SOURCE: Gladden, Samuel Lyndon. “‘Sebastian Melmoth’: Wilde's Parisian Exile as the Spectacle of Sexual, Textual Revolution.” Victorians Institute Journal 28 (2000): 39-63.

[In the following essay, Gladden analyzes Oscar Wilde's journal, written under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, in terms of his thoughts about being exiled from England after serving his prison term.]

Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so. … For I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one.

—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile, like most kings.

—Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

Exile, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

In recent years, much scholarship has been devoted to a reevaluation of Oscar Wilde, arguably the most famous—and certainly the most infamous—of all late nineteenth-century British writers; such scholarship, in particular Ed Cohen's groundbreaking study of fin-de-siècle constructions of masculinity in Talk on the Wilde Side, has demonstrated the centrality of the figure of Wilde to late nineteenth-century British culture and to emerging debates over the pathology of sexuality and disease or, to use an appropriate but unfortunately ubiquitous Deconstructionist metaphor, dis-ease. However, comparatively little substantive criticism has been written about Wilde's brief life following his release from Reading Gaol on 18 May 1897, a period Wilde spent traveling throughout Europe until his journey culminated in Paris at the rather run-down Hôtel D'Alsace, a decidedly unglamorous locale which, ironically, witnessed the death of Wilde, the nineteenth century's most famous Æsthete.

Wilde's oft-repeated “deathbed” remark, “Either the curtains go, or I do,” reminds us of the writer's lifelong association with æstheticism, his appreciation for beauty. In truth, Wilde's remark preceded his death by about a month,¹ when he did indeed disparage the decor of his embarrassingly thrifty rooms in the Hôtel D'Alsace, rooms whose ambiance dramatically lowered the standards to which Wilde had become accustomed long before his sudden fall from success and his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, where he served two years hard labor as punishment for acts of “gross indecency.” Wilde's clever remark nevertheless figures as an important paratext for the final phase of his life, for his anxiety over the decor of his last room metonymizes the whole history of Wilde's retreat into exile following his release from prison in 1897. Rather than following other critics in dismissing Wilde's final years as completely devoid of artistic or personal meaning, I want instead to chart the ways in which Wilde's Parisian exile demonstrates a revolutionary impulse even amidst the dramatic decline of the writer's tragically abbreviated life; specifically, I want to unravel the threads of meaning woven throughout Wilde's exilic pseudonym, “Sebastian Melmoth,” in order to demonstrate how that name functions as a code for the revolutionary.²

Following his release from prison, Wilde left England for Europe, settling finally in Paris, that prototypical nineteenth-century site of Revolutionary excess, where, like a criminal, he adopted an assumed name, an alias: “Sebastian Melmoth.” Even before leaving prison, Wilde remarked on his investment in the processes of naming; lamenting in De Profundis the shame his actions brought upon his family and his country, Wilde anticipates his decision to contrive an alias and to abandon the country, clearly in an effort to leave behind the name and the nation he has already so besmirched:

[My mother] and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archæology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.

(27-28)

The passage effectively announces Wilde's disinclination to review the history of his disgrace and shame; more importantly, the passage anticipates Wilde's decision to abandon both the name and the nation that witnessed his decline. In assuming an alias and in moving away from England, Wilde's desire not to record the history of his downfall will, he hopes, be realized, and indeed, in France, “Sebastian Melmoth” would find what Oscar Wilde lost in England—freedom, contentment, and some measure of self-respect.

More generally, the significance of Wilde's alias resonates on the broader levels of politics, history, art, and identity formation. “Sebastian Melmoth” imbricates two nineteenth-century manifestations of revolution by conjoining a code for an emerging identity, the homosexual (suggested by the name “Sebastian”), and shorthand for a style of writing, the Gothic (suggested by the name “Melmoth,” the title character of the 1820 Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, an enormously popular work penned by Wilde's great uncle, Charles Robert Maturin). Wilde's alias calls to mind both the textual strategy that marked early nineteenth-century responses to the French Revolution and the notorious lifestyle that galvanized fin-de-siècle discourse as the site and the sight—the space and the spectacle—of an erotic revolution that threatened to return the world to the chaos of another Great Terror. As we shall see, Wilde's fin-de-siècle self-exile conflates a revolutionary identity and a revolutionary literary style, so that in retreating into infamy, Wilde-as-“Sebastian Melmoth” embodies a complex hybrid of nineteenth-century manifestations of subversion, dissent, and chaos—in short, the seeds of revolution.³

From the earliest days of his fame, Wilde had been recognized—marked—as a symbolic figure for a literary or artistic style as well as for the lifestyle of the Decadent. Max Nordau's 1892 tome on the decay of modern society, Degeneration, pointed specifically to Wilde as the emblem for this anti-social, unhealthy movement:

[t]he ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the ‘Æsthetes,’ the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.

(317)

Wilde, Nordau argues, “despises nature,” is “a ‘cultivator of the Ego,’” and revels in “inactivity,” “contemplation,” “immorality, sin and crime” (320-321).

Wilde's elevation—or decline—to the level of symbol was not lost on the writer, who self-consciously represented himself as such upon the publication of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a meditation on public humiliation, notoriety, shame, and redemption, which Wilde wrote while in prison and for which he substituted his prison-cell identity, “c.3.3,” in place of his own name on the title page (Ellmann 559). Astonished when the poem sold 5099 copies—barely three months after its first printing—Wilde agreed to insert his own name in brackets next to “c.3.3” to claim authorship directly (560). By this time, of course, such a gloss was hardly necessary, for the poem's readers knew that Wilde and “c.3.3”—name and number, identity and symbol—were one and the same. The frontispiece to the 1924 Methuen and Company edition of the Ballad, a woodcut by Frans Masereel, neatly comments on Wilde's status as symbol: the author's face—his image—is obfuscated by a black text-box, a dark cell, which contains Wilde's cell-block identity, reminding the reader that in falling into infamy, Wilde “shifted” from author (one who produces text) to text itself (that which is to be read), from one who composes or controls meaning (subject) to one who is mastered by the disciplining eyes of others (object).

