Wilde Psychoanalytic Biography

ELT 38:3 1995 three manuscript versions of the novel have been published, the earliest as The First Lady Chatterley in 1944, and the second as John Thomas and Lady Jane in 1972. Expurgated versions were first issued in 1930 and 1932, and the surviving typescript of the novel has many alterations that Lawrence made for an expurgated edition he hoped Knopf would bring out in America, though the deletions did not in the end go far enough for a commercial publisher at that time; whether the "acceptable " version authorized by Lawrence's widow in 1932 uses this version is not, I think, made clear in this edition. It is possible, using the apparatus, to work out what Lawrence thought would be enough to satisfy censorship, but if the officially expurgated version went further, then this edition offers no information concerning it. Again, an electronic edition of the novel will have the capacity to make such fascinating material available. In the meantime the Cambridge edition offers the best we can expect. Simon Gatrell ______________ University of Georgia Wilde Psychoanalytic Biography Melissa Knox. Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. xxiv + 185 pp. $25.00 MELISSAKNOX'S psychoanalytic biography Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide begins with Freud's remark that fate is not a blow from the outside but an expression of character. Now there is no doubt that regarding the actual events of Wilde's fate—his going to trial in England and consequent conviction and incarceration for homosexual practices—a convincing case can be made, and Knox and many others have made it, for the role of his own volition in opting not to escape to France (as others had done). Yet granting the role Wilde's "character" probably played in the drama of 1895, many of us still respond violently to the suggestion that our lives are determined by ourselves alone. When I consider my comfortable bourgeois life in the suburbs, a victim of AIDS, a welfare mother, a sociopathic ten-year-old, or a millionaire member of Congress, I see more than the expression of different "characters." I see our respective "fates" as inextricably intertwined with contexts outside ourselves, beyond our control. When Martin Luther King said that he looked forward to the day that people would be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin, he was but observing that for many people in the real world character has little to do with fate. As 370 BOOK REVIEWS with racism, so with homophobia: even if Wilde felt that he could only be true to his "character" by confronting the mad marquess and the British public, the society that pilloried him should not be exempt from our critical consciousness. I am prepared to accept the theory of psychoanalysis as the great modern response to glib liberal dreams of autonomy , rationality, and progress, but I am also a progressive who cannot close her eyes to the social and material contexts in which characters are formed. Which is just to say that Knox might have had—and I hope that she does have—more sympathetic readers than I of her psychobiography of Wilde. Having said that, let me say what this biography does offer readers more sympathetic to its basic assumptions. First, this is a Freudian psychoanalytic biography. Although the notes and bibliography show that Knox is familiar with a range of psychoanalytic material , primarily from the United States, Lacan and Kristeva, or any of the neopsychoanalysts, are not mentioned, nor are their linguistic methods in evidence here. Even Freud receives relatively few references within the text, for Knox's self-described method is "to look at the work of art objectively, to understand what the artist wants to express, and to see the work as representative of the artist's thinking and feeling" (xiii). The works that she looks at are primarily the early poems "Requiescat" and The Harlot's House," The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Salome, some fairy tales, some letters (including De Profundis), the Society plays and The Importance of Being Earnest. Throughout, she stays close to the texts and Wilde's life...