by Neil McKenna
Oscar introduced his future wife in glowing terms: `I'm going to be married to a beautiful young girl called Constance Lloyd,' he wrote to Lillie Langtry, `a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her.'
Constance exuded a freshness, a purity that appealed to Oscar. His description of her as an `Artemis', the goddess of chastity, is interesting. Constance was undoubtedly a woman, but not over-womanly. She was certainly beautiful but not in an overtly sexual or sensual way. In a letter to a friend, Oscar described her as `mystical', a slightly strange epithet to describe his bride-to-be. Oscar's description of her head -'drooping like a flower' - and her hands of `ivory' suggest a cool, calm Madonna-like beauty. The heroine of Wilde's poem `Madonna Mia' remarkably anticipates Constance:
The physical similarities between the Madonna Mia of the poem and Constance are extraordinary: Constance's `flower-like head' and `her great coils of heavy brown hair' mirror Madonna Mia's `brown, soft hair close braided by her ears'; as indeed Constance's famous violet eyes mirror Madonna Mia's eyes of `bluest water'. Emotionally too there are extraordinary coincidences. Like Oscar's poetic Madonna, Constance had experienced, in her short but unhappy life with her mother, more than her fair share of `this world's pain'. She was certainly `longing' to fall in love and yet, like Madonna Mia, frightened of what love may bring. But Madonna Mia is not a portrait of Constance. Oscar had almost certainly written this version of the poem before his first meeting with Constance. (In fact, the poem is a reworking of a famous and profoundly homoerotic version written four years earlier called `Wasted Days' which concerns `a fair slim boy' with `hair of gold'.) Was Oscar struck by the similarities between Constance and his Madonna Mia? And did he fall in love with Constance because she was Constance? Or did he fall in love with her narcissistically as the incarnation of the Madonna Mia of his imagination?
Andre Raffalovich's vicious novel, A Willing Exile, published in 1890, is a roman-d-clef on the engagement and marriage of Constance and Oscar. Cyprian Broome is a poet and bon viveur who meets Daisy Laylham, a simple unspoilt girl who, like Constance, lives with her grandfather. Despite the downright nastiness of Raffalovich's depiction of Wilde - a nastiness born of a friendship gone sour - Raffalovich paints an intriguing portrait of Cyprian/Oscar's attitude to Daisy/Constance at the time of their engagement:
Impervious as Cyprian was to many things, and conventional as was his acceptance of this world's superficial morality, he could not help being touched by Daisy's sweetness, her kindness to servants, to bores, to all who were weaker or duller than herself.
To his great surprise, Cyprian finds himself drawn irresistibly to Daisy:
It was not love ... He had not met a girl before with whom he would have contemplated marriage; a widow or two, and some married women, older, and of better social position than himself, perhaps, but a girl, never. He had been accustomed to look upon women as the weavers of pretty clothes and of jewels, and as helpers to social success, and as symbols of his progress.
Finally, Cyprian proposes to Daisy as she plays the piano, in the same manner as Oscar proposed to Constance. Raffalovich's source for his jaundiced view of the Wildes' marriage may have been Oscar himself. In 1885, Oscar had reviewed Tuberose and Meadozvszveet, a volume of poetry by Raffalovich, not failing to pick up the homoerotic resonances. A correspondence was initiated in the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette and a friendship ensued. Raffalovich and Oscar were friends from 1886 onwards, until they fell out in the early 1890s, and Oscar almost certainly confided in him.
Raffalovich's view of Oscar's feelings for Constance - as not love, but something approaching, something akin to love; as something more than like and rather less than love - has a certain ring of truth. The love of Oscar for Constance, and of Constance for Oscar, was a strangely arbitrary, illconsidered, precipitate sort of love. Both seemed very ready to fall in love. Oscar had told his mother on the first day he and Constance had met how he was thinking of `marrying that girl'; and Constance had said she `can't help liking him' that first day.
