The Wilde Century

BOOK REVIEWS Despite these reservations, I heartily recommend Degeneration, Culture and the Novel. In addition to the virtues already mentioned, the book is very weU-written, includes some fascinating prints—for example , an illustration of "Six Criminal Types" from Lombroso's Criminal Man and a photograph of Hitler at the "Degenerate Art Exhibition"—and provides voluminous notes and a thorough bibliography (which, together , total eighty pages). Combining first-rate scholarship with a storyteUer's ability to weave a coherent yet intricate design from a tangled skein of history, literature and popular culture, Greenslade has written a work that those interested in British culture and nterature between the years 1880 and 1940 will find engaging as well as enlightening . Jim Barloon ______________ The University of Kansas The Wilde Century Alan Sinfield. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. viii + 216 pp. Cloth $39.95 Paper $14.95 THE CENTENARY ANNIVERSARY of Oscar Wilde's trials for homosexual behavior would naturally generate works such as The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. Alan Sinfield 's book is a part of Lillian Faderman and Larry Gross's Between Men-Between Women series on gay and lesbian scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, which includes works as diverse as John Clum's Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama and Kath Weston's Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Like many of the books in the series, Sinfield's text goes beyond biography or Uterary interpretation, resulting in an in-depth study which focuses on the Irish writer but spans four hundred years of Western culture. In The Wilde Century Sinfield argues that Oscar Wilde inadvertently caused a shift in thinking about homosexuality because he was effeminate . Prior to the trials of 1895, effeminacy did not necessarily denote same-sex passion; after the trials, the two ideas were synonymous. While Sinfield never explains the interesting wording of his title, it seems likely that the "Wilde century" is our own, during which time Western culture has perceived the homosexual as an effeminate (and aesthetic) man. The strongest chapters in Sinfield's book are the first and last. The 387 ELT 38:3 1995 author opens his discussion with the shock of the public upon hearing of Wilde's arrest. He quotes the anecdote of Frank Harris's disbelief (though he acknowledges Harris is an untrustworthy source) and notes the Marquess of Oueensbury^ surprise upon learning the truth of his own accusation. Yet the scandalous accusation of sodomy was hardly the biggest problem; sexual acts now defined as homosexuality were not uncommon in Victorian England. The scandal was that the public arrest and trial of a prominent citizen forced London society out of its denial of same-sex passion as more than simply deviation from the norm. The fact that the newspaper headlines read "Oscar Wilde posing as____* demonstrates, in Sinfield's mind, the denial of the Victorian public to admit to Wilde's crimes because they themselves did not have a name for it. This first chapter, entitled "Queer Thinking," introduces the ideas Sinfield will continue to elaborate on as the book progresses. He defines "queer" as a cultural construct associated with thinking after the trials (rather than as a socio-political post-Stonewall term), and uses the term "same-sex passion" to define "queer" activity prior to the trials. Such a distinction is important, considering the political and sexual labels that have been so easily misconstrued by both heterosexuals and homosexuals since then. Sinfield elaborates on the same-sex passion subculture which existed in Victorian society. He discusses the 1871 "Fanny and SteUa" scandal, detailing the arrest and attempted prosecution of two transvestites for soliciting. He also cites the underground gay pornographic novel Teleny (1893), to which Wilde may have contributed, an idea he accepts without question. It is curious that he does not discuss other scandalous subculture crimes directly connected to same-sex passion, such as the 1872 arrest of Simeon Solomon for indecent exposure and the 1889-1890 Cleveland Street affair. These examples, however, may have been passed over by Sinfield because they already have been discussed in detail...