SOURCE: “The Soldier and the Aesthete: Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Gilded Age America,” in Journal of American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1, April, 1996, pp. 25-46.

[In the following excerpt, Blanchard argues that with the increased aestheticism of the Gilded Age came a more open acceptance of homosexuality and alternative definitions of manhood.]

The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803-14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.¹

The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology. Influenced by the English reformers, John Ruskin, William Morris and the pre-Raphaelite painters, American aestheticism centered around the tasteful pursuit of the decorative arts. But the umbrella philosophy insisted that one should live for art and beauty, that one should create an aesthetic social environment. Indeed, the site for aestheticism was the domestic sphere, alien to the political or military discourse of the Civil War years. Aestheticism entered middle-class culture through the influence of the English handicrafts at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876, through the burgeoning of art societies, art journals, and industrial art schools at this time, through “cluttered” high Victorian decor which was considered “artistic,” and through the mantra of the word “artistic” which saturated the popular media—from general advice on decoration to the rhetoric in trade journals and sophisticated publications. By using the Aesthetic Movement as a framing device, this essay examines cultural attitudes toward both the soldier and the aesthete to explore the emergence of “male weakness” and feminine or homosexual figures in Gilded Age America.²

I

In the 1870s and 1880s, the rise of the new male, self-stylized aesthete patterned after Oscar Wilde was, of course, in dialectical relationship to the more persistent and visible ideal in American culture, the man as soldier. This older, more static model, emerging from the republican hero as the freedom fighter and from the more recent soldier/citizen of the Civil War, was symbolically overlaid on other cultural heroes of the Reconstruction years. For the vigor, aggressiveness, tenacity, and “manliness” of the soldier/hero was attached as well, note historians, to the ethos of the assertive entrepreneur, to the bravado of the frontier warrior, and even to the commitment of the Populist rebel or the union agitator. This military metaphor was evident in the model of the “soldierly” industrial worker confronted by competition from new international markets, and evident, too, in the ideology underlying the rise of competitive team sports in the late nineteenth century. Even social reformers formulated their ideology of the “moral equivalent of war,” the Salvation Army, for instance, in terms of the prevailing template of the “manly soldier.”³

Yet, during the 1870s and 1880s, the aftermath of the Civil War, a certain war-weariness induced some Americans to seek alternate modes of self-definition, as new formats, aesthetic style for one, competed with older categories like the “manly” soldier to define masculinity. For the acceptance of Aestheticism and the male aesthete was symptomatic of a culture that no longer celebrated the soldier's victory, but instead aestheticized death and divorced “manliness” from warfare. For many, this shifted concepts of masculinity and subjectivity from the Civil War battlefield to the aesthetic parlor. Only a cataclysm as profound as a war between brother and brother could have temporarily suppressed the visibility and continuity of the soldier/hero in a culture formed from a revolutionary war ethos. Never entirely disappearing as a cultural value, “soldierly” manhood, nonetheless, was a contested model during the Aesthetic years. Aestheticism could not have been a popular movement without the Civil War, for, during the 1870s and 1880s, for some men, the ahistorical “escape” from the memory of Civil War armies and battles allowed scope for the new forms of artistic endeavors and gender experimentation so prevalent in the culture at large and so intimate to popular Aestheticism in America.⁴

Little needs to be recounted of the Civil War itself and the innumerable casualties that ensued. These ravages were precipitated by the new age of the rifle, a modern weapon of carnage used in combination with the old-age war manoeuvre of tactical assaults. “It was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earthwork lined with infantry,” recalled one soldier. “We were very lavish of blood in those days.” In the end, more than 620,000 American men died and the United States began the painful process of Reconstruction, and the less visible, but crucial, drift toward Aestheticism.⁵

If the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 was the catalyst for the Aesthetic Movement, the fair's themes signaled a perceptible emasculation of the valoric soldier/hero model and a negation of the war itself. Cataloging our “first century of national existence,” the Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition, for instance, stressed “the noble arts of peace,” with no mention of any war experience, although the Civil War had barely ended. This omission was deliberate policy, for no paintings of war scenes were allowed in the officially sponsored art exhibition. The most visible icon of male strength at the fair was not the warrior from the battlefield but the modern steam engine. The great Corliss engine was praised as “an athlete of steel and iron,” but this male force was controlled by a woman, Miss Emma Allison, known for “the neatness of her dress and the perfection of cleanliness in both engine and engineroom.” Perhaps symbolically, the most popular exhibit was, not an emblem of forceful nationhood, but a shrunken relic of the war, “Old Abe,” the decrepit eagle mascot of a Wisconsin Civil War regiment.⁶

Other mass spectacles in the 1870s and 1880s suppressed the model soldier/hero as well. In her study of parades, Mary Ryan notes that women were the Goddess/heroes at civic events, while the “dashing citizen-soldier” of the war years was no more, replaced by older veterans or reluctant National Guard units “ordered to parade by their commanders.” In 1885, Ulysses Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (which sold 300,000 copies in the first two weeks after publication), an evocation to war that downplayed male heroism, revealing the womanly sentiment of compassion. Grant suffered personally over the death of his soldiers and of their animals. “I was always glad when a battle was over,” the author admitted, a reflection of a culture wearied and uncertain over the memory of death on the battlefield.⁷

