Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire (review)

"Tame passions," "manageable desire": the language in the title of Jeff Nunokawa's recent book suggests the contradictions on which he has chosen to meditate and on which, he argues, Oscar Wilde himself meditated. Tame Passions of Wilde is not the first book to imply that Wilde tried to have his cake and eat it too. That Wilde made his own sexual marginality central to his aesthetic philosophy; that he produced a new identity from products already proven in the marketplace; that he worked passionately to envision himself as a dandy-aesthete who did not exert much energy at all—such claims have been effectively argued in the past. Indeed, Wilde as conscious manipulator of cultural and social paradoxes has become one of the most popular images in contemporary scholarship on the man and his works. The conception of him as a wily strategist who took the deceit and subterfuge that his society forced him to adopt (primarily due to his sexual desires) and turned them to profit within the market economy is now familiar. Nunokawa, however, offers fresh perspectives on this image of Wilde as paradoxical or subversive by shifting the ground for analysis from the cultural context of Wilde's society to the philosophical context of modernity itself.

Versions of four of the volume's six chapters have been published previously. The two that appear here for the first time are the introductory and concluding chapters, their combined content making up almost exactly half the book. In all of the chapters, Nunokawa's aim is not to historicize Wilde's work or to establish cultural influences on his particular take on modernity. Rather, this study's greatest contribution to Wilde scholarship is its exploration of the man as a social theorist and as a major contributor to our understanding of the concept of modernity itself.

The claim that Wilde was a social theorist would not strike most readers as surprising. Works such as "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891) and "The Critic as Artist" (1891) suggest that even the author saw himself in this way. What Tame Passions offers, however, is an extended meditation on Wilde as a passionate and earnest scholar of modernity. According to Nunokawa, modernity, when considered through Wilde's oeuvre, is distinguished from previous periods by its character of desire. The term "desire," here, is not a synonym for sexual passion; rather, it defines a potential that claims the inseparability of erotic and other forms of desire, such as those to do with consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Thus, "the lighter brands of desire that Wilde labors to produce not only work to serve the demands of market society, they also take their forms from its material" (32). Although this study pays particular attention to the relation of sexual and consumerist forms of longing, Nunokawa's broader claim is that Wildean modernity is distinguished from other models by its early recognition of the polysemous possibilities of desire itself.

Through this broader notion of desire, Nunokawa wishes to distinguish his scholarship from that which has most often been defined as "queer theory." For Nunokawa, queer theory is characterized by two tendencies: the linking of sexuality to identity and the linking of identities (especially marginalized sexual identities) to particular political and aesthetic views. Tame Passions, however, aims to explore a collection of desires so diverse that they overwhelm any such attempt at categorization and instead demonstrate Wilde's position within modernity at large.

In his introduction, Nunokawa explains Tame Passions as an effort "to excavate fragments" of Wilde's "grand project" of "cultivating and celebrating strains of passion, attraction, fascination" (1). As such, a coherent developmental argument does not run through the book. Instead, the chapters discuss an array of different topics: Japonisme and "desire-lite"; Erving Goffman and the body beautiful; boredom and consumerism; de-essentialism and the Protestant work ethic; the arrested gaze and the...