Wilde's self-representation-as-symbol percolates throughout De Profundis, his lengthy prison-house letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, as well: Wilde recognizes his status as “… a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards” (36). Among the letter's most heart-wrenching passages is Wilde's account of his transfer to prison, during which his protracted stay on a railway platform exposed him to the taunts and jeers of passersby:

Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style. … On November 13th, 1895, I was brought down here from London. From two o'clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for the world to look at. … Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was, of course, before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob.

(103)

Wilde's status as spectacle found no reprieve inside the prison walls, either; writing in the 31 July 1895 edition of the Echo de Paris, Ange Goldemar describes glimpsing the disgraced Wilde through a window and, recognizing that figure's shame, feeling compelled to turn away from the image:

The door closes. It's Wilde. His first gesture is to stretch out his arms; then he takes off his cap. He is barely recognizable. Not that he has lost so much weight—his frame is still hefty, his shoulders broad. … His face seems to give the appearance of health, despite the yellowish tinge which has replaced the rosiness of before. The change is all in his head, hideously shaved, almost bald in an awful prison tonsure that reduces Wilde's head to insignificant dimensions, dull, doll-like, expressionless. … Several of us [left] the observation post behind the barred window, so overcome were we by the spectacle.

(trans. and qtd. in Erber 574-575)

Clearly, Wilde had become, as he recognizes at the close of De Profundis, “[l']enfant de mon siècle” (119), an exhausted, fallen, beleaguered embodiment of an age drained by what Karl Beckson characterizes as “the damnation of Decadence” (32). In another passage from De Profundis that echoes the language of Nordau's Degeneration, Wilde casts his own body as a corporeal manifestation of the degenerate text, lamenting that

… I am quite conscious of the fact that when the end does come I shall return an unwelcome visitant to a world that does not want me; a revenant, as the French say, and one whose face is grey with long imprisonment and crooked with pain. Horrible as are the dead when they rise from their tombs, the living who come out from tombs are more horrible still. Of all this I am only too conscious.

(6)

In private conversation, Wilde observed that he could not possibly outlive the fin-de-siècle culture he had come to symbolize: three months before his death, Wilde remarked that “[i]f another century began, and I [were] still alive, … it would really be more than the English could stand” (qtd. in Coakley 215). But the twentieth century nonetheless kept alive Wilde's spirit—or his demon, as many might have disparaged it—as a symbolic embodiment of the outcast, the “other.” Much like the Spaniard of Melmoth the Wanderer, upon whose presence “[a]ll order is broken, all discipline subverted” (Maturin 162), “[i]ntellectual, artistic and erotic life in the years leading up to World War I was lived in the shadow of the Oscar Wilde debacle,” writes historian Ian Young, for “[t]he persecution of Wilde served to frighten and mute intellectual and sexual heretics for decades” (264). Wilde's symbolic life extends even beyond the death of the writer's physical body, too; in the late twentieth century, pop-culture references to Wilde still conjured the specter of homosexuality, whether in covert affiliations with “the love that dare not speak its name” or as an epithet of derision.⁴

Wilde's meteoric rise and fall collapses any clear distinction between the categories of public and private, as well as the corollary categories of production (of the text) and pleasure (of the Decadent). Recalling what he characterizes as “the Romantic '90s,” Wilde's friend Richard Le Gallienne situates the author as a symbolic figure for the Decadent age, a latter-day Caliban whose response to his own horrifyingly primitive image remains endlessly conflicted: Le Gallienne writes, “[h]e is, beyond comparison, the incarnation of the spirit of the '90s. … Out of the 1890s chaos [Wilde] emerged [as] an astonishing, imprudent microcosm. In him[,] the period might see its own face in a glass” (156, 157). Sixteen years after Wilde's death, another of the writer's contemporaries, John Cowper Powys, agreed with Le Gallienne's assessment, writing of Wilde that “[h]is influence is everywhere, like an odour, like an atmosphere, like a diffused flame. We cannot escape from him” (417). Powys' assessment is, admittedly, a complicated and ambivalent one, for even as he seems to pay homage to the figure of Wilde, the image he constructs of an age attempting to “flee” from Wilde's influence suggests a lingering anxiety over the author's symbolic place in British culture, his ambiguous status as both hero and villain, both angel and devil.

A good deal of Wilde's later correspondence addresses the problems of self-representation, the traps of symbolic status. In an April 1898 letter written in response to a poem by Henry D. Davray, Wilde considers the role and meaning of the outcast, and he carefully distinguishes the outcast from the more general category of the underprivileged by aligning the outcast with figures of notoriety—of, one could suggest, rampant publicity; in exemplifying the outcast, Wilde names Lord Byron, another literary giant whose notorious reputation chased him into exile, as well (Letters 729). Just one month before, Wilde wrote to Robbie Ross about his situation in exile, musing cynically on his status as an outcast, particularly as it had emerged in English press attacks on his work and lifestyle: citing W. E. Henley's hostile review of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde writes that, “I am quite obliged to [Henley] for playing the rôle of Advocatus Diaboli so well. Without it my beatification as a saint would have been impossible, but I shall now live as the Infamous St. Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr” (720). Just a few days later, however, Wilde's ambivalence about his status as a symbolic figure—a wounded hero, a martyr—emerges in a letter to George Ives: considering the unprecedented success of the Ballad, Wilde writes, “I have no doubt we [exiles] shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms” (721). One of the martyrdoms about which Wilde might have been thinking was the death of John Keats, whom Wilde eulogized in a sonnet entitled “The Grave of Keats” by memorializing the poet as “[t]he youngest of the Martyrs” and by comparing the long-suffering Keats to St. Sebastian, a figure Wilde sets as Keats' equal in beauty and his predecessor in an untimely death (42).⁵

