Wilde Psychoanalysis: Oscar and Sigmund Architects of Modern Homosexualities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/7rgphw45Keywords:
Homosexuality, Narcissism, Psychoanalysis, Gay Identity, Cultural LegaciesAbstract
Freud and Wilde, born nineteen months apart, each probed the sexual conventions of nineteenth-century Europe. One was a revolutionary thinker whose theories helped define modern psychology; the other, an Irish man of letters imprisoned for “gross indecency.” Through their wit, provocations, and often-fraught treatments of queer desire, both shaped emerging discourses on sexuality that challenged prevailing norms. Their work contributed to new constructions and understandings of homosexual identity, even as their positions on same-sex desire were sometimes paradoxical. Both endured personal or professional consequences for their non-heterosexual expressions or associations, tensions that continue to shape their cultural resonance. This paper examines parallels between Wilde and Freud two men who never met, but whose approaches to homosexuality continue to meet in explicitly and subtly influenced modern ideas of queer identity.
References
Higginson worried that Wilde’s effete style appealed to “women of high position,” intruding into “ladies’ boudoirs [to] write prurient poems which their hostesses must discreetly ignore” (Edsall, 82).
In this ‘pre-trials moment’, Wilde’s effeminacy suggested a subversive, seductive masculinity, not yet coded as homosexual.
A century later, however, a misattributed photograph was circulated as Wilde dressed as the biblical seductress Salomé. Ellman’s biography (429) included it as such, and Le Monde republished it in 1987.
In Maurice (1914), Forster’s protagonist can only identify himself as “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort” (139).
“As regards America, I think it better now to publish there without my name, I see it is my name that terrifies … the withdrawal of my name is essential in America as elsewhere.” (Wilde, 2000: 1011)
A memoir described flamboyant men in evening dress as “perhaps like a couple of Oscar Wildes” (Sinfield, 135). Style alone could signal the allusion: “his neat moustache and admirable waistcoat suggested the sort of dandyism that despises women” (134). By the 1920s, Sinfield argues, the “homosexual Wildean stereotype was settled for two generations” (135).
“‘Oscar’ became a word that could be used as an accusation of homosexuality but also a way for gay people to talk of themselves.” (Eribon, 145)
Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1927) acknowledged that Wilde’s trials made homosexuality conspicuous: “The celebrity of Oscar Wilde and the universal publicity given to the facts of the case may have brought conviction of their perversion to many inverts … paradoxical though it may seem, imparting greater courage to others” (996).
Magnus Hirschfeld similarly observed that long after the trials, ‘to Oscar’ became slang for anal sex, and effeminate men were teased as ‘an Oscar’ (1914, 58).
“deafening silence.” On March 3rd 1895, Reynold’s Newspaper reported Queensbury’s arrest for libel but omitted the charge, referring only to “words unfit for publication” (Goodman, 34). The Star called it a “very grave and serious allegation” (43), while The Evening News described a “horrid nocturne of terrible suggestions” (71). The refusal to state facts generated curiosity, rumour, and discourse.
When Wilde was arrested following Queensbury’s acquittal, coverage continued by innuendo. The Daily Telegraph reported only that Wilde faced “a charge of a very grave character”, whilst denouncing his “inflated egotism” and “diseased vanity” (75). The Star referred to “the startling episode of yesterday, the moment involved as more important than any that had proceeded it.” (78) The Illustrated Police News called it “the most gruesome tragedy of the nineteenth century” (78) Papers debated whether “absolute reticence or modified publicity” better served morality, often choosing oblique horror: “More than that, mercifully, we need not at present say” (Pall Mall Gazette, 79)
For some, the solution was erasure. The Echo urged: “The best thing for everybody now is to forget Oscar Wilde, let him go into silence, and be heard of no more” (79).
“Bosie’s father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it. I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution.” (McKenna, 2004, 454)
In order that there may be no miscarriage of justice, I think it is my duty at once to send you a copy of all our witnesses’ statements, together with a copy of the shorthand notes of the trial. (Cohen, 174-5)
“If the country allows you to leave, all the better for the country; but, if you take my son with you, I will follow you wherever you go and shoot you.” (Hyde, 222)
“conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence.” (Mc Kenna, 2013, 237)
• Anal sex: “the disgusting filth in which they found the bedclothes on more than one occasion” (Holland, 277).
