GENERAL SECTION

Kants Aesthetics and Wilde Form

Jonathan Loesberg

Abstract Although Wilde was convicted of Gross Indecency, not of having written questionable literature, critics frequently take his trial as a trial of his literature and his theories, and, in a sense, they are oddly enough right since, at key moments, the difcult of reading Wildes writing becomes manifest in the difculty of reading what occurs in the trials. That reading difculty results from the alignment between Wildes aestheticism and the ostensibly straighter Kantian aesthetics, a theory Wilde queered only by clarifying its paradoxes. Through a comparative reading of Kants and Wildes theories of natural and aesthetic beauty and the manifestation of Wildes theory in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), this article will show how the ambiguities in Wildes trial result from his insistence on a connection between his theoretical paradoxes and what he called his perverse desires, a connection that enriches both aesthetic theory and our understanding of the cultural signicance of his trial. Key words: Wilde, Kant, Aesthetics, Queer Theory

Even after 115 years, it seems that we are still not precisely sure of what Oscar Wilde was found guilty: having engaged in same-sex practices
Victoriographies 1.1 (2011): 7995 DOI: 10.3366/vic.2011.0008 # Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/vic

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or having written queer literature. There is some excuse for this confusion. The text of the Labouchere Amendment under which he was convicted can be interpreted to cover a wide range of possibilities, applying as it does to any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency.1 Even assuming that the term gross indecency, vague as it is, had a known category of acts to which it referred, among which would not normally be the writing of questionable literary works, since the law covers the attempt to procure the commission of those acts, one could certainly argue that literature espousing such acts would be a transgression. Moreover, the path from the rst trial, in which Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, to the third, in which he was convicted of gross indecency, certainly traveled through contested interpretations of Wildes writing, not only some letters he wrote to Alfred Douglas, but in both the rst and second trials, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as the poem by Douglas ending with the Love that dare not speak its name. Further, in the rst trial, at least, in which the alleged libel was Queensberrys addressing a card to Wilde, labeling him, in his spelling, as posing as a sodomite, since the defense had only to prove that Wilde was posing as a sodomite, rather than having committed sodomy, Wildes writing was at least relevant to the claim. Thus, as one of the junior lawyers on Wildes case said, many years after the fact, It was understood that the libel involved an attack upon the decency and tness for publication of some of the books and writings of Oscar Wilde.2 So there is certainly some ground at least to take the cross-examination of Wilde in the rst trial as indicative of a cultural nding of guilt for his writing.3 Still, juridically, the course of the trials moves so relentlessly away from Wildes writing to testimony about his sexual acts as to call into question the critical desire to focus on the cross-examination of his writing. Both Wilde and his critics have exulted in that crossexamination, understandably since, even by the legal sense of the time, he at least held his own in the exchange.4 But this aspect of the trials shrunk considerably in the second trial, when Wilde was accused of Gross Indecency and its presence, as we shall see, may have accounted for the hung jury in that trial and had virtually disappeared by the third trial, after the judge in the second trial had found Wildes writings irrelevant to the case (Hyde 215). The jury who convicted Wilde did so almost entirely on the evidence of witnesses who attested to sexual acts or corroborated such evidence. One can see why both earlier and later literary critics might want to blink this

