“Like a live thing”: Uncanny interart in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Harlot’s House’ (1885)

Abstract

This paper aims to study Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Harlot’s House’ (1885) from an intermedial perspective to decipher its psychological complexity. As the very epitome of Wildean decadent intermedial poetics, the poem deserves special attention. ‘The Harlot’s House’ exemplifies the boundary-crossing ways Wilde draws on pre-existing and contemporary artistic conventions and theories to channel his often-subversive views on various aspects of contemporary cosmopolitanism, such as nocturnal vagabondage, urban prostitution and metropolitan alienation. I discuss the ways the poem deploys metamusic (Wolf 723), dance, theatricality and pre-cinematic strategies to convey its psychosexual complexity, capturing the uncanny phantasmagoria of urban modernity. Furthermore, studying the chronotopos of the night in the poem will help me establish a link between Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 notion of intellectual uncertainty (Jentsch 224) accompanying the poem’s intermedial thematization of the marionette and Sigmund Freud’s 1919 concept of the uncanny (Freud 84). ‘The Harlot’s House’, via its uncanniness, shows how the text’s intermedial poetics allow for an “uncertain” reading of Wilde’s poem in which the poetic voice becomes unstable and multivalent.