by Neil McKenna
Time passes and months, perhaps years, later, Des Esseintes encounters an American circus acrobat tantalisingly, provocatively named Miss Urania, a clear allusion to the emerging new term `Uranian', signifying love and sex between men. Miss Urania `has a supple figure, sinewy legs, muscles of steel, and arms of iron', and Des Esseintes is seized with erotic fantasies of sex with her. He imagines a mutual transmutation of gender, where Miss Urania becomes a virtual man, `as blunt-witted and brutish as a fairground wrestler', for whom he, Des Esseintes, hungers, `yearning for her just as a chloretic girl will hanker after a clumsy brute whose embrace could squeeze the life out of her'. He pays Miss Urania for sex and is disappointed with the reality when the `rough, athletic caresses' he at once desired and dreaded fail to materialise.
Finally, one day as Des Esseintes is walking alone, he is accosted by a youth asking him directions. Des Esseintes is struck by the unusual persistence of the youth, by his `timid and appealing' voice, by his evident poverty, by his cheap, tight-fitting clothes. His face was `somewhat disconcerting, pale and drawn ... and lit up by two great liquid eyes, ringed with blue ... the mouth was small, but spoilt by fleshy lips with a line dividing them in the middle like a cherry'. It was a pick-up:
They gazed at each other for a moment; then the young man dropped his eyes and came closer, brushing his companion's arm with his own. Des Esseintes slackened his pace, taking thoughtful note of the youth's mincing walk. From this chance encounter there had sprung a mistrustful friendship that somehow lasted several months. Des Esseintes could not think of it now without a shudder; never had he submitted to more delightful or more stringent exploitation, never had he run such risks, yet never had he known such satisfaction mingled with distress. Among the memories that visited him in his solitude, the recollection of this mutual attachment dominated all the rest.
On the morning of 9 June, Oscar was interviewed in his hotel suite by a reporter from the Morning News. `This last book of Huysmans is one of the best I have seen,' he declared. A Rebours had struck Oscar with the force of a thunderbolt. The book was a revelation to him, forcing him to recognise that his sexual experiences with men were not, as he had hoped, isolated and unconnected incidents, but were rather markers on the same homoerotic voyage of discovery that Des Esseintes had embarked upon. A Rebours resonated not just with Oscar's past, but also with his future. It was a kind of advance autobiography, especially in its shudderingly compelling insights into the dynamics of male homoeroticism.
Reading A Rebours was a turning point for Oscar; a moment of startling selfrecognition which, coming when it did, just days after the supposed euphoria of his wedding night, pointed up the contrast between the safety, the predictability, the normalness of sex with Constance within marriage, and the sheer danger and unpredictability of sex with young men. Until the point that he read A Rebours, Oscar could tell himself that his sexual attraction to men was a passing phase; indeed, a passed phase, now that he was married to his violet eyed Artemis. He had suppressed that `thing unworthy' of himself and had taken possession of his bride, legally, physically and sexually. But still it was not enough. The sexual and the emotional intimacy of marriage to Constance still could not quench his sexual hunger for men.
The story of Des Esseintes pointed the way forward for Oscar. The powerful paradoxes in the relationship between Des Esseintes and the youth who picked him up in the street must have struck Oscar forcibly. Some years later he told Andre Raffalovich how the seduction of Des Esseintes by the young male prostitute particularly thrilled and fascinated him. Even though the young man is clearly a male prostitute who exploits Des Esseintes ruthlessly, Des Esseintes finds such exploitation sweet. Even though he shudders at the risks and dangers of such a liaison, the satisfaction he experiences - inextricably mingled with distress - is incomparable and dominates his erotic memory. Reading A Rebours had fired Oscar's sexual imagination and ignited his barely repressed sexual desires. In the years to come A Rebours would have its own place in Oscar's erotic memory. Oscar would, just like Des Esseintes, experience a commingling of delight and distress, satisfactions and shudders in his own liaisons with young men.
