Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900 by Dominic Janes (review)

Near the end of Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes writes that “men such as [Oscar] Wilde and [Walter] Pater should be placed as the inheritors rather than as the initiators of a tradition of camp and sexual dissidence” (234), a statement that effectively summarizes one of the primary claims of this wide-ranging study. Whereas other scholars have pointed to the Wilde trials of 1895 as the genesis of a visible and readable queer public figure, Janes argues instead for a long-standing iconographical vocabulary of sexual otherness. Caricature, which by design depends upon exaggeration for its effect, seems a perfect medium in which to identify that vocabulary, as “the nuanced codes with which dissident desires were signaled in the street appear in more pronounced forms in satirical productions” (4). What those codes lost in subtlety when satirized they gained in recognizability both for viewers ready to pounce in judgment and for potential acolytes now given an example of an alternate mode of behavior and self-presentation.

To establish this pictorial and social history, Janes traces a tradition of legible sexual dissidence from the second half of the eighteenth century, when the dandiacal macaroni was depicted with increasing effeminacy. The first chapter explores obvious caricatures of the Continental macaroni, while the second chapter takes as its primary example Joseph Wright’s relatively conventional 1781 portrait of the reclining Sir Brooke Boothby, whose wardrobe and pose Janes reads as indicative of coded sexual alterity. As he is careful to note, the relationship between these depictions and the individual self-fashioning that they captured and inspired is indirect at best, dependent on rendering messages that were readable by the in-group without wholly alienating others. A repeated chorus emerges, reminders that his subject is necessarily elusive: “In the world of the late eighteenth-century poseur, one is unlikely to find consistent evidence of sodomitical tastes. Yet such indeterminacy can be seen as an element of queerness at the time” (84); “queer fashioning . . . relied on an oscillation between display and concealment, affirmation and circumspection” (34); and “it was precisely in the nuanced play between sign and strategic absence of sign, between laughter and sorrow, that, almost like the dashes and dots of Morse code, sexually subversive messages could be smuggled through” (86).

To be sure, this nuance can make the scholar’s work more difficult, especially at such a temporal remove from the original appearance of his often ephemeral subjects. Yet while Janes carefully notes that there is no “single visual stereotype for sodomites in the eighteenth century” (86), what does emerge from the period is an alignment of male effeminacy with the suggestion of sexual otherness. That alignment is further developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, the focus of the book’s second section, which charts the rise of the Regency dandy, whose difference was marked by sartorial restraint rather than flourish, and the “Byronist,” who “deliberately flirted with associations not simply of effeminacy but also of sodomy” (232), as typified in images of Benjamin Disraeli and Henry Brougham. The illustrations of the Cruikshank brothers earn special attention; in them, rather than effeminacy of behavior, it is the dandy’s body itself that takes on more evidently feminine proportions.

In the book’s final three chapters, Janes turns to the fin-de-siècle aesthete, whose varied forms further complicate any simple iconographic evolution of queer fashioning. Wilde’s standing as the embodiment of Victorian queerness par excellence has made him the focus of countless studies, but Janes invigorates the discussion by taking seriously the Marquess of Queensbury’s charge that Wilde was posing as a sodomite. This emphasis on posing connects Wilde’s self-presentation with his pictorial antecedents. “To pose as a sodomite,” Janes argues, “was to engage with forms that had developed in collusion with imagery conjured from the lurid imaginations of...