Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend

Salom

Salomé as Bombshell, or How Oscar Wilde Became an Anarchist E R I N W I L L I A M S H Y M A N On 6 April 1895, the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec received a letter from the famed Montmartre dance-hall performer La Goulue asking him to paint two large canvases that would adorn the exterior of her funfair booth at the Foire du Trône. In deference to his old friend, who had been a subject of his previous work, he worked furiously to complete the commission within the week,in time to promote La Goulue’s new act with an eye-catching advertisement. Whereas many of Lautrec’s scenes endow forms of urban social life with a sense of the carnivalesque, here the carnival is imbued with overt political import, for the foreground of the right-hand panel is dominated by the portraits of two controversial figures: Oscar Wilde and Félix Fénéon, imagined as spectators of La Goulue’s belly dance, alongside the figure of Lautrec (fig. 17). The Parisian funfairs“had a tradition of offering spectacles based on current political events,” which Lautrec clearly drew on by connecting the two men as both aesthetes and outlaws, here spectators but each quite recently objects of public spectacle.₁ On the one hand, Wilde had just lost his libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, and on the same day that Lautrec had received his commission, Wilde had been arrested and charged with “committing indecent acts.” On the other hand, Fénéon—esteemed art critic, quintessential aesthete and dandy, 96 3 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. champion of the neo-impressionists, and editor of symbolist works and of the prominent literary journal La revue blanche—had earlier that year been acquitted as an anarchist conspirator in the “Trial of the Thirty.” The trial, in which Fénéon had been tried along with Jean Grave, Sébastien Faure, and other anarchist theorists or writers, alongside eleven petty thieves, had turned Fénéon into a media celebrity. With rigid aplomb, his wit and ironic remarks outdid both prosecutor and judge, turning, in his biographer’s words,“what was essentially a sinister drama into a sophisticated comedy.”² For instance, the judge asserted, “It has been established that you surrounded yourself with [the anarchists] Cohen and Ortiz,”to which Fénéon replied,“One can hardly be surrounded by two persons : you need at least three.”Judge:“You were seen speaking with them behind Salomé as Bombshell, or How Oscar Wilde Became an Anarchist 97 Figure 17. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse mauresque ou les almées (The Moorish Dance) (1895). Courtesy of Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. a lamp-post!”Fénéon:“Can you tell me,Your Honor, where behind a lamp-post is?” (289–90). In each instance, the humor of Fénéon’s replies lay in the way in which he showed the ambiguity and the unstable meanings of the judge’s words, subverting the value of language as a transparent medium capable of seizing upon some“truth”about his“essence”as an anarchist. Thus, in numerous ways, Fénéon’s verbal style—his wit and wordplay—paralleled Wilde’s rhetorical gestures on the witness stand,although his ultimate acquittal shows that he was more able to elude legal definition as an anarchist than Wilde was as a homosexual. Lautrec’s portrait thus uses the two renowned figures to draw attention to La Goulue’s publicity billboard yet at the same time makes an ironic comment on spectator and spectacle. He establishes a visual connection between Wilde and Fénéon, rendered in opposing profiles, but in doing so alludes to a much more profound connection between the two: both arguably their culture’s most ardent advocates of “liberty in art,” both seen as threats to the social order, both representing the ultimate in individualism for a fin-de-siècle public simultaneously ready to glorify and pillory them for it. Fénéon sensed...