[In the following essay, Grossman examines anti-aestheticism in Trilby, including comparisons with Oscar Wilde's work and a discussion of bohemia and homosexuality in the novel.]

Writing about George Du Maurier in 1897, Henry James finds a “mystery” posed by the enormous public success of Du Maurier's Trilby (1894): “The case remains, … it is one of the most curious of our time.” “Why did the public pounce on its prey with a spring so much more than elephantine?” James asks, pondering both the novel and the author it turned into an unwilling celebrity.¹ Certainly shifting marketing practices of both books and authors at the end of the century enabled Trilby's popularity, as Edward Purcell suggests.² However, the answer to James's question lies in how Trilby uniquely fits into a cultural history of the 1890s. For though Trilby, a fictionalized account of Du Maurier's bohemian life in Paris in 1856-57, is set in the past, this essay will argue that Trilby is very much concerned with the artistic, sexual, and identity issues that were embraced by the label “Aesthetic” and that came to be represented by Oscar Wilde in the 1890s. In 1894, Trilby imaginatively reformulated Britain's contemporary credos of anti-aestheticism as a cultural myth.³

Before the 1890s, Du Maurier had been obviously linked to anti-aestheticism. From 1873 to 1882, he famously ridiculed the new aesthetic movement in Punch. As his caricatures of the aesthetes illustrate, the anti-aesthetic issues that surrounded the Wilde trials, such as the emerging codes governing homosexuality and the conflict over the arts, were hardly new in 1895. In fact, Du Maurier had already been caricaturing the aesthetes for seven years when Wildean characters first appeared in his cartoons, beginning with the introduction of the character Jellaby Postlethwaite in February 1880. This fact ironically provokes Du Maurier's authoritative biographer Leonée Ormond to proclaim that “a study of Du Maurier's cartoons establishes … the lack of any true originality in Wilde's outrageous behavior.”⁴

However, as Ormond goes on to quote, James Whistler found subtler words for the relationship between Du Maurier and Wilde:

Mr Du Maurier and Mr Wilde happening to meet in the rooms where Mr Whistler was holding his first exhibition of Venice etchings, the latter brought the two face to face, and taking each by the arm inquired: “I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?”⁵

Here, Whistler, who had accused Wilde of plagiarizing from him and who knew of his own long-standing presence in Du Maurier's cartoons, perhaps wryly insinuates that he is the aesthete who has “invented” both of them. Whistler's question—who invented who?—is also finally a feint cleverly designed to leave Du Maurier at a loss. For to Du Maurier, aestheticism is a pose, a pose understood as overlaying and perhaps corrupting an essential identity. Thus, when Du Maurier responds to Whistler's comment soon after with a cartoon, he mocks the idea of inventing a person. In the cartoon, a collapse of identity is equated with identity's collapse into artifice, but, then again, there the aesthetic characters are, presumably proof that identity is essential, that their identity is a reality beyond the pale of invention. In these exchanges, from Whistler's comment to Du Maurier's cartoon, the artists reveal conflicting understandings of identity, but also—and more importantly—they reveal the interdependent texture of their conflict in general. In fact, Du Maurier's cartoon appropriately appeared the same year that Wilde, on tour for Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, was himself busy promoting the caricaturing of the aesthetes. A collapse of this kind of dialectical tension would hardly come from either side operating in this vein. On the contrary, the exchanges underscore the ongoing process of self-consciously, mutually sustaining the conflict. Indeed, there is a necessary assumption of topicality and a rejection of closure in the genre of the cartoon itself that grants the aesthetes the right to an existence, if embattled.

In the 1890s, no longer linked by cartoons in Punch, this cooperative battle between Du Maurier's anti-aestheticism and Wilde's aestheticism has been understood as at an end, even as both Wilde and Du Maurier reach the height of their fame. Du Maurier's cartoons in the 1890s suggest to Ormond that “The outrageous developments in the art and literature of the period, which would in the past have aroused [Du Maurier's] interest and amusement, did not affect him.”⁶ Du Maurier had turned to a new genre, producing three illustrated novels from 1889 to 1896. Yet, if these novels, as fictionalized accounts of Du Maurier's past, seem isolated from those contemporary debates that had previously animated Du Maurier, Trilby, at least, is not. It is no coincidence that when the year of 1895 began, Oscar Wilde's Ideal Husband opened at the Haymarket Theatre and when it ended, the Haymarket was staging an adaptation of Du Maurier's Trilby, When in 1895, the press turned the Wilde trials into the story of the year, they tacitly and unwittingly, but predictably, found help from Du Maurier's immensely popular fiction story of the year before. Du Maurier's celebrated anti-aesthetic cartoons had been followed up with a thrilling novel.