We see in Wilde's own words, then, his understanding of his status as a symbolic figure as well as his struggle to come to terms with his new role as a particular type of martyr, an exile, one who has been pushed “out” of British culture even as his absence—his emptiness, his reduction to pure symbol, his devaluation to the status of nothing—assumes a central place in British culture as the image of the “other,” that figure whose very difference threatens to undermine the bases of mainstream British society. Perhaps in response to this recognition, Wilde begins traveling and corresponding under a name of his own invention, thereby creating for himself a new identity. Wilde's letters connect his motivation for taking on an alias with his desire to travel and to correspond undetected, to “pass” in European culture as something other than its “other,” despite the fact that he understood himself to be a spectacle no less recognizable to—and no less sought after by—English tourists than the Eiffel Tower (Ellmann 586). Thus failing in its intended value as a shield around the notoriously symbolic figure, Wilde's alias operates instead as a screen upon which an entire constellation of differences is projected, a map according to which a variety of fin-de-siècle anxieties may be cartographized. Just as Wilde exemplified the corporeal manifestation of otherness, of, to borrow Beckson's phrase, “the damnation of Decadence” (32), so too did his alias emerge as a textual manifestation of the very forces for which he had been excoriated. Specifically, these may be described as the forces of revolution, both sexual and textual, private and public.⁶

While residing at the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris, Wilde composed a letter to Louis Wilkinson on 4 January 1900 which closed with Wilde's response to Wilkinson's query about his assumed name. Wilde explains:

You asked me about “Melmoth:” of course I have not changed my name: in Paris I am as well known as in London: it would be childish. But to prevent postmen having fits I sometimes have my letters inscribed with the name of a curious novel by my grand-uncle, Maturin: a novel that was part of the romantic revival of the early century, and though imperfect, a pioneer. …

(Letters 813)

Wilde's explanation rings with double-entendre, primarily with the description of Maturin's novel as “curious,” a term which by the late 1890s had entered English parlance as slang, or code, for homosexual (Holder 53) or, to use a term Wilde himself might have invoked, for “Uranian”; secondarily, Wilde's characterization of the novel as “a pioneer” must also be read symbolically, for surely Wilde was a pioneer as well, not only in the sense that he was the first generally recognized Uranian, but also in that in leaving his homeland and making a place for himself in Paris, Wilde, like a pioneer, was staking out new territory to claim a space for himself in a seemingly distant and exotic land. In another letter, Wilde describes Maturin's novel as “an extinct volcano” (Coakley 209-210), again suggesting a slip between impotence and power, between uselessness and productivity—the very sort of ambivalence his alias encodes and the very sort of balance his exilic life epitomizes.⁷

William A. Cohen observes that at least since the onslaught of the trials of 1895, for Wilde, “… posing had become a particularly literary question, since Wilde was understood [by those in the court] to represent himself—that is, to pose—in his literary persona” (216). Of course, such a claim is proven in the records of Wilde's trials, where the author's works were placed in evidence to support the Marquis of Queensberry's charge, notoriously misspelled on the calling card that set off the explosion of the trials, that Wilde was “posing [as a] Somdomite [sic].” For Wilde, “posing” named a complicated activity that included both corporeal and textual embodiments, both private life, or pleasures, and public presence, or reputation, conflations which remind us of the ways in which the focus of gossip—its specifically demonized object—figures both corporeally and textually, since, after all, gossip textualizes corporeality. Wilde, the object of much scandalous speculation, becomes a walking, talking text-to-be-read, and, as such, he functions as a kind of embodied narrative, a corporeal code.⁸ The phenomena linking the narratives—the histories, the tales—of Melmoth and Wilde are remarkable: Melmoth's imprisonment in a maniac's cell predicts Wilde's own incarceration; Melmoth's suffering under the omnipotence of the Inquisition finds form in Wilde's courtroom examination and exposure; and Melmoth's assumption of false identities is followed by corporeal decline culminating in death, as Wilde's. That Melmoth epitomizes the figure of the Wandering Jew is strikingly appropriate, for, like the Wandering Jew, Wilde-in-exile is a text-to-be-read, a story-to-be-told, and even in his attempts to shield himself in the textual anonymity of an alias, Wilde remained nonetheless a recognized and symbolic—a readable—figure: like the exilic Wilde, Melmoth is marked by “an indelible stain, like original sin itself” (Baldick xii), and he becomes “an existence made up largely of report, reputation, and expectant surmise” (xvi), a figure whose strongest presence takes the form of absence and whose “direct presence, corrosive as it is, is not necessary to [the] dissolution of stable identities” (xvi). While the pose of “Sebastian Melmoth” may have succeeded at the level of the textual, it failed at the level of the corporeal, never effectively covering over the spectacle of Wilde himself, never shielding the sometimes-reluctant celebrity from public view, for Europeans in general never failed to recognize the defamed celebrity in exile. In short, Wilde-as-Sebastian Melmoth-as-Wandering Jew suggests the author's centrality to a nineteenth-century literary trope, for the wandering narrator figures prominently from the earliest examples of the Gothic mode, epitomized by Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, throughout the Romantic and Victorian ages and right up to Wilde's own Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the need to tell the secret becomes the undoing not so much of the teller of the tale as of its listeners, its would-be gossips.

