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31 August 2019 08:57As a Victorian, I get very annoyed by writers on Oscar Wilde.
Back in the day, it was popular for biographers (etc) to depict him as a kind of gay martyr; and before that, as a great artist let down by his fatal flaw. In the past five-ten years, it's been popular to be more critical of who Wilde was actually sleeping with - older working class teenagers.
One can never help applying contemporary morality to the past, and reshaping history to fit your ideological needs. All three of those interpretations of Wilde are kinda correct. But they annoy me because none of them try and take a Victorian look at his life.
The way we think about sexuality and gender has changed over time, the way we organise concepts and ideas about the world. It also differs internationally. The the idea of a "straight person" existing is less than 100 years old, although we've always had people engaging in heterosexual behavior.
And that's what I love about queer history: encountering people who shared my desires but also interpreted them differently. Early gay Victorian campaigner George Ives described himself as "rhe soul of a woman in the body of a man", and we *truly* have no idea what he meant by that. It's one way of describing the gay experience, but we can't rule out that Ives today may well have identified as genderqueer, or even as a trans woman. We can't speak to the past, or them to the future. It's awesome.
Anyway, my point is that...no one has really looked at Wilde's relationship through a contemporary lens. Bosie was Wilde's acknowledged beloved, and they were obsessed with one another; Bosie came on family holidays with Wilde's wife and children, he was a fixture in Wilde's life. But they weren't sexual with each other, but spent a lot of time having recreational sex with young working men, and cruising them together.
I guess I've never seen Wilde and Bosie's relationship claimed as...I don't know what terminology you'd use. I suppose something like, a homoromantic but asexual primary relationship. I've never seen them claimed as an example of alternative relationship structures or ways of living. Nowadays, the idea of someone being A Straight Person is popular, but historically it was more about straight behavior. And maybe you'd see something similar to that in like...I think there's something queer and challenging in being a very sexual person who has an asexual relationship with their life partner and beloved. I feel like that's never been discussed or picked up on as worthy of note. Like, obviously people have described their relationship, but I don't remember seeing anything exploring their relationship structure as inherently interesting, or trying to put it in a historic context; and ive never really seen them claimed by the poly community or I guess (?) In a weird way, the asexual community. Even though they were getting laid constantly and it's arguably the reason why Oscar didn't write more books, this iconic gay romance was a chaste one.
But this is what I mean by non-Victorians not writing books abour Victorians. In the contemporary way of things, it's usual to think of people as A Type of Person, and you'd kind of expect people to be either immutably asexual or into sex, and then correspondingly either looking for a relationship with or without sex. But Victorians thought about these ideas differently and organised the world differently, so Wilde and Bosie's relationship might be understood as an example of that.
Back in the day, it was popular for biographers (etc) to depict him as a kind of gay martyr; and before that, as a great artist let down by his fatal flaw. In the past five-ten years, it's been popular to be more critical of who Wilde was actually sleeping with - older working class teenagers.
One can never help applying contemporary morality to the past, and reshaping history to fit your ideological needs. All three of those interpretations of Wilde are kinda correct. But they annoy me because none of them try and take a Victorian look at his life.
The way we think about sexuality and gender has changed over time, the way we organise concepts and ideas about the world. It also differs internationally. The the idea of a "straight person" existing is less than 100 years old, although we've always had people engaging in heterosexual behavior.
And that's what I love about queer history: encountering people who shared my desires but also interpreted them differently. Early gay Victorian campaigner George Ives described himself as "rhe soul of a woman in the body of a man", and we *truly* have no idea what he meant by that. It's one way of describing the gay experience, but we can't rule out that Ives today may well have identified as genderqueer, or even as a trans woman. We can't speak to the past, or them to the future. It's awesome.
Anyway, my point is that...no one has really looked at Wilde's relationship through a contemporary lens. Bosie was Wilde's acknowledged beloved, and they were obsessed with one another; Bosie came on family holidays with Wilde's wife and children, he was a fixture in Wilde's life. But they weren't sexual with each other, but spent a lot of time having recreational sex with young working men, and cruising them together.
I guess I've never seen Wilde and Bosie's relationship claimed as...I don't know what terminology you'd use. I suppose something like, a homoromantic but asexual primary relationship. I've never seen them claimed as an example of alternative relationship structures or ways of living. Nowadays, the idea of someone being A Straight Person is popular, but historically it was more about straight behavior. And maybe you'd see something similar to that in like...I think there's something queer and challenging in being a very sexual person who has an asexual relationship with their life partner and beloved. I feel like that's never been discussed or picked up on as worthy of note. Like, obviously people have described their relationship, but I don't remember seeing anything exploring their relationship structure as inherently interesting, or trying to put it in a historic context; and ive never really seen them claimed by the poly community or I guess (?) In a weird way, the asexual community. Even though they were getting laid constantly and it's arguably the reason why Oscar didn't write more books, this iconic gay romance was a chaste one.
But this is what I mean by non-Victorians not writing books abour Victorians. In the contemporary way of things, it's usual to think of people as A Type of Person, and you'd kind of expect people to be either immutably asexual or into sex, and then correspondingly either looking for a relationship with or without sex. But Victorians thought about these ideas differently and organised the world differently, so Wilde and Bosie's relationship might be understood as an example of that.
