Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde

Paul Fortunato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135860943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries.

Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Women's World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright.

Because of his desire to impact a mass audience, the primary elements of Wilde's consumer aesthetic were superficial ornament and ephemeral public image – both of which he linked to the theatrical. This concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism – thus we can call Wilde's aesthetic a consumer modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased.

Chapter One

Background: Wilde’s Social Circles and Consumer Culture

How did a bohemian anarchist find himself writing West End comedies about elite society? To set the stage for this study, it is necessary to look at the world Wilde moved in, and to approach Wilde within this context. It is worth pointing out that, in his commingling of high and mass culture, of detached aestheticism and engaged reformism, Wilde was like many other writers and artists in late Victorian Britain. Kathy Psomiades notes that that culture, particularly among the aesthetes, was characterized by a close connection between art and mass culture.

In aestheticism, we can see the process whereby the private, lovely woman who signifies aesthetic experience shades gradually and imperceptibly into the public, tawdry woman who signifies the vulgarity of mass-cultural and commodity experience. (13)

Late-Victorian culture was a particularly fertile soil for the kind of consumer modernist work that Wilde engaged in. Here was a culture that frequently saw a fusion of high artistic production and efforts at middle-class taste-education. As Psomiades notes above, the woman aesthete often stood at the center of these efforts. And since she stood there, she was a creature of both high risk and high possibility, a quality that seems to have attracted Wilde to them. Not unaware that this was a potentially volatile combination of elements, Wilde and others worked the tensions within this cultural mixture, making them essential tools in their art.

Therefore, one major component of this study involves addressing Wilde’s context, his artistic and personal relationships with the people in the circles he moved among, particularly in the early parts of his career. It is clear that Wilde was a professional networker, and someone who knew that it was part of his job to build strong relationships with people who would help get his work before the public—Wilde had no intention of becoming a starving artist. He established himself in the heart of the capital of the major empire in the world. Wilde was conscious that his work was best carried out in enormous commercial cities. He thus saw that, in order to be most fully himself, he needed an immediate relationship to the cosmopolis, even for the sake of his creativity. Kerry Powell makes the point that Wilde needed London and its dramatic milieu as “an arena of cooperation and conflict which [was] essential to his work as playwright” (143).

One writer of an 1890 article, “Literary Women in London Society,” makes note of the changing face of that Society. In the past, the inner circle included people in the court and “only a few representatives of literature and art, and those most privileged by birth” (North American Review 151.329). However, by the 1880s, the writer notes that things had changed:

[A]ristocratic exclusiveness is a thing of the past, and fashionable people are only too ready to welcome as friend the men and women who amuse them or make them think. The English craving after social sensation has become rather a by-word among nations, but at least the craving is a healthy sign of dissatisfaction with the vapidity of ordinary social life. There is place in Society now for the leading members of almost every art and profession. (329)

Wilde certainly was adept at both amusing members of society and making them think. It was his expertise with these strategies that enabled him to ingratiate himself at the highest levels. The one circle that encompasses many of the other circles Wilde moved in is precisely the aesthetes, particularly the women. I use the term female aesthete according to Talia Schaffer’s definition in her groundbreaking book, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000). This group of women writers—or we should say groups, because they did not all form any formal group—is key to the re-reading of Wilde that I am offering.

Towards the “high” end of society is the elite social group of men and women who called themselves the ‘Souls,’ which included some female aesthetes. One group more in the middle is the Arts and Crafts movement of such figures as William Morris, E.W. Godwin and Walter Crane. And a group towards the lower end is the growing cadre of young London journalists, people like Bernard Shaw, Graham R. Tomson/Watson, and Richard LeGallienne. Also, a group that was present among all these groups was gay London. In fact, Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas was a member of one of the Souls’ major families: he was cousin to Lady Elcho and George Wyndham, the former being mistress of the estate Stanmore, one of the major Souls gathering places, and the latter being a political colleague of arch-Soul Arthur Balfour. Indeed, George Wyndham, a good friend of Wilde, worked assiduously first to try to prevent Wilde’s disastrous legal action in 1895, and then to try to get Wilde to leave Britain before he was arrested. He was perhaps as much concerned about his family’s dignity as he was about Wilde’s well-being. (I purposely deal very little with gay London because it is much less central to his mass-cultural persona, and because it has already been written about so thoroughly.)