As Grant made amends for his military role by refusing to valorize warfare and death, so did the progeny of other Civil War generals. Most striking was the penance of William T. Sherman's son, Tom. Tom Sherman graduated from law school intending a career in law. But influenced by his Catholic mother, Tom Sherman was instead ordained a Jesuit priest. In 1891 at General Sherman's death, Father Sherman began his proselytizing in the “army of Christ.” Like a “field commander addressing his troops,” Father Sherman founded in 1901 the Catholic Truth Society of Chicago dedicated to converting Protestants, but ended his life with a complete mental breakdown, committed to asylums and often violently disruptive. At the hospital, Sherman always wore his military cloak when sitting in his wheelchair, and when offered Communion he murmured to his nurses, “It is too late, it is too late.” Perhaps Tom Sherman's exile into a “sterile” parody of militarism and into spirituality and hysteria, the theaters of the Victorian woman, exemplified the profound dislocation some Americans felt in the post war years over the memory of the war's atrocities.⁸

Intellectuals, too, shared an ambivalence over national bloodletting. Henry James never served in the Civil War, but he perpetuated a life-long guilt over war, “this abyss of blood and darkness.” Even Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who, in 1862, spoke contemptuously of the “soft” and “sentimental” attitude toward war had, by 1884, admitted that war was “horrible and dull.” By 1895, as the Aesthetic decades ended, Holmes would endorse the blind faith of the soldier-fighter, but there was a metaphoric quality to this ephemeral warrior who served more as a standard-bearer of the agnostic human condition than as a model for masculine aggression. Indeed, Holmes could not bear to read anything about the Civil War in later years, just as William Dean Howells retreated into his imaginary literary world of genteel society by the 1870s and 1880s. Howells never volunteered for the war, but exiled himself with a consulship at Venice from 1861 to 1865. On his return in the 1870s, Howells ignored war themes, concerning himself with the “minor ailments of middle-class life … sentimental infatuation and snobbish intolerance.” Perhaps Howells himself is the real voice of one character in The Rise of Silas Lapham who discussed the “death-rate” of the Civil War: “Ah, nobody feels that anything happened … it’s really a great deal less vivid than some scenes in a novel.”⁹

Artists, too, dealt with death as a fictional issue. In the shadow of the war in the mid-1860s, the American pre-Raphaelite painters portrayed death as non-violent and gentle, an illusion of serenity. These artists chose diminutive still lifes, often of a single dead bird. Death was miniaturized, rendered frail and inconsequential through the corpse of a small titmouse in John Henry Hill's “Black Capped Titmouse,” c. 1866, or the soft repose of the common Blue Jay in John William Hill's “The Blue Jay,” c. 1865. The landscape painters, too, shifted their emphasis after the war. Where once artists at mid-century painted scenes of judgment and prophecy, like Thomas Cole in his “After the Deluge,” by the 1870s painters focused on “bombastic, theatrical” landscapes like Albert Bierstadt's “Mount Corcoran,” on subjective, symbolic interpretations like Albert Pinkham Ryder's “Jonah,” or on New Testament subjects, the life of the human Christ. Nature was no longer virile and judgmental, but was mystical and kind like the now-feminized, gentle Jesus. Even the theological overtones of Frederic Church's landscape scenes gave way to the more aesthetic George Inness who “quickened [art] with imagination original in tone and feeling.” Henry James articulated in 1873 what artists knew, and Americans sensed: There was a “thinness of American life,” James noted, “Our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely conditions, are … void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist.”¹⁰

Such ennui provoked passivity and ambiguity towards violence and masculinity. In the 1870s and 1880s, American art critics censured gore and violence as pictorial themes “eloquent of mental and physical degradation,” and, indeed, most American artists showing in the French salons favored dramatic expression over barbarous violence. Even the portrait painters, men like Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, and John Singer Sargent, created elusive nonthreatening figures, treating gender ambivalently, as multi-faceted and tenable, a direct result of the dislocation James perceived in the post war years.¹¹ Sculpture, as well, evaded a realist celebration of military triumph in commemorative pieces. In public monuments, the Civil War conflict was often viewed in archetypal themes, of brother versus brother or the symbolic images of peace. Even local monuments, a common soldier on a simple pedestal, were executed in a uniform, standardized vernacular, mimicked by both North and South.¹² Although the Civil War was often seen at the time as an apocalyptic vision or as a testing of male supremacy, in Augustus Saint-Gaudens monument to General William Sherman's victory over the Confederacy, the sculptor elevated the statuesque female as Peace, a female who deflated masculinity by leading the passive general seated docilely on his horse. Conceived in 1877, Saint-Gaudens' design underplayed Sherman as military conqueror by his idealized figure. Henry James, however, perceived the incongruity of the warrior being led by a “beautiful American girl.” “And I confess to a lapse of satisfaction,” James mused, “in the presence of this interweaving—the result doubtless of a sharp suspicion of all attempts, however glittering and golden, to confound destroyers with benefactors.”¹³