The Gothic, a form of writing for which the name “Melmoth” serves as a kind of talisman, has itself been recognized as the textual embodiment of a revolutionary force. In his study, Seven Gothic Dramas, Jeffrey N. Cox argues that not only is the Gothic “a particular response to the literary, theatrical, and political pressures of the age of revolution,” but that what Cox describes as the “second phase” of the Gothic is exemplified in the works of Maturin, where Gothicism functions less in the spirit of entertainment than in the interest of political protest (4, 58). In short, Cox regards the Gothic as a deliberately subtle attempt to work out and to spectacularize both the ideological and the aesthetic problems that plague the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (12). In the same vein, Judith Halberstam argues that the designation “‘Gothic’ describes a discursive strategy which produces monsters as a kind of temporary but influential response to social, political, and sexual problems” (“Technologies of Monstrosity” 339). More specifically, Cox argues that “the Gothic setting and plot … could be read as embodying the rhythms of the [French] Revolution and its liberation of enclosed spaces from the powers of the past” (18). In the end, Cox insists, the first interest of the Gothic is the celebration of the potential of Revolution; the second, the vindication of the villain-as-hero (30-31).⁹

Cox situates the Gothic as a liminal form, as “a meeting point between high and low culture” (4). Matthew C. Brennan agrees that the Gothic “undermines boundaries” (3), that the mode of writing might best be described as “an aesthetics of nightmare, … of crossed or open boundaries” (6). Halberstam draws these boundaries more specifically, finding in the Gothic a tension and a constant threat of the breakdown “between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, [and] inside and outside,” all of which “dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself,” not to mention the stability of the culture out of which the Gothic text emerges (Skin Shows 2). As a liminal site, the Gothic functions as the space against which, as Halberstam recognizes, “deviant subjectivities” are produced “opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (2). The Gothic thus functions contra hegemony in order to produce—to embody—the “other” against whom society defines itself, the threat which must be disciplined, if not eradicated, for the maintenance of hegemony to continue uninterrupted.

The particular threat of the Gothic lies in what Cox characterizes as that form's propensity for “seduction,” one of the many threats embedded within the Gothic's “theater of shock, surprise, … and terror” (13), a sensational mixture that threatens to “[uncover] the desires repressed by modern culture” (7): Brennan, quoting William Patrick Day, agrees with Cox's assessment, adding that the Gothic “addressed ‘those parts of the nineteenth-century reader's inner life that were disordered and fragmented’” (5). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick locates the seductive potential of the Gothic in its celebration of the trope of “the ‘unspeakable’” (94), which she situates in Melmoth the Wanderer at the site of the text itself: throughout Maturin's Gothic tale, Melmoth is cursed, doomed to suffer until he can find another to listen to his story and to assume his heavy burden of guilt and shame; but time and again, as Sedgwick observes, Melmoth's very narrative becomes “unspeakable” as “[t]he manuscripts crumble … or are ‘wholly illegible,’ the speaker is strangled by the unutterable word, or the proposition is preterited as ‘one so full of horror and impiety, that, even to listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it’” (94, Maturin qtd. in Sedgwick). In Wilde's day, of course, the “unspeakable” would have included—ironically, would have spoken of—“the love that dare not speak its name,” so that Wilde-as-Gothic-Monster or Wilde-as-Melmoth or Wilde-as-text embodies the unspeakable—viz. homosexuality, an antihegemonic engagement which, as Sedgwick compellingly demonstrates, finds form in the Gothic (90-92), so that once again we see the collusion of sexuality and textuality in a deviant form (the Gothic in general and Wilde in particular), which hegemony recognizes and excoriates—casts out—as dangerous, as revolutionary.

Because the Gothic explodes the ideological forces that lead to repression and entrapment, because the Gothic makes explicit the link between political and erotic freedom (Cox 25), and because the Gothic explores border-crossings, repressed desires, and the specter of homoeroticism, so too might the Gothic serve as a meta-narrative for Wilde's very public fall, his punishment, and, finally, his move into exile, an experiential space that may be characterized as Gothic given its status as a space outside of—in exile from—conventional morality (14). In Wilde's exilic surname, then, we find a textual embodiment for this revolutionary mode of writing, a code whose narrative suggests Wilde's deliberate celebration, rather than his ambivalent erasure, of his own “curious” stature—his “villainous” nature, his infamous “crimes.”

Just as Wilde's exilic surname textualizes political revolution, his exilic Christian name, “Sebastian,” celebrates, rather than declaims, sexual revolution—Wilde's own profligate past. Most scholars agree that Wilde adopted the name “Sebastian” from the Christian martyr, whose appeal to Wilde was three-fold: first, Saint Sebastian represents a protracted triumph over earthly defeat, or punishment; second, Saint Sebastian affords the viewer a homoerotic pleasure, for he is generally represented as a comely and semi-nude youth; third, Saint Sebastian's arrow-pierced—multiply penetrated—body corporealizes the spectacle of gay male pleasure even as it anticipates Wilde's own body-to-be-clothed in a standard-issue prison uniform, which, scored with arrows, textualizes Wilde's body as a criminal site.¹⁰ But in addition to these associations, I want to argue that Wilde's exilic Christian name embeds a variety of meanings beyond the most obvious, which I have described. For in addition to serving as a corporeally inscribed code for the forces of good and evil, or victory and defeat, the name “Sebastian” suggests a kind of border-crossing of its own, just as Wilde's move into exile transports him across the borders of nations. As Jan B. Gordon has argued, “[b]y using ‘Sebastian’ as a prefix, Wilde was perhaps attempting to combine the Hebraic questor without a home with the Hellenic saint, in [a state of] equipoise …” (“‘Decadent Spaces’” 56). In Gordon's reading, the name “Sebastian” evokes the condition of liminality, within which a variety of apparent oppositions may be resolved. The image of the martyr is thus mediated by the image of the hero, complicating the apparent status of “Sebastian” as victor or vanquished and thereby repeating—textualizing—the paradoxical space the exilic Wilde himself had come to occupy. Such a mediation reinscribes the formulation of Wilde-as-liminal-as-Gothic, and it calls to mind Wilde's sonnet on “The Grave of Keats,” in which the ephebic poet is glorified and, in such a state of glory, aligned with the similarly young, similarly beautiful, and similarly tragic Saint Sebastian.