By the time Constance and Oscar became engaged, two and a half years after they were first introduced, they hardly knew each other. Oscar had spent an entire year in America, four months in Paris, and then a further month in America. And what time they did spend together was limited and invariably carefully chaperoned. Before Oscar proposed, they had rarely been alone together. No doubt Otho, on their excursions, had allowed the lovers to walk a little ahead together where their conversation would not be overheard; and Speranza, with a great number of knowing winks and pointed allusions, had let them converse comparatively unmolested in her crowded drawing room. But, as for spending any significant amount of time alone together or achieving any real intimacy, that had been more or less impossible. In this respect they were not unusual. Many young couples became engaged and then married with barely an idea of the real nature of their spouse and, once married, were obliged to make the best of it. Love was supposed to be enough.
Even after their engagement, there was virtually no opportunity to get to know each other a little better. When the painter Louise Jopling asked Oscar why he had fallen in love with Constance, he replied tellingly, `She scarcely ever speaks, and I am always wondering what her thoughts are like.' Between the engagement and the marriage in May 1884, Oscar was constantly travelling the length and breadth of the British Isles on his mission to civilise the provinces and earn some money. He missed Constance desperately. `It is horrid being so much away from her,' he told Lillie Langtry, `but we telegraph to each other twice a day, and I rush back suddenly from the uttermost parts of the earth to see her for an hour, and do all the foolish things wise lovers do.' Constance was equally bereft while Oscar was touring. `I am with Oscar when he is in town, and I am too miserable to do anything while he is away.'
There was at least one opportunity, though, for Oscar to go through the prenuptial ritual of disclosing something of his past to Constance. A letter from Constance to Oscar makes it clear that he had imparted to her some details of his former loves and lovers. The letter revealed the intensity of her love for Oscar and the plenitude of her forgiveness: `My darling love,' she wrote:
You take all my strength away. I have no power to do anything but just love you when you are with me ... I don't think I shall ever be jealous. Certainly I am not jealous now of anyone. I trust in you for the present: I am content to let the past be buried, it does not belong to me: for the future trust and faith will come.
It is unlikely that Constance got anything but a heavily edited version of Oscar's sexual and emotional history. He almost certainly told her of his devotion to Florrie Balcombe and the story of the little gold cross; and of how he had asked Ellen Terry to give Florrie a crown of flowers to wear on the night she made her debut on the London stage so that, unbeknownst to her, she would be wearing a talisman of his unrequited love. Equally, he would have told Constance about his proposal to Charlotte Montefiore, carefully omitting to mention his waspish parting shot about her money and his brains. He would have mentioned his friendship with Violet Hunt and how he had once upon a time fancied himself to be in love with her. There may have been any number of disclosures of innocuous flirtations with the four sisters of Frank Miles at Bingham Rectory -'all very pretty indeed ... my heart is torn in sunder with admiration for them all' - and perhaps, for poetic colour, he might have tossed in a few mentions of stolen kisses on moonlit nights.
But Oscar would most certainly not have told Constance about his visits to women prostitutes in Oxford, London, America and Paris. Nor would he have told her about his sexual experiences with men. Nor indeed about his love affairs with other men like Frank Miles and his `Heart's Brother', Rennell Rodd. And he would most certainly not have boasted to Constance - as he did to others - that he had the kiss of Walt Whitman still
upon his lips. What Oscar may have tried to imply, and what Constance may have succeeded in inferring from his carefully edited confession, was that he had some degree of sexual experience. Constance was twenty-six, intelligent and had some knowledge and experience of the world. She must have known that Oscar at twenty-nine -'a very good age to be married', according to Lady Bracknell - was unlikely to be a virgin. But she could take comfort in the fact that Oscar was so ready to tell her all about his past, and that it seemed to have comparatively little in it for him to regret or for her to reproach. Or so she thought.
