"Effeminacy" and "Femininity" Sexual Politics in Wilde's Comedies

"Effeminacy" and "Femininity" Sexual Politics in Wilde's Comedies ALAN SINFIELD Lytton Strachey saw A Woman of No Importance revived by Beerbohm Tree in 1907: Mr Tree is a wicked Lord, staying in a country house, who has made up his mind to bugger one of the other guests - a handsome young man of twenty. The handsome young man is delighted; when his mother enters, sees his Lordship and recognises him as having copulated with her twenty years before, the result of which was - the handsome young man. She appeals to Lord Tree not to bugger his own son. He replies that that's an additional reason for doing it (oh! he's a very wicked Lord!).... The audience was of course charmed.I If the play had been read generally in this way, it could not have been performed on the West End stage, in 1907 or initially in 1893. EFFEMINATE MEN Silences, deconstruction has taught us, are significant; it might seem that this point has been well taken among commentators on Wilde, for any silence is likely to be read as a deafening roar about homosexuality. Now, Lytton Strachey 's interpretation of A Woman ofNo Importance seems all too inviting. Ian Small and Russell Jackson link Lord Illingworth with Sir Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray: both "instruct and educate a younger man, and become in the process sinister and attractive figures of authority. This in its turn suggests one of the stereotypes of homosexual relationships: the surrogate father."2 Today the "earnest," which it is so important to be, must be "homosexual." To Patricia Behrendt, "earnest" sounds like Urning, the term for boy-lovers proposed by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the I 860s, and even more like the French variant, uraniste; this is mooted also in Alan Hollinghurst's Modern Drama, 37 (1994) 34 Sexual Politics in Wilde's Comedies 35 novel The Swimming-Pool Library,3 Timothy d'Arch Smith's idea seems better : there may be an allusion to John Gambril Nicholson's book of poems, Love and Earnest (1892),4 But who would hear such an allusion? And for whom, in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), is it important to be a uraniste? No one. To the contrary, as Chris White remarks, "'Ernest' is the name that the men must adopt in order to be acceptable to the women they wish to marry,"5 Then there is Bunburying. Christopher Craft unearths seven respects in which Earnest, as a text, '''goes Bunburying' - in which, that is, Wilde lifts to liminality his subcultural knowledge of 'the terrible pleasures of double life. ",6 One is engraved cigarette cases, in the play and in Wilde's liaisons; but, ofcourse, Wilde himself did not know, when he wrote Earnest, that cigarette cases would prove embarrassing at his trials. Craft is concerned more with intertextual instabilities than with material allusions to a homosexual subculture. Others claim more. Bunburying "was not only British slang for a male brothel, but is also a collection of signifiers that straightforwardly express their desi.re to bury in the bun," Joel Fineman asserts, Behrendt declares that Bunburying "blatantly calls forth the image of a promiscuous sodomite and foreshadows the epithet 'somdomite' [sic] applied to Wilde" by Lord Queensberry (I don't understand the foreshadowing point). Linda Gertner Zatlin has another idea: that Bunbury was "the term for a homosexual pickup."7 As far as I can discover, there is no historical ground for any of these assertions. Bun does not mean "buttock" in Eric Partridge's Dictionary ofSlang, from the first edition (1937) to the eighth (1984). In John Farmer's dictionary of 1890 it means the pudendum muliebre, which is what Partridge says (it's to do with squirrels and rabbits). The meaning "buttock" occurs in the United States from around 1960, according to the Oxford Dictionmy of Modern Slang.8 So the implication in Algernon's Bunburying is heterosexual. Even now, "buns" has no necessary connection with brothels, promiscuity, or pick-ups; such inferences seem to derive from narrow stereotypes of modern gay behaviour. Above all, if these meanings were current in Wilde's time how could Wilde have got...