You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This highly readable and informative book by English professor Melissa Knox is a valuable addition to the existing scholarship and the current Wilde revival on Broadway, “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.” Like Schreber, Wilde shall never be forgotten as an absorbing topic for analysts, as clinicians and as people perennially driven to take interest in literature. The common denominator of both these interests is, of course, homosexuality and perversion. This is particularly topical these days, when in the literary mainstream the so-called “queer theory,” associated with the name of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is increasingly becoming a method of reading literary texts through the lens of same-gender erotic desire. More and more the works of hallowed literary giants, such as Goethe, Melville, and D. H. Lawrence are scanned for hidden allusions to homoeroticism.
To be sure, there is nothing hidden about Oscar Wilde's having been queer in more than one sense of the word, ever since the century-old sensational trials of Wilde, a defining moment not only for British homophobia but for the basic hostility of Mrs. Grundy toward any form of sexual freedom, straight or gay, as epitomized by the furor later created by Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses. The quintessential “queerness” of Wilde was also defined by his glorification of the affective and esthetic sensibilities, by the very modern willingness to “go to the stake for a sensation,” a mood, a feeling, be it erotic or artistic; by his equally modem, Nitzschean, grandiosity and flamboyance in dress, speech, and manner; and last, but not the least, in his wish to make a mark not only by his life but also by his death.
Knox brings a wealth of literary erudition and perusal of source to the question of why Oscar Wilde became who he was. She also attempts to enrich her insights by a recourse to psychoanalysis, under the mentorship of the nonagenarian and still indefatigable Oscar Sternbach, a pillar of the Natio