Yet another meaning lies latent in the name “Sebastian,” one which, I believe, is perhaps more apropos of Wilde's exilic attitude toward his own identity as a criminal or villain, as his culture's other. A number of scholars have recuperated Wilde's exile as, at least in part, a mitigated victory, for in exile we find Wilde beyond the constraints of English law and order, and, at least to some degree, removed from the gaze—the prying eyes, the gossipy nature—of Englishmen in general. While a great many critics dismiss Wilde's exile as a period of loss or failure (see note 2), many others regard Wilde's exile as a personal and ideological victory, as the triumph of queer pleasure. Jonathan Dollimore argues that Wilde's aesthetic avoids Angst and, quite to the contrary, activates a flight into jouissance (73), but Dollimore's abstraction is perhaps better qualified by the more concrete memoirs and accounts of Wilde's contemporaries and biographers. Rupert Croft-Cooke characterizes Wilde's final years as offering “fulfillment of another kind. There were no more attempts to write, or even think about writing; friendship with Bosie was without passion or strain, and [Wilde] lounged about the boulevards and amused himself with young male prostitutes and wrote supremely entertaining letters about them to [Robbie] Ross and Reggie Turner” (238). Croft-Cooke includes these letters among many written during Wilde's final years which, “for the most part,” suggest the image of “a cheerful man chuckling over the absurdities of life about him and his own misfortunes; … a comic artist turning every grotesque or whimsical incident to a laugh …” (279). In fact, Wilde wrote to Robbie Ross from Paris that “[l]ater on in life, humour goes, but laughter is the primaeval attitude towards life—a mode of approach that survives only in artists and criminals” (Letters 767), and in a letter to W. Morton Fullerton, he characterized the humor of nonsense as “a form of art the French are rich in, but the English sadly to [sic] seek” (804).

H. Montgomery Hyde's assessment of Wilde's final years concurs with Croft-Cooke's; he notes that “[t]he return of freedom gave [Wilde] back the sense of humour …” (Oscar Wilde: The Aftermath 209), and while Wilde may have been “disgusted at the implication that he would be welcomed back [to England] for his ‘airy mood and spirit,’ but only if a conversion of his sexual preference could be extorted from him” (Schmidgall 341), Hyde recounts moments in which Wilde managed to turn his controversial sexuality—such as his experiments at a (heterosexual) brothel in Dieppe—into marks of his own queer victory: “‘The first in these ten years,’ [Wilde] said to Dowson in a low voice, ‘and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton!’ And then, raising his voice so that the crowd could hear, he added, ‘But tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character!’” (Oscar Wilde: A Biography 373). Once in Paris, Wilde flaunted the very vices for which England had placed him under lock and key: writing to Ross, Wilde comments that “[i]t is very unfair people being horrid to me about Bosie and Naples. A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms” (Letters 705). Chris Baldick offers evidence to suggest that Wilde's mitigated victory in exile repeats his ancestor Maturin's:

Having helped a few years earlier to prepare a biographical introduction to an edition of his great-uncle's novel, Wilde knew the history and reputation of the Revd Charles Robert Maturin, Anglican curate of St. Peter's in Dublin, novelist, playwright, eccentric, and failure: Maturin had died in poverty in 1824, his literary efforts frowned upon by his ecclesiastical superiors in Dublin, slighted by most of the critics in Edinburgh, and laughed off the stage in London. In Paris, however, his reputation had flourished posthumously.

(vii)

Perhaps Wilde's own exilic flourishing is best exemplified in the sexual relationships he enjoyed after being released from prison: in addition to a brief though ultimately unhappy reunion with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde enjoyed the company of a variety of young men in the years between his release from prison and his death in Paris in 1900.¹¹ Wilde's exile, though certainly compromised by poverty, personal struggles, and professional humiliation, nonetheless afforded him the pleasure of the spectacle of revolution—of the attenuated triumph, of the subversive victory of Wilde-as-“Sebastian Melmoth.”

The name “Sebastian,” I argue, textualizes the “deviant”—specifically, the homosexual—pleasures that marked Wilde's exile, for the name functions as a code for the emerging identity of the Uranian, that creature who, under the contemporary designation “invert,” had been pathologized as a chaotic amalgamation—a blur, a border-crossing—of male and female. Surely Wilde must have recognized the gender-blurring associated with the name “Sebastian” in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in which the character Sebastian is, at one point, mistaken for Viola, who herself has donned male disguise. More locally, Wilde's appropriation of the name as an in-the-know gay code reappears in his one-time friend André Raffalovich's conversion to Catholicism and admission into the lay order under the name “Brother Sebastian” (Rosario 162), an appellation Wilde would certainly have recognized as paying homage—intentionally or not—perhaps to Wilde's exile and certainly to Raffalovich's own gay past as well as to his ongoing amorous relationship with John Gray, the beautiful young poet who, many have argued, provided the model for Wilde's own Dorian. Richard Ellmann notes (although perhaps pejoratively), that Sebastian has, traditionally, been “the favorite saint among homosexuals” (71n), and Camille Paglia describes Sebastian as the image in which “[h]omoerotic iconicism goes full circle” (112). Ellmann also reproduces Guido Reni's highly eroticized painting of the arrow-pierced body of that saint, which he describes as one of Wilde's favorite works. Ian Young comments on the significance of Wilde's appropriation of the name “Sebastian” as well, arguing provocatively that “[t]he sadomasochistic image [of the martyred saint] is intensified … by his traditional depiction as suffering a kind of ecstasy as he is penetrated by a gang of men—Roman soldiers with arrows. Here is male beauty, oppressed, penetrated, and transformed, a perfect icon for the homosexual in Christian culture, who is so often characterized as suffering, nobly or ignobly, and dying young” (16). “Sebastian” thus designates Wilde as a martyr, in the tradition of the Christian saint and, later, Keats; as a metaphor for Wilde-as-prisoner; as a gay icon, in the image of the comely, nearly nude, penetrated youth; and, finally, as a corporeal manifestation for a play across the lines of gender, a blur between “manhood” and “womanhood,” a pleasure in the repose of inversion.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has argued that “[b]order-crossing was absolutely necessary to Wilde, whose sexual orientation gave him a marginal, not to say criminal and subversive, subject position. … Wilde believed that the creative artist must cross gender borders, representational borders, truth borders and law and order borders, in order to realize fully his personality in his art” (140-141). Wilde's ultimate physical location, Paris, is perhaps as significant as his alias in making sense of the writer's symbolic status in the final period of his life. Baldick's observation about the significance of the name “Melmoth” to fin-de-siècle Parisian culture underscores the argument I have suggested regarding Wilde's motives for leaving England for the continent and, finally, for settling in Paris: “… as Wilde well knew, the name of Melmoth still echoed in France, as it did no longer in Ireland or England, with the notoriety of high Romantic despair and damnation; it was the badge of the eternal outcast, of his grandiose self-hatred, and of his withering scorn for heaven and earth” (vii). Wilde's removal to Paris, one might argue, follows his choice of alias, for in a letter to Ada Leverson, Wilde encouraged her to address him by his alias, and he pointed out that the name was to be preceded by the French designation “Monsieur” rather than followed by the English “Esquire” (Hyde 368). Wilde thus contextualizes his alias as a specifically French identity, a move we should not find surprising given his response to English prudery following the banning of Salome in 1894: enraged, Wilde gave vent to his expatriate fantasies in a Parisian newspaper, pontificating that “‘[m]y resolution is deliberately taken. Since it is impossible to have a work of art performed in England, I shall transfer myself to another fatherland [France], of which I have been long enamoured’” (qtd. in Holland 86).¹²

