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76 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
and remains the signified, his murder can be read, not as a tragic termination, but
as the unification of the desiring and the desired on a single surface, the
stabilization of desire that allows Basil to become the Other through the medium
of Dorian’s body: not only does Dorian’s body surface (exteriority) as signifier
achieve immortality through sign appropriation, but so does Basil’s desiring
essence (interiority) as signified. The apparent murder of Basil by Dorian
actually marks the conceptual birth of Wilde’s homosexual social identity by
freeing the artist from self-definitional dependence upon the posed model.
Utilizing the metaphor of the pose in this body of work, Wilde explored the
possibility of initiating a hitherto unavailable discursive formation of a personal
homosexual identity. While he had successfully invented a homoerotic sign
through application of a Delsartean semiotic applied to the body of the desired
Other figured as an artist’s model in his construction of the portrait-as-sign in “Mr.
W.H.,” and though he had conceptualized a way in which the sign could be
replicated through an appropriation that skewed the depth model by stabilizing
his own desire on the surfaces of the Other’s body in Dorian Gray, it was
confined to the text. To complete the operation, it needed to be reproduced and
enacted in the praxis of everyday life. This apparently occurred in 1895,
conjunct with Wilde’s sex scandal trials. An examination of the activity of
“posing” as it impacted with the legal apparatus can elucidate this process.
THE SOMDOMITICAL (sic) POSE
The artist’s model, as a recurrent and transgressively reinscribed figure in
Wilde’s work, signals what appears to be his use of the “pose” as an organizing
metaphor through which to codify the surfaces of the Other’s body. In “London
Models” especially, it is clear that Wilde’s use of the term “poser” was used to
describe a “type,” of which the artist’s model was only one example: “Besides
the professional posers of the studio there are the posers of the Row, the posers
at afternoon teas, the posers in politics, and the circus-posers” (113). Wilde goes
on to explain that a flawless male physique is his single criterion for typing, and
gives the reader a list of locations at which one can find posers to look at: “the
running-ground at Eton, the towing-path at Oxford, the Thames swimming baths,
and the yearly circuses” (113). Here, the “pose” provided terms under which he
could recognize his own desire in any body that became the object of his
homoerotic gaze. In other words, when Wilde applied the term “poser” to a body
he was engaging in what, in contemporary gay slang, is termed “cruising,” that
is, objectifying the body of the Other through a delimiting visual inscription within
the circuits of homoerotic desire.
This dichotomous artist/model relationship was one of extreme inequality and
disparity, organized around polarized distinctions between active and passive and
intimately linked to conceptions of the respective sexual roles involved in the
practice of sodomy. At the time, and for many decades following, it was only the
“passive” partner (insertee) in the sodomitical act who was stigmatized and