Whether Du Maurier was projecting his contemporary issues into the past or finding them there, Trilby is straightforwardly about art and artists engaged in a conflict that can only be understood in terms of the dialectic between aestheticism and anti-aestheticism that is in full swing in 1894 when Du Maurier writes. Thus, Trilby begins with a tendentious presentation of two competing artists with two competing conceptions of art: Little Billee's drawing of Trilby's foot and Svengali's performance on his flexible flageolet. Roughly speaking, Little Billee's “petit chef-d’oeuvre”⁷ represents art in the classical style, in which Du Maurier was trained in Paris. In the Platonic tradition, Little Billee attempts to imitate perfect forms, which sometimes appear in nature. In this case Trilby's perfect foot makes it difficult for “poor human art to keep pace with [Nature]” (p. 18). In contrast, Svengali miraculously turns “a twopenny tune on his elastic penny whistle” (p. 28) into “a vague cosmic vision” (p. 30). Svengali creates art in the contemporary aesthetic mode, as nervously viewed by Du Maurier. This art is pure performance, unrelated to any natural reality. Damning Svengali on the same grounds as he does Wilde, Du Maurier writes that Svengali's art is ultimately nothing more than a “magic” trick that makes the “base” suddenly and momentarily beautiful (p. 57) and that Svengali gives a “charm … to any music that he played, except the highest and the best of all, in which he conspicuously failed” (p. 56). Likewise, when the “demon” (p. 435) Svengali finally dies in a theatre box from which he secretly conducts Trilby's mesmerized performance, his end characterizes his Wildean, aesthetic collapse of the boundaries separating artist, art, performer, and audience. Svengali even has the same artistic foibles Du Maurier sees in Wilde: an “overweening conceit” that leaves “but one virtue—his love of art; or rather, his love of himself as a master of his art—the master” (p. 56). Trilby, nevertheless, is hardly about a nuanced reworking and (mis)understanding of Wilde's artistic ideology. On the contrary, in its most sweeping anti-aesthetic move, Little Billee and Svengali represent the artistic issues surrounding the aesthetic movement in the 1890s formulated as a melodramatic battle between good and evil. Thus, from the opening of Trilby, Du Maurier disparages the aesthetic conception of art and personifies his view of the aesthetic movement in Svengali, a personification that in itself anticipates the use of Wilde as a symbol of the aesthetic movement at his trials. It is not that Du Maurier simply depicts Wilde. The Jewish Svengali is too different from Wilde ever to be read as a direct, libelous importation, despite the novel's obvious link to the artistic debates surrounding aestheticism and the Wilde trials. In Trilby, Du Maurier is not openly challenging the aesthetes; he is secretly imagining their incarnation as a single, demon-artist.

Only in its original, serialized version does Trilby betray its otherwise covert anti-aestheticism. In the serial edition, a minor character named Joe Sibley is an obvious caricature of Whistler, one of the aesthetic movement's leading artists. Whistler sued Du Maurier for libel and won. Most of the libelous parts were omitted or altered when the novel was published. Nonetheless, illustrations picturing Whistler remain in the novel, one of which aptly enough depicts him fleeing the burly artist Taffy as Taffy throws another of those too bohemian artists to the floor. However, it is in the excised libelous sections that we discover that Du Maurier was not evoking the Whistler he knew in Paris in the 1850s, but rather the Whistler of his present-day 1890s (see Ormond's full account of the libel suit). With this in mind, we must consider the description, excised from the novel, of Whistler/Sibley's relationship to Svengali:

Then there was Joe Sibley, the idle apprentice, the king of bohemia, le roi des truands, to whom everything was forgiven, as to François Villon, “à cause de ses gentillesses.”

Always in debt, like Svengali; like Svengali, vain, witty, and a most exquisite and original artist; and also eccentric in his attire (though clean), so that people would stare at him as he walked along—which he adored!⁸

The comparisons between Sibley and Svengali accumulate here, linking the libelous personification of Whistler, the aesthete, closely with Svengali, hinting descriptively and alliteratively, that Whistler and Wilde are the contemporary counterparts. For Trilby, as a historical roman à clef, accounts for the presence of Whistler/Sibley, but Svengali's presence, with no Parisian source, suggests the incursion of another artist, specifically the leading aesthetic artist of Du Maurier's present—Oscar Wilde—into the imagining of Svengali.

