[Socialism Today, No 7, April 1996, p. 26-29]
One hundred years ago Oscar Wilde was languishing in Reading gaol, after one of Britain’s most famous courtroom dramas. Here Vince Dicey examines Wilde and the anti-gay witch hunt which broke him with prison and exile
At the start of 1895 a friend proclaimed Wilde ‚as well-known as the Bank of England‘. That spring two of his plays opened successful runs in London’s West End. This complemented his separate careers as a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist and celebrated society dandy, famed for his beguiling conversation and dazzling wit.
Yet before the summer was out, Wilde had undergone three trials, been sent to prison, made bankrupt, subjected to a press witch-hunt, and transformed by the establishment into a ’non-person‘. Leaving Britain on his release in 1897, his spirit broken by his experiences, he died three years later aged 46.
Of course. by the time last year’s anniversary came round, Wilde’s artistic standing had been fully re-established. He has even received belated admission to the hallowed sanctuary of Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey. So is the Wilde case a one-off Victorian tragedy of little interest, or does it hold lessons for today?
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the punishment for ‚buggery‘ was death. By the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, this had fallen into disuse, taken off the statute book in 1861 and replaced by penal servitude for ten-years-to-life. In the 1880s, however, campaigns in the press and by ’social purity‘ groups over the ‚white slave trade‘ of prostitution and the sexual abuse of girls, had prompted the Liberal government to introduce the Bill which became the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Among its provisions were an increase in the age of consent for women to 16 and penalties against brothel-keepers. On the floor of the Commons the Radical MP Henry Labouchère added a new clause, which became Section 11 of the Act The ‚Labouchère Amendment‘ cast the existing legal net against male same-sex acts as wide as possible by enacting penalties for all homosexual acts.
In our own times Major’s Conservatives have tried to exploit ‚family values‘, attacking single parents, lesbians and gays, and other groups through initiatives like the ‚Back to Basics‘ campaign. The precedents for reactionary social policies such as these are revealed in the debate surrounding the 1885 legislation.
Historian Jeffrey Weeks sets the Criminal Law Amendment Act against the events of that period: “The year 1885 was one in which imperialism and national decline were on everybody’s mind. The issue of Home Rule for Ireland and the threat of a breakup of the United Kingdom were looming. And early 1885 saw the fall of Khartoum and the death of the imperial hero, General Gordon … The 1880s also saw the first stirring of socialist propaganda for a generation, and this again seemed to pose a threat to bourgeois hegemony. The puritan emphasis on the family offered an antidote: ‚In all countries the purity of the family must be the surest strength of a nation; and virtue from above is mighty in its power over homes below‘ (The Sentinel)”.
During the same period, Alan Sinfield has described how a ‚cult of manliness‘ developed in the ruling class in Britain, and the roles between the sexes became more rigidly defined. Following changes in the composition of the ruling class brought about by the struggle between the new industrial capital and old landed interests, and the need to develop a new loyal bureaucracy to run the expanded British empire, the cult of manliness was part of a wider process being engineered ‚to discipline the elite as much as the workers‘. Increasing numbers of the male children of the upper class were sent to public schools, ‚away from the excessive influence of women‘. He charts how, over the course of three centuries, the meaning of the word ‚effeminate‘ changed. From describing heterosexual male figures such as the flirtatious ‚fop‘ regarded – by the dominant standards of the period – as being ‚overly‘ interested in the company of women, it came to invoke the new negative stereotype of the homosexual man, who supposedly exhibits the ‚inferior‘ qualities of women instead of the required ‚manly‘ ones. Thus the increasing repression of same-sex desires in late Victorian England was linked to the oppression of women in capitalist society and the wider needs of the system.
* *
*
In the 1880s a series of sex ’scandals‘ had raised accusations of collusion and cover-ups against the establishment. When a brothel-keeper called Mrs Jeffries was tried and acquitted in 1884, the social-purity lobby put this down to her ‚friends in high places‘, The same year Dublin Castle was the scene of a homosexual ‚ring‘ involving top officials.