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aspect of the trial. For an earlier generation, who did not feel laws against homosexuality to be manifestly unjust, Wildes clear engagement in the sexual acts of which he was accused was at best irrelevant and at worst embarrassing to his literary reputation. To a later generation, wanting to read in the trials the embodiment of the cultural drama by which, through Wildes prosecution, homosexuality as an identity was both dened as pathology and criminalised, the course of the nal trial can seem only grim, brutal persecution rather than a more signicant cultural refusal to read Wildes complexity. It will be the argument of this paper that the confusion over what Wilde was found guilty of, however, is well-founded and indeed comprehends a confusion over his aesthetics, one that is far more fully Kantian in its most deliberate paradoxes than is generally recognised. By trying to separate aesthetics from Wildes sexuality by ostensibly separating his irresponsible aestheticism from a less paradoxical one, earlier formalist critics could normalise an aesthetic they wanted to turn to their own purposes. For similar reasons, later critics could argue that they were departing, with Wilde, from a constrainingly straight aesthetic. In either case, they had to nd that his trial was a trial of his theory and, in both cases, they were oddly enough right since, at key moments, the difculty of reading Wildes theory becomes manifest in the difculty of reading what occurs in the trials. And this difculty is predicted in Kants only seemingly straight theory, which Wilde queered only by clarifying its paradoxes. To get to the deepest connection between Kants and Wildes theories, we can start with a connection that is fairly obviously Kantian, even if it seems paradoxical in Wildes formulation. Wildes dictum about the difference between morality and art, which caused him trouble at his rst trial, of course, comes directly out of Kant. In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde states: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all (Wilde 17). Although Queensberrys attorney, Edward Carson, looked askance at this claim (Hyde 10910), its source in Kants straightforward separation of our appreciation of the beautiful and our liking of the good (Kant 4849) is clear enough. And although many critics both before and after Carson have questioned it, at a certain level, it may be taken as a mere category identication: if there is something which we may meaningfully designate as artistic beauty, and if our response to it is distinct, then it follows that our response to it will be distinct from our response to moral obligation. Certainly Kant, who would hardly be thought of as amoral, did not think that attending to this category distinction raised any moral

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issues or threatened immoral action.5 The real moment of strangeness, if not queerness, in Kants aesthetic, and the one that Wilde rephrased most challengingly in his own constant comparisons of nature with art, was Kants distinction between natural and artistic beauty. To get to that distinction, we must start with the recognition that Kants end in the opening Analytic of The Critique of Judgment (1790) is not to describe the features of objects that we call beautiful but rather to describe what kind of judgment we make when we say that a thing is beautiful hence his distinction between an interest in the good and a liking of the beautiful. He describes the features of a judgment, not the thing judged. Nowhere is this clearer than in his claim that one of the features of that judgment is that we attribute to the object purposiveness without purpose. In the rst instance, as his examples make clear, Kant is not distinguishing among objects but among ways of perceiving the same object. Thus, he says about our perceiving a birds song as beautiful, A birds song proclaims his joyfulness and contentment with his existence. At least that is how we interpret nature, whether or not it has such an intention (Kant, 169). Kants point here is that we apprehend a meaning to the song that we know we have no basis for apprehending. Indeed, if we found that we did have a basis for apprehending it, if we found that what we thought was a birds song was actually an imitation of that song by a human being, we would immediately cease to nd it beautiful. Having recognised the artice, we take it for deception. Thus, it seems, we can only see natural objects, or objects we treat as natural, as beautiful: In order for us to be able to take a direct interest in the beautiful as such, it must be nature, or we must consider it so (169). Obviously, we could consider human made objects in this way, taking them without regard to the purposes for which they were made. We could look at cups without regard to their being made to hold liquid. But we are, then, considering them as if they were natural objects and, if we see them as beautiful, construing them as having a design or signicance we know we cannot impute to any intention behind the object. But this denition creates a problem for attributing beauty to art, even though that is ostensibly its dening characteristic. In distinguishing the types of art, Kant says an art is ne art if its purpose is that the pleasure should accompany presentations that are ways of cognizing (172). The phrase about pleasures accompanying ways of cognising refers back to the various distinctions Kant makes between knowing, taking pleasure in a sensation, and the pleasure we have in beauty. That pleasure seems to arise from a cognition, a knowledge of an object, even though it does not. But if the artwork has, as its purpose, the giving

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to us of such pleasure, then when we take the pleasure from it that it intends, we are apprehending a purposiveness that it in fact has as a purpose. In seeing an artwork as beautiful, in a sense, we are apprehending no differently than we do when we see a chair as something to be sat in or a cup as something to be drunk from. But being beautiful is different from being drunk from since, for us to perceive beauty in an object, we must see its appearance without regard to its purposes. So, unless we see artworks as if they were something else, we must both see their beauty and recognise as part of seeing them as artworks that the beauty is intended and thus not exactly beauty. At the same time, although Kant does not explain this claim in any detail, because beauty is a dening feature of artworks, when we see nature as beautiful, we are seeing it through the lens of art. Kant denes this relationship in a sentence that follows rigorously from his logic but is inescapably Wildean: Nature, we say, is beautiful [scho n] if it also looks like art; and art can be called ne [scho n] art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature (174). It is not to hard to unpack this sentence, up to a point, as if we were good, hard-minded philosophers, or even legal cross-examiners, but that unpacking will only give point to its deepest paradox. There is no problem, chronological or epistemological, about which came rst, nature or art here. All(!) Kant means here is that, when we look at nature and see it as beautiful, the criteria we use for beauty are those we draw from art, even as we therefore know, as part of judging it to be beautiful, that those criteria are not there as part of any purpose or intention nature might have. We see the appearance of the thing as beautiful rather than looking at the thing as it is given to us. By the same token, when we see art as beautiful, we see the thing as it is indeed given to us, but, in order to see it as beautiful, we have to treat it as not so given, as natural. If this unpacking seems to clear up the distinctiveness of nature and art, it does so at the cost of making beauty that which we see purely in natural objects even as it is the dening feature of art objects and not natural objects paradoxical in its denition. What we do when we apprehend it is clear enough, as clear as taking a birds song as signifying contentment even when we know that the bird intends no such meaning. But what we apprehend becomes secondary as an object as soon as it becomes real in the object: it ceases to be directly beautiful when the object means to present it to us as beautiful. What makes this paradox so telling is that Kant does not seek it. He means to explain how we see the appearance of things as beautiful without regard to what we know they are, surely the rst step toward guring out what we do when we call something

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beautiful. From that intention to explain, however, the logic to this Wildean end seems inescapable, to arise in fact from what art and beauty are. In effect, Kants formulation and we should remember how important in the version of it that states that beauty is purposiveness without purpose it has been for subsequent formalist theories of both art and literature states that, once we learn to see from the perspective of aesthetic beauty, we relearn how to see nature and thus relearn how to see art as well.6 Wildes ostensibly paradoxical dicta on aesthetics, particularly in The Decay of Lying but also in Dorian Gray, where paradoxical aesthetics are associated notoriously with ambiguous sexuality, can be readily derived from Kants explicit claim that the perspective of aesthetics causes us to re-see both nature and art. Wilde makes the connection between his aesthetics and his erotic life explicit in De Profundis: What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion (Wilde, 1018).7 This connection claries what may also be extrapolated from the logic of Kants implicit claim that nature changes once art allows us to see it aesthetically, just as art becomes the secondary version of aesthetic beauty at the instant it exists and allows us to see nature as beautiful: the reason we cannot quite decide, as Wilde cannot quite decide, at least from the evidence of De Profundis, of what he was found guilty, is because once, in the perspective of Wilde, his sexual practices took on his cultural identity, while it may once have been possible to see these two elements separately, it no longer is so. Kants aesthetics may be taken to elucidate what happens to Wilde and our understanding of him in the light of his trial, but equally, Wildes trial gives Kants aesthetics a force it does not have when Wildean perversity is taken from it. At the opening of The Decay of Lying, Wilde must surely mean to oppose the general analysis of beauty in nature from eighteenthcentury aesthetics through Ruskin and certainly including Kant. He has Vivian, who articulates the theory in the dialogue, declare Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty [. . .] Art reveals to us [. . .] Natures lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unnished condition (Wilde, 1071). And he also argues that, should we nd out a character we thought to be ctional to be real, we should lose all interest in him: The only real people are the people who never existed (1075). These passages may be contrasted with two opposing claims in Kant. With regard to the second claim, in the passage in which Kant hazards why we nd a birds song beautiful, he concludes that in order for us to take this interest in beauty, this beauty must always be that of

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nature: our interest vanishes completely as soon as we notice that we have been deceived, that only art was involved (Kant, 169). And while both these passages do not speak to an ontological difference (the question is as to whether we think an object is art or ction, not whether it is or not), and they may thus be taken merely to derive from a difference in well taste, Kant concludes from what he takes to be our response to an articed birds song a judgment that not only opposes Wildes opening claim but might be taken to judge him:
In order for us to be able to take a direct interest in the beautiful as such, it must be nature, or we must consider it so. This holds especially, however, if we can even require others to take a direct interest in it. And we do in fact require this; for we consider someones thinking to be coarse and ignoble if he has no feeling for beautiful nature . . . and sticks to the enjoyments of mere sense that he gets from meals or the bottle. (169170)

While the conclusion with regard to eating has made some critics see Kant as valuing a renement in aesthetic appreciation as opposed to a coarseness in sensual enjoyment, other parts of this chapter make clear that, while he does not precisely nd pleasure in art to be a symptom of coarseness, he does nd someone who values only beauty in art and not in nature to be morally suspect (166167).8 Although the eighteenth-century dandy more than provided enough of a basis for this common moral judgment, it becomes an absolute cliche with regard to Wilde, of course. We could bring Kant and Vivian into an uneasy alignment by going back to Kants insistence that our judgment of the birds song as beautiful because expressing contentment makes no claim on whether the birds song actually does this. By extension, Kant withholds any claim on whether any of the designs (the purposiveness without purpose) we see in nature are really there. And this claim can at least live with Vivians acquired anti-naturalism (he claims he has lost the faculty for enjoying nature rather than that he never had such a faculty) and its insistence that nature has no design. But starting with this extrapolation would not really highlight how aligned the theories are or, indeed, why Kants seeming preference for natural beauty nevertheless coincides with his claim that we see natural beauty only when we look at nature as if we were looking at art. But we will get closer to the true coincidence between the theories by starting with one passage in Wilde that could be taken as a reading of Kant:
The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us

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in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of Art. To Arts subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent. (Wilde 1077)

Wilde reads Kants concept of disinterest with admirable rigor. It has nothing to do with objective judgment. It is, as Kant says, an indifference to the existence of the object (51), by which he means that we regard the object as it appears to us and not as it really is and thus cannot, by denition, care about its existence. When Wilde says that we should not care for the subject of an artwork, he often mistakes himself to mean that artworks should not have some aims rather than others (social improvement rather than being merely beautiful), but his point here is the right one. He is dening what we do when we apprehend aesthetically, not what the qualities of artworks are, and, just as Kant does, he claims as a matter of analytic denition that our aesthetic apprehension differs from our sensual pleasures and our moral judgments in being indifferent to what the object we are judging really is or what the subject of the artwork we are regarding is. This indifference carries us directly back to the subject of natural and artistic beauty. Kant cannot, of course, mean that natural beauty is somehow, as natural, superior to artistic beauty, since he thinks that when we see nature as beautiful, we do not see it as it is and are indeed indifferent to it as it is. Thus we see nature as if it were art. He is unwilling to deny that the design we see in nature cannot be there.9 But since he argues that our judgment is indifferent to whether it is there or not, it comes to the same thing. Nature doesnt have its own beauty. Moreover, Wildes indifference carries him to the same judgments Kant makes about how nature is beautiful and the secondariness of arts beauty to the extent that we treat it as the art it is. Vivian does recognise that we can see nature as beautiful once art has taught us to do so. Thus he praises the Impressionists for teaching us to see fog and mist anew (Wilde 1086). To this extent, Wilde might be made less paradoxical than Kant since he could be taken to argue merely that beauty is a feature of human imagination, as Hegel did, and that is its objectivity. But indifference carries him to the Kantian paradox from a different direction. He insists on seeing life as art: I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of ction he says in De Profundis (1017). And although I could have juxtaposed this sentence immediately with Kants on art and nature, now we can see its real paradox. If we treat art as primary because it expresses beauty in being what it is, we treat art non-aesthetically, without

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indifference, judging it for what it is and nding what it is better than nature. Only if we judge art as we would judge nature when we judge nature aesthetically, can we actually treat it as if it were reality, can we add the aesthetic as if of art back to art. Wilde posits a connection between paradox in thought, between the aesthetics he shared with Kant, and perversion in passion, but he does so in one of those passages in De Profundis in which he so desperately chastises himself for the connection that we have since found so culturally important:
I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a a neur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. (Wilde 1018)

