Sunday, 27 March 2011
"Cover-up" at Oscar Wilde trial?
The Independent on Sunday has an interesting story about the discovery of love-letters between Lord Alfred Douglas and Maurice Schwabe, a member of WIlde's circle who was also the Solicitor-General's nephew. Schwabe was mentioned in the Marquis of Queensbury's Plea of Justification in the libel trial as one of the men Wilde allegedly incited to commit sodomy (R. Elmann, Oscar Wilde, pp. 416-7), but he left the country, didn't testify and wasn't named in court. All very interesting but as a boring pedantic lawyer I'm not sure it counts as "cover up". Was the relationship between Schwabe and Bosie actually relevant to either of the trials?
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In the Independent on Sunday article it also refers to 'homosexuality' being 'illegal' at this time. Isn't this incorrect?
ReplyDeleteIn effect the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1885 s. 11 (the "Labouchere amendment") criminalized all homosexual activity between males as "gross indecency" - which is what Wilde was convicted of. There was no need to prove sodomy.
ReplyDeleteIsn't 'homosexuality' an identity rather than an activity?
ReplyDeleteNo, homosexuality is the clinical term for the activity. Although interestingly, many regard modern gay identity as having begun with Wilde's trials - since Wilde's very distinctive public persona became associated in the public eye with 'what homosexuals look like'. Even gay men began referring to each other, for a period, as 'Oscars' to aid identification with each other. This is ironic, insofar that Wilde's public persona was a construction based on the principles of Aestheticism ("one should either be a work of art or wear a work of art," he wrote) rather than on "trying to look gay." And this is relevant to Tony's original post because at his trial, Wilde consciously perpetuated this urge to theatricalise himself, by carefully choosing how to look, what to say, and what not to say. Among the things he didn't say was anything that might seem to incriminate anyone else - that would have been vulgar, and thus the greatest crime of all. Interestingly though, in De Profundis (Wilde's open letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison), he strongly hints that he was sent down in part for activities actually perpetrated by "someone else" -- i.e. that the rent boys lined up by the Crown were describing things done not with Wilde (though he admits that he too consorted with them - "feasting with panthers") but a.n.other. The other could only be Douglas, his beloved Bosie, whose 'sins' Wilde appears to have been willing to take upon himself... (In De Profundis, Wilde strongly associates himself with Christ...) So the new Schwabe letters may provide circumstantial evidence to support the idea that evidence at the trial was knowingly misdirected at the wrong target... There again, does it matter? What Wilde succeeded in doing in De Profundis, above all, was to seize back authorship of his own life narrative from the legal-punitive system: he created enough uncertainty and ambiguity around it that it remains a work of art, rather than a tissue of mere facts.
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