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  • “Perilous Coquetry”: Oscar Wilde’s Influence on Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr.
  • Emily J. Orlando

“[T]he most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman’s way of arranging her dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room.”

—Edith Wharton, “New Year’s Day”

“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”

—attributed to Oscar Wilde

The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-written with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., put Edith Wharton on the map as an authority on domestic aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century. A kind of decorating guide for the wealthy set, the design manual “launched Wharton into contemporary architectural discourse and allied her with a sociocultural movement at once old guard and reformist, aesthetically neoclassical and civicly progressive.”1 The volume distinguished her as a writer highly attuned to aesthetics, form, taste, and a reverence for what she and Codman called “the best models.” These are all concerns that powerfully inform the critically and commercially successful realist fiction for which Wharton would, by the publication of The House of Mirth (1905), become famous. The “perilous coquetry” marking Lizzie Hazeldean’s drawing-room (“New Year’s Day”), Newland Archer’s “glazed black-walnut bookcases” (The Age of Innocence), and the François Boucher tapestries that read as dollar signs to Undine Spragg’s acquisitive eyes (The Custom of the Country) all assume new meaning when read in the context of this book. For twenty-first-century readers enchanted by the “life-changing magic”2 of home beautification, The Decoration of Houses resonates as a treatise on the possibilities afforded by sound house design and decoration.

As it happens, another impeccably dressed arbiter of taste also made his American debut dispensing advice on interior décor. Oscar Wilde, then twenty-seven years old and known mostly as a velvet-clad poet and personality, lectured across North America on house decoration in 1882.3 The most successful of Wilde’s talks, “The House Beautiful” was first presented [End Page 25] in February 1882 in Chicago under the name “Interior and Exterior House Decoration” and was delivered at least fifteen times in the United States and subsequently during Wilde’s tours in England, Scotland, and Ireland over the next four years.4 Wilde formally adopted the title “The House Beautiful” when he reached California in April 1882. Wilde seems not to have intended to publish his lectures and no manuscript save for a brief fragment of “The House Beautiful” survives. The lecture was, however, extensively reproduced in newspapers across the United States. As Kevin H. F. O’Brien notes, “‘The House Beautiful’ was perhaps Wilde’s most effective lecture in America. Practical, colloquial, and witty, it received the best reviews from newspaper critics.”5 Further, Michèle Mendelssohn has noted that “the newspaper coverage of Wilde’s visit to Washington was extensive and in-depth. Long passages from the lectures were reprinted.”6

Wilde did not, of course, invent the phrase “house beautiful.” In the 1880s, it was most closely associated with Clarence Cook’s American interior design manual by that name—The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (1878). Cook’s book was reprinted in 1879, 1881, and 1895.7 Cook’s The House Beautiful, which was second only to the widely read and reprinted Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste, is the very sort of sentimental and non-scholarly model from which Wharton and Codman wished to distance themselves in publishing The Decoration of Houses. Wilde seems to be capitalizing on Cook’s success in naming his lecture “The House Beautiful.” Cook was in turn borrowing the title from Walter Pater, who used the phrase “house beautiful” in 1876 to describe the idea that “the creative minds of all generations . . . are always building together.”8 Pater took the phrase from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, an association that broadcasts the moral implications of the term. As Marcus Waithe has noted, “the ‘house beautiful’ is more commonly interpreted as an allusion to . . . the design philosophy of William Morris.” But a key distinction is that the ideas associated with Morris and...

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