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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 10 Degeneracy and Atavism The trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde were seen at the time and have been seen ever since as important symbolic events, and not only in the development of a sense of homosexual group consciousness and gay liberation. Wilde’s persecution was simply one act in a greater cultural , social, even political drama. The increasing visibility and articulateness of the homosexual subculture was contemporary with and linked, or seen to be linked, to a variety of other challenges to mid-Victorian values and conventions : feminism, the free-love movement, secularism, socialism, and the like. Inevitably the forces of conservatism and respectability struck back, and the Wilde trials provided a perfect opportunity to do so. The prosecution denounced him not only as a sexual deviate but as a corrupter of youth—though the youths in question hardly needed lessons in corruption—and even as a threat to the social order in that he constantly consorted with those well below him on the social scale. That this was almost as serious a breach as his sexual offenses and certainly made them worse was an argument the prosecution clearly hoped the jury would find doubly persuasive. The presiding judge at the first Wilde trial certainly did. In his summing up he characterized Wilde’s co-defendant, Alfred Taylor, who had introduced Wilde to many of his sexual partners, as belonging “to a class of people in whom it is difficult to imagine such an offense.” The implication was unmistakable; if Wilde and Taylor would not—had not—set an example of respectability such as their social standing required, then society could and should make an example of them. That suffices to explain most of what happened to Wilde and, in the aftermath of Wilde, to Carpenter and Ellis—most but not quite all. The ferocity of press commentary on Wilde would seem to indicate a deeper anxiety than the Wilde case by itself could have engendered, even with all the baggage that became attached to it. Very few in the press kept their heads, the most inter-| 127 10-V2660 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page 127 G&S Typesetters PDF proof esting and surprising example being W. T. Stead, whose white-slavery campaign ten years earlier had played a critical role in creating the climate for the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. “The heinousness of the crime of Oscar Wilde and his associates does not lie,” Stead argued, in its being unnatural. It would be unnatural for seventy-nine out of eighty persons . It is natural for the abnormal person who is in a minority of one. At the same time it is impossible to deny that the trial and the sentence bring into very clear relief the ridiculous disparity there is between the punishment meted out to those who corrupt girls and those who corrupt boys. . . . The male is sacrosanct ; the female is fair game. To have burdened society with a dozen bastards, to have destroyed a happy home by his lawless lust—of these things the criminal law takes no account. But let him act indecently to a young rascal who is very well able to take care of himself, and who can by no possibility bring a child into the world, . . . then judges can hardly contain themselves from indignation when inflicting the maximum sentence the law allows. Nor, according to Stead, was that the only example, or even perhaps the most glaring one, of British hypocrisy in such matters: “Another contrast is that between the universal execration heaped upon Oscar Wilde and the tacit universal acquiescence of the very same public in the same kind of vice in our public schools. . . . Public schoolboys are allowed to indulge with impunity in practices which, when they leave school, would consign them to hard labor.” Though that was certainly an exaggeration—homosexuality, though notoriously rife in the public schools, was often savagely punished—such frankness, detachment, and recognition of the social and sexual double standard was exceedingly rare. For the most part the press overindulged itself in gleeful vindictiveness or haughty self-righteousness. Long content, though with increasing bite and more than a touch of hysteria , to satirize Wilde as the symbol of limp-wristed aestheticism, the humor magazine Punch now savaged him mercilessly: If such be “Artists,” then may Philistines Arise, plain sturdy Britons as of yore, And sweep them off and purge away the sins That England e...

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