However, the occlusion of its contemporary relevance is finally part of the novel's achievement. Svengali is hardly a novelistic version of even Du Maurier's indirect depictions of Wilde as Postlethwaite in Punch. In Postlethwaite's case, Du Maurier explicitly forges the connection, even if he only admits “Postlethwaite was said to be Mr Oscar Wilde, but the character was founded not on one person at all, but a whole school.”⁹ After Wilde's first defeat in court, the Daily Telegraph editorial of April 6, 1895 has no problem making the connection between Wilde and Postlethwaite, commenting self-righteously and unselfconsciously that “The pranks of Postlethwaite and his congeners were innocent so long as they were merely aesthetic.” In contrast to Postlethwaite, the character Svengali is encrypted so as not to be read as Wilde or even as anti-aesthetic parody because the anti-aesthetic of Trilby is working to remove Wilde and the aesthetic movement from contemporary relevance. Trilby is not an encoded anti-aesthetic work that is supposed to be decoded, like Du Maurier's cartoons, the operetta Patience, or the novel The Green Carnation. In fact, Trilby is different from even that wide range of dissimilar texts that are generally considered relevant to a history of anti-aestheticism before the Wilde trial, stretching back from Max Nordau's blatant, scientific polemic Degeneration (English edition in 1895) to Robert Buchanan's “The Session of Poets” (1866). For Trilby is not just overlooked when a critic like Jerome Buckley surveys and constructs a canon of texts that constitute anti-aestheticism; it hides. For this reason, the mystification that Henry James feels in 1897 about why Trilby is so successful is the predictable fruit of Trilby. His mystification follows from Trilby's contradictory product as cultural myth: to express in order to repress its culture's contemporary issues. Trilby succeeds by eliding, rather than by displaying, the contemporary relevance that made it so popular. Wilde, then, was not explicitly linked with Svengali because the anti-aesthetic agenda undergirding Trilby silently dismisses, rather than openly engages, aestheticism. This story is effectively disguised as a historical roman à clef. Translating Trilby into Du Maurier's Paris days, a process that suggests that this book is somehow really about the past, paradoxically functions to remove the reader even further from the contemporary artistic, sexual, and identity issues in whose burial the novel and the reader are already participating.

This burial is produced by the nostalgia of “good to remember, and sweet to muse upon (with fond regret) in after years” (p. 3) that characterizes Trilby as a novel different from most other novels. The nostalgic narrator disposes of the contemporary debates surrounding the aesthetic movement by removing them to an extinct past, in this case, the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1850s. The nostalgia is so thick here that it becomes the plot, which turns into a nostalgic recounting of a nostalgic return by the three heroes to the France of their youth. At one point, they buy part of their own past as a souvenir. Contemporary fears about Wilde as artist are thus transported to the fictive context of a safely resolved yesteryear, to those “Oh, happy days and happy nights, sacred to art and friendship! oh, happy times of careless impecuniosity, and youth” (pp. 39-40) from which we have grown up, or, rather, as the nostalgia announces to which we can only look back. In the end, the narrator's condescending fondness indicates distance from and authority over the past that is being described. It is no coincidence that after Svengali and Little Billee's dueling art exhibits, the narrator announces: “And then—well, I happen to forget what sort of day this particular day turned into at about six of the clock” (p. 32). Here, the narrator suddenly shifts for several pages to a purely nostalgic perspective that occurs throughout the novel, dispatching the previous artistic debate to the past. This perspective no longer relates events that are tied to specific occurrences, but rather conjures up generalized memories of when “you” (p. 32) did this or did that, a bygone era. Du Maurier thus imagines a position through the narrator's perspective when the aesthetic movement is part of the past. Wilde's end as artist is imagined, and therefore imaginable. The shifted perspective anticipates the movement of the aesthetes themselves into cultural memory.¹⁰

Not surprisingly, the artistic style of Trilby, of which this nostalgic tone is so much a part, is itself as anti-aesthetic as Trilby's depiction of artists and artistic debates. For if part of the aesthetic movement's place in a history of philology is as “the apotheosis of linguistic self-consciousness,” as Linda Dowling suggests, then Trilby represents the apogee of reaction to that style of “fatal,” or, as Dorian Gray (1891) puts it, “poisonous,” books written in a “curious jewelled style … full of argot and archaisms.”¹¹Trilby was widely celebrated for its casual and conversational narrative voice. “Nothing so extravagantly colloquial was ever so exact a means to an end” writes Henry James; “talk is so much the whole of the matter that the books come as near as possible to reading as if a report of it had been taken down at various times by an emissary behind the door.”¹² Nothing could be further from the “curious jewelled style” of the Decadents. Trilby delivers a voice so successfully celebrated as natural and immediate that it begs a linguistic historical context, which Dowling provides: “the reaction against Pater's linguistically problematic ‘dead language’ coincided in the 1890s with a ‘renaissance of romance,’ with a neo-Wordsworthian demand for a model of literary language once again based upon the voice, the speaking voice now recognized in all its linguistic legitimacy.”¹³ With a loud and seemingly present voice, punctuated everywhere with exclamation marks, Trilby announces itself as thoroughly English, the healthy replacement for aestheticism's purple prose and Wilde's brilliantly unsettling epigrams.

Yet, Trilby, which takes place in the Latin Quarter of Paris, is filled with French. This French, often rendered anglicized (or similarly inflected by other languages), might seem at first to present a corruption of the natural English, in the style of the Decadents. However, just as the geographical placement of the heroes in French Bohemia automatically unites them as English characters, the French language in Trilby produces the purified English: “Three nice clean Englishmen, all speaking English—and such dear old friends! Ah! j’aime tant ça—c’est le ciel! I wonder I’ve got a word of English left!” (p. 371). The purity of English (and the English) is established not by the absence of the foreign, but rather through the introduction of it. Moreover, crucially in this case, that foreign is Bohemia. For now as we move from considering the art and artists of Trilby to exploring Trilby's concerns with sexuality, we must pay closer attention to the fact that the art and artists' scene in Trilby is bohemian. The reader is, in the title of Felix Moscheles's book, In Bohemia with Du Maurier.¹⁴ And, as we will see, inasmuch as the Wilde trials were an attempt to dispose of homosexuality, which was linked inseparably to Wilde's aestheticism, the narrative of the trials was a national, symbolic trip through bohemia for which Trilby helped to clear a path.