• Paedophilia/Corruption of Youth: “None of them his equal in years; and … a curious similarity in the ages of each and every one of them” (274).
• Prostitution: “Had you any particular business with Taylor?” (159).
• Effeminacy and cross-dressing: “Did his rooms strike you as peculiar? … elaborate furniture … luxurious … highly perfumed? … Did you know whether Mr. Taylor had a lady’s costume there? Did you ever see him with a lady’s fancy dress?” (154–8).
as Foucault observed, a shift in which “the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage … a type of life … consubstantial with him.” (43).
“Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.” (Moran, 206)
Sir Howard Vincent, Director of Criminal Investigations at Scotland Yard, had called homosexual acts a modern “scourge” (Kaplan, 173).
“Yes, I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long and red with monstrous martyrdoms. … Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good. That is the essential. It is not so much public opinion as public officials that need educating.” (Wilde 2000, 1044)
Engels, responding to Marx’s transmission of Ulrichs’ work called the Urnings “extremely unnatural revelations” (Kennedy, 29).
“a great affection … as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect” (Ellmann, 463).
“I use the word Uranians to indicate simply those whose lives and activities are inspired by a genuine friendship or love for their own sex, without venturing to specify their individual and particular habits or relations towards those whom they love” (Carpenter, 891).
In 1898, after his imprisonment, Wilde wrote to Robbie Ross: “To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble, more noble than other forms” (2000, 1019).
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance” (Wilde, 1894a: 19382).
Platonic philosophy celebrated him as morally and sensibly attuned (Wieseler, 1856)
Sadger was pivotal in introducing the term into psychoanalytic discourse in 1908, claiming “a prolonged remaining at the transitory stage of narcissism definitely predisposes to homosexuality” (1974, 13), and associating it with maternal dominance, paternal weakness, vanity, and mirror fascination (1921, 1974). A committed advocate of degeneracy theory, and lifelong bachelor, Sadger believed homosexuality could be ‘cured’ through psychoanalysis (1920b), though he himself refused to undertake treatment.
Freud initially praised this introduction of narcissism as “new and valuable” (Nunberg & Federn, 312)
“my main recollection is of my mother, in tears, poring over masses of press cuttings, mostly from Continental newspapers. … I could not help seeing the name OSCAR WILDE in large headlines.” (Holland, 1999: 61).
Cohen describes the trials as “splashed across the front pages of most newspapers throughout Europe” (129).
Vienna-based Neue Freie Presse, a paper Freud both read daily and contributed to (Solms, 397),
was the first German-language newspaper to announce the forthcoming libel trial on March 10th, 1895 as “Prozeß Queensberry” (Ivory, 223).
noting that Carson “suchte aus Wilde’s Schriften dessen kontrasexuelle Eigenschaften zu beweisen” (sought to prove from Wilde’s writings his ‘contrary-sexual’ characteristics) (Ivory, 227).
The Germanic press, reflecting contemporary sexological discourses, framed Wilde less as a criminal than as a pathological case, deploying medicalised language such as “krankhafte Belastung” (pathological encumbrance) (Ivory, 230),
As Erber observes, the Echo de Paris explained Wilde’s case through “the two dominant explanations of sexual orientation current in French sexology” (1996, 571),
while another French journal published an interview with Max Nordau, who claimed that his Degeneration had foretold Wilde’s downfall (569).
As Ivory puts it, “Wilde’s real fall happens in April rather than May in Germany” (Ivory, 231).
“Too naive to appreciate Wilde’s work, they have poured on him all their hatred and fear of ‘decadent’ artistic movements and thus made him a scapegoat for the ills of their own society. The whole scandal and the sentence and punishment that followed was simply, for Handl, ‘very English’ (Ivory, 232).”
Freud’s 1919 The Uncanny drew on Rank’s concept of the “double,”... to signify a “harbinger of death” (235).
Wilde provocatively reworked the ancient dictum “Know thyself” into a modern exhortation “Be thyself” (1891b, 18953),
Freud, for his part, remarked that “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise” (Masson, 272).
Wilde declared at his trial that “the realisation of one’s self is the primal aim of life; to realise one’s self through pleasure is finer than to realise one’s self through pain” (Holland, 75).
Freud noted, “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead” (1914, 280).
Wilde declared, “Illusion is the first of all pleasures,” and lying was “the very basis of civilised society” (1891c: 16850).
