Women

If the narrator of Wilde’s dramatic monologue The Sphinx is to be believed, feminine sexuality is deeply problematic. The poem follows an unnamed subject who relates how ‘a beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom’ (l. 2), a Sphinx that he (assuming the subject to be masculine) then interrogates: ‘Come forth, my lovely seneschal! so somnolent, so statuesque! | Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal!’ (ll. 11-12). Half woman and half animal, the Sphinx is intensely erotic, and Wilde probably has somewhere in mind Gustav Moreau’s painting of Œdipe et le Sphinx (1864) (Figure 7.1), in which the Sphinx is grasping onto the half naked body of Oedipus and gazing coquettishly into his eyes, repeating physically the coupling of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis. What then follows, to use the words of one anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum, is ‘a catalogue (put in the form of questions) of the Sphinx’s amours, which [...] would appear to have been “frequent and free” ’.3 ‘Who were your lovers?’ the speaker demands: ‘who were they who wrestled for you in the dust? | Which was the vessel of your Lust? what Leman had you every day?’ (ll. 44-45). But the Sphinx remains impassive and refuses to answer. Suddenly, the speaker f lies into a rage: ‘Why are you tarrying? Get hence! I weary of your sullen ways, | I weary of your steadfast gaze, your somnolent magnificence’ (ll. 149-50). The silence of the Sphinx, the refusal to acquiesce to the narratophilia of the speaker, the refusal to titillate with tales of her prodigious sexuality becomes an excuse to attack that very eroticism which was so desired. The speaker now seeks to reverse the entire narrative, and to figure himself as a victim — a poor ‘student’ (l. 161) — of this feminine sexual

predator. The Sphinx, already ‘half animal’, is now an ‘animal’ only (l. 167), pure bestiality (l. 168), who carries within herself the power of dissimulation, to make men what they ‘would not be’ (l. 168). She is the power of the false, simulacral, representative of the realm of sensuality and desire opposed to the truth and rationality of man: ‘False Sphinx! false Sphinx!’ (l. 171).