Hence the following courtroom exchange is recorded in the “Wilde-Taylor Case” of The Daily Telegraph, 1 May 1895:

Mr. Gill: Did it strike you that this [Taylor's] place was at all peculiar?

[Wilde]—Not at all. I thought it Bohemian.

Wilde's response in the courtroom failed as an exculpating description. The jurors and the public were generally horrified by his visits to the bohemia of “Taylor's rooms, with their heavily draped windows, their candles burning on through the day, and the languorous atmosphere, heavy with perfumes.”¹⁵ By the time of the Wilde trials and of Trilby's tale of bohemia, bohemia was not simply a foreign artists' colony, but part of the culture's emerging concept of homosexuality. Writing of “bachelor novels,” including Trilby, Eve Sedgwick rightly defines “bohemia as the temporal space where the young, male bourgeois literary subject was required to navigate his way through his ‘homosexual panic’—seen here as a developmental stage—toward the more repressive, self-ignorant, and apparently consolidated status of the mature bourgeois paterfamilias.”¹⁶ This temporal space is constructed in Trilby by the nostalgia for the youthful heroes. Their story is seen as a surmounted, earlier, bohemian stage, effectively collapsing the older artistic sense of bohemian into its newer sexual meanings. To this narrator, the almost butch/femme homoerotic relationship of the “girlish” (p. 9) Little Billee and the “brawny” (p. 3) Taffy are nothing but a happy memory of youth, something almost in the homosexual tradition of British public schools. The nostalgia enables the narrator to recall homoerotic memories and to evoke an otherwise unauthorized gaze at male bodies, such as the celebration of Taffy's body (p. 96) or Svengali's visits to the naked English characters while they bathe (p. 64), all without threatening a (current) heterosexual identity. Thus, in much the same way that Trilby bypasses the complexity of artistic debates by removing the aesthetic artistic movement to the past, Trilby reconstructs the aesthetic movement's homosexual dimension as part of a bohemian rite-of-passage of youth, besides which the complexity of the men's relations in Trilby pales. Located safely outside of England, bohemia is, as Sedgwick suggests, figured in Trilby as nothing more than the terrain of a phase of youth. Yet, the celebratory tone of the narrator's nostalgia in Trilby gives Little Billee's and his male comrades' route through bohemia a much more positive valence than Sedgwick's terms “navigate” and “panic” imply. In studied contrast to Taylor's bohemian place, the bohemian studio that is the center of Trilby always has a fresh breeze, and though it has heavy curtains, those “curtains were drawn and shutters opened; the studio flooded with light—and the afternoon was healthily spent in athletic and gymnastic exercises till dinner-time” (p. 31). Trilby's bohemia is not a place of panicky encounters with homosexuality, but rather a celebrated (foreign) homosexual space in which everyone proves themselves heterosexual.

In other words, Trilby visits bohemia in order to introduce homosexual purlieus that it then reveals are not homosexual. The novel opens on a bohemian artist's studio, as the narrator employs the doubled narrative strategy of both recreating Du Maurier's Parisian studio and reworking the opening few paragraphs of Dorian Gray. Appropriately for Trilby, the first character introduced is next to a divan, not smoking on one like Lord Henry, the first character introduced in Dorian Gray. Du Maurier's description of this divan illustrates Trilby's dynamic of near-brushes with the homosexual:

And an immense divan … a divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented Englishmen could all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once without being in each other's way, and very often did!

At present one of these Englishmen … was more energetically engaged. Bare-armed, and in his shirt and trousers, he was twirling a pair of Indian clubs round his head. (P. 3)

Here, Du Maurier establishes that the men can be on the sofa-bed together without touching, something that is strictly reserved for their promenades and the macho roughhousing of their constant, vigorous exercises. In a similar vein, the three male artists, Taffy, Little Billee, and the Laird, all effectively live together, though nominally Du Maurier allows only that the Laird lives in the studio. Trilby, with its studio-home and its immense divan, is a story, which, expressing in order to repress, continually verges onto homosexual possibilities for its male characters, while simultaneously placing them outside the sweeping—even Svengali loves Trilby—heterosexual trajectory.