Wilde depicts himself here as if he had been Dorian Gray, drawing a message of moral condemnation that seems, at least, the explicit theme of that novel in a way that would undercut the reading given by his prosecutors at the trial and numbers of queer theorists, from a different perspective, of it as a covert recommendation of perversion.10 But his claim that his problem was a desire that became a madness or a malady or both suggests a different reading at least of Dorian Gray, if not of this passage of De Profundis. Jeff Nunokawa argues importantly in Tame Passions of Wilde (2003) that Wilde means to nd a way to manage passion, to remove oneself from its constraint. He argues with regard to Lord Henrys defense of Hellenism, in Dorian Gray, that this management is, among other things, a necessary savoir faire in the face of a desire that monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful (5). But desires that are managed are also articed, therefore unnatural, as is nature perceived as art and as is perversion. The seeming moralism of Dorian Gray occludes a more Wildean theme, that Dorians problem is neither perversion nor aestheticism but a refusal to accept either in its fullness and in fact treat life and passion as art rather than trying to make life art by expelling its desires. At moments of its most seemingly standard moralism, Dorian Gray offers a slightly different reading of what is occurring, one that suggests

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a perversion of aesthetic spectatorship as an alternative to Dorians oddly passionless sensuality. The rst moment is Dorians rejection of Sibyl upon her ceasing to act because she has learned real love. Sibyl, in a cliche d way, offends against the aesthetic of The Decay of Lying, by returning [from art] to Life and Nature and elevating them into ideals (Wilde 1091) when she nds that she cannot mimic Shakespeares love having felt her own: I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like re (Wilde, 72). But Dorians response of falling out of love with her rather raises the same question with regard to his love for her in the rst place. Either he must have fallen in love with her performances of Shakespeares heroines or with her acting abilities. In either case, taking that love as a love for her would be an equally clumsy mistake of art for life rather than a treatment of life as art. At this point, Dorian, through a callow aesthetic, commits the cliche d cruelty of a Victorian cad, though one can hardly think that his decision the next morning to marry her would have really been a solution to the situation. The portraits rst revelation of its miraculous powers, though, reveals a new aesthetic possibility for Dorian. It is hardly standardly moralistic; but it contrasts with the sensualism he opts for. The portraits rst manifestation of a change in Dorian has a feature that is consistent with later changes and is insufciently commented upon: it not only registers Dorians emotions, but it registers them even when he is unaware of having experienced them. The rst of these is his cruelty to Sibyl: there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth (74). Dorian is at least not consciously aware of having been cruel (amazingly enough): Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girls fault, not his (74). One might take Dorian here as being willfully ignorant. But the portraits last manifestation of emotion in the novel conrms this feature. Having decided to reform, Dorian looks at the portrait to see if his expression has improved, as if he cannot tell the emotions he feels. And indeed he cannot, since the portrait registers a hypocrisy of which he had been unaware (158). Again, not looking into himself, but regarding the portrait, Dorian assents to its information of what he does not feel: Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiositys sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now (158). One can imagine unrecognised cruelty that one actually has felt. But hypocrisy is a far more deliberate and intellectual motive. If one does not think one is being hypocritical, there is some question as to whether one can be. The portrait, it seems, doesnt reect emotions that Dorian actually does feel but rather registers the

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emotions that he would feel if he himself were not a walking portrait, an external appearance without internal life. Dorian considers two possible ways of dealing with this situation, though he seems to imagine them as versions of the same. One of them, while certainly no less perverse as judged by standard Victorian moral codes of the kind expressed by Wildes various prosecuting attorneys, would entail treating ones life as a work of art, in the manner Wilde endorses; the other turns Dorian into the gure Wilde laments, in De Profundis, that he became:
For there would be real pleasure in watching [the portrait]. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. And when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. When the blood crept from his face and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and eet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything. (Wilde 84)

