ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde is most often remembered for three things: his plays, his sex life and his conviction for acts of gross indecency – not necessarily in that order. The narrative of the Wilde trials is well known: the Marquess of Queensberry, incensed by the open displays of intimacy between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, or Bosie, left a card at Wilde’s club with the words ‘For Oscar Wilde posing [as a] somdomite [sic]’.1 Wilde reacted by suing the Marquess for libel, but agreed to break off the trial at the final moment when it became apparent that the Marquess had in fact acquired evidence against Wilde in the form of testimonies from rent boys who had had sexual relations with him. This evidence was passed to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and led to two further trials in which Wilde was accused of engaging in ‘acts of gross indecency’ with other men contrary to the Labouchère Amendment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. As Sos Eltis has noted, ‘Wilde’s life was an affront to the Victorian establishment and the Victorian public’, and Victorian society punished him for this affront by convicting him and sentencing him to two years’ hard labour at Pentonville Prison.2 This chapter approaches the Wilde trials from two perspectives. Section (I)
examines the use of the word ‘pose’ in the proceedings by placing the trials in the context of the history of sexuality. The subsequent sections explore the ways in which Wilde’s ‘literary’ works were interpreted as ‘legal’ evidence in the courtroom, and the implications of such interpretative acts for our understanding of law and literature. Edward Carson, the lawyer for the Marquess, attempted to use Wilde’s writings as a way of ascertaining the writer’s lifestyle and conduct: if he could convince the court that their allusions to same-sex desire were based on, or inspired by, the author’s own experience, then he would win his case. Wilde, in turn, challenged the correlation the lawyer attempted to draw between
his works and his life. Section (II) places the question of interpretation in the trials
in the context of debates about the relationship between literature and reality in Victorian England. Sections (III) and (IV) explore, in detail, the legal interpretations of Wilde’s writings in the trials. They argue against existing discussions of the legal case to show that the courtroom exchanges between the lawyer and the playwright represented a conflict not only between a ‘legal’ mode of reading and a ‘literary’ mode of reading, but between two competing literary conceptions of the relationship between text and reality in the second half of the nineteenth century.