The marriage of Oscar and Constance was over almost as soon as it had begun. Their love for each other had been consummated and, at least for Oscar, had been found wanting. Even though he had fulfilled his role as suitor, bridegroom, husband and lover, he knew that something essential was absent from the marital equation. He realised that whatever marriage may or may not bring in terms of companionship, stability and security, it had not and would not extinguish his burning desire for sex with young men. Reading A Rebours in the rooms he shared with his bride of a few days had opened his eyes to the trajectory of his true sexual nature and inflamed his desires. As he gazed at Constance, as he watched her undress, as he shared a bed with her, as he made love to her, he must have realised that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake. In his search for love, for peace, for normality, he had walked into a trap, the doors of which clanged shut behind him. Paradoxically, Constance had gained her liberty while Oscar had lost his. Ironically, his married state would only magnify and inflame his homoerotic desires. Oscar had made his bed. Now he must lie in it.
An ideal wife
`What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!' exclaimed Lord Henry. 'A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.'
After their four-week honeymoon in Paris and Dieppe, Oscar and Constance returned to London to start married life in earnest. There was much to do, and much to take Oscar's mind off the disappointments of married life and distract him from his real sexual desires. There were decisions to be taken about the decoration of the House Beautiful in Tite Street, visits to be made and work to be done. Oscar was still on his mission to civilise the provinces and had to spend a considerable amount of time travelling.
But marriage had its compensations. When Grandpapa Lloyd died less than a month after their return from honeymoon, Oscar and Constance were at last in possession of a more than adequate income. With Oscar's fees from his lectures and now, increasingly, from his journalism, it seemed they were assured of a bright future. And it made a pleasant change to be a married man with a beautiful young wife, respectable, settled and, if not quite beyond reproach, effectively insulated from the jibes, jeers and insinuations about his sexual orientation.
Now that she had her `liberty', Constance was eager to work. She was young, she was free, and the world seemed full of exciting possibilities. `I am thinking of becoming correspondent to some paper, or else of going on the stage; qu'en pensez vous?' she wrote to Otho. `I want to make some money: perhaps a novel would be better.' Constance's ambitions were considerably grander than those Speranza had in mind for her daughter-in-law. She wanted Constance to learn to correct Oscar's proofs and bask in her husband's reflected literary glory.
Back in September 1875, Oscar had spent a few days at Clonfin House in County Longford where a fellow guest, an American, had brought with him a novelty, a blank album entitled Mental Photographs, an Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits and Convictions. It was a parlour pastime, probably completed at teatime or after dinner and then read aloud for the amusement of other guests. It was a questionnaire, with forty questions designed, as the album's title suggested, to create a snapshot of a personality. Oscar filled in his questionnaire and then thought no more about it. But the album survived and his answers are revealing. In reply to the question `What should be the distinguishing characteristic of a wife?' Oscar had written `devotion to her husband.' It was more than a throwaway answer. It expressed a profound belief about the role of wives.
Again and again, in his prose and in his plays, the qualities of duty, devotion, self-sacrifice and forgiveness of sins are pointed up as the hallmarks of the ideal wife. These were views inherited from Speranza who, despite her radicalism, had some decidedly old-fashioned opinions on the role of a wife. Speranza believed that wives were there for the benefit of their husband
s, not vice versa. Wives, she said, should ask for nothing out of marriage, except `the divine joy of sacrifice, the ecstatic sense of selfannihilation for true love's sake'. In her essay Genius and Marriage, Speranza warned of the dangers of a wife discovering that her husband had feet of clay. She was almost certainly talking of her own marriage to Sir William Wilde, but her words have a curiously prophetic ring about the marriage of Oscar and Constance:
A woman has a strong tendency to look on a man of genius as a god, and to offer him worship as well as love; but in the fatal intimacy of daily life illusions soon vanish, and she finds that, except in moments of inspiration, his divinity is even weaker than an ordinary mortal, less able to guide or strengthen others; so she resents the knowledge that the idol is only made of clay, and her feelings alternate between contempt and dislike, especially if she is of a passionate, impulsive temperament.
