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Wilde, Sexuality, and the Gaze of Contemporary Cinema O L I V E R S . B U C K T O N In his recent biography of Oscar Wilde, Neil McKenna argues that, despite Wilde’s status as an icon of homosexuality, his sexual life has frequently been misrepresented by biographers.According to McKenna,“most accounts of Oscar’s life present him as predominantly heterosexual, a man whose later love of men was at best some sort of aberration, a temporary madness and, at worst, a slowgrowing cancer, a terrible sexual addiction which slowly destroyed his mind and his body.”₁ Wilde contributed to this perception of his homosexuality as a disease by writing to the British home secretary from Reading Gaol in July 1896 that his “offences are forms of sexual madness and are recognized as such not merely by modern pathological science but by much modern legislation”and adding that “during the entire time [the three years preceding his arrest] he was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position in London and Paris, his European distinction as an artist, the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions.”² Despite the important pragmatic motives for this self-lacerating language—Wilde was petitioning for early release from prison—it has surely contributed to the reading of Wilde’s 305 12 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. homosexuality as an “aberration,” a tragic straying from the heterosexual path on which he had been traveling. This issue of Wilde’s sexuality and its complex effect on his writing has been pivotal to the construction of Wilde as a central figure of fin-de-siècle decadence and hence to Wilde’s legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As an enduring figure in popular culture,Wilde’s image has been determined by his relation to discourses of hetero- and homosexuality and the unstable relation between them.Wilde has been kept alive as a vital cultural figure by the numerous stage productions of his plays, the vast amount of scholarship on his life and work, and his iconic status in queer culture. From the outset, moreover, Wilde’s “identity” as homosexual has been based on visual representation. Research on the media coverage of Wilde’s trials and imprisonment has shown that his construction as a modern sexual criminal was founded on the use of Wilde as spectacle and was designed to highlight the visible legibility of his perversion. In modern culture, cinema is the medium through which popular perceptions of Wilde have been constructed and mediated for a mass audience. There have, of course, been numerous films focusing on Wilde and his work. Albert Lewin’s adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) significantly diminished the homosexual references in the novel by assigning Dorian a female love object in the person of painter Basil Hallward’s “niece.” The adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest helmed by British director Anthony Asquith (1952) was effectively a filmed version of the London stage production with which it shared several cast members. A decade later, two films were released that focused on Wilde’s trials: The Trials of Oscar Wilde, aka The Man with the Green Carnation (directed by Ken Hughes,1960),starring Peter Finch in the title role; and OscarWilde (directed by Gregory Ratoff, 1960), starring Robert Morley as the main protagonist.³ There have been more recent representations of Oscar Wilde in Wilde (directed by Brian Gilbert, 1997) and The Importance of Being Earnest (directed by Oliver Parker, 2002), which reflect the construction of Wilde as spectacle in contemporary cinema. To what extent do these recent representations of Wilde in film reinforce the cultural perception of Wilde as a predominantly heterosexual artist led astray by the “dangerous” temptation of homosexuality? Given the changes in legal and social attitudes toward homosexuality since Wilde’s conviction , can Wilde’s same-sex desire be at once recognized and affirmed by the gaze of contemporary cinema?⁴ Examination of the film Wilde—which is based on Richard Ellmann’s 1987 biography—and the recent film version of Earnest (which 306 Oliver S. Buckton You are reading...

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