Elsewhere in his letters, Wilde's sense of alienation from England emerges time and again: writing to Ross in January 1898, he describes Oxford as “that sweet grey city that nurtured me,” but in which he has “of disciples ‘but few or none’” (Letters 752). In his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde expresses his disaffiliation with English prudery by observing that individualism, which Dollimore describes as the recognition and respect of cultural and personal differences (9), is antithetical to what Wilde characterizes as that “immoral idea of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England” (1041). Elsewhere in the same essay, Wilde writes that “Art is Individualism and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value” (1030). For Wilde, England must have seemed hostile toward him on at least two counts: for his Decadent works and for his “Uranian” habits—two forces, one textual, the other sexual, which together posed a double threat to the British sense of normalcy.

Hyde characterizes the Decadent period as “… the culmination in England of the movement which had developed in France with the concept of personality in the Revolution a century before and which had reached the height of a collective expression on the other side of the English Channel in the glorification of Napoleon” (“Introduction” xi). Hyde's contextualization of Decadence as an originally French phenomenon imported to England through the spirit of Revolutionary fervor reminds us of the always-political nature of Decadence itself, of its enduring links to the social and political turmoil that gripped France in the age of Revolution. Hyde's complicated formulation embeds a wide range of translations, or crossings, and all of these, I believe, find embodiment in the figure of Oscar Wilde.

Wilde's turn to France seems an appropriate response to his excoriation by an English public who, before the spectacle of Wilde's fall, loved and adored the writer as if he were one of their own; that is, at his height, Wilde's popularity seemed to erase the difference—specifically, his Irishness—that set him apart from mainstream English culture, but after his fall, Wilde was attacked and rejected on the basis of a whole spectrum of differences—now including much more serious charges, of course, than mere Irishness. While the term “Natural Enemies” had long been used in British newspapers as shorthand for an ongoing English/French tension (Abrams 940n8), in the case of Wilde, that tension finds literal embodiment, and thus Wilde's body continues to function as a nexus for the textual and the corporeal. In its account of Wilde's trial on 6 April 1895, for example, The Daily Telegraph fueled anti-French sentiment in its demonization of the besieged Wilde: “Everybody can see and read for himself, every honest and wholesome-minded Englishman must grieve to notice how largely this French and Pagan plague has filtered into the healthy fields of British life” (qtd. in Goodman 76).¹³ In moving into exile and, finally, in settling in Paris, Wilde returns to the prototypical nineteenth-century site of Revolution, for that city's name continued to resound throughout the age with the ring of political upheaval and erotic license.

Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, a comedy that was enjoying great success at the time of the writer's arrest, comments on the “proper” English excoriation of all things French: Lady Bracknell, that play's primary voice of traditional British values, responds in horror when she is told that Bunbury, the symbolic figure whose always-absent body metonymizes a range of decadent pleasures—among them deceit, treachery, and, Christopher Craft has argued, homosexuality¹⁴—has died or, to quote Algernon Moncrieff exactly, has been “… quite exploded,” Lady Bracknell exclaims, “Exploded! Was he the victim of some revolutionary outrage?” (act 3). While Algernon admits that Bunbury's demise resulted not so much from corporeal as from textual explosion—he was, Algernon says, “found out,” or read—earlier in the play another Bunbury's death is more specifically located: arriving in the country, Jack Worthing announces that his brother Ernest (a figure who, for Jack, fulfills the same purpose as does Bunbury for Algernon) has “… died abroad; in Paris, in fact” (act 2). When Jack adds that Ernest “… expressed a desire to be buried in Paris,” the Reverend Chasuble, another of the play's voices of traditional British morality, shakes his head and retorts, “In Paris!. … I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last” (act 2). Nearer the beginning of the play, Lady Bracknell sets the tone for the symbolic meaning of Paris as the site of the wicked, or, as her attitude suggests, the anti-British, when she remarks to Jack that what we might call his luggage-lineage sets him outside of British culture, rendering him an embodiment of the other: “To be born, or at any rate, bred in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?” (act 1). Lady Bracknell's final question is a rhetorical one; its answer, implicit in the speech itself, is that the French Revolution led to the breakdown of the family and, by extension, to the breakdown of all social order—the very sort of threat posed by Wilde's so-called “gross indecency.” Wilde's characters thus espouse a typically British attitude toward the city that Wilde came to call home in his last days: throughout the play (whose initial run, as it happens, neatly bracketed the months that witnessed Wilde's fall from the heights of fame to the depths of notoriety), Paris emerges as the place of excess, the site of indecency; in short, the city functions symbolically as the space of the other, as a haven for the outcast.