`It is much better to have loved and lost than to have loved and won,' Oscar said to a young friend who had sought his advice about a love affair with a young woman, the course of which was not running smoothly. Oscar was almost certainly talking about his own life and his marriage to Constance. He had loved her and he had won her. And now he had to live with her.
In one respect, though, Oscar found that playing the role of husband was far less irksome than he might have reasonably expected. Even though his real sexual desires lay outside the marriage entirely, even though, like the hero of Teleny, he found the joys of married love `more of a sedative than an aphrodisiac', there was still comfort and convenience to be had in the marriage bed. Whether Oscar was focused on Constance as the object of his sexual desire, or whether, like many other married men in the same predicament, who `succeeded in accomplishing their object with difficulty, or by means of evoking the images of men on whom their affections were set', Oscar performed his husbandly duties manfully and to good effect. Just four months after her marriage, Constance found herself pregnant. If her hopes of a career were dashed or delayed, she was soon cheerfully reconciled. Cyril Wilde was born in July 1885, and the new parents professed themselves to be delighted. Like many young women who suddenly found themselves wives and mothers, Constance embraced the role and duties of a devoted mother almost thankfully. In motherhood, at least, there was a clear role for her.
Two days after Cyril's birth, Adrian Hope wrote spitefully to his fiancee, Laura Troubridge: `Did you see the Wildes have a boy, I rather pity the infant, don't you?' Adrian Hope was a relation of Constance's by marriage and, after the debacle of Oscar's trial and imprisonment, was destined to play an important - if equally spiteful - role in the affairs of the Wilde family. Adrian and Laura belonged to a not-so-select band of doubters and dissenters as to the happiness of Mr and Mrs Wilde. Their animosity was particularly directed at Constance, who was less able and less willing to defend herself than Oscar. Often their dislike was rooted in disappointment. Both Laura Troubridge and Violet Hunt had at one time or another declared themselves to be more than a little in love with Oscar. Constance's dress sense, her shyness and - to some eyes - an apparent stupidity brought forth barbs. `Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde to tea,' Laura confided to her diary shortly after the Wildes returned from honeymoon. `She dressed for the part in limp white muslin, with absolutely no bustle, saffron coloured silk swathed about her shoulders, a huge cartwheel Gainsborough hat, white and bright yellow stockings and shoes - she looked too hopeless and we thought her shy and dull. He was amusing of course.' Three months later Adrian Hope met Oscar and Constance at the house of Mrs Napier, Constance's aunt. `Oscar Wilde and his wife came in while I was there,' he wrote to Laura, `he dressed quite like anyone else, she in mouse-coloured velvet with a toque to match looking horrid ... She never opened her lips but seemed in a state of silent sulky adoration.'
The novelist Marie Corelli was scathing about Constance's manner after attending a lecture Constance gave to the Rational Dress Society, a cause especially dear to her heart, as it was to Oscar's: `Mrs Oscar Wilde is utterly devoid of the correct demeanour that should be observed on the lecture platform; she giggles at her own witticisms, and explodes in a titter of laughter when she says something that she thinks especially smart.' Another acquaintance, Morton Fullerton, found Constance dull: Burne Jones and Oscar Wilde with their respective wives dined here ... The two women were dull, and the evening slow.' Much of the criticism of Constance was the consequence of her shyness, especially in social situations with people she did not know. As she had written to Oscar during their engagement, she was `so cold and undemonstrative outwardly', it was easy for people to get the wrong impression.
Even when Constance plucked up her courage and managed to express herself in more intimate social situations, she brought forth ridicule and venom. When Adrian Hope met Oscar by accident, Oscar insisted on taking him home to Tite Street for dinner with Constance where the three of them discussed the virtues - or otherwise - of marriage. Remarkably and radically, Constance thought that trial marriages would be an excellent thing. She `said during dinner that she thought it should be free to either party to go off at the expiration of the first year', Adrian Hope reported to Laura. Oscar, he said, `had distinct leanings to a system of Contract for seven years only, to be renewed or not as either party saw fit'. Laura was outraged. She was engaged to be married and clearly could not and would not brook discussion or deviation from the institution of marriage. She called Constance's views `simply revolting' and wrote to Adrian: `I dislike Constance Wilde for her remark even more than her opinion on dancing - unless by the by it was a desperate attempt at originality. No wonder she has a sulky, dull face if those are the thoughts she has to talk with when she is alone.'