This passage ends with a very different attitude toward the portrait from the one with which it starts. At the opening, Dorian imagines the portrait as providing him with the intellectual pleasure of watching himself made manifest. He will be able to see the secret places of his soul. His emotions would be manageable in Nunokawas sense because he would be separate from them, watching them, watching himself as a work of art. From this perspective, Dorian even reaches a conclusion that amounts to a morality that owes as much to Ruskin as to Wilde: I want to be good. I cant bear the idea of my soul being hideous (Wilde 78). After a couple of sentences, though, the passage changes direction. The portrait becomes important as bearing the depredations that otherwise his body would experience. His desire is not to see himself in it, but to hide himself in it. Instead of being interested in the canvas, Dorian ceases to care about the canvas except as it will make him safe to live without the consequences of what he experiences. In both cases, Dorian in his body will be an animated portrait whose internal life only the portrait shows. In one case, though, the value of this will be its allowing him to regard his life as an aesthetic spectacle. In the second, as it works out in the novel, the value, rather than aesthetic, is to give him an alibi for experience

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without consequence. Although readers seem to collapse both versions into aestheticism, only the rst really regards nature as if it were art. In the analogy between paradox in thought and perversion in passion, although the rst attitude might well lead to a life that looked like a moral one and from certain perspectives would therefore be a moral one it is surely no less perverse, at least in the sense of shifting normal causality, than the second. Making Dorian a spectator upon the life his portrait experiences, it has some of the effects typically attributed to aestheticism since Pater. And, of course, it distances oneself from ones passions in a way that makes them unnatural. But it is a perspective on whose moral and aesthetic consequences one cannot quite get a handle, either a grasp or a lever for reliable manipulation. It can, as we saw, conduce toward moral behavior. And, while it is paradoxical, it is not clearly immoral, whatever behavior it leads to. One can see the attorneys who cross-examine Wilde try to get a handle on this position, even as critics of Wilde try to as well. My point in nding with Wilde paradox and perversion to be versions of each other in this conclusion will neither be to nd that some version of sexual dissidence, in Dollimores terms, is Wildes real signicance and his aestheticism is challenging because of that, nor that his aesthetics is the only thing that matters, and his homosexuality is merely incidental, or any of the various methods that try to articulate a relationship that keeps Wildean paradox and perversion as separate categories. Rather, I want to conclude by arguing that the various readabilities of what Wilde was tried for are readabilities for which his Kantian aesthetics prepares even as the acts or stances for which he was tried clarify a perversion to aesthetics with which it can never really be without. The issue of something like categorical separation between Wildes aesthetics and his sexuality has been a signicant one because of the importance of both his trial and his self-presentation to the argument that our modern notion of homosexuality was constructed at that time and signicantly out of his trial. Thus, in response to readings that connect Wildes paradoxical thinking with the challenge of his perversity, numbers of critics have argued that Wildes contemporaries did not make this connection and neither did Wilde himself, at least prior to his trial. The connections among being an aesthete, being a dandy, and being gay are largely retrospective, resulting from their having been forged by Wildes trials.11 But an aesthetic that rests on the paradox of dening nature in terms of art and art in terms of nature questions whether chronological order creates a logic that supports a criticism of retrospective thinking,

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particularly here where its presence is part of the chronology in question. One can readily see the way in which questions of priority, at least at the level of interpretation, occur in the cross-examination regarding Wildes writing. Because both Wilde and his prosecutors, following an oddly Wildean form of dialogue, refused to speak the name of the love for which he was on trial (or on trial for posing as having), interchanges about Wildes writing and his meaning are constantly at cross purposes, and one can never be really sure of who is meaning what. One critic has argued that Queensburys attorney, Carson, argued for a straightforward hermeneutic in which the Wildean text is transparent: Wilde posed as a sodomite; only a pervert would pose as a sodomite, the pose told the truth, and the truth was available for all to read (Danson 108). But since no one would dene terms, Carson no less than Wilde, Carsons claim of what a straightforward reading of a Wildean text might look like is not always wonderfully persuasive, nor, does the record seem to show, was it so at the time, since, as I said, such cross-examination became less and less central to the prosecutions case. Here for instance is an exchange about Dorian Gray, in response to Wildes statement in the preface to the novel that books are neither moral nor immoral, only well-written or badly written:
A perverted novel might be a good book? Carson persisted. I dont know what you mean by a perverted novel, Wilde answered crisply. This gave Carson the opening he sought. Then I will suggest Dorian Gray is open to the interpretation of being such a novel? Wilde brushed aside the suggestion with contempt. That could only be to brutes and illiterates, he said. The views of Philistines are unaccountable. (Hyde 110)12

