Oscar in The Tragic Muse

Henry james's The Tragic Muse is in part a response to James's encounters with Oscar Wilde. Though James first met Wilde in London, his encounters with Wilde in, of all places, Washington, D. C., early in 1882, were decisive in determining his opinion of Wilde. Wilde was in Washington as part of his lecture tour in America. James was visiting there to see friends. Though James referred to Wilde as a "fatuous cad," nevertheless he called on Wilde and accepted a dinner invitation at which he knew Wilde would be present. James disapproved of Wilde's flamboyant self-promotion. No doubt Wilde's sexual ambivalence and its association by Wilde with art also made James profoundly uneasy.

James's The Tragic Muse was published in the Atlantic from January 1889 to May 1890, that is, just before Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray began appearing in Lippincott's Magazine in July 1890, so it is possible that The Tragic Muse influenced Dorian Gray. Both works were published five years before Wilde's trial and downfall. The Tragic Muse is, among other things, James's attempt to come to terms with his complex feelings about Wilde through the presentation of the aesthete Gabriel Nash. Nash is modeled, in part at least, on Wilde. No doubt James also had reason over the next five years to have strong feelings about Wilde's great success as a dramatist, while James's own Guy Domville was a failure. James consoled himself by making disparaging remarks about the shallowness and flimsiness of Wilde's plays. The catcalls and hoots after the first performance of Guy Domville put an end to James's high hopes of becoming a successful dramatist. On that disastrous opening night of Guy Domville, on January 5, 1895, James, unable to stand the strain of staying for the first performance of his own play at St. James's Theatre, went to see Wilde's An Ideal Husband, which was running with great success at the Haymarket. Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, perhaps his masterpiece among his plays, opened at the St. James Theatre on February 14, 1995, immediately after Guy Domville closed. It was produced by George Alexander, the same actor-manager who had played the title role in the ill-fated Guy Domville. Wilde's action for criminal libel against The Marquess of Queensberry, the beginning of his downfall, commenced one month later, in March, 1895.

The Tragic Muse had been in its own way as much a failure as Guy Domville was to be. As James ruefully tells the reader in the preface written for the New York Edition of 1908, The Tragic Muse was the last of his novels for a long time to be accepted for serial publication in a magazine like the Atlantic: "I was to see this production make a virtual end, as by its sinister effect—though for reasons still obscure to me—of the pleasant old custom of the 'running' of the novel. Not for many years was I to feel the practice, for my benefit, confidingly revive" (1:vi). Moreover, as James also tells the reader, The Tragic Muse received no critical attention or response whatsoever. This may be why Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of the Atlantic, as well as other journal editors, refused for a long time to serialize any more novels by James. "I remember well," says James, "the particular chill, at last, of the sense of my having launched it in a great grey void from which no echo or message whatever would come back. None, in the event, ever came" (1: vi). As Oscar Wilde once said, "it is better to be talked about badly, than not to be talked about at all." The Tragic Muse was not talked about at all. It is still the case today that The Tragic Muse has received relatively little attention from critics, though the interest in James by queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick may change that.

The failure of The Tragic Muse may have had some of the same causes as the failure of Guy...