The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory by Heather Marcovitch, and: The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde by S. I. Salamensky, and: Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century edited by Annette M. Magid (review)

In the 1990s, Oscar Wilde’s reputation was reinvigorated when he became a touchstone for new theories of performativity, theatricality, imitation, and sexual subversion, and three new books demonstrate that we are still working through the significance of this influence. In fact, one of the books, The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory, by Heather Marcovitch, could easily have been written in the 1990s and cites no scholarship written since 2000; however, it raises an important question about how Wilde’s work for the theater, his production of himself as an aesthetic spectacle, and his various meditations on the theatricality of just about everything, present an evolving theory of performance that might resonate with the foundational theoretical work of modern performance studies. As her benchmarks for the modern here, she cites the late twentieth-century work of such critics as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Philip Auslander, and Judith Butler—not with any great rigor or new insight—but the concepts she discusses are still at the core of current discussions of performance with regard to identity politics—to self-invention, self-promotion, and self-commodification. This book may do more critical rehearsing than performing, but Marcovitch offers an overview of the contemporary relevance of every aspect of Wilde’s thinking about theatricality as it developed from his American lecture tour and his early dandyism, to the spectacular success of his plays and dialogues, and to the tragic spectacle of his trials.

The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde, by S. I. Salamensky, offers a more eclectic series of readings of the spectacle of Wilde’s aesthetic persona. She is at her best as a critic of other critics, interrogating the diverse uses made of Wilde’s aesthetic persona by scholars, fans, and foes. She has herself become an ardent consumer of ephemera about Wilde, both the Victorian and the more modern varieties, and her lighter critical asides are suitably amusing and opinionated, as when she raves about a Monty Python skit about Wilde, or when she derides the study guides that accompany a live transmission of a Wilde play at the cinema, or when she sips Pimm’s at Oxford with the members of the Oscar Wilde Society, whose obsessive biographical inquiries she characterizes as “half gossip, half Talmudic debate” (157). In a more scholarly mode, she digs into the archive of aestheticism to discuss a few parodic fictionalizations of Wilde’s persona during his lifetime, especially the figure of Nash in Henry James’s novel The Tragic Muse (1889–90). She reads James alongside two lesser known novels, Julia Constance Fletcher’s Mirage (1877) and Rhoda Broughton’s Second Thoughts (1880), both of which have much the same plot: “In each, a bright, sensitive young woman is romantically pursued by a brilliant, creative, charismatic, yet also unmasculine, ungrounded aesthete presented as a creature of an impending modern era that is both exciting and discomfiting. The Wilde figure is positioned in opposition to a blunt, solid, stolid, strong-but-silent suitor able to provide a conventional marriage and sound material future” (13). The Wilde figure is rejected in both cases, but we may infer from Salamensky’s numerous other examples, both Victorian and more modern, that this opposition is...