Opium, Sex & Colonialism

The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde's Opium Smoke ScreenAuthor(s): Curtis MarezSource: ELH, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 257-287Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030253Accessed: 22/09/2010 21:04

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THE OTHER ADDICT: REFLECTIONS ON COLONIALISM AND OSCAR WILDE'S OPIUM SMOKE SCREEN

BY CURTIS MAREZ

Between two of the windows stood a large Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony, and inlaid with ivory and blue lapis. He watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate and make afraid, as though it held something that he longed for and yet almost loathed. His breath quickened. A mad craving came over him. .... At last he got up from the sofa on which he had been lying, went over to it, and, having unlocked it, touched some hidden spring. A triangular drawer passed slowly out. His fingers moved instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on something. It was a small Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round crystals and tassalled in plaited metal threads. He opened it. Inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odor curiously heavy and persistent.'

In this scene from The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel's hero

anxiously unlocks an ornate cabinet which holds a secret stash of Chinese-boxed opium. The cabinet-or closet, if you will-of Dorian

Gray seems to support Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim in "Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations of the Male Body," that Dorian Gray represents a "gay-affirming and gay-occluding orientalism."2 Both here and in her essay on Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Sedgwick argues that literary depictions of drug addiction often function as displacements for the "secret vice" of

homosexuality.3 Although I find this reading partially persuasive, the

sequel to the above scene significantly complicates it. While Dorian's "closet" is already well stocked with the drug, he nonetheless locks it

up again and departs for the opium dens on the quays of East London. The craving for opium impels a movement from the fastness of Dorian's home to the edge of the city-and by extension, the island nation-where England opens out onto scenes of threatening racial othernesss. Like Dorian, then, the meanings of drug use are migra- tory. Sedgwick's account prematurely stabilizes such migrations, more or less subordinating the multiple significations of opium to an

ELH 64 (1997) 257-287 c 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 257

"epistemology of the closet." While I assume as a given that in Dorian Gray addiction signifies homosexuality, in what follows I claim that for many late-Victorians opium was simultaneously racialized and racializing. Put another way, by focusing on opium I will argue that while racial and sexual categories can overlap, race was an independent, relatively autonomous structuring principal in Wilde's work and the culture(s) he inhabited.4

We will want to keep in mind, for example, that Wilde's position as an Anglo-Irish colonial subject was, in various ways, a racialized one.5 As I will show, Wilde identified with the British Empire and against his stigmatized "Irish" status. In order to transcend this position, Wilde constructed an "Aesthetic Empire" which he hoped could mediate between England and Ireland. Wilde aestheticized the Union by theorizing a distinctly European artistic tradition to which he was a privileged heir. He thus attempted to transform the in-between status of the Anglo-Irish colonial middle class into a position of strength. For these reasons, Joyce's Wildean "cracked looking-glass of a servant" becomes an apt symbol for an art which reflects both the fissures in colonial subjectivity and the sutures that join the colonized to the colonial power.6

At its most expansive, Wilde's model of the Union extended beyond Britain to include much of Western Europe: Wilde sub- sumed both England and Ireland within a European culture which he defined against the cultures of non-European peoples, especially those of the southern hemisphere. Wilde in effect sustained his identification with the British Union and European culture by racializing ornamental otherness as a subsidiary adjunct to an Aes- thetic Empire. Beginning in the 1880s, Wilde attempted to cultivate in his audiences an abstract, decontextualizing taste for forms of non-Western art. If Wilde hoped that his own taste for such objects could serve to consolidate a cultured, British and European sense of self, however, his American and English detractors ultimately col- lapsed the hierarchical distinction between cultured subject and non- Western object, suggesting that as an Irishman Wilde was as primitive as the exotic objects he celebrated. Wilde's audiences, in other words, aggressively re-racialized him. This response to Wilde's mim- ing of racializing imperial ideology thus indexes the distancing and denaturalizing effects of a colonial repetition with a difference.' Wilde's mimicry of empire creates a legitimacy crisis in colonial representation, calling into question who may or may not reproduce imperial racializations. Turning finally to The Picture of Dorian Gray,

258 Colonialism and Wilde's Opium Smoke Screen

I argue that the novel's juxtaposition of non-Western art and opium allows Wilde to restage just such questions of racial representation. Dorian Gray narrates, in my account, one of the constitutive contradictions of fin-de-sikcle British colonization. On the one hand, the Empire disseminates imperial ideologies in Ireland, thus making possible the appropriation of such ideologies by Wilde and other colonial subjects. On the other hand, insofar as the Empire rests on the absolute racial difference of colonizer and colonized, it simulta-

neously bans the ideological traffic between the two.

WILDE AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF COLONIAL IDENTITY

Wilde's commitment to a British Empire of Art would appear, at first glance, to be at odds with his Irishness. How did the son of Anglo-Irish nationalists come to speak for and through British authority? To answer this question, I will consider Wilde's contradic-

tory sense of his racial and national identity as a response to debates

concerning Irish home rule. The participants in this debate included Anglo-Irish Nationalists (like Wilde's parents), Irish Protestant Union- ists, and English Liberals.

In 1880, Charles Stewart Parnell, an Anglo-Irishman, assumed the

leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party and began working for home rule. Such a prospect outraged many Irish Protestants, particularly in Ulster, where "King and Union" served as a rallying cry. Meanwhile, in England, Gladstone was leading an abortive effort to

grant Ireland home rule while simultaneously maintaining the union of the British Empire, albeit in a modified form. In response to Unionist objections, "Gladstone and his followers offered a new model of Britishness: one that conceived of the United Kingdom as a multinational state" containing within its borders distinct yet related historic nations with their own traditions and identities.8 This new model nonetheless presumed that England would remain the prime shaper of the unified nation's future. Gladstone's understanding of home rule served to reconcile "imperial unity with diversity of legislation." Such a reconciliation guaranteed, in Gladstone's words, that the "supreme statutory authority of the imperial parliament remained unimpaired."9 Similarly, although Matthew Arnold was quick to condemn English injustice, he maintained that the Irish must blend into an Empire which was ultimately ruled from England.'o

Despite the clear difference between Liberal and Unionist-one for, the other against, home rule-the two shared a common commitment to the abstract spiritual unity of Empire. Both were critical,

Curtis Marez 259

although in different ways, of the present English parliament and its rule of Ireland; yet both pledged their allegiance to an ideal British Empire which transcended the limits of its current parliamentary instantiation. Unlike English Liberals, however, many Irish Protes- tant Unionists actually lived in Ireland. As obvious as this conclusion sounds, it nonetheless has profound implications. Gladstone's con- version to the home rule camp intensified the strain many Irish Protestants felt between, on the one hand, their loyalty to and sense of inclusion within an abstract English majority, and, on the other hand, the sense that Liberals were deserting Anglo-Irish subjects and cementing their status as minorities within Ireland. The events of the 1880s thus intensified the split in an already divided Anglo- Irish identity. This colonial class felt itself to be both English and

Irish-loyal to the British Empire yet simultaneously proud of its Irish heritage."

The minority/majority contradictions faced by many Irish Protes- tant Unionists also informed the thinking of Anglo-Irish Nationalists, like Wilde's parents. Taken as a whole, the Anglo-Irish professional middle class to which the Wildes belonged was, as David Lloyd writes, "deracinated with regard to rural and Gaelic Ireland and only awkwardly recentered with regard to the Empire, on whose political power they are socially, economically, and often culturally parasitic but from whose center they are nonetheless excluded."12 While the

Anglo-Irish partially identified themselves with the colonizing majority, they remained a distinct yet powerful minority within the colony.

The strains caused by the Anglo-Irish middle class's awkward position between colonizer and colonized helps explain what Lloyd calls the "curious formal coherence between nationalist and unionist thinking.... Quite as much as the unionists, the middle-class Young Irelanders lacked, in consequence of the historical conditions for their existence, any 'organic' connections (to borrow Gramsci's formulation) with the people in whose name they claimed to speak. In consequence, both parties invoke an alternative concept of

organicism that rewrites actual discontinuity as merely a moment in the continuously evolving narrative of the Empire or the nation."'3 Since the Anglo-Irish middle class-both Unionists and National-

ists-occupied structurally similar positions within Ireland, it is not

surprising that they should also develop notions of nation and empire that were formally analogous. While the unique position of the fin- de-siecle Anglo-Irish middle classes may have led a young Yeats, for example, to pursue an aesthetic vision of the Irish national spirit,


these same conditions prompted Wilde to urgently claim England's Aesthetic Empire for his birthright.'4

As an Anglo-Irishman, Wilde began life with a split identity and he attempted to resolve this contradiction by making English letters his conquest and hence the source of his status. According to Richard Pine, Wilde "came from a milieu which, while it did not formally encourage eccentricity, certainly condoned it and had drawn more flexible boundaries than those prevailing in England."'5 As one classmate remembered, this formative familiarity with the Anglo- Irish professional middle class had as its corollary a corresponding alienation from the English public school system.'16 Wilde's experiences at Portora Royal School near Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, could not possibly have prepared him for his encounter with the so- called old boy network at Oxford. Portora may have aspired to English public school status but its slogan-"The Irish Eton"- graphically marked its difference from English institutions. Wilde's origin in the professional middle class and his subsequent movement from the "Celtic fringe" to the core of English culture at Oxford thus describe the arc of a trajectory from the ideological preconditions of Nationalism to those of Empire-from opposition to assimilation. Because Irish Wilde stood out like a sore green thumb at Oxford, he took great pains to replace his colonial accent with a crisp "English" one.'7 Moreover, the migration to Oxford and the London art scene constituted a flight from Irish national politics: "I live in London for its artistic life and opportunities. There is no lack of culture in Ireland but it is nearly all absorbed in politics. Had I remained there my career would have been a political one."'8 But given the formal coherence between Anglo-Irish Nationalism and Liberal Unionism, Wilde's movement from Irish politics to English art required a relatively short step, enabling him to identify with a British Empire represented primarily by an English aesthetic tradition. Like Gladstone's reconceptualization of Britishness, Wilde's notion of Aesthetic Empire theoretically absorbed Ireland as an equal partner yet practically subordinated it to English authority.'

Though Wilde was initially confident that he could perfect a cultural-racial tradition embracing both nations, various events in the 1880s and 1890s raised serious questions concerning the British Empire's ability to absorb Ireland. The members of Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party and, more spectacularly, the Fenians, loudly denounced the moral and political adequacy of the Union. One of the first casualties of Fenian agitation was Lord Frederick Cavendish,

Curtis Marez 261

a onetime dinner guest of the Wildes in Merrion Square, who was kidnapped and murdered in Dublin's Phoenix Park on 6 May 1882 by a group known as "The Invincibles." Shortly thereafter, an American

reporter solicited Wilde's view of the matter. Striking a characteristi-

cally equivocal pose, Wilde first answered: "When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her," but then added: "We forget how much England is to blame. She is reaping the fruit of seven centuries of injustice."2" Wilde here criticizes English injustice but only after he has denounced the violent efforts by oppressed mobs to redress the wrongs of Empire.

From one vantage point, Wilde's criticism of Fenian methods represents a principled stance against violence. Wilde did not, however, distinguish between terrorism and other forms of popular political action. Throughout his career, Wilde described almost all acts of popular resistance as forms of terrorism. For example, in the poem "Libertatis Sacra Fames"(1880), a sonnet which he claimed represented his political creed, Wilde wrote:

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, Than to let clamorous demagogues betray Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy. Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reign Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honor, all things fade Save Treason and the dagger of her trade, And Murder, with his silent bloody feet. (CW, 715)21

While Wilde was in some sense an Irish Nationalist, he was also deeply invested in a tradition of liberty and gloriously bloodless revolution which he associated with the constitutional tradition of the British Empire; this double position allowed him to criticize the current state of English rule in Ireland while maintaining his devotion to a uniquely British heritage encapsulated in a canon of beauty. To return to the sonnet, "the rule of One, whom all obey" remains preferable to popular "anarchy": Wilde's autonomous man of culture-the "One" who must rule--dictates social order. The masses, Wilde contends, should not allow traitorous "demagogues" to represent them, but must instead look to the artist. As he argues in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," "all Humanity gains a partial realiza- tion" in the artist (CW, 1095). Only when a society is anchored by men of culture can a stable heritage-"Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honor"-remain safe from "Treason" and "Murder." Although Wilde


at times disapproved of the current instantiations of the Empire, his alternative-an Aesthetic Empire, or British "inheritance" which the artist must reclaim and perpetuate-remained "imperial." As Wilde explains in the poem "Theoretikos"(1881), the artist can only revital- ize this inheritance when "standing apart" from "the rude people (who) rage with ignorant cries / Against an heritage of centuries." Wilde implicitly argues that the artist's autonomy-his separation from the "rude" masses-can provide new support for a "mighty empire" which had of late developed "feet of clay" (CW, 716).

This model of Empire allowed him to resolve, on an aesthetic plane, the political differences between England and Ireland. "National hatreds are always strongest," Wilde told an American audience, "where culture is lowest." How, we might ask, can culture reduce the hatred between English and Irish? Wilde's paradoxical answer was that the dominance of English art was the only lasting alternative to imperial conflict: "We in our Renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that shall still be England's when her yellow leopards are weary of wars, and the rose on her shield is crimsoned no more with the blood of battle.""22 As already noted, Wilde concluded that an Empire of "Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honor" was England's best protection against the "kiss of anarchy." In response to Fenian bombings and murders, Wilde imagined art as a form of counter- revolution. Here Wilde followed Arnold who, in his essay "On the Study of Celtic Literature," concluded that the institutionalized study of Celtic art would serve to protect England from Fenian terrorism.