In fact, recreating the story of his days in Paris primarily as a struggle for Trilby is the other major imaginative change in Du Maurier's reconstruction besides the invention of Svengali. For though Trilby has a source in Du Maurier's Paris, he “never got beyond saying good-morning to her.”¹⁷ Du Maurier's invention of Trilby's role thus refigures what was originally primarily a story of male-male relations as a heterosexual romance. In Trilby, the complexities of the original male-male relations are visited so as to be dispatched by a narrow, fictive, heterosexual plot. If practically every available man in the novel loves Trilby, she herself not only “would have made a singularly handsome boy” (p. 16), but also takes her name from a male literary character, thereby representing another case of successfully repudiated homosexual possibility. So, while Trilby might be read either as refiguring a set of potentially homosexual relations by asserting that every man in the book is madly in love with Trilby or as depicting a homosocial community in which the heterosexual men's homosocial relations are sanctioned by the presence of a woman, in either case, the bohemian sexual dynamic undergirding the novel is the same: the construction of heterosexual characters through the introduction of the already repudiated possibility of homosexuality.

In a general sense, then, Trilby constructs bohemia as a heterosexualized homosexual space in part to show that there is no homosexual life story. This construction recalls that homosexuality was rendered lifeless as a prerequisite for homosexuality to be figured as isolated transgressions, as it was in the Wilde trial.¹⁸Trilby, however, neither overtly depicts, nor criminalizes homosexuality. Rather, in its confirmation that its intimate male camaraderie is heterosexual, Trilby repeats a fundamental anti-aesthetic trope: an anti-aesthetic (e.g. heterosexual) identity is covertly defined through the erasure of the aesthetic (e.g. the homosexual). Paradoxically, Trilby makes clear what isn’t there. A “perverse dynamic” that Jonathan Dollimore describes is at work here when the heterosexuality of Trilby establishes itself by erasing the homosexual; as Dollimore suggests, we can then see the “fearful interconnectedness whereby the antithetical inheres within, and is partly produced by, what it opposes.”¹⁹ Yet, like Sedgwick's term “panic,” Dollimore's adjective “fearful” implies an uneasiness that is hard to find in the exuberance of Trilby. In Trilby this “fearful interconnectedness” becomes a celebrated spectacle, reminding us that the anti-aesthetic hegemony that did so self-righteously and authoritatively send Wilde to prison was an ideology that had always been cheerfully close to its eventual victim. So, as it turns out, the familiar and often fruitful search in current literary criticism for this interconnectedness, for the “instabilities and contradictions within dominant structures which exist by virtue of exactly what those dominant structures simultaneously contain and exclude,”²⁰ leads to an intellectual version of fool's gold in the case of Trilby. Anti-aestheticism was always unabashedly crossing over, or, at least, striking the pose.

Trilby, in fact, wallows in its “instabilities and contradictions.” It even proudly announces immediately of its hero Little Billee that he has a “tinge” (p. 6) of Jewish blood, and “Tant pis pour les autres!” [So much the worse for the others] without “a minim of that precious fluid” (p. 7). But Svengali's Jewish blood makes him a villain; it is one more potent ingredient in his overall degenerate mongrelization. A strange rhetoric of hybridity is at work here. Trilby pits what might be called false hybridity (Little Billee) against true hybridity (Svengali). However, why Little Billee should somehow be both pure and healthily corrupted becomes obvious in his battle for Trilby. For Little Billee loses Trilby as much because of his moralizing mother and his own anguished prudishness and naiveté (called “his almost girlish purity of mind” [p. 9]) as because the thrilling Svengali steals her away. Svengali's differences are terrifying, but Little Billee's reduced, parallel differences (such as his “tinge” of Jewish blood) just barely save him from his own pristine virtuousness. The hero that is being forged in this novel is the happy, middle figure between two mythic enemies: the tediously pure and the contaminated hybrid. The ideological upshot is that the tacit anti-aestheticism is saved from appearing too pure and prim, an effect established explicitly by the humorous parodying of the aesthetes in Du Maurier's cartoons or in Patience. After all, to survive, anti-aestheticism must not appear to be a rigid authority whose discourse is a half-step from death by petrification, even as it simply underscores and reaffirms the contemporary, bigoted clichés of middle-class society. Thus, it is not that anti-aestheticism does not celebrate the aesthetic; on the contrary, it must, but only with the assumption that aestheticism is all a formulaic guise, a dirty pose.

Hence, in a famous scene in Patience, the Dragoons, who are trying to win over the rapturous maidens, dramatically and comically fail in their attempts to adopt aesthetic behavior. The Dragoons thereby play badly at transgression, simultaneously establishing the impossibility for themselves of that transgression and enacting its repudiation: look at me, I can’t do this! Their essentially un-aesthetic identity is thereby confirmed, or, rather must be continually confirmed this way. What is crucial to see in the scene is that the Dragoons are not simply defining themselves by pairing off the primary, if variable, elements of the binaries that ostensibly structure their identity (e.g. militaristic/artistic, manly/effeminate, heterosexual/homosexual, etc.). The Dragoons define themselves as Philistines only posing as aesthetes, unable to be truly aesthetic because of their essentially normal identity. They are, in fact, goons in drag. Aestheticism is thus defined as a pose which is in turn assumed to indicate a corrupt overlay of an essential identity. This is why in asides and soliloquies the aesthetes in Patience reveal that they are not really aesthetes, though all turn to the pose if it is to their advantage. This is why the lesson at the end of Patience is that Bunthorne, and presumably any other aesthete, will be punished, not for being aesthetes, that is impossible, but for holding an aesthetic pose too long. In the end, anti-aestheticism claims to be able to see through aestheticism's posings.