II

If the soldier/hero was upstaged by a “beautiful American girl,” such ambivalence suggested the need for new models. Although the quest for a “man of character” had evolved since the early nineteenth century, E. Anthony Rotundo posits three ideals of middle-class manhood throughout the nineteenth century: the Masculine Achiever, the Christian Gentleman, and the Masculine Primitive. Forgotten in this surmise is the rise of the aesthete during the aftermath of the war years, a model personified by Oscar Wilde, the “Apostle of Aestheticism,” during his 1882 lecture tour in America. Wilde was asked to lecture on aestheticism and house decoration to publicize Gilbert and Sullivan's new production, “Patience,” a spoof of the Aesthetic Movement which was touring America at the time. Wilde criss-crossed the country for a year, lecturing in the West, in California, in the South, in Canada, and throughout the Northeast, speaking to audiences of many thousands. His speeches were printed in all the major newspapers, and Wilde traveled like a celebrity in a special train replete with a huge banner on the side of his special car. Advance agents marketed the Apostle of Aestheticism, and Wilde conformed to this image by dressing in “feminized” attire: lace cuffs, open shirt, velvet knickers and coat, long hair, and shaven, painted face.¹⁴

If noticed by cultural historians at all, Wilde plays a marginal role as outre, perceived as amoral, if not immoral, and aestheticism itself has been targeted as an idiosyncratic or elite venture. Unnoticed in this appraisal is the ramification of Wilde's perceived homosexuality by Americans at large, for Wilde was targeted as an “invert” through the staccato descriptions of his effeminacy by the press, for the charge of effeminacy was the usual nineteenth century caricature of male homosexuality. There was an awareness among the public and among the new breed of aggressive journalists at the time of Wilde's visit that, in fact, there was a viable, “invert” culture, a “school of gilded youths eager to embrace his peculiar tenets,” noted the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Wilde, indeed, often mirrored these very groups.¹⁵

For the popular media to refer to a “school of gilded youths” suggests that the urban homosexual world so diffusely detailed in police and sociologists reports at the time was, in fact, commonly acknowledged in straight society. Gilbert and Sullivan's “Patience” was popularly noted as “one long joke about Oscar Wilde's tastes,” evidence that outsiders were cognizant of Wilde's particular “school.” But the scientific knowledge of insiders was more impressive. In 1889, a Dr. G. Frank Lydston reported that “there is in every community of any size a colony of male sexual perverts … known to each other … likely to congregate together … [and] characterized by effeminacy of voice, dress, and manner.” Jacob Riis, reporter for the New York Evening Sun, admitted a “demi-world” of “perverts” who had saloons protected by the police. On the Bowery, beer gardens, known picturesquely as The Slide or Walhalla Hall, catered to this demi-world with elaborate dances. George Chauncey has catalogued a complex culture among “fairies” and “queers” in lower New York at this time, a culture intersecting with the uptown middle-class men who frequented these downtown haunts. Paresis Hall, No. 392 Bowery, was “the place where [these] fancy gentlemen go,” acknowledged one New York State Report. And “they act effeminately; most of them are painted and powdered,” cautioned this investigator. To protest these intruding eyes, a splinter group in Paresis Hall formed a “little club, the Cercle Hermaphroditos … to unite for defense,” evidence of the cohesion and loyality of the homosexual subculture in Wilde's day. “We care to admit only extreme types—such as like to doll themselves up in feminine finery,” ran the manifesto, a sympathetic echo of the “womanish” Wilde who appeared uptown in lace cuffs, with penciled eyebrows and flowing hair. Nearby Philadelphia, too, was “as rife … as any city in the east,” and, again, one reporter mimicked the profile of Wilde by noting the faces of “these creatures” as “clean shaven and highly decorated with cosmetics.”¹⁶

The curiosities of this known culture extended to the widespread reports of the meeting between Wilde and Walt Whitman on 18 January 1882, in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Ellmann tells us that one informant declared that Wilde boasted that the poet had made no effort to conceal his homosexuality from Wilde at this time. “The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips,” Wilde recalled, and reporters carefully documented each gesture of the two poets at this meeting, evidence that the straight public was perhaps both curious about and privy to the male coding of the invert world. The Newark Daily Advertiser was typical of the extended and descriptive coverage: Whitman, interviewed later, admitted that the two poets retired upstairs to a private third floor den where, after finishing a bottle of wine, “we had a jolly good time … a very happy time together … I saw him behind the scenes.” Pregnant perhaps was the ensuing note: “We came up here, where we could be on ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ terms. One of the first things I said was that I should call him ‘Oscar.’ ” This frank and bold intimacy was reciprocated by a physical gesture. “I like that so much,” he [Wilde] answered, laying his hand on my knee.” Possibly the reporters were exposing more than a rote narrative, for Whitman later played a womanly role by making Wilde “a big glass of milk punch.” The Washington Post emphasized the unmanly aspect of this gesture: “Then they took some more milk punch and dreamed of faint lilies.” On 1 March 1882, Wilde wrote to the venerable old poet, addressing Whitman as “My Dear Dear Walt,” testimony to a male bonding that was perhaps seen as part of the larger subculture of emerging male eroticism.¹⁷