Constance's letter of plenary forgiveness ended - literally - on an iron note: `When I have you for my husband, I will hold you fast with chains of love and devotion so that you shall never leave me, or love anyone else.' Had Oscar not believed himself blindly in love, and been so blindly determined to get married to Constance, he might have mused on the comfortableness or otherwise of being held fast with chains of love and run away from his approaching marriage as fast as his legs would carry him.
W.H. Auden described Oscar's marriage to Constance as `certainly the most immoral and perhaps the only really heartless act of Wilde's life'. Auden argued that Oscar knew himself to be a lover of men but married Constance anyway, coldly calculating the value of her income as well as the value of the social respectability that marriage conferred.
But the truth, as Oscar would later remark, is rarely pure and never simple. Oscar was well aware that he was attracted to men. He had had occasional sexual encounters with men, but rarely, except in the case of Frank Miles, and perhaps Rennell Rodd, had these sexual attractions and sexual encounters coalesced into anything resembling a relationship. Most men who continued to find other men sexually attractive into their twenties and thirties experienced a tremendous struggle with their sexuality, and Oscar was no exception. There were times in his life when he experienced violent, contradictory and disturbing feelings about his sexual and emotional attraction to young men, swinging between feelings of ecstasy and degradation, sexual exultation and remorse. Oscar could invoke the homoerotic glories of Greek pederasty and discuss the joys of sex with `pretty boys' with Walt Whitman. And then, quite suddenly, he would turn away with abject self-loathing at the grossness of his sexual behaviour. It was perhaps one of these episodes of self-loathing - possibly to do with Frank Miles, or possibly as a result of a casual sexual encounter with a man - which had caused him to seek spiritual guidance from Father Bowden at the Brompton Oratory in April 1878.
Oscar was not alone in struggling with the burden of his sexual attraction to young men. Many men experienced violent feelings of self-loathing and disgust at their sexual urges, and sought to gain mastery over their unacceptable desires. Some chose the path of celibacy, and some chose the solace of the Church - the Catholic Church especially - as Oscar very nearly did. Some attempted, and some even succeeded, in committing suicide, finding the burden of their shameful secret unendurable, like the anonymous `Case VI' in Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex, for whom `prayers, struggles, all means used were of no avail ... Death, even if it meant nothing but a passage into nothingness ... would be a thousand times preferable' to the living hell of sexual desire for other men.
Many men believed that their homoerotic desires could be neutralised by working up their heterosexual instincts. Fire could be fought by fire. Repeated sex with a woman, they convinced themselves, could instil a habit of normal intercourse. They might even develop a taste for sex with women, which must inevitably bring about the longed-for `cure'. After Oscar's imprisonment, the Marquis of Queensberry wanted to `cure' Bosie of his sexual tastes for boys and young men and offered to pay for him to travel to the South Seas where he would `find plenty of beautiful girls' who were sexually available. Many men tried to `cure' themselves by forcing themselves to have sex with women in the hope that heterosexuality might blossom. John Addington Symonds wrote in his posthumously published Memoirs that what he needed `was the excitation of the sexual sense for women, and the awakening to their sexual desirableness, combined with the manifold sympathies, half brutal and half tender, which physical congress evokes'. In twelve out of the thirty-five men whose sexual case histories Havelock Ellis published:
there had been connection with women, in some instances only once or twice, in others during several years, but it was always with an effort or from a sense of duty and anxiety to be normal; they never experienced any pleasure in the act, or sense of satisfaction after it.
Female prostitutes were plentiful and cheap, which made it easy for men to practise `physical congress' with women. Ellis's `Case XIII' tried the prostitute `cure' with little success:
I sought out a scarlet woman in the streets of -- and went home with her. From something she said to me I knew that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again. This I did twice, but without any real pleasure. The whole thing was too sordid and soulless, and the man who decides to take an evil medicine regularly has first to make up his mind that he really needs it.
