Was Oscar Wilde A Gay Martyr? (Part II)
Musings on Platonic Love
Read Part I here.
As an undergraduate obsessed with Oscar Wilde, I was always looking for his intellectual descendants. Who else had a love for the past, was an entertaining conversationalist, was equally proficient in fiction, essays, and drama? There was only one answer: Gore Vidal.
While contemporary talking heads repeat Vidal’s arguments about sexual libertarianism (without his intellect and fluency) they’ve forgotten a point he repeatedly emphasised: there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts.
It was probably his study of the classical world that led him to this conclusion: "Trying to make categories is very American, very stupid, and very dangerous," he said. He pointed out that in classical Greece, a man could lust for another man while being married and producing children. The words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are late inventions: "To create categories is the enslavement of the categorized because the aim of every state is total control over the people who live in it. What better way is there than to categorize according to sex, about which people have so many hang-ups?"
Whether he knew it or not, Gore Vidal was summarising an argument that is now associated with Michel Foucault, who outlined how interpretations of sexuality depend on time and place, and who became a surprising inspiration for Michael Hannon arguing against the idea of “sexual orientation” in the American Catholic magazine First Things. Here is Mr Hannon:
Michel Foucault, an unexpected ally, details the pedigree of sexual orientation in his History of Sexuality. Whereas “sodomy” had long identified a class of actions, suddenly for the first time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term “homosexual” appeared alongside it. This European neologism was used in a way that would have struck previous generations as a plain category mistake, designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.”
It was advances in medicine, psychology, and social science that led researchers in the late nineteenth-century to invent the labels of “homo-” and “heterosexuality” for people.
Commenting on a famous passage from Foucault, Mr Hannon writes:
But emphasizing this new standard did succeed in cementing these categories of hetero- and homosexuality in the popular imagination. “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality,” Foucault writes, “when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” Sexual orientation, then, is nothing more than a fragile social construct, and one constructed terribly recently.
Mr Hannon concludes:
Although I expect many conservative Christian thinkers will find Foucault a strange bedfellow, I want to suggest that our endorsement of the radical left on this subject should be an enthusiastic one, although it must also be carefully circumscribed. In essence, we should happily join our voices to those of the poststructuralist queer theorists in their vigorous critiques of the naive orientation essentialists, who mistakenly think “straight” and “gay” are natural, neutral, and timeless classifications.
Their disillusioned historicism makes these sexual genealogists uniquely positioned to see through the deceptions of sexual orientation, and while we Christians do not need them in some essential sense, nevertheless, in an accidental way, they may prove a great asset to us at present. Ironically, these radical leftists may be the only ones who can heal the blindness we have foolishly inflicted upon ourselves of late by uncritically adopting the language of hetero- and homosexuality.
These critics aren’t motivated by prejudice or cheap political points but a sceptical understanding of what concepts such as “homosexuality” might mean and whether they can be applied to anyone outside of a specific historical context or to anyone at all. Curiously, Oscar Wilde anticipated their argument. A few months after his release from Reading Gaol, he wrote to his publisher, Leonard Smithers:
“My life cannot be patched up. Neither to myself, nor others, am I any longer a joy. I am now simply a pauper of a rather low order: the fact that I am also a pathological problem in the eyes of German scientists: and even in their works I am tabulated, and come under the law of averages! Quantum mutatus!"
Not even Wilde saw himself as a “homosexual,” and that his acts became a kind of statistic is almost insulting to a man who cultivated a unique artistic life and was appreciating the glories of ancient Greece.
Or was he?
One popular understanding is that the classical world was one where, sexually, anything was permitted, and that this freedom was smothered by the repressive forces of Christianity. Wilde appealed to something like this interpretation in his trial when he was asked to define the “Love that dare not speak its name”:
"The love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
The Plato that Wilde refers to here is almost certainly that of the Symposium, where Socrates describes how Diotima explained to him the “right kind of love for a boy” – it starts with an appreciation of physical beauty and then ascends to ideals:
So when a man by the right method of boy-loving ascends from these particulars and begins to descry that beauty, he is almost able to lay hold of the final secret. Such is the right approach or induction to love-matters. Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; from personal beauty he proceeds to beautiful observances, from observance to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is concerned with the beautiful itself and that alone; so that in the end he comes to know the very essence of beauty.
There are serious problems with this opposition between Antiquity and Christianity. With respect to Mr Hannon, his summary of Foucault is somewhat hurried. Although Foucault did emphasise the medical classifications of the late nineteenth-century, he argued that the internalisation of sexual and social norms goes back to the Christian practice of confession; he believed that the Council of Trent (1545-63) brought new techniques of self-examination and reproach.
Furthermore, Foucault seriously questioned the popular idea that sex in the classical world had only a positive meaning and in Christianity only a negative one. In fact, ancient Greeks and Romans had negative views about sex long before Christians did. Same-sex love was permitted in some parts of Greece but not others – but even in Plato’s Athens, the more important concern was status. Only free men had full status, so using women or male slaves for sex was no problem. Sex between two free men was a problem, and men who yielded themselves too often and too easily were treated with ridicule.