The inference of these reports is ambiguous, but the association of “young men” with the Apostle of Aestheticism was pronounced. An odd account of Wilde's visit to the New York Stock Exchange accented the homoerotic nature of the adulation, linking Wilde to “telegraph” and “messenger” boys. Telegraph boys were an integral part of a male prostitution ring uncovered in “The London Scandal on Cleveland Street,” a scandal duly reported in the New York Times in November 1889. In the 1880s, descriptions of the New York Stock Exchange emphasized an undercurrent of physical playfulness and suppressed homoeroticism. At the Exchange, for instance, fraternal rituals included “Bacchic dances to the entrancing music of Italian organ-grinders, tremendous attempts at Graeco-Roman wrestling, exasperating ‘tug-of-war’ contests,” and a Christmas Carnival with same-sex dancing. … Reporters covering Oscar Wilde's visit to the Exchange noted this physical interaction. “The jostling [was] severe,” mentioned Harper's New Monthly Magazine, “The sunflower knight finds it difficult to keep his aesthetic legs.” Wilde “looked his sweetest,” reported the Washington Post, coding Wilde as the homosexual persona with “a form suggestive of corsets … flowing tresses … fresh from the oil jar, and rainbow stockings tucked into dapper knee-breeches.” “About 1,000 messenger boys crowded close around the aesthete” on the street, observed this writer. Wilde was rushed inside the Stock Exchange:

The hoodlums followed … The very bad little boys made the hallways and galleries of the Exchange ring with their enthusiasm … There arose a great shout which was a tempest, compared with the hootings and cries of the messenger boys … The crowds grew bigger and the cries grew louder. A hundred brokers stood at the foot of the main stairway ready for a concerted rush whereby to get Oscar upon the “floor.”

If the implication of a gang rape was suggested (“the very bad little boys … a hundred brokers … a concerted rush”), the finale was a disappointment as, with Wilde “charging down a back stair,” “the brokers were sadly disappointed, so were the messenger boys.”¹⁸

Wilde's connection to street boys was not confined to this incident at the Stock Exchange. The male sports journal, the National Police Gazette, published an illustration of Wilde leading his following of “newsboys and bootblacks, that precocious set,” indicating a knowledgeable sophistication among its readers concerning the “precocious set”. … Certainly these implications were as telling as a later report of Wilde “permeating society even to its lower strata.” Indeed, Wilde's influence permeated all of popular culture, for men throughout the country impersonated Wilde—from publicity-seeking journalists in Denver to young dandies at the Milwaukee Stock Exchange dressed in Wildean attire. Even a grocer in St. Louis declared himself to be Wilde in person. On 6 January 1882, at the time of Wilde's arrival, the Jerseyman (Morristown) reported on a man cross-dressing “in a black silk dress” and on the “adoption” of a newsboy by a Senator David Davis. “It is said of Senator Davis that he is constantly doing that sort of thing,” added the Jerseyman, suggesting that the pederastic overtones of Wilde's conduct was a popular concept both to report on and to generate a homosexual response in the public at large.¹⁹

This “adoption” of a newsboy during Wilde's visit was a seemingly open act and one apparently sanctioned by the culture at large, for there was no censure in the Jerseyman report over Senator Davis's actions. For example, Charles Warren Stoddard, a California poet and secretary to Mark Twain lived openly in San Francisco at this time with a young boy named O’Connor. The boy's mother accepted this arrangement and helped Stoddard in his efforts on behalf of her son. Although Stoddard sent his work to Whitman to “get in among people not afraid of instincts,” Stoddard's male household was a model of bourgeois domesticity and apparently approved, for Henry Adams, the genteel New Englander, sent the couple three “Persian pillows” to decorate their parlor.²⁰

Such open cohesion between the “lower strata” of boys and middle-class domesticity mirrored efforts by reformers like Charles Loring Brace, founder of the New York Children's Aid Society, who, like Wilde, was a guru among the city's street children. Though Brace's relationship to homeless boys was activated by his reformist impulses, Brace often confessed to a “powerful attraction” toward the boys in his Newsboys' Lodging House. Associated with Brace's boy charities was Horatio Alger, Jr., who had in 1866 been accused of the “revolting crime of unnatural familarity with boys,” and who was instrumental, as Michael Moon argues, in “gentrifying” the concept of the “dangerous” lower-class boy to one of “gentle” middle-class idealism. Alger's Tattered Tom series, followed by the successful Ragged Dick stories, allied success in the Victorian marketplace with a rags to riches narrative that valorized male domestic partnership and bourgeois values. In reality, in the 1870s, a viable subculture of some estimated 6,000 hobos with their “prushuns,” homeless boys of ten to fifteen, existed. That homeless boys could be sanitized into domesticity in acceptable middle-class success narratives indicated that the Wildean pederastic innuendos in 1882 were part of a larger literature of acceptable and muted boy love.²¹

In addition, the tone of levity in the accounts of Wilde's veiled homoerotic escapade at the Exchange in publications as conservative as Harper's New Monthly Magazine and the Washington Post suggests that the figure of the aesthete was viewed with tolerant good humor by the public at large. Such levity suggests, as well, that there was a sympathetic cohesion between the aesthete model and the middle-class itself, and, indeed, Wilde's lectures on the decorative arts were popular and prestigious events throughout the country. That Wilde, the guru of aestheticism and suspect invert, should present himself as arbiter of middle-class taste was reflected in the stage decorations for his lecture tour, decorations that made Wilde a symbolic icon of both Victorian domesticity and aesthetic, homosexual proclivities.