THE ‘SOULS’

Let us begin at the top. London high society in the 1880s and 1890s was a collection of nobility and wealthy gentry. This was a powerful group, many of the men wielding power in perhaps the most powerful assembly in the world at the time, the British Parliament. Also, both men and women elites were cultivating themselves in their exquisite lifestyle, patronizing the best that the arts world had to offer at theaters, galleries and concerts, as well as through the “decorative” arts of house design and dress. London was a place where elite society was in constant contact with leaders in the arts, a fact that allowed many artists of low estate to rise quickly—which was also something that made many more traditional people nervous. (It is striking how many actor-managers, department store owners, popular writers and the like, end up getting knighted in the 1890s. Had Wilde not been prosecuted, my guess is that he would also have been knighted.) The Souls prided themselves on being large-minded enough to associate with people who did not have means but had culture. Thus, they dared to wander beyond the comfortable confines of Belgravia and Mayfair into the more mixed-districts like South Kensington and Chelsea. Painters like James M. Whistler and D.G. Rossetti lived in Chelsea, and eventually Wilde moved to a house there with his painter friend, Frank Miles. When he got married, he also purchased a home in Chelsea.

The Souls, though they were not always admired, were undoubtedly at the center of all London society. Charlotte Gere describes them in the following terms: “The galaxy of friends known as the ‘Souls’ was, in a glittering era, the most scintillating social group in the country” (1). The leading figure was Arthur James Balfour, in the 1880s a rising Conservative politician; later on, he would rise all the way to Prime Minister. But it was really the women in the Souls who were the driving force, women like Madeline Wyndham, founder of the Royal School of Art Needlework, and her daughter Mary—like her brother George, a close friend of Wilde. Mary would become Lady Elcho (and was also, incidentally, the lifelong confidante of Balfour). The Wyndhams’ estate house, Clouds, was a major gathering site for the Souls. Designed by William Morris’s associate, Philip Webb, and decorated by Morris himself, it represented the apex of British aesthetic culture. Perhaps the next two central Souls were the Tennant sisters. Wilde dedicated many of his fairy tales to Souls, including “The Star Child” to Margot Tennant and “The Birthday of the Infanta” to Mrs. W. Grenfell (Lady Desborough).

The correspondence between Balfour and Lady Elcho has been published in a scholarly edition. Balfour writes there of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Wilde at the country estate gatherings of the de Grey family (77). He also tells Lady Elcho in an 1893 letter that “I have just been invited by Oscar Wilde to go to the first night of his new play [A Woman of No Importance]” (93). Their box, said Balfour, was to include George and Lady Grosvenor (both patrons of the London arts scene). In fact, when Wilde set the play Lady Windermere’s Fan at a house on Carlton House Terrace, he may have had Balfour’s home (number 4) in mind.¹ The Elchos lived very nearby, at 23 St. James’s Place, which was within a stone’s throw of the theater where Lady Windermere played.

One of the Souls, the poet Wilfrid Blunt (a first cousin of Percy Wyndham) writes of Wilde, “The fine society of London and especially the ‘Souls’ ran after him because they knew he could always amuse them, and the pretty women all allowed him great familiarities” (463).² It was this social scene that Wilde thrived in. In the late 1870s, he was just out of university, was fairly poor and was barely at the beginning of a writing career³—yet because of his personality and the openness of much of fine society, he soon was walking amongst the most elite circles. Alice Comyns Carr, who would contribute to the Woman’s World, writes that “Oscar Wilde was often of the Walton party [at the Lewis family estate]—fresh from Oxford then, and considerably esteemed as a wit himself” (129). There were several sub-groups in which Wilde also made his presence felt, including the Grosvenor Gallery and other art galleries, the West End theater world, and the Arts and Crafts world.