“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple” (1895: 4604).
“After the first words uttered in an intimate, endearing voice, I felt I had known her all my life.” (1960, 180), a celebrity crush he shared with Wilde;
In 1907 the critic Lothar observed, “Nowadays, Oscar Wilde has become a theatrical trump card in Vienna” (Mayer, 208).
Bernard Shaw echoed this in 1905, writing in Neue Freie Presse "Vienna will more easily get used to the style of Oscar Wilde, for Wilde embodied the artistic culture of the 18th century. Seeing that Vienna, apart from Paris, is the most regressive city in Europe it ought to appreciate Oscar Wilde far more greatly than he will ever be appreciated anywhere in Germany or England. (Mayer, 203)
in 1910 Freud also publishes Über ‘Wilde’ Psychoanalyse, not an analysis of Wilde, but a polemic against unanalysed doctors who, in his view, applied psychoanalytic ideas too crudely. Here Freud explored masturbation and the “rejection of sexuality, or a repression which is over-severe” (223).
Sadger is well-documented; calling him a “congenital fanatic of orthodoxy” (quoted in Rose, 71)
and wrote to Jung in 1910 of the “interminable flow of Sadger’s rubbish” (McGuire, 283) and “insufferable” prose (291).
“Other terms were developed … but it was homosexuality which was adopted as the medical term primarily because of the influence and prominence of Krafft-Ebing” (Bullough, 27).
By his death, Psychopathia Sexualis—already in twelve editions—had become “the world’s most informative volume on the subject of sexual deviation” (35) and “a ground-breaking examination of sexual aberrations” (41).
“I am finishing Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in the explanation of sexual inversion, I go as far as the literature permits (Krafft-Ebing and predecessors)” (Masson, 464).
Alfred Douglas (Bosie) in the Noel Pemberton-Billing libel trial testified that before Wilde wrote Salome in 1890, he had been reading Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. (Bristow, 195)
Wilde may well have been thinking of Krafft-Ebing, or indeed Freud, when, after his imprisonment, he bemoaned the fact that “I am a pathological problem in the eyes of German scientists and even in their works I am tabulated” (Wilde, 2000, 1006).
Wilde’s 1896 petition to the Home Secretary cited Lombroso and Nordau, invoking language of “sexual madness”, “pathological science”, “erotomania”, and “sensual monomanias,” framing his predicament as “diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge” (2000, 656).
Freud’s Three Essays - Freud intriguingly acknowledges inversion as “found among persons who otherwise show no marked deviation from the normal, who on the contrary are distinguished by especially high intellectual development and ethical culture” (139). Yet, tied to science’s visual demands to ‘see’ evidence, he notes “amphigenously inverted (psychosexually hermaphroditic)” individuals (136), bodies not fully male in appearance. Freud engages discursive practices aligning physical hermaphroditism with inversion, referencing Ulrichs as “a spokesman of the male inverts (theory of) ‘a feminine brain in a masculine body’” while debating the “regular concurrence of inversion with the psychic and somatic signs of hermaphroditism” (7).
Freud still recognises its contingency within scientific discourse: “I was already familiar with the idea of bisexuality used to explain inversion. You will certainly find it in Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing” (Masson, 467).
For psychology, he observes, the contrast between the sexes increasingly fades into one between activity and passivity, “in which we far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness” (1920, 105–6).
Norton’s Mother Clap’s Molly House: Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 reinforces this historical perspective, arguing that “gay men did not think of themselves as women trapped in men’s bodies until the sexologists began popularising this theory” (1992: 104).
In Teleny (1895), a gay pornographic novel attributed to Wilde, we see literary expression of this alignment when one protagonist laments, “Why was not one of us born a woman?” (171–2), while another remarks during sex, “I seemed to be a man in front, a woman behind, for the pleasure I felt either way” (118).
Hester Travers-Smith published Oscar Wilde from Purgatory, “Being dead is the most boring experience in life. That is, if one excepts being married or dining with a schoolmaster.” (7); “Yes, I have seen my mother. She has not really improved in the process of dying” (9)
“Dreams dwell far from the world, and in your gross age they live on those who know that life is faded and without form, unless the dream comes which creates for us the veritable image of beauty as she is. We, who have passed beyond your ken, we only know what these men (Freud and Jung) guess at.” (33)
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