Indeed, the merging of the domestic and the aesthetic was evident in the artistic parlors which were created on stage for Wilde's lectures in cities from Salt Lake City to Boston. In Denver, for instance, the stage setting was “art decorations of the interior miniature house … [with] elegant and genuine Turkish upholstery … plush and raw silk curtains … with walls and pillars of … artistic beauty,” while, in Milwaukee, the stage walls “were covered with wonderful and fearfully proportioned dados and eastlakes, and great storks standing knee-deep in “yaliery-greenery” … [with] wide Moorish doors with portieres of green material.”²²

III

If Wilde was popularly associated with a domestic aestheticism, this only reflected other examples in a culture that was redefining gender, a culture ambivalent, yet creative, in its attempt to reconstitute and defuse the warrior ethic. An unusual example of the merging of feminine and masculine taste was the celebrated interior of the Seventh Regiment Armory. Founded in 1812, the Seventh Regiment's historic record included defense of Washington during the Civil War and protection of the city during the violent riots of the nineteenth century. Many members were from socially prominent families in New York, and the construction of a new armory building in 1879 included contributions from William Astor, A. J. Stewart, and William J. Vanderbilt, as well as from banks and insurance companies. In 1879, A New Armory Fair which raised $140,000 was opened by President Rutherford B. Hayes, testimony to the importance of the Regiment, and testimony to the building itself as a national symbol of the ideals of masculinity and war.

Completed in 1880, the interior design was commissioned to the aesthetic decorators, Associated Artists, with Stanford White as consultant architect. Certainly the themes of the Veteran's Room, the public meeting area, centered around martial triumph, for the “chronological record of warring nations, and of war weapons” was the motif of a frieze on canvas which encircled the room. However, the execution displayed no emblems of the United States, no eagle or American flag. Rather a mythological rendering of twenty cultures and twenty battles transposed the reality of modern warfare into a distant, exotic and nearly fictional experience. … One chronicler noted the frieze as a “charming record” of national ornamentation, “the sharp zig-zags of the savages, the eccentricities of the Chinese … the many and labyrinthian convolutions of the Moorish, and Byzantine scroll-work.”²³

Interior detail, as well, transposed this masculine space into an ornamented, feminized arena. The textured blue-gray paper was stenciled in a silver and copper chain-link pattern which accented the iron-squared panels in the oak of the wainscotting. This juxtaposition of a chain-link theme in both oak and in shimmering wall coverings diluted the symbolism of bounded military strength as it revealed that aesthetic considerations dominated over military themes: noted one appreciative critic, “the links of copper and of silver color … [are] dancing and sparkling over all the surface of the walls.” A further rendering of the chain-link pattern extended into the plush velvet and embroidered curtains which covered recessed stained glass windows in the north wall. This chain-link motif, undulating and sumptuous in the folds of the heavy velvet drape, was as fanciful and unreal as was the contrived patina of reddish glaze on the wood paneling which simulated rust on ancient iron walls. Supporting columns were wrapped with a simulacra of the pliable chain-links, patined, as well, to look like rusted medieval artifacts, and fancifully taut “as if giant had pulled home its twines and giants driven the spikes which hold it”. … A belt of carved work on the wainscot, “tangles of old Saxon or Celtic tracery,” jewelled stained glass. … and “a weird conception” above the mantel, “a red-tongued dragon … with the eagle making clutch at him,”. … prompted William C. Brownell, the critic, to caution that the symbolism of the ornamentation evoked, not the virile soldier/hero, but “must be set down as phantasmagorical … the peculiar temptations of exotics, the temptation to fantastic efflorescence … [with] weak and pale tints.”²⁴

As these details conjured a theatrical setting of suggested medieval jousts or of a pre-modern Celtic past, or of unmanly “weak and pale tints,” the balcony structure in the north-west corner evoked the Moorish echoes so popular in domestic aesthetic decoration and in the stage sets for Wilde. Stanford White, given the problem of an asymmetrical tower alcove, wanted to plumb out the space. But the final solution was Louis Comfort Tiffany's design, the replica of an enclosed harem space on a latticed balcony, where the stained glass window was copied from the “pattern of a harem”. … That the commemoration of a distinguished fighting National Guard unit should include the exotic, artificial mimicry of an Oriental harem retreat suggests how permeable were the boundaries between the real and imagined world under aesthetic dictates. The Veterans Room decor implied, too, that domestic and public interior space could draw on the same aesthetic idioms and artistic applications, rendering a neutrality between the passive feminine sphere and male marketplace. Perhaps it was this acclaimed artistic showpiece that revealed how deeply the emergence of “male weakness” exemplified in the aesthetic life and in the visiting Wilde, and its connections to female domestic aestheticism, had captivated popular imagery during the Aesthetic decades. This aesthetic quest skirted the boundaries of female space and of female forms as it provided space for testing “male weakness” as a cultural asset in a post-war society.²⁵

