Butterfly and ape

Appropriately, given his propensity for role-playing, Oscar Wilde attracted a variety of animal comparisons. These may have been largely forgotten now, replaced by the baser images of his three trials, which supplied another infamous conjunction of sex and animality. In 1895 Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensberry for libel. Queensberry was the father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas and had accused Wilde of ‘posing as a somdomite [sic]’. Wilde was himself then prosecuted for, and convicted of, committing acts of indecency in private with members of his own sex, an offence which, under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, carried a sentence of two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. After the jury failed to agree on most counts, Wilde faced a retrial. Part of what was felt to be at stake is clear from a review of Max Nordau's Degeneration (which was published in an English translation in 1895) that appeared in the Weekly Sun, three weeks after Wilde's conviction and sentencing. As Ed Cohen observes, the notice drew an implicit contrast between Wilde's behaviour and Nordau's book, which it described as ‘a manly, healthy, and badly-needed protest against some of the inanities and – the word is not too strong – bestialities which raise their barren and brutal heads in the literature of our time’. The reviewer declared Nordau's work to be ‘entitled, therefore, to the admiration of every honest, pure, and manly man’. Cohen affirms that while the review made no direct mention of Wilde it had him in its sights: the condemnation of inanities and bestiality makes this clear.

The review reads like a desperate attempt to salvage some sense of masculinity in the face of Wilde's effeminacy. Its tautology of ‘manly man’ reeks of nervous desperation and insecurity. But alongside this concern to protect the boundaries of gender and sexuality is the horror of a breakdown in class positions. Cohen shows that the press coverage of the trials reported defence counsel Edward Carson's questioning of Wilde about inappropriate liaisons with socially inferior men.