Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (review)

In Acting Wilde, the distinguished critic of late nineteenth-century theatre, Kerry Powell, presents a revisionary reading of Wilde's career. The title points toward the book's emphasis on performativity and self-fashioning, which Powell develops primarily by drawing on Judith Butler and Victor Turner. Other studies have dealt with Wilde and self-invention, including Jeff Nunakowa's Tame Passions of Wilde (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Shelton Waldrep's The Aesthetics of Self-Invention (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), but Powell's book is distinctive for its historicizing approach and its well-informed reliance on pre-publication materials and on the uncensored, privately commissioned transcript of the libel trial against the Marquess of Queensberry (published as The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde [Fourth Estate, 2003]).

After an introduction that gives a helpful overview of the argument, the first of six chapters deals with Wilde's posing for photographs in America and his concern with posing and self-enactment later. Chapters two through four interpret Wilde's four drawing-room comedies and Salomé. In chapter two, Lady Windermere's Fan provides, in light of its revisions, the initial basis for Powell's contention that Wilde accommodates the views of social-purity feminists, even though he does not accept them, and it provides a pattern for later claims that Wilde betrays his own positions in significant ways. In chapter three, Powell argues that An Ideal Husband fails because of internal contradictions that emerge through "unusually tortured revisions" (100), while in chapter four he claims that The Importance of Being Earnest succeeds because of Jack Worthing's contingent selfhood. Based on details in the libel-trial transcript, in chapter five Powell reinterprets Wilde's trials as sex trials, despite the silence about sex acts in public accounts. Chapter six argues for Wilde's capitulation to social forces in De Profundis, the long letter that he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas while he was in Reading Gaol. In both the trials and in De Profundis, Powell finds Wilde not living up to the ideal of the performative.

The study presents Wilde in historical context and, briefly, in relation to modern drama. Powell's knowledge of archival materials is thorough, and he brings to light new material, in particular a marked typescript for An Ideal Husband that Wilde apparently used to record revisions for the play's belated 1899 book publication, after his release from prison. The historical framing is selective, of necessity in a study of this length, but illuminating, especially concerning the social-purity movement (which also affected early modernists, including James Joyce) and the absence of a clear definition of "gross indecency," the legal basis for Wilde's conviction. Powell tends, however, to overstate and to repeat some of his claims, and his commentary leaves the impression, at times, almost surely unintended, that he is putting Wilde in his place or second-guessing him while setting the historical record straight. His interpretation of An Ideal Husband is unduly harsh.

Readers interested primarily in Wilde and modern drama should consider reading the epilogue first, which may seem discontinuous with the book's argument but which actually articulates Powell's alternative view of Wilde's modernity. While the six chapters of the book argue against understanding Wilde's modernity as his having either precipitated a new gender concept or anticipated poststructural attitudes consistently, the epilogue presents Wilde's anti-realism as exceptional in its time and anticipatory of modern drama from Artaud to Beckett. This view is persuasive and consonant with the study's emphasis on performativity, which is incompatible with realism's dependence on a stable conception of identity.

The book is multiply revisionary. Powell takes exception to the claim that Wilde's two criminal trials (for supposed acts of "gross indecency") were enabling and initiated the treating of homosexuality as a matter of character, not sexual acts. (Ed Cohen's Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse...