Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle

Libidinal Lives

Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates, Patricia Pulham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138826342
• eBook ISBN: 9781317576587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Literature

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of 'needs' to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet. The collection builds on recent critical developments in fin-de-siècle literature (including major interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies) and asks, for instance, how did late nineteenth-century writing schematise the libidinal and somatic dimensions of economic exchange? How might we define the relationship between eroticism and the formal economies of literary production/performance? And what relation exists between advertising/consumer culture and (dissident) sexuality in fin-de-siecle literary discourses? This book marks an important contribution to 19th-Century and Victorian literary studies, and enhances the field of fin-de-siècle studies more generally.

Part I
Articulating Desire

1 Always Leave Them Wanting More

Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the Failed Circulations of Desire

Ruth Robbins

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?

(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891)

That desire is always fatal—or at least very dangerous—in Wilde’s works, is signalled in part by the epigraph to this chapter. Of course we know now that the cigarette is a particularly dangerous pleasure, which gets its effect from the fact that it does indeed always leave one wanting more, causing increasing damage as it exerts its pernicious pull. The Victorians might not have known this precisely, but a certain kind of commentator certainly disapproved of smoking.¹ This was part of its pleasure for Wilde, for it allowed him to flout conventions in a variety of contexts. The joke about the “perfect pleasure” of cigarette-smoking was repeated with variations in several of his works, suggesting that Wilde always knew that you can’t have too much of a good thing. In The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) the formidable Lady Bracknell comments, against the grain of normal expectation, that she regards smoking as a suitable “occupation” for an eligible bachelor (Wilde 1994, 368). The bachelor characters in “The Decay of Lying” (1889) smoke as a matter of course, as they discourse on art and morality (Wilde 1994, 1071). Wilde himself appeared on the stage after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) wearing a green carnation and smoking a cigarette as he congratulated his audience for their excellent taste in approving of his play (Ellmann 1988, 346). This act shocked some of his audience in part because the so-called New Woman’s key marker of emancipation, along with her bicycle, was her twenty-a-day habit. But it is not the cigarette per se that matters here, despite its over-determined fin-de-siècle exoticism; it’s the fact that the cigarette is defined as a perfect pleasure, and that perfection is itself defined by its refusal of a satisfied sigh of fulfilment, precisely because fulfilment is always unobtainable.

Although sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette, it is also, among other things, a metaphor, which, with its wreaths of smoke, its louche associations and its fatality, stands for the dangerous allure of forbidden pleasures of many kinds. It has no place in the text of Wilde’s biblical play, Salome (1891; English translation, 1893), in which it would obviously be anachronistic, and nor does it appear in any of the drawings that Aubrey Beardsley supplied for its English publication in 1893. But it is very strongly associated with Wilde as one of the planks of the new consumerism on which the naughty nineties were founded, and with which Wilde was associated following his American tour in 1882. As Michèle Mendelssohn has pointed out, Wilde’s image was appropriated to “endorse products ranging from hosiery and corsets to stoves and sewing machines” (Mendelssohn 2007, 3), establishing, probably against Wilde’s inclination a connection between the aesthetic creed of “Art for Art’s sake” and the capitalist imperative of art for money’s sake. The idea of desire and consumption does find its way into Wilde’s play. Because it provokes desire but does not ever fully permit its fulfilment, the cigarette stands for the circulation of desire which cannot be met, with a clear relationship to a late nineteenth-century capitalist economy which requires insatiable desire. The late-nineteenth-century economist, William Stanley Jevons pointed out in his The Theory of Political Economy (1871; 3^rd edition 1888), an essential distinction between ‘utility’ (the production of goods based on need) and consumption (the production of commodities that afford their buyers pleasure):

it is surely obvious that Economics does rest upon the laws of human enjoyment; and that, if those laws are developed by no other science, they must be developed by economists. We labour to produce with the sole object of consuming, and the kinds and amounts of goods produced must be determined with regard to what we want to consume. Every manufacturer knows and feels how closely he must anticipate the tastes and needs of his customers: his whole success depends upon it.

(Jevons 1888, Ch. 3, paragraph 5)

The fact that the cigarette was also one of the new consumer products of the period (in Wilde’s case, quite deliberately and self-consciously a luxury item associated with exoticism and expense—he smoked gold-tipped Egyptian cigarettes for preference) brings together in a single image the combination of “romance and finance,” which Regenia Gagnier has identified as central to Wilde’s sexual practices, his relationships, and his works (Gagnier 1986, 179).

This is also a central tenet of Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), which is in part the pre-text for this chapter. Lyotard’s title and the book it names combine the necessary desires of capitalism—we must desire things to make the financial world go round—and the biological desires of human sexual instinct—we must desire people to propagate the race, but also to realise our destiny as rounded human subjects who are in part defined by those very sexual desires. The risk of that joint set of desires is that we might desire people as things and mix up the two elements in an unethical rapaciousness. (The origin of the word rape means seizure, possession by force—turning a person into a thing.) And we also know that the Victorians understood sexuality as having an economic trace. Spending, for instance, was commonly used as a metaphor for male sexual activity, and being spent as one for sexual exhaustion, so that economic and sexual potency (and, indeed, their lack) were often couched in the same language, a set of traces which Libidinal Economy toys with.² The book’s central metaphor is famously the Moebius Strip, an elastic band which is folded onto itself in a figure-of-eight. This is a figure whose force is that inside and outside cannot be distinguished from each other, which Lyotard reaches by staging a fantastic and grotesque autopsy on an imagined woman’s body, laying out her skin in a lingering, repellent, and fascinating series of images of abjection, a theatre of cruelty which is both surgical and spectacular.

In my view, a third element alongside sexual desire and its displacement into the desire for things is the element of language. This is a Foucauldian point deriving from The History Sexuality—where Foucault argues that sexuality is at once practice and discourse, and that the two are intertwined as much as the bodies that embody them and the practices they define (Foucault, 1990). And in part, it is the displacement of desire into language that Lyotard refuses, in language which is often strikingly Wildean. He writes, for instance, of a “theatricality without reference, masks revealing no face unless it is a mask in its turn” (Lyotard 2004, 18), a sentiment with which Wilde, at his most arch and anti-realist, might well have sympathised. The relationship between words and things is one that is consistently called into question by Wilde’s oeuvre. In Salome, this is a particularly urgent issue, since the words which define the things that are meant to stand for the people we desire, are very much part of a story about what cannot be spoken. Or as Lyotard puts it: “desire cannot be assumed, accepted, understood, and locked up in names = nomenclatured, because these intensities we desire horrify us, because we flee them, because we forget them” (Lyotard 2004, 19). We should also note the happy historical accident that intercourse means conversational exchange among other things: and that adultery was defined by the Victorian law courts as “criminal conversation,” a rather neat periphrasis or euphemism—those speech habits that disguise that which should not be spoken, imagined, or dreamed. Lyotard begins his book with a naming of parts: an obscene version of the blazon in which the beloved’s attributes are lovingly listed in sixteenth-century sonnets. Salome in Wilde’s play also speaks of body parts, in turn attracted and, when he rejects her, repelled, by Jokanaan’s attributes, until her acts eventually turn him into a corpse. She is by turn “amorous of [his] body” (Wilde 1994, 589ff), his hair, mouth; and by turns disgusted by each of them. The dismemberment of his body in speech becomes a literal decapitation. Love and hate cannot be contained in words. All this, by way of preamble. And so to begin.

§

It is a commonplace of critical commentary on Salome that it is very different from Wilde’s other works. In the words of one of his more recent commentators, Michael Y. Bennett: “How is it possible that the same writer who made a name for himself through writing comedies of manners like The Importance of Being Earnest also wrote a play like Salome?” (Bennett 2011, vii). As Bennett points out, the anomaly of Salome is all the more remarkable because its composition and fraught publication history, as well as its censorship at the hands of the Lord Chamberlain, all took place absolutely simultaneously with the composition of the four major comedies of manners, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Those other plays are resolutely set in the contemporary world; they all focus on a more or less realistic portrayal of the contemporary (albeit highly artificial) social world. They are utterly commercial productions with huge commercial audiences during their own time and beyond. (Neither of these things is true of Salome, which has never been a commercial proposition, by the way.) The comedies share a decor, a set of stock characters and situations, and they function in the realms of epigrammatic wit. Portentous people are always mocked in the comedies: they are all, as in Earnest’s subtitle, Trivial Comedies for Serious People.