It is from this perspective that Svengali is, after all, somehow fundamentally not merely a corrupt and demonic hybrid, but a dangerous poser from his first trick performance on a little flute to his phony construction of Trilby as a singer. Indeed, the whole battle between the evil Svengali and the good Little Billee over the model Trilby hinges upon what posing her will mean. And this question—what does it mean to pose?—is a central fulcrum between aestheticism and anti-aestheticism, one that concerns not just art but homosexuality and conflicting, fundamental conceptions about identity.

What does posing mean? For a long time, the word “posing” only meant to question or to interrogate. That sense of “posing” stretches back to a time when “posers” could refer straightforwardly to examiners, sometimes of a scholarly type, who could honestly be proud of a University title like “Poser-general” (see the oed). Then, the Victorians placed the blurry word “pose” in the charged intersection of identity, the body, and art. Models posed. The Victorians thus invented the attitudinizing and artistic meanings of pose that figured in the new disparaging use of “poser” or “poseur.” Hence, for the Marquis of Queensbury, his notorious accusation that Wilde was “Posing as Somdomite [sic]” carried with it not just a pseudo-legal charge that Wilde appeared to be practicing sodomy, but the burden of Victorian anti-aestheticism contained by the word “Posing.” In the anti-aesthetic discourse of the trials, “posing” operates as an accusation of Wilde's self for aesthetic, homosexual, and identity transgressions, while the term “influencing” works the same multivalent, disciplinary shift, but as an accusation of his potential to endanger others. If to “pose” is to falsify your own identity, to “influence” is to falsify that of another. Tautologically, Wilde's influence threatens to turn Lord Alfred and other young, British men into posers—homosexuals, artificial identities, aesthetes. Even a cursory review of the anti-aestheticism deployed in the press's narrative of the Wilde trials shows this use of the term “pose” and the term “influence” (which is often modified by “corrupt” and sometimes substituted for by “corrupt”). An untouchable, shifting anti-aesthetic epistemology is at work in the press's narrative of the Wilde trials. Yet, the prosecutors at the trial were not inventing a language or coining new anti-aesthetic terms. On the contrary, their discourse is clearly relying on accepted definitions.

At first it seems that Wilde himself had provided a primary source, if not the evidence and script for his trial, in Dorian Gray. Appropriately fluid, “influence” seems to run all over this novel. It flows between characters. Lord Henry, who finds “something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence” (p. 33), influences Dorian who “had the most extraordinary influence over [Basil]” (p. 89). It flows between art and characters. Even books influence readers in this book. The text thus both doubles itself and represents the influence of J.-K. Huysmans's À Rebours (1884): “For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book” (p. 98). At one point, Lord Henry, responding to a still naive Dorian, constructs a commentary on influence that seems ready-made for the prosecution of Wilde:

“Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?”

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.”

“Why?”

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” (P. 19)

Lord Henry momentarily assumes a “natural” identity here in opposition to one under “influence.” He does so, however, in a novel that deconstructs the notion of a natural or essential self as, in Dorian's words, “the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing, simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence” (p. 111). Lord Henry's assumption of an essential self here rapidly dissolves into the complexities of the novel's insistence that identities are always constructed by influence, even, as Dorian discovers, “influences that came from his own temperament” (p. 93). Moreover, despite—indeed partly because of—the sinister valence of the words associated with “influence,” such as “corrupting” and “poisonous,” the protagonists of this novel enjoy the flow of “influence,” as their frequent comparisons of influence to music suggest. Lord Henry, Basil, and even Dorian may be villainous, but they are not the villains of the novel. In fact, though the 1891 edition generally encodes and elides the homosexuality of the 1890 Lippincott's version, the addition of James Vane's attempts to kill a fearful Dorian further deflects the possibility of reading Dorian (and by extension his homosexuality) as villain. Dorian Gray, despite its gothic, fatal ending and fantastic, gruesome painting, does not demonize “influence” or its aesthetic, homosexual, or identity-construction implications. Dorian Gray may have helped define the terms of Wilde's trial narrative, but this novel is ultimately used as evidence against Wilde, as proof that Wilde sanctioned the behavior for which he was tried.

It was Trilby that had silently helped to construct a perspective from which to condemn Wilde as artist-villain by imagining the villain-artist Svengali as a demon of influence, for Svengali corrupts by influence of the most dangerous sort: mesmerism. He hypnotizes Trilby in order to make her a world-famous singer, turning her into a zombie of pure performance: “And you shall see nothing, hear nothing, think of nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!” (p. 72). In Trilby, Dorian Gray's “influence” is recast as overwhelming, rather than inspiring, as victimizing, rather than empowering, as specific to a single character, rather than ubiquitous, and as an evil power, rather than as a complex reality. Trilby thus at once made influence itself dangerous and framed the aesthetic movement, in all its dimensions, as a truly dangerous influence. Whereas in Dorian Gray “influence” signals both subjectivity and subjects (art, homosexuality, developing identities), Svengali redefines influence as the evacuation of subjectivity with his famous mesmeric invocation: “Et maintenant dors, ma mignonne!” [And now sleep, my darling] (p. 379).

