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72 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
signifying project onto the body of the object of desire when he proclaimed the
artist’s model, not the dandy, “as the sign of the decadence” (18).
The model, to whom he gave the title of “professor of posing,” was a primary
example of pastiche, a practice of stylistic imitation that, according to Wilde, had
the ability to empty art of meaning (1886b: 18). Fredric Jameson has called
pastiche “the imitation of…style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a
dead language” (1983:114). This was also how Wilde thought of pastiche when
he claimed that the model could only appear “as everything he is not, and as
nothing that he is” (1886b: 18). The model as pastiche, divorced from his own
interiority, offered up his body surfaces and made them available for inscription
by the artist. The artist, in turn, used them to signify his own inner state. In
severing the connection between surface and content, the model made a living by
skewing the depth model of identity upon which. bourgeois notions of the self
were based. In his 1889 essay “London Models,” Wilde assessed the skill of a
model precisely by his ability to produce a usable surface, with use value
determined by the degree to which the model was able to put his personal
identity under erasure. The effect achieved by the model was the construction of
a “neutral” surface, a tabula rasa, acting as an objectified site of the artist’s
desire.
Conceptualized as a neutral surface, the model’s body could be ethically
objectified by the artist, for the model’s own interiority would be left untouched,
forever innocent, even when used to signify the artist’s desire, however perverse
its physical expression. This neutrality figures prominently in Wilde’s 1889 short
story “The Model Millionaire,” in which the young protagonist feels sorry for a
man in rags who is posing in an artist’s studio only to find later that the beggar is
actually one of the richest men in Europe. The discrepancy between the artist’s
inscription and the model’s “true” identity becomes the justification for
manipulation of the model’s body because, regardless of what was done to it, the
encounter was solely a harmless dialogue between the artist and a neutral surface.
Dealing only with a neutral body, Wilde could blindly and naively justify the
exploitation. In “London Models,” for example, he narrates: “Occasionally…an
artist catches a couple of gamins in the gutter and asks them to come to his
studio. The first time they always appear, but after that they don’t keep their
appointments” (113). Wilde then describes the boys’ extreme discomfort in being
forced to pose, but finds such behavior merely charming.
The effect of surface neutralization is the elimination of the model’s identity.
In “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” this becomes a paradox that drives the narrative. This
detective story is an extended meditation on the portrait of a boy thought to be
Shakespeare’s lover: the plot revolves around the search for the identity of the
portrait model in order to establish Shakespeare’s homosexuality by proving the
boy is the same “W. H.” to whom the bard dedicated his sonnets. This search
must fail utterly for, in order to posit the model as the object of the playwright’s
desire, the boy’s identity must first be erased. Wilde’s rationale for publicly
writing the homoerotic was based on purifying desire under the ideal of art. But