Wilde in fact wrote an article about the opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. The Grosvenor was a place associated with aestheticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, and to a lesser extent, the Arts and Crafts movement. The money behind the Grosvenor came from Sir Coutts Lindsay, whose wife Blanche—another who would contribute to the Woman’s World—was a prominent female aesthete. There were Sunday afternoons at the Gallery “at which Lady Lindsay presided over a company including all the most notable people in Literature and Art, to say nothing of the ‘beaux noms,’ courtiers and politicians in her more exclusive set” (Comyns Carr 77). Comyns Carr wrote that the Lindsays “took a certain pride in being the first members of Society to bring people of their own set into friendly contact with the distinguished folk of art and literature” (Reminiscences 54).

Alice Comyns Carr was a theatrical costume designer, and apparently was delighted to be the inspiration for the cartoon aesthete character, Cimabue Brown, created and mocked by George Du Maurier in Punch. Alice’s husband, Joe Comyns Carr, was one of the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery, as well as a West End playwright and producer. (These links among the art gallery, aesthete, and theater worlds come up again and again. Wilde represented just one among many in his penchant for linking them all.) The Grosvenor in the late 1870s sought to offer an alternative to the Royal Academy exhibits, building around the works of Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane and James M. Whistler. (D. G. Rossetti, who was ailing and near the end of his life, decided not to show his work there). Later, in the 1890s, Joe Comyns Carr produced King Arthur for Henry Irving (the leading actor-manager of the age) at the Lyceum, with dresses designed in part by Carr’s wife, and with sets and clothing designed by Burne-Jones. Carr also wrote and produced Forgiveness for George Alexander in January 1892. His play immediately preceded Alexander’s production of Lady Windermere’s Fan (which began in February). In addition, Carr—who was a remarkably active person—was editor of the English Illustrated Magazine, and he managed to get Wilde to write a couple of pieces for the magazine.

Another theatrical acquaintance of Wilde was Ellen Terry, the star actress, and some-time-domestic partner of the aesthete interior designer and theatrical producer, E.W. Godwin. Godwin has been described as “the most flamboyant and brilliant figure of the 1870s and 80s. [Also, he] left his mark on furniture design and helped create a radically simplified interior that was adapted from Japanese traditions, Greek, Egyptian, and English Renaissance forms” (Gere 398). One can see in aesthetic designs like Godwin’s that British imperial conquest fed right into aesthetic styles of design.

These various social circles overlapped a lot: high society, the West End theater, aesthetic dress and interior design, Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist painting, and the Arts and Crafts movement. It is also striking that Wilde was managing to place himself so well within almost all of the circles. For a time, he and Whistler formed a sort of dynamic duo, frequenting the events in the London “Season,” and spending time with the professional beauties of the time in studios, galleries, theaters and society balls. The two were staples of the society columns. Wilde also formed a sort of public-relations team together with actress Lillie Langtry. He performed outlandish acts like sleeping on her doorstep and walking down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand to deliver to her. He was a prime mover in getting her started in an acting career, both in London and New York. She for her part helped make sure Wilde was invited to society events.

ARTS AND CRAFTSMEN

Wilde formed friendships also with Walter Crane and E.W. Godwin, both of whom were leaders in the Arts and Crafts movement, and who associated themselves closely with William Morris. Wilde’s connection with Crane can be seen from the fact that Crane wrote for the Woman’s World, and was more than once reviewed by Wilde in a periodical. Crane also did illustrations for some of Wilde’s published collections of fairy tales. Wilde’s connection with Godwin was also manifold. Wilde was friendly with Godwin’s former partner Ellen Terry. He also lived in a house whose interior was designed by Godwin—indeed he wrangled with Godwin for tarrying in its completion. Wilde reviewed Godwin’s theatrical endeavors, and led off his first edition of the Woman’s World with an article about Godwin’s outdoor productions. He also borrowed many of Godwin’s ideas when writing his essay on theatrical costumes, “The Truth of Masks.”