In Trilby, then, influencing returns to its older astrological meaning of supernatural possession, and, as with Socrates's fear for the rhapsode Ion, this possession is performance. As Trilby finally climactically reveals, performance leads to a dangerous loss of identity. Trilby performing has not been “the real Trilby” (p. 443). The “real” Trilby, whom Little Billee and his comrades worship in the first volume before her fall into Svengali's hypnotic clutches, is the high-spirited and independent model they try to transform into a typical housewife: “the sight of her sitting cross-legged on the model-throne darning the Laird's socks or sewing buttons on his shirts … was so pleasant it was painted by all three” (p. 89). In contrast, in Dorian Gray, Sibyl Vane is only real when she is performing. When Sibyl loses her ability to perform, which is what makes her different and profound, and discovers instead her natural identity, which only makes her boring and ordinary, she also loses Dorian's love. As a result, Sybil kills herself. It is exactly this aesthetic valorization of performance that is deadly for Trilby. In a denouement that mirrors the end of Dorian Gray, Trilby is confronted by a “portrait” (p. 417)—a photograph—of Svengali, and she becomes re-hypnotized, dramatizing, like Dorian Gray, the death of a model into art with her resurgence of mesmerized singing. However, her death, unlike Dorian's death, reveals that she is an innocent victim. She sees Svengali, not herself, in the picture, fixing Svengali as the sole source of corruption. After singing, she dies whispering the incriminating words “Svengali … Svengali … Svengali …” (p. 420, original ellipses). Thus, if throughout Dorian Gray influence is the key to an identity made of poses, influence is the guilty and horrifying crime against identity that is hidden until the end of Trilby. Reimagining influence as the corrupting power of a villainous artist, Trilby tacitly constructs the anti-aesthetic assumptions that will produce Wilde in the trial narrative as a Svengali of homosexuality. Trilby, it would seem, casts its own rather hypnotic spell of anti-aestheticism.

By reformulating anti-aesthetic credos as invisible and seemingly a priori positions, Trilby produced a cultural myth. It thus helped crystallize a divisive opposition between aestheticism and anti-aestheticism in the mid 1890s. Paradoxically, Trilby nonetheless also shows us that anti-aestheticism is neither static nor monolithic. As Trilby evinces, the dominant discourse itself was finally not simply the blatant sort of denouncement of Wilde's counter-culture that we find in Nordau's Degeneration. The whole ideological conflict was finally much more complicated. Recently scholars have argued rightly and extensively that Wilde's thinking was never simply an inversion of society's dominant discourse. Likewise, if nothing else, the variety of Trilby's tactics suggests that the dimensions of anti-aestheticism cannot simply be deduced in opposition to aestheticism, despite my use of “anti-.” Anti-aestheticism is but a name for a multiform and even self-contradicting tradition. In the end, it takes equally elaborate ideological special effects to produce simple and narrow ideals and ideas in people as it does to make them think. For the horror of the complexity of the anti-aesthetic ideology in Trilby was that in the end it helped deal with aestheticism in all its dimensions by turning it into nothing more than an evil, deviant opposition and a single, incarceratable invert.

From this perspective, the Wilde trials were the completion of a contemporary cultural rage that momentarily polarized—indeed froze—identities as well as identifiable viewpoints for much of the society. The silent gathering of this wave in Trilby led to its uncanny success. This is not to say that in 1894 and 1895, there were not other, heated, and more obviously depicted contemporary issues fueling Trilby's popularity as well, such as Trilby's depiction of a startling version of an 1890s New Woman, its questions of premarital sex, and its pronouncements about religious belief. The sprawling, disjointed text of Trilby is not to be solved, as it were, by demystifying its ideological effects; no novel is. Yet, the mystery of Trilby's success tautologically suggests that something mysterious was indeed at work in this novel. Du Maurier himself was at a loss to understand what happened to his novel, and he is only less justifiably and equally foolishly turned into a personification of anti-aestheticism as Wilde was of aestheticism in the trials. In fact, the predictable irony of Trilby's success is that Wilde was not the only artist that Trilby victimized; there was Du Maurier, too. As James writes in Du Maurier's obituary, “The whole phenomenon grew and grew till it became, at any rate for this particular victim, a fountain of gloom and a portent of woe. … It became a mere immensity of sound, the senseless hum of a million of newspapers and the irresponsible chatter of ten millions of gossips.”²¹

Notes

1. Henry James, “George Du Maurier,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 95 (September 1897): p. 604.

2. Edward Purcell, “Trilby and Trilby-Mania, The Beginning of the Bestseller System,” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (Summer 1977): pp. 62-76.

