Wildean Interpretation and Formalist Reading

When Oscar Wilde said about himself in De Profundis that “what paradox was to me in the field of thought, perversity became for me in the sphere of passion,” he offered a better way to think about formalist criticism than the limiting one developed in the twentieth century. Usually, we think, paradox is caused by language while perversity entails a moral judgment about acts. Still, the formalist attention to paradox amounts to perversely turning one’s head away from reality, which should be non-contradictory, toward language. And there’s something queer about that. This paper argues that Wilde shows in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. that there is and ought to be something queer about formalism and that the straightening of its attention only to figural language has been a limit on its possibilities.