IV

Thus the aesthetic ideology filled the vacuum of historical time and space opened up by the suppression of Civil War carnage and the suppression of the soldier/hero model. As some Americans escaped the psychological effects of the Civil War by accepting an Aesthetic Movement so alien to the bravado of the war years, they accepted too, with the suppression of the Civil War soldier/hero model, the possibility of other definitions of manhood. For the acceptance of invert Wilde was a possible option. In the 1870s and 1880s, the aesthetic ideology suggested new ways to define both manhood and to define Victorian culture itself.

It was this final fear, that culture itself would be as feminine and “weak” as the homosexual Wilde which triggered in part the return to a realism based on the historic Teddy Roosevelt as the masculine icon and the return of virility and war as part of the American ethos. Certainly the imperialist plunge at this time (all the American colonies—Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Guantanamo base and the Canal Zone—were obtained between 1898 and 1903) intensified the profile of the soldier/hero as it diminished the role of the aesthete in middle-class culture. Medical authorities were no longer tolerant of the invert in a Wildean model as homosexuality was now labeled as abnormal and decadent. Wilde was castigated as a sodomite at his 1895 trial in London, while the popular media in America neither reported on his trial nor on any of his subsequent plays. Perhaps harking back to the earlier rhetoric of classical republicanism from the Revolutionary era, spokesmen now mirrored the medical authorities by using effeminacy and the invert to scapegoat perceived enemies: for revolutionaries, an effete England; for physicians, threats to the ideal of normalcy; and for imperialists, the weaker and “decadent” Orientals.

For, if the example promulgated by Wilde prevailed, the male citizen, now an effete and “weak” decorator of domestic space, would produce an ineffective and degenerate nation, a nation in which culture was spawned from the hothouse aesthetic environment. Indeed, Wilde would publicly praise J. K. Huysmans's A Rebours, a detailed account of an aesthete's deliberate degeneracy into a “strange and extravagant” life amid a domestic suffocation of artificial and luxurious decor: “abnormal indulgences, unnatural pleasures … impotence was not far off.”²⁶

Writing from jail, Wilde, however, understood the compelling importance of the new martial tropes associated with pain and death. Words, warned Wilde defiantly, were “as the fire or knife that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed.” The aesthetic life of the invert was like the soldier/hero's parley with death, a flirtation with “the evil things of life … like feasting with panthers.” “I used to feel as a snake-charmer,” Wilde revealed, lured by “the brightest of gilded snakes, their poison was. … part of their perfection.” Wilde admitted he once longed to die, but understood now that nothing was meaningless “and suffering least of all.” “I am far more of an individual than I ever was,” he affirmed.²⁷

Wilde's words were lost to an American audience that now discarded the Aesthetic Movement and the ideals of living for art and beauty. If Wilde had, at one point, tentatively incorporated the “male weakness” of aesthetic style into the ethos of middle-class domesticity, he could not, by 1900 at his death, integrate the passion of the soldier/hero into his dying attempts to resuscitate his aesthetic and “weak” self. George Chauncey has charted the evolution of homosexual style in the early twentieth century into the lower and blue collar cultural milieu, a milieu vibrant and open—but one divorced from the middle-class compatibility of the Aesthetic Movement, and one divorced from the acclaimed and light-hearted Wilde who graced Gilded Age America.²⁸

Notes

1. Linda L. Carroll, “Who’s on Top? Gender as Societal Power of Configuration in Italian Renaissance Drama,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (Winter 1989), 531-32; Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 149; Arthur N. Gilbert, “Sexual Deviance and Disaster during the Napoleonic Wars,” Albion, 9 (1977), 98-113.

2. Doreen Bolger Burke et al, eds., In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rizzoli, 1986); Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 240-54.

3. On the rise of corporate America on the template of a military bureaucracy (multiunit enterprises, hierarchical administration), see Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). On the “soldier aristocrats” as frontier heroes, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986). On the “manliness” of the Populists, see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 99-101. On the “militant pragmatism” of the American worker, see Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 173-93. On the equation of athletics and war, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 240; Richard Collier, The General Next to God: The Story of William Booth and the Salvation Army (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), 80-6, 164-75; William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in William James, Essays on Faith and Morals (New York: World Publishing, 1972), 311-29.

4. On the suppression of personal expression in wartime, see Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1962), 487.

5. On the dislocation of the returning veteran, see Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973), 238. On the blurring of historical memory after the Civil War, see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 93-113, esp. 105, 108-09, 117, 119, 128-29, 141.