3. As Nina Auerbach writes in the prelude to her own exploration of Trilby's, or rather, Trilby's mythic dimensions: “A cultural myth thrives in large part because it lives below the formulated surface of its age; rarely does it crystallize into explicit gospel or precept which the conscious mind can analyze and reject” (Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982], p. 10).

4. Leonée Ormond, George Du Maurier (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), p. 253.

5. James McNeil Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, ed. Sheridan Ford (New York: Lovell, 1890), p. 241. This is a pirated edition.

6. Ormond, p. 431. More recently, however, Elaine Showalter has made the apt general observation in her introduction to Trilby (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) that “Du Maurier's bohemian Paris is … as much a projection of the 1890s as a recollection of the 1850s” (p. xiii), and though George Taylor has focused on Herbert Beerbohm Tree's famous dramatization of Svengali, Taylor does draw together aestheticism and Svengali, especially with his provocative title “Svengali: mesmerist and aesthete” (in British Theatre in the 1890s, ed. Richard Foulkes [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992], pp. 93-110).

7. George Du Maurier, Trilby (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895), p. 31. All further page references will be cited in text. All italics in quoted matter appear in the original. References are to the novel, not the serial version, unless otherwise indicated.

8. George Du Maurier, “Trilby,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 88 (1894): p. 577. “Le roi de truands” means the king of the good-for-nothings; in general, I will only translate the French texts that are really needed to understand the quoted passage.

9. Pall Mall Gazette, 19 May 1894.

10. Viewing a contemporary problem as a memory does not automatically imply a conservative removal of that problem to another time. It could reveal illuminating historical parallels. However, a similar, but more explicit, removal of the aesthetes to the past that appears in Punch, 2 February 1895, clarifies, underscores, and imitates the power of this particular narrative strategy operating in Trilby. In a mock article by “Max Mereboom” (Max Beerbohm) called “From the Queer and Yellow Book,” the narrator pretends to look back on 1894, creating the same narratological effect as Du Maurier, but by positioning the perspective in the future. Thus:

    Much of this remote Period must remain mobled in the Mists of Antiquity, but we know that about then flourished the Sect that was to win for itself the Title of the ‘Decadents.’ What exactly this Title signified I suppose no two entomologists [sic] will agree. But we may learn from the Caricatures of the day what the Decadents were in outward semblance; from the Lampoons what was their mode of life. Nightly they gathered at any of the Theatres where the plays of Mr. wilde were being given. Nightly, the stalls were fulfilled by Row upon Row of neatly-curled Fringes surmounting Button-holes of monstrous size. (P. 58)

    The aesthetes are imagined as an extinct insect type led by Wilde, just a month before the Wilde trials begin the brutal process of extinguishing Wilde. Here, the pseudo-scientific discourse creates a similar effect as the rhetoric of nostalgia in Trilby; both indicate that the past has little to do with the present. “Max Mereboom,” however, would have been more likely to see Wilde as Du Maurier did: as a hypnotist like Svengali. Beerbohm's notes after meeting Wilde read: “Effeminate but vitality of twenty men, magnetism—authority. Deeper than repute or wit, Hypnotic” (qtd. in John Lahr, “Introduction,” The Plays of Oscar Wilde [New York: Vintage Books, 1988], p. xiii).

11. Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), p. 146; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald Lawler (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 241. Further references to Dorian Gray will be indicated in the text in parenthesis.

12. James, pp. 605, 604.

13. Dowling, p. 181.

14. Felix Moscheles, In Bohemia with Du Maurier (New York: Harper, 1897). Moscheles's book, however, only describes the period just after Du Maurier left Paris, when he continued his bohemian life in Antwerp.

15. “Oscar Wilde at the Old Bailey,” The Illustrated Police Budget, 4 May 1895.

16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), p. 193. See the work of Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Ed Cohen, and Joseph Bristow for discussions of the emergence of the “homosexual” at the end of the nineteenth century and general background to this section. The late Victorian word “homosexual,” and not “gay,” is intentionally used in this essay to indicate a Victorian construction of sexuality, which in fact coalesced in the 1890s around the Wilde trials.

17. Ormond, p. 53. As Ormond recounts, shortly after Du Maurier left Paris, he made his first attempt at an illustrated novel. In this work, Les Noces de Picciola, he depicts the woman whom Ormond sees as the source for Trilby and with whom Du Maurier and his roommate were currently involved. This attempt at a novel is, suggestively, about a ménage à trois that consists of himself, the woman, and his (male) roommate, a solution unavailable in the narrower sexual practices of Trilby.

18. The fifteen separate charges against Wilde, each of which more or less announces a time, place, and victim, meant Wilde's life narrative had to be recast in terms of crimes, as repetitions of an incident of transgression that turned the incidental bed stain into a smoking gun. Wilde was finally not tried for living a homosexual “lifestyle,” as gays are demonized for doing today. Rather, he was, even in the press's trial narrative's generalized and vague terms, perceived as repeatedly engaging in criminal activities, which were then reinscribed as the behavior of a criminal type—“the homosexual.”

19. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); p. 33.

20. Ibid., p. 33.

21. James, p. 607.