Constance found herself out of her depth. Richard Le Gallienne, the poet and one-time disciple of Oscar, recalled Constance as `a pretty young woman of the innocent Kate Greenaway type'. It was impossible, Le Gallienne said, `not to predict suffering for a woman so simple and domestic mated with a mind so searching and so perverse and a character so self-indulgent'. The dayto-day realities of marriage to Oscar were not what Constance had bargained for. She had not anticipated the depth of scrutiny that being the wife of Oscar Wilde attracted, nor had she ever imagined that the venomous criticism which had been heaped on Oscar would now also be directed at her. Arthur Ransome's early biography of Oscar, published in 1912, painted a shrewd portrait of Constance. It almost certainly comes directly from the mouth of Robbie Ross, Oscar's lover, friend and literary executor, who knew her very well:
She was sentimental, pretty, well-meaning and inefficient. She would have been very happy as the wife of an ornamental minor poet, and it is possible that in marrying Wilde she mistook him for such a character. It must be remembered that she married the author of Poems and the lecturer on the aesthetic movement. His development puzzled her, made her feel inadequate, and so increased her inadequacy. She became more a spectacle for Wilde than an influence upon him, and was without the strength that might have prevented the disasters that were to fall through him on herself. She had a passion for leaving things alone, broken only by moments of interference badly timed. She became one of those women whose Christian names their husbands, without malice, preface with the epithets `poor dear.' Her married life was no less ineffectual than unhappy.
Ada Leverson, the gifted, witty Jewish writer who became the devoted friend of Oscar and Bosie, also recognised this portrait. Although she doesn't mention Oscar or Constance by name, this is clearly a portrait of the Wilde marriage:
I knew a case of a man of remarkable and brilliant gifts - genius is not too strong an expression - and he fell in love with and married a simple, sweet little woman, not at all clever, who worshipped him. He thought this ideal at first, but his point of view gradually changed. She had, alas! no tact - tact is part of cleverness. She always said the wrong thing, invariably spoilt his conversation by some irrelevant ineptitude; she worried him with household matters at the wrong moment, and was, in fact, in every way as stupid as the cleverest man co
uld desire. The result was that, though he was deeply attached to her, and felt for her always a sincere affection, he gradually could not stand her society. It became more and more irksome to him. He grew to take interest in other things than his home, and at last they unhappily drifted apart.
Ada Leverson goes on to say that the couple would never have drifted apart if Oscar had `married a clever woman who would have understood him and not wearied him'. No doubt the `clever woman' she was thinking of was herself. But both she and Arthur Ransome were wrong in their conviction that a woman who was cleverer than Constance, stronger than Constance would have prevented Oscar's drift. Constance was clever and she was strong, stronger perhaps than anyone could have imagined when the catastrophe broke. It was not Constance, it was her gender. No woman, no matter how clever or how strong, would have been able to stifle Oscar's homoerotic cravings. A different woman might have been able to reach an accommodation, a modus vivendi with her husband's sexual desires, allowing him to go off and have sex with men and yet remain a husband and a father. But Constance was not such a woman. She was an idealist. She was blindly devoted to her Oscar. She loved him, she adored him and she was convinced of his genius. `How passionately I worship and adore you,' she wrote to Oscar when she was pregnant with Cyril.
There was no doubt that Oscar was fond -'really very fond', he would later say - of Constance: she was the mother of his sons, she was the chatelaine of the House Beautiful, and she had `some sweet points in her character'. And throughout the marriage she was `wonderfully loyal' to Oscar. Constance represented certainty, consistency and conformity, qualities that Oscar valued or chose not to value as the mood took him. But marriage and Constance had disappointed Oscar. `There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is,' he remarked. Despite Constance's sterling qualities, the death of the marriage was inevitable. `She could not understand me,' Oscar wrote later, `and I was bored to death with the married life.'