Wilde once celebrated France as “manag[ing] … better” the split, the distance between public and private lives (“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” 1034), thus situating the country which in his final years he came to call home as a safe haven for the object of gossip, as a land that respects the boundaries between the personality one exercises in public and the pleasures one enjoys in private. In France, Wilde-as-“Sebastian Melmoth” embodied the conditions of excess that framed the nineteenth century—the excesses of the French Revolution and their textual embodiment in the form of the Gothic, and the excesses of fin-de-siècle decadence and their corporeal embodiment in the figure of Wilde himself. As the site of revolution moves throughout the century from one odd tendency to another, at first textual and finally sexual, Wilde's retreating figure—retreating both in its disinclination to respond to the wrongs perpetrated against it, and retreating in its decided move out of England and into Paris—looms as the spectacle of nineteenth-century revolutionary potential. At once sexual and textual, “Sebastian Melmoth” functions not as a shield of anonymity but as a badge of defiance, a sign that announces Wilde's self-identification as his culture's “other,” a self-inflicted mark of Cain that articulates Wilde's allegiance to a sexuality and a textuality his fellow Englishmen excoriated as the sites of revolutionary excess.

During the recitation of his tale to Maturin's Melmoth, the Spaniard remarks with some ironic pleasure on his status as an outsider: “Doors were clapped to wherever I was heard to approach; and three or four would stand whispering near where I walked, and clear their throats, and exchange signs, and pass audibly to the most trifling topics in my hearing, as if to intimate, while they affected to conceal it, that their last topic had been me. I laughed at this internally” (101). Wilde's experience in exile strikes a parallel chord: Croft-Cooke observes that though “[l]ife in Paris suited Wilde[, who] had always regarded the city as a refuge and a playground …” (257), the writer's exile proved a mixture of victory and defeat, pleasure and pain, optimism and regret. In exile, “Sebastian Melmoth” continued to inhabit that anxious space of the blur in which either/or gives way to both/and, that dizzying space of revolution in which rule and order are suspended as the “other” is tossed back and forth from objectivity to subjectivity, from containment to freedom, from discipline to pleasure. Somewhere in this mix, I like to think, Wilde-as-Sebastian Melmoth savored the spectacle of his protracted triumph over the culture that sought to exclude him.

Notes

1. In fact, Wilde's remark was no “deathbed” declaration at all: Ellmann reports that Wilde uttered the clever quip to Claire de Pratz on 29 October 1900, a full month before his demise. Wilde's exact words were as follows: “‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go’” (qtd. in Ellmann 581).

2. A great many critics dismiss Wilde's exile as a period of aesthetic and ideological loss or, even worse, as a personal failure. Among these, the following are the most representative. Frank Harris, Wilde's friend and sometime-companion during the writer's final years, remembers how Wilde's rooms “affected [him] unpleasantly,” those “ordinary, mean, little French rooms, furnished without taste”; “[w]hat struck me was the disorder everywhere; … [t]he sense of order and neatness which he used to have in his rooms at Tite Street was utterly lacking. He was not living here, intent on making the best of things; he was merely existing without plan or purpose” (307). Near the end of his memoir, Harris admits that “the truth [about Wilde] is still more appalling,” and he goes on to catalogue the symptoms of Wilde's plunge into decline, including physical illness and excessive drinking (316). Sadly, Harris's disgust resounds throughout the one-sentence paragraph that follows his account of Wilde's death: “[e]ven the bedding had to be burned” (316). Philippe Jullian draws on the recollections of Wilde's friend Vincent O'Sullivan to remark that, in his final years, Wilde habitually “[passed] a trembling hand over his face as if to brush aside a nightmare” (391, emphasis added); according to O'Sullivan, Wilde once admitted to him that “‘I died in prison’” (qtd. in Jullian 392). Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, follows Frank Harris's lead in his book-length homage to his grandfather, The Wilde Album: he writes, “[w]ith little left to live for, Oscar's last two and a half years were a long slide to the grave. He spent them wandering aimlessly around Europe, poor but not penniless, alone but not without friends” (180). Nancy Erber, quoting the novelist Lucien Muhlfeld, suggests that “‘… after his trial and his stint of “hard labour” … Paris took no notice of the man it had taken up’” (586). Richard Ellmann says of Wilde's exile that “Wilde's place in the world was now fixed for good—no longer at its center, but always on its outskirts” (554). While many might argue that the outskirts mark the space of perversion, the domain of subversive pleasure and power, Ellmann invokes the term pejoratively, as the final chapters of his biography make clear. Stephen Calloway and David Colvin comment that Wilde's death brought to an end the dark period of exile—“the most devastating and heartbreaking of all the states of the soul” (101)—“during which [Wilde's] mental decline had been almost as marked as his physical” (6); “[b]y stages, Wilde became a tragic figure. … Looking shabby, his former pride in his dress and toilette gone for ever, Oscar slipped into the habit of importuning old friends, and even perfect strangers; even his sole remaining asset, his talk, became worn and threadbare, and like Brummell before him, he cut a sorry figure” (103). A 1995 publication commemorating the centenary of the Wilde trials, Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces, opens with an introduction whose first paragraph concludes that “[c]onvicted of practicing ‘indecent acts,’ the notorious writer spent the next two years kept to hard labor in prison, dying barely two and a half years after his release” (iv). Michael S. Foldy begins his account of The Trials of Oscar Wilde by commenting that “[t]he three years between his release from prison in 1897 and his death in 1900 were spent living in poverty, shame, and, most sadly of all perhaps, unproductivity” (ix); “[e]ven though he was eventually able to leave England behind, Wilde was never able to escape his notoriety or to reclaim the secrecy his private life had previously afforded him” (128).

