I propose that The Importance
of Being Earnest allows for two readings: one can assume the role of
the narrator of "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." (Wilde) or that of Lady
Bracknell. Both readings have their limits and privilege the performance either
of class or of sexuality in the play. In "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,"
Wilde's narrator undertakes a project that is essentially one of recovery – a
counter-reading in the face of the heterosexist narratives that have effaced
the homosexual desire at the heart of Shakespeare's sonnets. This same assumption
informs the arguments of Christopher Craft, Patricia Behrendt, and Joel
Fineman; they look in Earnest for representations of a fully
formed gay masculinity – a "Uraniste" in Ernest (Behrendt
172–73). They begin with a "positivist desire for proof in the
pudding" (Craft 120) and find a current of same-sex desire running through
the play that destabilizes various heterosexual assumptions. But it all begins
with the assumption that there are representations of gay masculinities in the
play; it begins with a theory, like Wilde's narrator's project – that there was
a boy actor named Willie Hughes who was the object of Shakespeare's desire.
Reflecting on this theory, the narrator reviews Shakespeare's sonnets and finds
his proof in the pudding: "Every poem seemed to me to corroborate Cyril
Graham's theory. I felt as if I had my hand upon Shakespeare's heart, and was
counting each separate throb and pulse of passion. I thought of the wonderful
boy-actor, and saw his face in every line" ("Portrait" 323).
Later, the narrator reflects on his
scholarly project and declares that "the one flaw in the theory is that it
presupposes the existence of the person whose existence is the subject of
dispute" (334). In the context of Earnest, this person is
the fully formed, self-identified male homosexual – a type of masculinity that
was only emerging through events like the Wilde trials.
It is the argument of Alan Sinfield's
book-length study, The Wilde Century, that the codes of
behavior we have come to view as stereotypes of male homosexuality were
constituted primarily through Wilde's exposure in the trials of 1895 and do not
necessarily prefigure the trials. In his introduction, Sinfield argues
explicitly against reading Earnest as a play about homosexual
desire although he remains sympathetic toward the impulse to provide such a
reading:
Many commentators assume that
queerness, like murder, will out, so there must be a gay
scenario lurking somewhere in the depths of The Importance of Being
Earnest. But it doesn't really work. It might be nice to think of
Algernon and Jack as a gay couple, but most of their dialogue is bickering
about property and women; or Bunburying as cruising for rough trade, but it is
an upper-class young heiress that we see Algernon visiting, and they want to
marry.
(vi)
Sinfield is almost certainly
responding to Craft, Behrendt, and Fineman when he argues that identifying a
fully constituted homosexual subject in the play is anachronistic. In his
essay, "'Effeminacy' and 'Femininity': Sexual Politics in Wilde's
Comedies," he isolates one particularly anachronistic claim that is made
by Fineman and rearticulated by Craft – that Bunbury "was not only British
slang for a male brothel, but is also a collection of signifiers that
straightforwardly express their desire to bury in the bun" (Fineman, qtd.
in Sinfield "'Effeminacy'" 34). "Bun" does not signify
"buttock" in any of the dictionary records that Sinfield reviews –
that is, until it assumes that meaning in United States sometime in the 1960s
(35).
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/modern_drama/v048/48.4lalonde.html
No comments:
Post a Comment