Oscar had swallowed this `evil medicine' and visited female prostitutes on a number of occasions that are known about, and perhaps on several more that are not. But these `animal' encounters were, for Oscar, rarely satisfactory and he famously remarked, after an unappetising visit to a prostitute, that she was `like cold mutton'.
For those like Oscar who found the prospect of celibacy unappealing and recourse to female prostitutes unappetising, marriage to the right woman seemed to be the only option. For some men, the `right woman', in practice, meant a woman who resembled a boy as closely as possible. Consciously or unconsciously, they sought out boyish women they could use as a sexual surrogate for the boys or men they really wanted to have sex with. Ellis's `Case XXV' `used to dream of finding an exit from his painful situation by cohabitation with some coarse boyish girl'. And Oscar, in an unguarded moment, once exclaimed to Aimee Lowther, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a friend: `Aimee, Aimee! If only you were a boy, how I would adore you.'
The Austrian sexologist Richard Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis includes a case history of a man who had had sex with hundreds of male partners and yet who successfully married a woman, telling how `the boyish appearance of my wife was of effectual assistance' in stimulating sexual desire. In Teleny, the explicitly homoerotic novel which Oscar secretly wrote towards the end of 1890 in conjunction with three other young men, the hero Des Grieux struggles to fight his strong sexual attraction to the pianist Rene Teleny. Des Grieux is convinced that he has found a `means of getting rid of this horrible infatuation' in the person of his mother's new chambermaid, a country wench of sixteen or so, who has:
the slender lithesomeness of a young boy, and might well have been taken for one, had it not been for the budding, round, and firm breasts, that swelled out her dress.
Des Grieux is prepared to go to any lengths to escape his sodomitical fate: `Could I but have felt some sensuality towards her, I think I would even have gone so far as to marry her, rather than become a sodomite.' Eventually, in a fit of self-loathing and despair, Des Grieux rapes the chambermaid only to discover that his homoerotic infatuation with Teleny is unimpaired. Significantly, Constance was described as boyish by some observers. Oscar himself described her as `slight', and Anna, Comtesse de Bremont, who knew Constance well, talked about her `youthful, almost boyish face with its clear colouring and full, dark eyes'.
Marriage was the main `cure' offered by doctors to men who were sexually attracted to other men. Andre Gide consulted an eminent doctor after he had proposed to Madeleine Rondeaux in 1895. Gide was not sure that he would be able to perform sexually in his marriage because of his powerful attraction to young men. The specialist was reassuring: `You say you love a young lady and yet hesitate to marry her, on account of your other tastes ... Get married! Marry without fear. And you'll soon see that the rest only exists in your imagination.' He was, the specialist told him, like a hungry man trying to make a meal out of gherkins.
Havelock Ellis warned that `physicians are often strongly tempted to advise marriage and to promise that the normal heterosexual impulse will appear.' This was dangerous advice, he said: `There is but too much evidence demonstrating the rashness and folly of those who give such advice, and hold forth such promises, without duly guarded qualification and with no proper examination of the individual case.' No doubt he had in mind the experience of his friend and collaborator John Addington Symonds, with whom Oscar had been in contact since Oxford. In his Memoirs, Symonds wrote of his struggle with his sexuality when he realised he was in love with a young man called Alfred Brooke:
I felt the necessity of growing into a natural man. That is, I think, how the problem presented itself to my innocence. I thought that by honest endeavour I could divert my passions from the burning channel in which they flowed for Alfred Brooke, and lead them gently to follow a normal course toward women.
The twenty-three-year-old Symonds blindly followed the advice of his father and of the eminent physician Sir Spencer Wells, who `recommended cohabitation with a hired mistress, or, what was better, matrimony' as the only `cure' for his attraction to young men. Shortly afterwards, Symonds deliberately sought out Catherine North, whom he had met on holiday in Switzerland, as a likely prospect for matrimony. They married, and Symonds fathered four daughters. But, looking back on his life, he described his marriage as the `great mistake - perhaps the great crime of my life':
