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O 5 } “Acceptable Hints of Infinity” Dissident Desires and the Erotics of Countermodernism fin-de-siècle prelude: wilde, james, and the homosexual novel of manners In 1882, at a reception at the Washington home of Judge Edward G. Loring , Oscar Wilde met Henry James, then the toast of literary salons in America for recently having published both Washington Square and Portrait of a Lady.1 There began the end of one of the most unlikely friendships in international letters. Wilde, appearing in knee breeches and adorned with a large, yellow silk handkerchief, introduced himself to, among other dignitaries, an American general and a United States senator . James later wrote to Isabella Gardner that Wilde, whom he termed “fatuous” and “repulsive,” was ignored by everyone, although, if one can trust the testimony of Judge Loring’s daughter, this was yet another of the Master’s intriguing distortions. “James was so boring,” wrote Loring’s daughter. “Mr. Wilde was so amusing.”2 Warmed by a favorable remark Wilde offered to a newspaper reporter regarding James’s talents, James later showed up at Wilde’s hotel for a chat. The meeting was evidently a disaster. “A fatuous fool, a tenth-rate cad, an unclean beast,” James wailed to Mrs. Henry Adams after the encounter. (Mrs. Adams was undoubtedly relieved, as she had earlier declined to have Wilde as a guest in her home because, as she put it in her crisp, no-nonsense way, she considered him a “noodle.”) Nearly fifteen years later, James’s distaste for Wilde darkened into extraordinary cold-bloodedness. After the playwright’s imprisonment, James refused to sign a letter asking for leniency. Writing to the French novelist Paul Bourget, he remarked that hard labor had been an inappropriate form of punishment. Isolation, insisted James, would have been more just. I rehearse this history of the strained relations between the American novelist and the Irish playwright because that narrative is one that has dominated the extraordinary affinities linking the work of James and Wilde. The tension-producing differences between these two mavericks of modern letters would seem to have been well summed up in Richard Ellmann ’s remark that Wilde posed a threat to James because “James’ homosexuality was latent, Wilde’s patent. . . . When they come to the beautiful boy, Wilde is all atremble, James all aslant.”3 Others, such as the critic Jonathan Freedman, recently have underlined the contiguous bonds between Wilde’s much-flaunted aestheticism and James’s own formalist tendencies in his later fiction. As Freedman writes in his study Professions of Taste, “Wilde’s interest in the social interplay of verbal representation of finely tuned, acutely self-aware subjectivities and—more powerfully— of the drama of influence, freedom, control and violence they enact in their interplay with each other is one that Henry James will take up and make his own.”4 Despite his astute attention to the shared stylistic strategies in the writing of James and Wilde, Freedman mostly accepts Ellmann’s judgment on the contrasting sexual attitudes of these two authors, noting that the “aestheticism James shared with Pater was affronted by Wilde’s extravagant sexuality and threatened by his social disgrace.”5 It would be misguided, however, to see chiefly formal resemblances between these two authors. Both writers went very far in shaping an intriguing, underestimated literary subgenre: the homosexual novel of manners. Suggestively, Wilde’s Dorian Gray and James’s The Tragic Muse appeared almost simultaneously; The Picture of Dorian Gray was first serialized in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890 (and later published in book form in 1891 with six additional chapters), whileThe Tragic Muse appeared in 1890. With a polished attention to the niceties of drawing-room fiction, Wilde in the early chapters of Dorian Gray and James in the first third of The Tragic Muse strove to shape novels of dangerously assured homosexual innuendo, setting the initial terms for a novel of (partly) homosexual concerns. Some thirty years later, two other novelists with often acrimonious , entwined personal histories—E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence— gave that literary venture another try, although both Forster and Lawrence no longer felt obliged to situate their fictions in drawing-room settings. All four of these writers remained preoccupied with the dilemma of how to depict homoerotic relations given the loosening, but still severe, constraints placed on the representation of eroticized same-sex activity in the novel. Both Dorian Gray and The Tragic Muse tackle this problem with...

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