In Salome by way of contrast we find ourselves instead in the biblical world of Herod Antipas, in Israel at the time of Christ and John the Baptist. Instead of focusing on a clearly defined genre—the comedy of manners—we are in a world marked by experiment: this play appears to have little on the surface that is typically “Wildean.” Having said that, I have argued elsewhere following some of the insights of Josephine Guy and Ian Small, that Wilde was strongly concerned with self-conscious manipulations of genre and the horizons of expectation that genre enlists in the constructions of effect and affect (see Robbins 2011; Small and Guy 2000). One possible way of understanding Salome is to see it as a tragedy with a keen sense of the ridiculous. It is to some extent a fin-de-siècle trait to produce work which embodies generic instability and incongruity, a trait which is perhaps explicable in that the fin de siècle was also one of the first periods of mass literacy where popular genres increasingly mattered in the monetisation of literary production. Wilde was not alone in his very careful, though also highly subversive, distortions of genre. In performance, Salome is tragedy—she dies at the end; but it is also very funny, at least potentially (the Steven Berkoff production of 1989, for instance, brought out the comic potential of its overblown rhetoric), and a great deal of its force comes from the fact that the situation of a bedroom farce has been transported to biblical Israel and treated with high-blown seriousness. The play dramatises the farcical situation in which an apparently powerful man, Herod, is actually henpecked by his monstrous wife (Herodias), and turns out to be hysterical and weak, not omnipotent at all. Added to this, he is in lust with his stepdaughter (Salome). We also have a situation where one young man’s (the Page of Herodias) longing for another (The Young Syrian) is deliberately misread by the second boy, who in turn fancies the pretty ingénue princess (who might not be quite that ingénue, I admit, but who has that role in part). In turn, she loves the pure young man, the prophet who abnegates and sublimates all desire in his all-consuming religious fervour. The fact that this particular bedroom farce is played as tragedy not comedy doesn’t undo its farcical nature. In the words of Mario Praz, “[It is] a parody of the whole of the material used by the Decadents and of the stammering mannerisms of Maeterlinck’s drama—and, as parody, Salomé comes very close to being a masterpiece” (Praz 1954, 298). More recent commentary has been a bit less kind. For Andrew Russ, “The sheer proliferation of colour, musicality, dance, spectacle and smell of language, character and form … is certainly a heady brew. But it borders on the ridiculous” (Russ 2011, 48). It does. It is ridiculous. At the same time, though, it also takes a serious view of desire, which may itself be ridiculous when you come to think of it too much. In his comedies Wilde offered a corrective vision to punitive Victorianism. The sexual and financial peccadilloes of his plaster saints (romance and finance again) are forgiven rather than punished. But in Salome’s more primitive world, all desire is fatal. A king loses his authority to it; a young girl is killed for her desires; and even purity won’t save you—Jokanaan dies too despite his utter refusal to participate in the various erotic exchanges that make up the play. The biblical decor is for Wilde the location for tragedy; to an unnamed correspondent in 1893, Wilde wrote: “Whether a comedy should deal with modern life, whether its subject should be society or middle-class existence, these are questions purely to the artist’s own choice. Personally I like comedy to be intensely modern, and like my tragedy to walk in purple and to be remote: but these are whims merely” (qtd. in Ellmann 1988, 321).

This expresses the view I suppose that Wilde’s position on the “earnestness” of the nineteenth century is that it is, in fact, very funny. It allows him to mock what some would have regarded as serious in the comedies. It is also a commentary that implies tragedy is impossible at the end of Victoria’s reign unless it is displaced to the long-ago and far away.

As any brief glance at late nineteenth-century European culture will attest, Salome was a ubiquitous figure in the period.³ The biblical account of her story was expanded to speak to the period’s own concerns with orientalist fantasies, sexual immorality and impropriety, and the decadent assault on the sacred cows of organised religion. She was a repeated image in the art of the period, and, as Bram Djikstra has shown, the focus was on a voyeuristic vision of the sexualised female body shown as powerful and erotic, images which certainly do owe much to the view of the orient as the exotic other, primitive space, contrasted to European women who, buttoned up and covered up, flaunted clothes not bodies in their displays of conspicuous consumption. As Djikstra argues, she is the figure of the femme fatale for the period, a fruitful ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Articulating Desire
• PART II Human Currencies
• PART III Queer Performativity
• Contributors
• Index