6. James D. McCabe, The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1876), 3, 125; G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 74; Dee A. Brown, The Year of the Century: 1876 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966), 130, 132; John Maass, The Glorious Enterprise: The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and H. J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief (Watkins Glen, NY: American Life Foundation, 1973), 122. On the decline in Navy power after the Civil War, see William Pierce Randel, Centennial: American Life in 1876 (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co., 1969), 159.

7. Mary Ryan, “The American Parade,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 149; “Jefferson Davis and His Book,” American Pottery and Glassware Reporter 5 (1881), 18. On the failure to valorize the inventor of the “Monitor,” see John Ericsson, Contributions to the Centennial Exhibition (New York: printed for the author at “the Nation” press, 1876), III. On the “dread and heart-ache” of the Civil War veteran, see Marietta Holley, Samantha at the Centennial (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1887), 517; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 152-58; Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Selected Letters 1839-1865 (New York: Library of America, 1990), 348.

8. Edmund Wilson notes of Sherman's widow, Ellen: “Her son's dedication to the priesthood was perhaps the price paid by his father for the reckless elation of his March to the Sea.” Wilson, ibid., 210, 208-18. On “untrustworthiness” in men after the Civil War, see “The Sense of Honor in Americans,” North American Review 149 (1889), 207. On the failure of moral reform after the Civil War, see Ronald S. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), x.

9. Lutz, ibid., 249-50; George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 86, 194-95, 217-38. On Holmes, see Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 280-85; Wilson, ibid., 743-96; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 23-24; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1046. On the “distancing, if not expunging of the working war” in Civil War photography, see Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” in Philip Fisher, ed., The New American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 287-319.

10. Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1985), 50-51. On Frederic Church's Hudson River School as “alien … defunct or moribund,” see Clarence Cook, “Art in America in 1883,” Princeton Review (January-May 1883), 312. On Elihu Vedder and John La Farge as the new artists with a “psychology in color … [and] the language of the soul,” see “Fifty Years of American Art, 1828-1878,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 59 (June to November 1879), 495; Alan Gowans, “Painting and Sculpture,” in Wendell D. Garrett et al, The Nineteenth Century: Arts in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), 235, 238; Elizabeth Brown, Albert Pinkham Ryder (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990); Lois Marie Fink, interview with author, 23 May 1990, Smithsonian National Museum of Art; Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Salons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 163, 164, 211; Wilson, ibid., 49, 68, 69, 91, 96.

11. On Chase's portrait of Whistler as controversial, see Ronald G. Pisano, William Merritt Chase (Seattle: University of Washington, 1983), 81. On the multiplicity, divergence, and anti-enclosure of Eakins, Sargent (and Henry James) as well as the sexual ambivalence of Sargent and James as due to their lack of participation in the Civil War, see David M. Lubin, Act of Betrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 14-21; Elizabeth Johns, Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. 144-69.

12. Brooklyn Museum, The American Renaissance, 1876-1917 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 42-43; Alan Gowans, “Painting and Sculpture,” in Wendell D. Garrett et al, The Arts of America: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), 264-65; Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory, Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127-49. G. Kurt Piehler notes that Civil War battlefields weren’t preserved until the late nineteenth century: Piehler, ibid., 66-69.

13. On the Civil War as an apocalyptic vision, see Royster, ibid., and Russell F. Weigley, “War as Apocalypse in Nineteenth-Century America,” Reviews in American History, 20 (September 1992), 326-30. On male supremacy in wartime, see William Divale and Marvin Harris, “Population, Warfare, and the Male Supremacist Complex,” American Anthropologist, 78 (1976), 521-38. By 1898, Civil War veterans would protest the choice of a female figure as “Victory” because it lacked “martial character.” See Phieler, ibid., 83; Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 481; John Wilmerding, American Views: Essays on American Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 273-75.

14. Roberta A. Park, “Biological Thought: Athletics and the Formation of a ‘Man of Character,’: 1830-1900,” in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 7-35; E. Anthony Rotundo, “Learning about Manhood: Gender Ideals and the Middle-Class Family in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Mangan and Walvin, ibid., 35-51; Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 1882 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1936).

15. Roger B. Stein, “Artifact as Ideology: The Aesthetic Movement in Its American Cultural Context,” in Burke, ibid., 26; Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 3 Jan. 1882, p. 2. On the institutionalization of “manly” love in the nineteenth century, see Jeffrey Richards, “‘Passing the Love of Women’: Manly Love and Victorian Society,” in Mangan and Walvin, ibid., 92-123. On homoerotic tendencies in straight men, see Martin Bauml Duberman, About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (New York, 1986), 43-45. On Wilde as the leader of a homosexual subculture in London, see Jonathan Dollimore, “Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide,” Genders, 2 (Summer 1988), 34.

16. On the view that nineteenth century Americans “who were wholly heterosexual were obsessed with homosexuality,” see Dr. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, Homosexuality and Creative Genius (New York: Astor-Honor, Inc., 1967), 134-35; Jonathan Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 213, 219, 221, 235; Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1987), 47, 368; George Chauncey, Jr., “Negotiating the Boundaries of Masculinity: Gay Identities and Culture in the Early Twentieth Century,” paper presented 9 December 1989, conference on “Constructing Masculinities,” Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. On the nineteenth century homosexual culture at City Hall and in Battery Park (and the “silences” over the term sodomite), see Michael Lynch, “Silent Sodom,” paper presented 5 November 1989, American Studies Association International Convention, Toronto.

