Failure & Queer Masculinity From Wilde to Wilfred Owen

IN HIS CONTRIBUTION to Palgrave's series, Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, James Campbell pursues with considerable success an ambitious speculative argument concerning how Oscar Wilde conceived of his own sexuality (by contrast with the currently prevalent object-oriented thinking about homosexuality) and how his self-conception influenced Wilfred Owen. His highly suggestive, well-written book deserves the attention of scholars writing on Wilde, on queer theory, on the poetry of World War I, and on military masculinity. Objecting effectively to characterizations of Wilde as a homosexual in the way the term is often used today, Campbell chooses the word "queer" as an alternative to designate Wilde's self-understanding that, he argues, is bound up with the notion of intergenerational male procreation evoked in Wilde's 1899 "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." as he interprets it. He makes his multi-faceted argument from a historicist perspective, with attention to recent queer theory and through close readings of texts in all the genres.

The study includes an introduction, six chapters, and a brief afterword. The first chapter develops the book's central concept, male procreation. Through a reading attuned to the complicated play of provisos within "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," the chapter brings out the story's implications for cultural reproduction through erotic engagement between two males in which effeminacy is not denigrated. Chapter two focuses on the 1890 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray read as a sequel to the earlier story that extends and reconsiders male procreation by presenting various impasses that arise in the relations of the three central male characters. Campbell argues that the longer narrative destabilizes the ideal of male procreation, which goes awry within the context of culturally entrenched attitudes. Drawing on John Addington Symonds's concept of personality as a union of spirit and flesh for the Greeks, he cannily compares The Picture of Dorian Gray as a work of art to the green carnation (which Wilde used to suggest same-sex desire but not explicitly) as simultaneously masking and revealing its sexual implications. Chapter three contrasts Wilde's stance toward queerness with significant moments in queer theory of our time, arguing cogently that Wilde's implicit handling of the child is distinctive. Campbell distinguishes between Wilde as an icon for same-sex liberation and Wilde as the author of literary texts whose implications concerning sexuality may diverge from current dominant attitudes about gay identity. In describing the queer implications of Wilde's writings, Campbell draws effectively on David Halperin's How to Do the History of Homosexuality, which explores four aspects of sexual deviance that antedate the emphasis on object orientation: "effeminacy, paederasty, friendship, and inversion." Doing so enables him to give weight to queer failure as he responds to writings by Lee Edelman, Jose Estaban Muñoz, Heather Love, and Jack Halberstam.

Chapter four deals with the figures of child and lover in De Profundis, in Wilde's life, and in Salome, with, regarding the latter, consideration of incest and the politicizing of Wilde during World War I through the Pemberton Billing libel suit brought by the Salome performer Maud Allan. Campbell establishes that Wilde was important during the war because he was the target and representative figure for a homophobic, xenophobic conception of same-sex desire as debilitating for English masculinity. He interprets Salome in an original way as a clash between the visuality of Hellenistic culture and the aurality of Judeo-Christian culture. Chapters five and six both concern Owen, especially the influence of Robert Ross's circle on his thinking and his writing. As Wilde's literary executor and former lover, Ross provided a living conduit between Wilde and Owen. Campbell identifies Keats as an important precursor for both writers concerning supposed excesses of style and the sexual objections sometimes raised to Keats's work in the late nineteenth century. He argues that Owens's turn toward Decadent literature and toward the representation of combat experience in his poetry yielded new or revised poems that responded to Wilde's conception of male procreation.

Chapter six focuses on the poet and eventual Proust translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, of the Ross circle, and on three of Owen's best-known poems ("Disabled," "Dulce et Decorum Est," and "Strange Meeting") from the perspective of male procreation. The material about Scott Moncrieff is particularly pertinent regarding Owen's knowledge of Wilde's concept, because of Scott Moncrieff's sonnets addressed to him as "Mr W. O." Campbell takes witty advantage of the reversible initials as part of his often lively style. The end of chapter six returns to failure as the fate of male procreation both for Wilde in his writing and his life and for its cultural potential because of World War I's apocalyptic character. Without quoting Wilde's famous statement about utopia from The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which would support his case, Campbell argues that Wilde's conception was utopian and unsustainable, especially under the changed historical circumstances of the war. But he also maintains persuasively that Owen as spokesperson for its failure exemplifies the successful genealogy of male procreation that passed the concept along from Wilde and Robert Ross to Scott Moncrieff and Owen. Campbell turns the tables partially on failure as well in the last pages by bringing out the effect of Owen's poetry on the understanding of World War I by historians and by the public. He argues speculatively but also memorably that the persistence of a minority perspective in widely accepted thinking about the war is implicitly the persistence of Wilde's notion of male procreation because of its influence on Owen's writing.

This book is original and stimulating, though stronger in some parts than in others. The strengths dominate. Chapter five presents fascinating details about Owen's involvement with the Ross circle of Wilde admirers, but its treatment of Keats, who is pertinent for reading both Wilde and Owen, does not contribute sufficiently to the argument. Campbell makes a strong, canny decision to focus on the 1890 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, with strategic comparisons to the 1891 book version, as a way to gauge the effect of the objections raised immediately to the 1890 text, objections that can take us back to the positive presentation of male procreation in "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." Less successful are the readings late in the study of Owen's poems in specific relation to male procreation, which would be more satisfying if pursed in greater detail and also with consideration of other poems by Owen. Even so, Campbell's treatment of the poems raises acute questions concerning military masculinity and World War I by contrast with Wilde's ideal. Although Campbell's argument that Wilde is an important figure for our understanding of the war is better in the round than in its details concerning Owen, it has the ring of truth. In presenting the destruction of soldiers' bodies as a revealing symptom of antithetical cultural attitudes involving attachment to the male body and the maiming of it, Campbell stages a version of Wilde's insight from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" but without articulating it in Wilde's words from the closing stanza: "all men kill the thing they love." The statement reinforces and expresses what Campbell suggests concerning British cultural attitude toward male bodies as they emerge between 1890 and 1920.

Campbell's argument is well informed historically, and the readings of Wilde's texts are detailed and compelling. They would have been even more satisfying had he devoted more time than he does to the misogyny of Wilde's thinking and to the class bias of his attitudes, both of which he mentions. He does more with misogyny (102–103) than with class prejudice. Among the study's most revealing and suggestive segments is the strong-minded discussion exactly in its center (92–103) concerning Wilde's queer identity, preorientation aspects of queerness, and significant moments in contemporary queer theory. Campbell carefully places Wilde in a speculative way that develops his claim "that the iconic Wilde became a symbol for a system that Wilde the writer would not have recognized nor, perhaps, endorsed." Rightly skeptical of Wilde's denial during the trials of links between his works and sexual discourse, Campbell argues for those works' relevance to thinking about what it can mean to be queer. His conclusion is that Wilde's ideal of queerness participated in all the forms that Halperin outlines but that Wilde treated inversion distinctively as active, creative, and effeminate. He then goes on to test briefly later aspects of queer theory against the implications of Wilde's texts, suggesting that Wilde's attitudes pose a challenge to Lee Edelman's currently influential ones by emphasizing utopian possibility in a way that is closer to Jose Muñoz. Campbell's focus on failure draws on queer failure as Heather Love and Jack Halberstam develop the notion. Like his treatment of World War I's place in history as influenced by Wilde through Owen, Campbell's speculations about queerness open onto large issues that he broaches in stimulating, thoughtful ways but necessarily without reaching closure. His multiperspectival study raises significant questions that other scholars will respond to and pursue.