To reduce such contempt, a courtship ritual emerged in which an older man (the erastes) would pursue a beardless boy (eromenos) and show that he had interests in the boy’s upbringing, not just his body. The relationship was to end when the boy reached adulthood.
Is this the type of love we find in Oscar Wilde’s life and works? Wilde often admired the beauty of his young lovers, but did he ever, as Plato would have wanted, ascend beyond the physical?
The Picture of Dorian Gray is full of references to one man’s desire for another, but the novel is hardly a hymn to homosexuality. By contrasting Dorian’s physical appearance with the sins that mar his portrait, Wilde’s novel suggests that appearances can hide as much as they reveal; that loveliness can obscure as much as it can brighten. After Lord Henry Wotton’s “Hellenic ideal” inspires Dorian, the younger man’s life becomes more and more depraved: the betrayal of Sibyl Vane (leading to her suicide), the murder of Basil Hallward, the blackmail of his old friend Alan Campbell (who later kills himself), the accidental shooting of James Vane. Lord Henry praises himself for having fashioned Dorian:
Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow... There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...
Yet, throughout the novel, Lord Henry remains indifferent to the moral consequences of his influence on Dorian. He’s an anti-Socrates, leading young men not to wisdom and truth but to captivity and corruption. Dorian Gray becomes the opposite of the Platonic ideal: instead of being the master of himself, he’s a slave to his passions. With lovers like Lord Henry, who needs enemies?
One of Wilde’s enemies is a major figure in the discussion of Platonism and late Victorian homosexuality: the Catholic convert Marc-André Raffalovich. Born in 1864, this French-Russian man moved to London, where he published poetry in English. In 1885 he published his second volume of poems Tuberose and Meadowsweet, which Wilde attacked in a review on the grounds that the poet didn’t know how to pronounce “tuberose,” a flower – Raffalovich had made it trisyllabic, and thus related to the potato.
Both he and John Gray (supposedly the model for Dorian Gray) joined the Catholic Church and become members of the Dominican Third Order.
In 1896, the year after Wilde’s trials, Raffalovich published Uranisme et Unisexualité, a miscellany on what he called sexual “inversion” or “uranism” (his terms for homosexuality). In one of the early chapters, he makes a startling claim:
The truth is that there is no absolute distinction between the heterosexual man and the homosexual man. There are men who are, above all, sexual beings and men who do not consider sex such an important matter. The latter can be homo-sexual or heterosexual without harming themselves or others or they can attain the state of pseudo-hermaphrodism. It is in this group – of men for whom violent sexual desire does not predominate – that geniuses are usually found. The most sensual or the most sexual genius can always go back to his old ways after having abandoned them. (Translation by Nancy Erber and William A Peniston.)
For Raffalovich, “uranism” wasn’t teleologically ordered towards any sexual act but towards Platonic self-mastery and virginity: among the Greek philosophers and the early Christian mystics, “celibacy, with its duties, occupations, and devotions, was a vocation for those passionate souls who wished to achieve wisdom.” The chaste homosexual can benefit his community by devoting his life to his work:
The superior uranist has a right to congratulate himself for having the good fortune and the courage to do the right thing to avoid the burdens of marriage in order to dedicate himself to art, science, or a vocation, or some other sort of ideal that includes celibacy.
In fact, for Raffalovich, the celibate “invert” is saintly because he cultivates an existence whose meaning goes beyond the flesh, the passions, and biological reproduction. Instead of a binary between the self-fashioning hedonistic individual and the dutifully procreating father, Raffalovich offers a third option: those who are “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven” and live out their calling – whether artistic, political, or ethical – in service to the world.
Uranisme et Unisexualité includes a chapter on the “Oscar Wilde Affair,” which claims that Wilde was a criminal not because of his sexual acts but because of the influence he had: “I am concerned with the vulnerable youths’ characters that he perverted and the vices that he encouraged.” (Just as damning, in my mind, is Raffalovich’s view of Dorian Gray: “it is artificial, superficial, and effeminate… Oscar Wilde, having neither vitality nor much real talent, could only depict sexual inversion or perversion weakly, deceitfully, and languidly.”)
Both Wilde and Foucault miss the point about Platonism that Raffalovich hints at: the goal is to become the wise man, the sage, someone who is simultaneously human and beyond human, natural and supernatural. One can become a sage only through tough spiritual exercise: not remaking oneself but refining oneself – a purification, a purging of surplus. The right metaphor is not the picture of Dorian Gray, but the sculptor removing superfluities in order to find the true form hidden under the rock. Here is Plotinus:
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.
The Platonist does not “express” himself, painting his image on the world; he scrapes away his imperfections, and finds his own beauty in the transcendent Good. As Plotinus maintains, “it is just to say that in the Soul's becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.”
On this reading, Oscar Wilde was not a gay martyr. He was a failed Platonist.
