Wilde & Paris

THIS IS A BOOK research libraries should keep on the open stacks and readers of ELT may wish to add to their personal reference collections. This is the case in spite of Oscar Wilde’s Elegant Republic’s being not easy to read from start to finish.

Its difficulties do not arise from the involutions of theory or convolutions of jargon. The writing is normally clear, and with a scent of personal charm. It is sometimes briefly witty, sly, or gnomic. The difficulties are more like those of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial. The author is fascinated with his subject, knows more about it than anyone else, and cannot leave anything out. When one finds the note in the preface that this is the first of three projected volumes, one suspects a joke; it cannot be possible that there is that much more to say, at least by one person.

The author, David Rose, was the first director of the Oscar Wilde Summer School and the founding editor of the online journal THE OSCHOLARS. These are good situations for a scholar to snap up un-considered trifles. Rose acquired a hoard of things both trivial and significant that bear upon Wilde and other English writers working in Dublin, London, and Paris between 1880 and 1900, and he has poured these treasures into this book.

More than fifty percent of the book proper is quotation. A page will set out briskly some theoretical notions about the anthropology of time, space, identity, gender, or other fundamental concepts, and how our sense of life changes from culture to culture, era to era, and then illustrates this theme over many pages by extensive quotation, with ironic or evaluative remarks appended to the quotations.

Rose has discovered, and read, and provided a précis of a remarkable number of journals, letters, and autobiographies of those who were in Paris during this period. Having made what I took to be a thorough search for such materials for my own projects, I was amazed at how many I had missed that he has found. The forty-five-page bibliography is an important feature of the book’s value, and so are the 170 pages of discursive notes. One supposes that in actual practice, most scholars will enter this book via the index (which is adequate, but could be much more detailed).

The body of the text often takes the form of a catalogue. For instance, a section on the masked balls of Paris includes so many and so much detail about each that the author in organizing his material begins to riff on the variations for the pleasure of those in the know. Or the pages on pseudonyms adopted by harlots and writers become a kind of rhythmic poem constructed out of proper nouns. Oscar Wilde’s Elegant Republic sometimes seems to have been modeled on Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” but Rose’s touch is lighter and his aim is to be helpful to readers of Wilde and his contemporaries.

For instance, if a reader wanted to know what is the difference between a grand horizontale, grisette, cocotte, and a “kept woman,” or between all these and a stage actress, that reader would find here many pages that illustrate with many quotations each term, fixing a light on the ambiguities, and leaving the subject at last with all its complications not resolved but put on show.

With respect to Wilde, Rose is not the sort of scholar who identifies with his subject and thus hides Wilde’s shortcomings or takes his side in every quarrel. The pages on the question of just how good Wilde’s French was, or just how much of a success he was in Paris, are characterized by a properly discriminative skepticism. In general, Rose is led by a desire not only to add detail to the record, but to clean up mistakes in past scholarship. He succeeds in doing this...