A jury might be expected to understand what Carson meant by perverted, and brush aside the tautology of dening it by referring to the novel whose meaning was precisely in question. But they could not be expected to evaluate whether Wilde was being evasive or denitive in rejecting the assertion without clearer denition. And, rather than clarifying anything, the dialogue between Wilde and Carson continues in this vein. In other words, since no one would dene what constitutes a perverted meaning, except with the claim, in the face of constantly ambiguous language, that one could tell it when one saw it, when the issue was precisely that one could not either tell it or see it, any meaning one might attribute might equally be the plain

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meaning behind the evasion or the imposition of a meaning in the retrospective light of the current accusation. The question of meaning starts to go directly to how one is to construe what Wilde and his audience might have thought about both perversion and paradox in his famous defense of the Love that dare not speak its name:
The love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you nd in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the Love that dare not speak its name, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is ne, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it. (Hyde 201)

Hyde reports that the public in the gallery greeted this statement with applause and suggests that it had its effect on the jury (perhaps implying that it played a role in its inability to reach a verdict). Ellman, in his biography, argues that This cri de coeur had its effect (435). But one wonders what exactly the public thought it was applauding. Even if we take Wilde to mean a non-sexual, Romantic friendship between an older and a younger man, one that is pure and intellectual, it would only dare not speak its name to the extent that it was already connected with sexual friendships, as indeed it certainly was in Plato. But it would hardly have been true that no one would have heard the suggestion of a relationship that we have come to call homosexual in this speech. Linda Dowling opens her Homosexuality and Hellenism in Victorian Oxford (1994) with a discussion of this speech and the way it contested the prosecutors suggestion of sodomy with a new and powerful vocabulary of personal identity (2) and, although she sees this language as only later reconquered in the name of new clinical or psychiatric languages of sexual pathology (3), in fact the force of the book is to show the history of a cultural connection between liberal, Hellenic values and homosexuality as already in place, having been put together in the twenty preceding years. Moreover, a bare three months

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after this speech, Alfred Douglas, in reference to Wildes conviction, defends same-sex love and sexual activity, explicitly but also in Wildes terms:
Why on earth in the name of liberty and common sense a man cannot be allowed to love a boy, rather than a woman when his nature and his instinct tell him to do so, and when he has before him the example of such a number of noble and gifted men who have had similar tastes (such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Michael Angelo, Frederick the Great, and a host of others) is another question and one to which I should like to hear a satisfactory answer. (Hyde 343)

Since the editor to whom the letter was sent declined to print it and it does go on to speak of male prostitutes in any case there can be little doubt that he knew what Douglas was defending. But that would mean that a defense of a friendship between an older and a younger man, compared to loves of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, would have meant the same to the ears of 1890s Victorians as it does to ours. And yet, of course, the public, in applauding Wilde, and the jury in refusing to convict him, could hardly have construed his speech in this way. The constant ambiguity that attacks even the most determinately literal and common-sense reading, resulting from everyone not merely refusing to speak a name but debating over whether the name they will not speak applies to the text, emotion or action being questioned, makes the question of historical dating of the linkages between aesthetic theory, personal style and sexual choice seem less telling than the way the categories start to work together as those of nature and art in both Kant and Wilde once they are in place. I would like to end with Ellis Hansons denition of queer theory, because, if my argument has been successful, one will be able to see it as a denition of aesthetic theory as well:
By queer theory, I mean analysis of sexuality as rhetoric, as a language with a variety of formal rules and narrative structures. Queer theory helps us to recognize the erotic dimension of a formalist approach through which we can conceive of Wildes exquisite suffering not as a personal malady nor even as a political predicament, but more specically as an aesthetic innovation peculiar to the tradition in which he wrote (102).

