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UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 73
to justify homoerotic desire as art, the model’s identity had to be relinquished in
the production of the “pure,” immaculate body surface, the only kind of surface
that could qualify as an acceptable site of inscription. Therefore, it was only the
process of body surface neutralization that permitted him to be read as a signifier
of Shakespeare’s homosexuality. To solve the mystery of W.H., Wilde would
have to surrender his interpretation of the portrait, but to do so would entail a
loss of the narrative. Like a dog chasing its own tail, Wilde circles round and
round, leading finally to an exhausted abandonment of the search for the boy’s
identity. As John Berger pointed out: “To be on display is to have the surface of
one’s own skin …turned into a disguise which…can never be discarded” (54,
emphasis mine).
The decision to quit the search represented a conscious choice for Wilde: what
was at stake was his (the spectator’s) identity. In “Mr. W. H.,” Wilde was
attempting to construct and justify a personal homosexual identity by positing
Shakespeare as precedent; thus the search for the model’s identity becomes a
desperate, frantic, and personally invested exploration of his own. But, as Diana
Fuss reminds us, “identity is always purchased at the price of the exclusion of the
Other, the repression or repudiation of non-identity” (103). Wilde had created a
booby trap by reading the boy’s identity as his own, thus deconstructing the
dialogic relationship between Self and Other needed to establish the difference
upon which to articulate his own identity. The boy in the portrait could either
signify the artist’s interiority or signify his own, but he could not signify both.
The character of Erskine, frustrated by the impossibility of resolving the paradox
and refusing to surrender his assertion of the boy model’s personal identity,
ostensibly commits suicide at the end of the story. In other words, he loses his
identity by allowing the model to maintain his, symbolizing the outcome of one
of two possible choices. The nameless narrator of the story (Wilde) chooses to
relinquish the quest, saves himself, and inherits the portrait from Erskine upon
his death: he acquires the homoerotic sign. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”
represents, then, Wilde’s first formulation of a homoerotic subjectivity, the
outcome of a rather painful choice. As Laura Mulvey has explained:
an image constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/
misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the
“I” of subjectivity. This is a moment when [a]… fascination with looking…
collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of
the long love affair/ despair between image and self-image.
(365)
The “affair/despair” that runs through “Mr. W.H.,” represented by the very
different choices made by Erskine and the narrator, is responsible for the text’s
obtrusive tension. For while Wilde had finally constructed a homoerotic sign, it
had yet to be appropriated to the surfaces of his own body, thus simultaneously
producing a complacent elation in its construction and a frustrating