It is people like Crane, Godwin and Morris who most strongly exemplify the way the arts and commerce were so closely connected during that era. Morris ended up somewhat disillusioned with his own life, lamenting the fact that while he held Socialist principles, he spent the bulk of his time catering to the expensive tastes of the very wealthy. That is not to say that he did not have a real, beneficial effect on the whole of society, educating people’s tastes in all sectors of society so that middle- and working- class people could decorate their homes in a more “artistic” and less purely-commercial manner. But it is a fact that, like haute couture, the Arts and Crafts movement operated by creating expensive commodities that only the wealthiest could afford. By virtue of that fact, the high fashion would only secondarily shape and dictate popular fashion—through the very mass-produced goods that Morris so hated. Mrs. Comyns Carr also exemplified this strategy, designing theatrical dresses for Ellen Terry. Fashion was thus disseminated by means of public spectacles and other media.

This principle is well illustrated by the “Morris Room” at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), a room that is both a work of art and a commercial advertisement. The museum was started precisely with the idea of providing models of artistic work that members of both Society and the middle classes could view and learn from. Education and advertisement mix here. If in the past, the works of master painters were mainly to be seen by the few at private palaces and estates (with the notable exception of art in churches), by the late Victorian period, the royal family and other wealthy art collectors were displaying their paintings at museums and art galleries.⁴ In fact, one way of understanding the existence of the Morris Room is that Morris and the museum curators wanted to share the wealth, they wanted Morris’s designs to be seen by everybody, not just by the wealthy—a noble if not completely altruistic goal. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Wilde was one of those spending much time with Whistler and others at events at the South Kensington Museum; he would have been thoroughly familiar with the way Morris worked in both high and mass culture.

Interestingly, “Aesthetic” interiors and “aesthetic” dress, at the moment they tried to disavow a connection with modern commercial culture, ironically succeeded most fully in becoming coveted consumer items. E.W. Godwin worked first for Collinson and Lock and then for Liberty and Co., the latter being a huge department store in one of the fashionable shopping districts of London, and one associated with aesthetic interiors and dress. (It had first gotten a reputation for importing goods from the Far East, and contributed to the japonisme craze.) Sir Arthur Lazenby Liberty would remark of Wilde:

My ‘art fabrics’ were produced before [Wilde] became a celebrity. I gave him his opportunity, and he helped me mightily through the publicity he commanded. (article in The British Warehouseman, Feb. 1895)

Wilde was learning much from the people in these various social circles, people like Morris, Godwin, and Liberty.

THEATRICAL PERSONALITIES

We saw that many of the ‘Souls’ were involved in the world of theater. Perhaps because of this, Wilde also formed close friendships with numerous actors and actresses, Langtry, Ellen and Marion Terry, Helena Modjeska, Genevieve Ward, Norman Forbes-Robertson, Hermann Vezin, Mrs. Bancroft … His letters show that he used these acquaintances in order to, as salesmen put it, name-drop. He writes of “my friend Mr. Dion Boucicault [the Irish playwright],” and writes to Oscar Browning that “I saw Lord Houghton at [Henry] Irving’s supper,” getting two important names into one phrase (20 Feb. 1880). He wrote some letters with the address line not of his own address but of Langtry’s house. He also cultivated the acquaintance of the Examiner of Plays, E.F.S. Pigott, writing a letter in which he requests “any helpful advice your experience and very brilliant critical powers can give me” (CL 98).

As mentioned above, Wilde and Lillie Langtry collaborated in promoting each other. And both Wilde and his roommate from 1879–1881, the painter Frank Miles, were giving a higher profile to Langtry’s public persona. Miles sketched some acclaimed portraits, and Wilde published a poem about her, “The New Helen.”⁵ (Inde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Background: Wilde’s Social Circles and Consumer Culture
• Chapter Two Newspaper Culture in the Pall Mall Gazette Years (1884–1890)
• Chapter Three The Woman’s World (1887–1889) as Fashion Magazine and Modernist Laboratory
• Chapter Four Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: The Aesthetics of Fashion in Baudelaire, Wilde, and Tomson/Watson
• Chapter Five Consumer Fashion and Modernist Aesthetics in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
• Chapter Six Mrs. Erlynne as Modernist: The Artist of Consumer Image and Ritual
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index