Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (review)

{ 122 } BOOK REV IEwS in American society translated into the vernacular of the popular stage”(1). The great strength of this work is to reinsert theatre into culture and culture into theatre so as to make clear the intimate connection between historical events, social organizations, and cultural activity. This contextualization characterizes the best work of recent theorized history, Heather S. Nathans’s Slavery and Sen­ timent among them. —ROSEMARIE K. BANK Kent State University \ Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde. By Kerry Powell. London : Cambridge University Press, 2009. 204 pp. $90.00 cloth. In Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde, Kerry Powell infuses vigorous new meaning into Shakespeare’s legendary dictum that the world is but a stage and all mortals merely actors. Powell builds on this concept in examining Oscar Wilde’s struggle to determine whether people could write their own scripts and fashion their own images and performances, challenges that haunted Wilde throughout his life. As Powell notes, Wilde’s “visionary theatricality ” literally discerned life as “a continuum of performance,” an observation that “lies at the core of his importance” in both theatre and thought (1). Drawing extensively upon newly discovered or reinterpreted materials—particularly Wilde’s courtroom transcripts—Powell discusses how Wilde’s gendered identity was formulated and even textualized through the historical framework of Victorian values that made impossible a distinction between “the ‘performed’ and the ‘real.’” Furthermore, Powell argues that Wilde’s place in charting modern drama has been seriously underrated, noting he “altered the course of drama by strategically abandoning” its traditional mimetic basis and sought “to create new worlds and perform new selves” (171). Powell frames his short but richly textured book within the framework of Wilde’s fame, beginning with his renowned American tour and ending with the prison term that left him a shell of a man. Throughout six chapters, Powell charts the various poses that Wilde adopted or was forced to assume: “his attempt , perhaps doomed at the outset, to create himself anew, on his own terms, while inhabiting a character in a script written by someone else with very different motives” (17). One of the most potent illustrations of this stylization is the iconic photograph of Wilde by celebrity photographer Napoleon Sarony de- { 123 } BOOK REV IEwS picting the author as a“gorgeously clad, dreamy-eyed figure”(24). Powell’s incisive discussion strikes at the heart of his central theme—whether Wilde assumed his own pose or whether Sarony controlled and thus “invented” him—and is underscored by the ensuing landmark litigation concerning the ownership of this pose. Powell further locates this issue of identity ownership in Wilde’s subsequent works, such as the title character in The Picture of Dorian Gray, who “seizes control of the portrait he sat for” (37). Powell also examines the concepts of identity and performativity in Wilde’s five most prominent plays: Lady Windemere’s Fan, Salomé, A Woman of No Im­ portance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Powell views these works as “the acting out of the author’s conflict and to a high degree his compromise with an increasingly powerful variety of late-Victorian feminism” that demanded the standards of feminine purity be applied to men as well as women—an admirable undertaking but one that would ironically help bring about Wilde’s downfall (41). Powell scrupulously examines the textual evolution of these plays, incorporating the importance of social and feminist influences on Wilde’s revisions and exploring the “new if fitful recognition” concerning gender conceptions as“regulatory fictions”rather than universal truths of identity (43). In the process, Powell leads readers through the tangled Victorian ideals of purity, drawing upon contemporary factual and fictional references and noting the changing influence of these forces on Wilde’s own works. For example, Powell cites the chasm between the first and rarely cited draft of Lady Windemere’s Fan and the final version, which presents a considerably more sympathetic view of the “Puritan” woman, a “softening” that Powell argues “would become the paradigm of Wilde’s social comedies,” as though he were negotiating radical feminist views with his own “deep hostility towards them” (55). Similarly...