3. Wilde, as history and Hawthorne show, was not alone in his appropriation of renaming as a strategy for personal and political re-alignment. Melanie C. Hawthorne recounts the Wilde family's decision, following the writer's disgrace, to flee “… into exile in Europe to avoid the unwanted publicity generated by the trial” and to adopt the name “Holland,” a pseudonym “unrelated to the Dutch origin of the Wildes” yet nonetheless “obviously [preserving], even [embodying], the trace of the very criminal identity that the family wished to escape. Holland is home to Dutchmen, [so-called] queer and unpatriotic men like Wilde and [J.T.] Grien,” director of the Independent Theater Society, whose planned production of Salome in 1918 led to a court case against Grien, Maud Allan, and others, raising the specter of Wilde as a still-potent symbol of deviance almost 20 years after his death (176). “By taking their place of origin as … patronymic, [the family] preserves [their] affiliations in the very act of repudiating them” (176) in exactly the way that “Sebastian Melmoth” preserves Wilde's revolutionary commitments even as it seems to suggest his desire to escape from the burdens of his name.

4. Specifically, I am thinking of the appropriation of the name and image of Wilde in two instances: first, by the British pop singer Morrissey, who has used such symbology for the last decade and a half to signify his investment in what Lord Alfred Douglas and, later, Wilde, referred to as “the love that dare not speak its name”; second, by a moment in the 1995 American film Clueless, in which a homosexual newcomer is “outed” by a heterosexual classmate's string of epithets, which include the fascinating phrase “Oscar-Wilde-reading. …” Richard A. Spears notes that in the twentieth century, the term “Oscar” functioned as a euphemism for what mainstream culture still considered a “deviant” identity and action: as a noun, the term names “a homosexual male”; as a verb (“oscarizing”), it describes the act of “commit[ting] pederasty” (284).

5. Wilde and Keats may also be connected in terms of their deaths: though Keats's demise resulted from consumption, or tuberculosis, and Wilde's, depending upon which account one consults, from either a botched ear infection or tertiary syphilis, both deaths symbolically manifest the vituperance of outraged critics on the body of the embattled artist, thus registering textual invective as corporeal decline. Keats, as Byron famously remarked, was so weak that he was, in effect, killed by criticism: to Percy Bysshe Shelley, he wrote that “I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats—is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing” (601), and to John Murray he confided that “… I did not approve of Keats's poetry, or principles of poetry, or of his abuse of Pope;. … [h]owever, he who would die of an article in a review would probably have died of something else equally trivial” (661). Wilde, too, symbolically succumbed to public outrage, admitting to Vincent O'Sullivan that “‘Lucien hanged himself, Julian died on the scaffold, and I died in prison’” (qtd. in Jullian 392). Both Wilde and Keats suffered death at the level of the textual, when their works came under heavy attack from conservative readers and critics who launched arsenals of criticism against them; ultimately, such “fatal” offensives led to their downfalls, symbolically hastening their real, physical deaths.

6. For readings of the press coverage of the Wilde trials in terms of the textualization of the corporeal—the discussion and depiction of Wilde's body-as-narrative—see Cohen and Goodman, passim.

7. The letter, though quoted in Coakley, is inadequately documented, and its correspondent remains unidentified.

8. Jan B. Gordon defines gossip as “the (often) studied resistance to propriety—the ownership of discourse marginalized to be self-same or identical” (Gossip and Subversion xii); “[g]ossip, speech that is trafficked as opposed to being held in reserve, would obviously assume values antithetical to those of Western liberalism's vulnerable ‘inner voice’: repetition rather than a self-identical ‘sincerity’; the loss of a private self; an enforced conformity with institutional demands; an instrumental posture toward the self; and a dissonance which subverts self-knowledge” (300). Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks devotes an entire study to the discussion of the mechanisms of gossip; see her book, Gossip.

9. A more recent book by David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, The Body and The Law, situates the Gothic as the locus of a variety of strategies of transgression, all of which work against and must be contained by culturally sanctioned apparatuses, such as the law.

10. Wilde plays on the multiple significations of his arrow-scored prison uniform in another passage from De Profundis: “[o]ther miserable men when they are thrown into prison, if they are robbed of the beauty of the world are at least safe in some measure from the world's most deadly slings, most awful arrows. They can hide in the darkness of their cells and of their very disgrace make a mode of sanctuary. The world having had its will goes its way, and they are left to suffer undisturbed. With me it has been different. Sorrow after sorrow has come beating at the prison doors in search of me; they have opened the gates wide and let them in” (33). Wilde's lament invokes the physical image of the prison uniform and raises the image of the (prisoner's) body to the level of the (prisoner's) experience, textualizing the corporeal by way of the figure of speech “slings and arrows,” always understood to be verbal—textual—taunts that attack at the level of the corporeal, but here also including the very condition of the (prisoner's) body itself, which registers those arrows as actual arrows, as the sight and the site—in short, as the spectacle—of excoriation.

11. For accounts of Wilde's exilic escapades, see Wilde, Letters 563-844; Harris, Oscar Wilde 264-322; Croft-Cooke 238-282; Jullian 358-398; Ellmann 527-589; and Schmidgall 331-344.

12. In writing to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison, Wilde, though clearly cognizant of the bleak prospect the future held for his return to the pleasures of old, nonetheless looks forward to his move away from England as an opportunity for a kind of purification: “The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigeneia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world” (De Profundis 115).

13. In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde considers the current vogue for the term “unhealthy” in criticism of the arts, and he concludes that “[i]n fact, the popular novel that the public call healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art” (1033).

14. See Craft's “Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest” for a reading of the play's central device of “bunburying” as, among other things, “a pragmatics of gay misrepresentation, a nuanced and motile doublespeak, driven both by pleasure and, as Gide puts it, ‘by the need of self-protection’” (28).

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