One of the biggest scandals, in 1889-90, centred on Cleveland Street off Tottenham Court Road, where a brothel staffed by telegraph-boys was frequented by aristocrats, including Prince Albert Victor, son of the Prince of Wales. A local paper accused the police of hampering the investigation at Cleveland Street in order to protect ‚the highest in the land‘. Several peers. fled abroad, and the prince was sent to India. The cumulative effect of this sequence of ’scandals‘, with their aftertaste of establishment cover-ups, was one of the factors already in play on the national political level when the Wilde affair broke in 1895, The sequence of events which culminated in the destruction of Wilde’s glittering reputation are well known.
It is thought that Wilde, who had married in 1884 and had two young children, had his first gay relationship in his early thirties. In 1891 he met, and a year later, fell in love with, the much younger Lord Alfred Douglas, one of four sons of John Sholto Douglas. Marquis of Queensberry, an immensely rich aristocrat and author of the boxing rules, Queensberry became hostile to their friendship and exhibited what we would now describe as ‚homophobia‘ – prejudice against lesbian and gay people – to a pathological extent. As well as demanding that his son end his friendship with Wilde, in abusive notes and letters, Douglas was involved in a number of disturbances, including bursting into Wilde’s house with a ‚minder‘ in tow, and, after the trials, fighting in the street with his son Percy, who had stood bail for Wilde. The famous calling-card describing the writer as a ‚posing sodomite‘ which triggered his libel action, was delivered to Wilde’s club after Queensberry was frustrated in his original plan to jump on stage and disrupt the premiere of the play The Importance of Being Earnest in February 1895.
A few weeks later Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensberry for criminal libel. If successful, this would have resulted in Queensberry’s imprisonment. But it collapsed on the third day. The authorities then prosecuted Wilde and a man called Alfred Taylor under Section 11 of the 1885 Act, with the help of a dossier on the writer’s private life compiled by private detectives acting for Queensberry.
At his first trial for ‚gross indecency‘ (the second of the three trials overall), the jury was unable to agree on a verdict, In addition to the advocacy skills of Wilde’s counsel Sir Edward Clarke – who gave his services free -a major factor was Wilde’s speech from the dock, in which he defended the ‚love that dare not speak its name‘ as a ‚deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect… which repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man‘ – albeit ‚intellectual‘, This was greeted by applause in the courtroom.
In the interval before the retrial, however, in the words of the trials historian H. Montgomery Hyde, the Crown “determined to make every effort towards securing a conviction”. The press whipped up a mob atmosphere against Wilde. Early on, the windows of his publishers were broken, and when Wilde obtained bail after the second trial, a gang sent by the Marquis of Queensberry harried him all over London, threatening hotel managers of the ‚consequences‘ if they admitted the writer. All the so-called ‚male strumpets‘ who featured in the case were given immunity from prosecution in return for agreeing to testify against Wilde, and paid the then substantial sum of £5 per week while the trials proceeded. One of them, Sidney Mavor – who later became a priest – retracted his statement after the trial and complained about the police pressure. The judge at the third trial, Mr. Justice Wills, sentenced Wilde to the maximum of two years imprisonment with hard labour, adding that this was ‚totally inadequate‘. After Wilde was convicted, his counsel Sir Edward Clarke, who had been the previous Solicitor-General, took the unusual step of attacking the prosecuting counsel and incumbent Solicitor-General Sir Frank Lockwood for having gone beyond the bounds of ‚fairness‘ in his presentation of the Crown’s case.
Straight after the verdict prostitutes danced outside the Old Bailey in celebration that the ‚dangerous competition‘ of Taylor and his friends had been dealt a lethal blow. Wilde’s name was taken off the posters of the theatres where his plays were running. Fashionable ladies cut it out of the spines of the Wilde editions in their libraries. As the writer stood manacled to a prison warder at Clapham railway station, a crowd jeered at him and people spat in his face. Wikle’s wife Constance obtained a judicial separation, and changed the surname of his young sons, who never saw him again. One described later how he didn’t discover what his father had been sent to prison for until he was in his twenties.
The Daily Telegraph wrote at the time: “We have not the slightest intention of reviewing once more all the sordid incidents of a case which has done enough and more than enough to shock the conscience and outrage the moral instincts of the community … Young men at the universities, silly women who lend an ear to any chatter which is petulant and vivacious, novelists who have sought to imitate the style of paradox and unreality, poets who have lisped the language of nerveless and effeminate libertinage – these are the persons who should ponder with themselves the doctrines and the career of the man who has now to undergo the righteous sentence of the law”.
