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PARTISAN REVIEW
behavior in the drawing-room---one usually finds a preference for
"trade," i.e., sexually normal males, because, if another homosexual
yields to him, he is only one of a class, but if he can believe that
an exception is being made in his case, it seems a proof that he is being
accepted for himself alone.
Had Wilde only desired to be accepted by one world or the other,
·he would probably have kept out of trouble but he wanted to be ac–
cepted by all worlds and that was his ruin. Nothing is clearer in the
history of the three trials than his unconscious desire that the truth
should come out. This desire was not caused by guilt in the conventional
sense but by the wish to be loved as he really was. One suspects that his
secret day-dream was of a verdict of guilty being brought in whereupon
Judge, Jury and public would rise to their feet, crown him with flowers
and say: "We ought, of course, to send you to gaol, Mr. Wilde, but
we all love you so much that in this case 'we are delighted to make an
exception." Mary McCarthy in her excellent, though I thought a bit
governessy, PR review of GieIgud's production of
The Importance of
Being Earnest
a few years back pointed out that Lady Brackwell is
really Britannia, the moral Dragon whose capitulation to the hero's
charms is the supreme victory. At the end all secrets are out, there is no
need for Mr. Bunberry and Lady Brackwell surrenders. In the Eden of
Wilde's Hertfordshire all things are possible; in the late-Victorian Old
Bailey, unfortunately, they were not.
/ Mr. Woodcock who
is,
one gathers, an anarchist, does his best to
show us what Wilde's ideas on Religion, Art, and Politics were, and to
make of him an apostle of individualism, but it is difficult to take
ideas as serious or contradictions as important paradoxes which seem so
clearly to be simply strategies for an occasion/Of alI men Wilde was
least in the position to say: "the real weakness of England lies . . . in
the fact that her ideas are emotional and not intellectual" for in few
cases is the emotional root of thinking so obvious as in his.
Thus when, like all the nineteenth century literary
ecole paienne,
he extols the Greeks, the Great God Pan, and the Beautiful Pagan Life,
any resemblance to the historical reality is accidental and all he seems
to mean is: "I should like ·a world without Sunday closing, damp
weather and overcooked vegetables but with plenty of sunshine and
lots of yummy scantily-clad teen-agers who can't say No." When he calls
Sin "an essential element in progress," this has nothing to do with the
serious Antinomian heresy, "Sin the more that grace may abound";–
if one were to substitute a specific sin, say, cruelty, which Wilde really
believed to be wicked, he would be horrified-the statement is simply
