Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books (review)

Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books, by Nicholas Frankel; pp. 222. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, $47.50.

Ours is an age where the enigmatic personality of Oscar Wilde--controversial in his own time--dominates Wilde studies, laments Nicholas Frankel. At the outset of Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books, Frankel summarizes the biographical imperative of Wilde studies. Wilde is identified with his amoral wit, clever irony, and satire--all masks to reveal himself. At the best extreme, current scholarship remains skeptical and views Wilde's literary works as a poor substitute for court documents and letters; at the worst, it conflates the author and the text. Frankel's approach, by contrast, goes against the grain of Wilde studies to examine the physical appearance of the text, which mattered as much to the Victorian fin-de-siècle reader as the text itself. Frankel uses the artifact--the face value of Wilde's decorated books--as a critical lens to read Wilde's writing itself. In talking seriously about the decorated book, Frankel taps into a much earlier phase in Wilde studies (1900 to 1914), which focused on the material condition of Wilde's books, including bindings, papers, marginal designs, title pages, and illustrations. But his approach is also grounded in poststructuralist theory and editorial theory, making his own book a fitting addition to the Editorial Theory and Literary Studies series.

In his attention to the elaborate editions of Wilde's work that appeared during Wilde's own lifetime, Frankel is attuned to the text's iconic status. Wilde's decorated books emerge as scenes of production in which the linguistic text and the medium of the printed book collaborate. In the first part, entitled "From Text to Work," he sets Wilde's writings into an historical context and establishes the argument that we cannot mask internal contradictions between textual versions or reduce a work to a single text. Rather than cite one version of a Wilde text as definitive or authoritative, a topic of dispute in textual studies, Frankel argues that we see Wilde's play Salome as the sum of distinct textual moments. He raises, for example, the first abortive stage production of Salome (where Sarah Bernhardt was to play the title role) in comparison to the play textualized in the form of a book, first in French (1893) and then in English (1894), illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. He aptly concludes this chapter on Salome: "In searching for a deeper, less contradictory Salome, the truth-tellers risk losing their heads" (76).

In the second, longer part of the book, entitled "The Decorated Book," Frankel discusses variations between journal and book versions of Wilde's Intentions (1891, Wilde's collected major criticism including "The Decay of Lying") and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) to put forth a notion of the book as a cooperative effort between author and graphic designer. He explores Wilde's increasing fascination with bindings and title pages and the influential role that designers, such as Charles Ricketts, had in creating decorative editions that influence our interpretation of the linguistic text. While Wilde is more commonly thought of as a playwright, in this section Frankel gives attention to Wilde as novelist, critic, and, in particular, poet, in devoting a chapter each to Ricketts's designs for Wilde's Poems (1892) and his now little-read The Sphinx (1894).

Both parts adhere to a claim Frankel sets forth at the close of the Introduction: "Wilde's devotion to a world of appearances, manifest in the rigorously 'decorative' character of his most powerful writings, forces us to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about what constitutes a literary text and how such a text might be read" (22). Throughout the book, Frankel includes Wilde's theoretical writings and letters to inform his argument that Wilde's fascination with book decoration and poetry became pivotal to his theory of language as "aesthetic." The volume, though slim, follows this focus through to the final chapter...