Stephen Tifft notes that the trials of Oscar Wilde centered on a tense dispute between two versions of beauty: the aesthetic beauty that Wilde proclaimed as the lodestar guiding his behavior and writings, and the erotic beauty that Edward Carson, the formidable prosecutor, tried to expose as the truth behind the alibi of aesthetics. That aesthetic and erotic beauty are deeply entangled is a defining premise of Wilde’s Aestheticism; it is also staged, intensely and ambivalently, in the work repeatedly interrogated by Carson, The Picture of Dorian Gray. This paper argues that the delicate and sometimes impossible challenge of drawing aesthetic and erotic beauty into exquisitely close proximity, yet sustaining a taut, minute distance between them, is as crucial to Wilde's art as it was disastrously difficult to maintain in a court of law; and that this dilemma exposes a faint undertone of societal opprobrium against the aesthetic itself which accompanies the public’s more strident homophobia.
“How nice that we are bisexual,” Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her lover Valentine Ackland in 1931. “Do we do it in alternate spasms, do you think, like synchronised oysters . . . or is one both at once?” Maud Ellmann notes that this letter appears in a posthumous collection of the lovers’ correspondence edited by Susanna Pinney, who also chose its cringeworthy title I’ll Stand By You (1998). A work of “queer epistolarity,” in Sarah McDaniel’s words, I’ll Stand By You is queer in several ways: in its dual or even triple authorship; its genre-bending mixture of archival recuperation and (auto)biography; and its disjunctive temporality, in which the present tense of the letters jars with the retrospective viewpoint of Warner’s narrative interpolations. Focusing on I’ll Stand by You, Ellmann’s paper investigates the relation between bisexual passion and what Warner calls the “bi-location” characteristic of the woman writer.
For Ellis Hanson, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are an ideal gift for a boy, not the least because Wilde was imprisoned as a sex offender— and today would be arrested because his rentboys would be considered underage. How has our understanding of his sexual crimes complicated the mode of address in his texts ostensibly written for children? Tales easily read as wise, if paradoxical, allegories for the virtues of kindness and sacrifice, they have increasingly served as allegories for their author’s life, in particular his love for a “dearest boy,” as his letters put it: not just Cyril and Vyvyan, whom Wilde fathered and put to bed at night and read to, but also the boys whom he had sex with -- and fathered and took to bed at night and read to. The queer ambiguity has never been more striking than in two cinematic treatments of Wilde’s life, Brian Gilbert’s Wilde (1997) and Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince (2018). In both, a fairy tale read aloud by the author makes a narrative of his downfall an allegory of boy-loving; this downfall becomes a paradoxical principle of form when we notice that these tales are also addressed to us—as if we ourselves were his “dearest boys.”
Henry James, Kevin Ohi notes, is perhaps the first major novelist to make unrequited love central to the experience of his main characters, and to what makes their psychologies of interest. Harrowing, often, and cold, are the rigors of their exclusion, but there is an unquestionable grandeur in their solitude, to which the charisma of Jamesian interiority accrues. The Ambassadors will provide the occasion for exploring the relation of unrequited love to James’s rendering of psychological interiority—where passion cannot be said with any precision to be contained, or to escape containment. That paradoxical topography follows from James’s narrative rendering of consciousness. Whatever one thinks of James’s own erotic life—thwarted or not, unfulfilled or otherwise—unrequited love in his fiction leads one to other measures entirely for the gauging of his passion.