* *
*
Surveying the period overall Jeffrey Weekes concludes: “The Wilde trials were not only the most dramatic, but also the most significant events, for they created a public image for the homosexual, and a terrifying moral tale of the dangers that trailed closely behind deviant behaviour. They were labelling processes of the most explicit kind, drawing an impassable border between acceptable and abhorrent behaviour‘. But is it correct to regard Oscar Wilde as a martyr for gay rights?
To some extent Wilde was trapped by the logic of his failed libel action. His speech from the dock was certainly ambiguous in suggesting that same-sex affection was ‚intellectual‘ rather than physical. But at that time a gay movement did not exist in any substantial form, While Oscar Wilde and his friends used the word ‚homosexual‘ in private conversation, it had not yet appeared in print in English, while the word ‚gay‘ would not be applied to same-sex desire until many years later. Others active in that period such as the socialist Edward Carpenter, author of Love’s Coming of Age and The Intermediate Sex, were closer to the modern position of lesbian and gay rights. If someone like Carpenter had been charged instead, the trial might have become an occasion for a more clear-cut public stand against the anti-gay witch-hunt.
In a way which was artistic rather than political, Wilde seems to have been working towards a kind of ‚gay consciousness‘ in his writings. For instance, it has been argued that his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray remains a puzzle until the reader infers same-sex desire into the exchanges between the characters. Oscar Wilde had flourished as an artist by adopting guises, wearing masks and jesting at the expense of the high and mighty, When he found himself under attack in a courtroom, his instinct seems to have been to try and ‚get by‘ doing what he had always done. This is captured in some of the hilarious-but-deadly exchanges between Wilde and the barristers for Queensberry and the Crown. Whatever Wilde’s personal dynamics, he underestimated the forces which had lined up against him. The intellect which had dominated the London literary scene was overwhelmed by the bureaucratic machine of a hypocritical capitalist establishment intent on sacrificing a leading artist and others to pander to reactionary forces in society and reap the political benefits of scapegoating a sexual minority.
Nonetheless, whatever the shortcomings of his public stance in the teeth of repression, the achievements of Oscar Wilde are twofold. One, for which he paid a heavy personal price, was to establish a resonant example of ’sexual difference‘, This transcends the small change of his individual actions and even his personality as a whole, ample though its proportions were. A hundred years after Wilde’s victimisation, the plaintive cry of Queensberry’s heirs in the tabloid press is that ‚queers are everywhere‘. In that sense the trials succeeded in the short term, but ultimately failed. The social ‚ghetto‘ which the authorities erected for people with same-sex desires merely welded lesbian, gay and bisexual people together and helped them forge a common identity through which to begin a struggle to build a life free from repression and harassment.
Wilde’s second achievement is the living legacy of his writings.
Although the political outlook of Wilde as revealed in his 1891 essay The Soul of Man under Socialism inevitably is coloured by the author’s comfortable position and lack of contact with the working-class movement, it shows that, among other things, he understood the connection between the social system of capitalism and the personal life of individuals – a tragic embodiment of which Oscar Wilde’s life was shortly to become.
In its closing lines Wilde looks forward to the socialist society he envisages as arising in the future, and writes: “Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly, When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself”.
* *
*
Postscript: ‚Gross Indecency‘
In 1994 a campaign was launched for Oscar Wilde to be granted a posthumous ‚Royal Pardon‘. According to The Times, the Home Office responded that pardoning Wilde was impossible “because the crime of which be was convicted is no longer illegal”.
However, in an article entitled ‚Oscar Re-Tried‘ the lawyer Angus Hamilton assessed the details of the 1895 prosecution against the framework of modern law (Gay Times, January 1995), He showed that ‚gross indecency‘, far from disappearing, “was explicitly confirmed in the Sexual Offences Acts in 1956 and 1967” and left untouched by the 1994 legislation reducing the male age of consent, Whereas Wilde received the maximum sentence of two years, now ‚the maximum penalty for gross indecency where one party is over the age of consent and one under has actually been increased to five years‘. Television producer Will Parry points out that since 1985, at least 150,000 men have been convicted of ‚consensual‘ gay offences. One hundred years on, he concludes, “the legal legacy of Oscar Wilde is alive and kicking”.
Schreibe einen Kommentar