While Wildes innovation was certainly to establish a connection between what he calls passional perversity and aesthetic paradox, I think once that innovation was in place, it was no longer peculiar to the tradition in which he wrote. As we see beauty in nature as if it were

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art and beauty in art as if it were natural, we may see Wildes aesthetic in Kants just as we can trace Kants in Wildes. Further, although this claim goes beyond the purview of this paper, the twentieth-century formalist expulsion of Wilde to create a straight formalism does as much damage to the theory it wants to create as would a queer suspicion of Kantian aesthetics as straight constraint.
Notes 1. Quoted from Cohen, 92. 2. Queensberrys card is quoted from Hyde, 76. Travers Humphreys remark appears in his Foreword to Hyde (8). 3. Dollimore, 67, nds the cross examination of Wilde at least reective of the judgment of many of his contemporaries on his playfulness. And Danson, 1078, argues that the questioning of Wilde opposed a Wildean hermeneutic with one that sought transparency, reading from the pose of the literature to the reality of his being a sodomite. 4. At least so judged Travers Humphrey (Hyde, 8). 5. Wildes use of the term book rather than beauty or artistic beauty might seem to broaden Kants claim dangerously. But when Carson asked Wilde whether that was his view, he answered My view on art, yes (Hyde 109) and the context in Dorian Gray makes this clear enough. 6. It is well beyond the purview of this article to trace the importance of Kants aesthetics to formalism, or, alas, the misreading of Wilde that has led to his expulsion from the Kantian line, but as the barest indication of Kants importance, one can consider William Wimsatts famous anti-intentionalism (Verbal Icon) and Clement Greenbergs explicit references to Kant in Homemade Esthetics, though usually with reference to the problem of subjectivity and aesthetic taste. 7. Dollimore tellingly juxtaposes this sentence with one from Cleanth Brooks on paradox in poetry, but he does not comment on the juxtaposition (Dollimore 103). 8. For the reading of Kant as valuing a class based aesthetic renement, see Bourdier, 489. I have argued about this reading at more length in A Return to Aesthetics, 21836. 9. Indeed, his larger argument, which is about teleology in nature, is about how we can meaningfully see design in nature without, mistakenly, as he thinks, inferring a designer. In this argument, the aesthetic judgment, though, has the role of showing how it is possible to see design when we know we have no basis for claiming that it is there at all. 10. No doubt as a result of passages like this one, Dollimore persuasively reads De Profundis as a tragic defeat. With regard to Dorian Gray, Queensburys attorney questioned Wilde about Basil Hallwards declared love for Dorian as well as some suggestions of Dorians corruption of other men (Hyde 10915). Gagnier (7) has noticed the books moralistic conclusion and suggested that the books scandal may have more to do with the audience scandalised than the book. Nunokawa has also noticed the way the book may be taken to punish the homosexuality it implies in Dorian through the excess that marks the novels rendering of what age does to the beloved body of youth (88).

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11. Sineld, 24, makes this case most forcefully. Bristow also follows him in this argument (196, 199200). 12. It should be remembered that Hydes account of the trial comes from newspaper reports and not transcripts (although their consistency argues that they were produced by reporters adept at transcribing dialogue) and all of his characterisations of the exchange should be taken as narrative ornamentation.

Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bristow, Joseph. A Complex Multiform Creature Wildes Sexual Identities. Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Ed. Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 195218. Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of Discourse on Male Sexualities. New York, NY: Routledge, 1993. Danson, Lawrence. Wildes Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. New York, NY: Oxford U.P., 1991. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism & Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1988. Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986. Greenberg, Clement. Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hanson, Ellis. Wildes Equisite Pain. Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 101123. Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. New York: Dover, 1973. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. Loesberg, Jonathan. A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmoderinism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Nunokawa, Jeff. Tame Passions of Wilde: Styles of Manageable Desire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Sineld, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994. Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works. Introduced by Merlin Holland. London: HarperCollins, 1994. Wimsatt, W.K. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1954.

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