17. Richard Ellmann, “Oscar Meets Walt,” New York Review, 3 Dec. 1987, 44. “Wilde and Whitman,” Newark Daily Advertiser, 20 Jan. 1882, 1. Ellman, Oscar Wilde, 166-72. Washington Post, 21 Jan. 1882, 2; Oscar Wilde to Walt Whitman, from New York, 1 Mar. 1882, Feinberg/Whitman Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. For a critique of Whitman, see “Walt Whitman's Poems,” Littell's Living Age, 13 (Jan.-Mar. 1876), 91-102. On Whitman as a homosexual (“the scandalous suppression or bigoted interpretation of Whitman's homosexuality”), see Katz, History, 337. On Whitman's disavowal of his homosexuality to John Addington Symonds, see Katz, History, 337-57. On Whitman as a homosexual and American man of letters, Ruitenbeek, ibid., 120-40. On perceived connections between Whitman and the “peculiarly hot-house atmosphere of Mr. Rossetti,” see Robert Moore Limpus, American Criticism of British Decadence, 1880-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1939), 71. On Wilde's homosexuality: at Portora Royal School in Ireland, see Woodcock, ibid., 24; at Oxford, see Richard Pine, Oscar Wilde (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), 19; as claimed by Robert Ross in 1886, see Percy Colson, “Oscar Wilde and the Problem of Sexual Inversion,” in The Marquess of Queensberry, Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas (New York: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977), 167; as a bisexual, see Martin Fido, Oscar Wilde (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 41. On Whitman's homoeroticism as a reflection of acceptable same-sex love in the nineteenth century, see David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 391-403.

18. On the Cleveland Street scandal, see Katz, Almanac, 215-16; Hyde, ibid., 123-27; Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121-35; “Dancing in Stock Exchange,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 71 (18 Nov. 1885), 844; “Oscar Wilde in Wall Street,” Washington Post, 20 Sept. 1882, p. 2.

19. On incidents of impersonation, see “Oscar Field, How the Managing Editor of the Tribune Palmed Himself Off as Oscar Wilde,” Denver Republican, 17 Apr. 1882, 1; on a bum's impersonation of Wilde, “Oscar Wilde's Renaissance,” National Police Gazette, 11 March 1882, 7; on a St. Louis grocer's impersonation of Wilde, New Orleans Times Picayune, 28 June 1882, 2; on impersonations of Wilde in Milwaukee, “Rich Revelations, What May Be Expected When Milwaukee Men Don Oscar Wilde Attire,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 5 March 1882, 7; National Police Gazette, 21 Jan. 1882, 10; National Police Gazette, 11 March 1882, 7; Jerseyman (Morristown), 6 Jan. 1882, 2.

20. John Crowley, “Charles Warren Stoddard: Locating Desire,” paper presented 5 November 1989, American Studies Association International Meeting, Toronto.

21. Michael Moon, “‘The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes:’ Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger,” in Fisher, ibid., 260-87; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), 611; Katz, History, 33; Brian Harrison, “Underneath the Victorians,” Victorian Studies, 10 (Mar. 1987), 239. On the “high proportion of deviates” among lower-class emigrant groups to America, see Bullough, ibid., 607.

22. Salt Lake Tribune, 5 March 1882, 6; Milwaukee Sentinel, 5 March 1882, 6; Milwaukee Sentinel, 6 March 1882, 5; Boston Evening Transcript, 14 Jan. 1882, 6; “Oscar Wilde's Talk,” (Denver) Tribune, 16 Apr. 1882, 12; Newark Daily News, 10 Jan. 1882, 3; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 4 Jan. 1882, 2; Independent, 7 Sept. 1882, 25.

23. The Veteran's Room, Seventh Regiment, N.G.S., N.Y. Armory (New York: “Privately printed,” 1881), 17.

24. The Veteran's Room, 13, 18; William C. Brownell, “The Seventh Regiment Armory,” Scribner's Monthly, 22 (July 1881), 374-75, 378; Burke, ibid., 125-27.

25. Lisa Weilbacker, “The Decoration of the Veterans' Room by Louis Comfort Tiffany with Associated Artists,” paper presented 21 November 1992, Victorian Society in America Fall Symposium, New York; Lisa Weilbacker, interview by author, 28 January 1993 and 1 February 1994.

26. J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (A Rebours) (1884; rept. New York: Three Sirens Press, 1931; Dover Publications, Inc., 1969), 7.

27. Limpus, ibid., 84-5; Terry L. Chapman, “‘An Oscar Wilde Type’: ‘The Abominable Crime of Buggery’ in Western Canada, 1890-1920,” Criminal Justice History, 4 (1983), 97-118; Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis,” in Complete Works, ibid., 755, 808, 788.

28. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).