The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (review)

One cannot but wonder at all the press Oscar Wilde has been getting lately. Plays, films, articles, and books about his life abound; his theatrical work has received renewed attention; he has even been bestowed a place in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. Anything but modest in his appetite for public acclaim, Wilde would doubtless have found such attention gratifying. The motives behind the recent wave of interest are, however, puzzling. Is it a vogue for gay icons and martyrs? The resonance of Wilde’s fin-de-siècle decadence with our own? Or perhaps, with the centenary of his death in 1900 just around the corner, it is simply that the time for his memorialization has come.

Foremost in the nineties fashion in Wilde, however it is explained, has been a fascination with the sensational trials that precipitated his downfall. For many years, H. Montgomery Hyde’s was the only extended treatment of the case available. Based on newspaper stories and personal reminiscences, Hyde’s dramatic account of the three trials is a heavily edited rendition; shorthand records have never been recovered. Unreliable as it may therefore be, Hyde’s is the best version we have of the events.

Michael S. Foldy’s new study addresses questions about the trials’ meanings, both for their contemporary audience and for spectators one hundred years later. With Hyde’s book widely available, there is little imperative for Foldy to recount the case in detail, and he accordingly disposes of the familiar narrative in the opening two chapters. The only significant difference in emphasis in Foldy’s version is the detailed, although conjectural, case he makes for Prime Minister Rosebery’s involvement in Wilde’s prosecution: beginning with Lord Alfred Douglas, many have speculated that Rosebery and other high government officials scapegoated Wilde for political ends. The third chapter considers press reaction to the proceedings, including printed letters to the editor. The study becomes more theoretical and broader in scope beginning in Chapter Four, which addresses Victorian constructions of sexuality and gender. Wilde’s aesthetic theories and their relation to his criminal prosecution are the subject of Chapter Five, while the final chapter discusses late-Victorian social purity movements as a context in which to understand the trials.

Although claiming to write from an historian’s perspective, Foldy is really an historical sociologist, exploring a series of paradigms through which to apprehend Wilde’s downfall. Few discoveries could be expected in a case so heavily researched, and the book evinces little new primary research, with the exception of editorial material from the Daily Telegraph and the Star. Salutary as these newspaper investigations are, the story remains essentially unchanged from Hyde’s version. Foldy acknowledges the dubiousness of Hyde’s text, but he relies on it, as he says in the Introduction, “primarily for aesthetic reasons” (xii). Yet the dramatic appeal of Hyde’s “clarity and [. . .] stylistic merit” (xii) is, in fact, the very problem with his account.

One of Foldy’s aims is “to show how and why the Wilde trials radically transformed popular and professional attitudes toward practitioners of same-sex passion” (81), and how this transformation was accomplished “almost overnight” (xiv). Although Wilde’s trials were the most widely reported vehicle to date for disseminating information about sex between men, this does not mean that the trials “invented” the modern homosexual. As a result of considering the Wilde case exclusively, Foldy erroneously attributes the full force of the change to it. At the same time, the social contexts he supplies are so general—theories of evolution, degeneracy, and empire—that they can suggest only the vaguest historical explanation for change. Indeed, in some places, Foldy presents evidence for the gradual emergence of “the homosexual” from earlier formations of sodomy without reconciling the apparent contradiction between this argument and the one that Wilde’s case produced the transformation: “By the end of...