Wilde also developed his notion of Aesthetic Empire in the context of contemporary English literature on the nature of "Britishness." Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson isolate two strands of aesthetic thought in turn-of-the-century England-"art for Empire's sake" and "art for art's sake." The former strand, exemplified by writers like Kipling, relied upon the rhetoric of a "declamatory, cajoling and uplifting patriotism." In contrast, proponents of "art for art's sake," Wilde included, often criticized jingoistic celebrations of imperial wars. Despite these differences, however, the two sides shared an analogous form of patriotism. According to Brooker and Widdowson, although the "arts for art's sake" movement was, on the whole, "non-aggressive (and) sometimes non-militaristic," its advo- cates were nonetheless "invested in ideas of the national character, its traditions and a unifying love of country." "Those abashed at aggressive imperialism," they continue, "may have felt more com- fortable with a contemplative Englishness and the 'true empire'

Curtis Marez 263

within; but as forms of nationalistic patriotism, these positions and tones were not incompatible, as popular anthologies, poets and poems show.""23 Brooker and Widdowson conclude that the existence of aestheticized patriotism does not prove "that aestheticism was responsible for imperialist verse, but that its self-conscious removal of art from a common public, its abortive antagonism to 'externali- ties' and its language of mood, dream and sensation were open to appropriation and completion in the service of received attitudes."24

For his part, Wilde was certainly "abashed at aggressive imperialism," particularly in Ireland. He was instead more attracted to the contemporary, "contemplative" model of "Englishness" represented for him by an Aesthetic Empire. In this way, Wilde rearticulated imperial ideology as a potentially oppositional aesthetic discourse. Yet while theoretically in opposition to English imperialism in Ireland, Wilde's British patriotism was, at times, formally indistinguishable from more overtly jingoistic positions. For example, the emphasis on an organic British heritage was common to both aesthetes and the poets of Empire. Even though he sometimes criticized the British Empire and identified with Irish nationalism and the Celtic "race," Wilde more usually idealized English culture.25 In his early poetry he often eulogized the dimmed literary greatness of England whose heritage included Spencer and Milton ("Garden of Eros"[1881], "To Milton"[1881], "Quantum Mutata"[1880]). Wilde routinely identified with England, as in phrases like "our English chivalry" ("Ave Imperatrix," [CW, 712]) or "our English Land" (in "The Grave of Keats"[1881], [CW, 776]). "The Burden of Itys"(1881) even opens with a ritual sacralization of the English landscape: "This English Thames is holier far than Rome ... / God likelier there / Than hidden in that crystal-hearted star that pale / monks bear."

Wilde's appropriation of imperial ideology ultimately rendered it "uncanny." Despite or perhaps because of this Irishman's attempts to represent Britain, English and American audiences attempted to re- familiarize Empire by othering Wilde. In the next section, I will argue that Wilde anticipated such efforts by displacing his own differences onto non-Western ornaments and the people who produced them.

OTHERED ORNAMENTATION IN THE HOUSE THAT OSCAR BUILT

Throughout his life, Wilde exhibited an intense interest in various forms of non-Western ornamentation. Wilde and others in the Aes- thetic Movement did much to change English tastes in this regard. According to a 1895 commentator, "aesthetes" like Wilde stimulated


consumer interest in "curios" and "knickknacks" from "India, China, Japan and elsewhere."26 To the audiences he addressed during his 1882 American lecture tour, Wilde often recommended forms of non-European ornamentation (including supposed Eastern water jugs and embroidery, Japanese vases and mattings, Turkish hat racks, and rugs from China and Persia) as design models."2 Under Wilde's editorship, Woman's World published over thirty essays dealing with aspects of so-called exotic cultures and their ornaments. These articles, too numerous to name, include references to Eastern mac- rame and wallpaper designs; Persian, Egyptian and Indian appliques; South African ostrich feathers for fans; South American perfume bottles; Egyptian and Indian shoes; Egyptian, Chinese and Japanese combs; Chinese screens; and Chinese, Egyptian, Turkish and Persian bridal costumes. All of these Woman's World essays either explicitly or implicitly suggest that non-European ornaments should inspire the fashion choices of wealthy English women.

Wilde further suggested that European designers had been influenced in important ways by the example of non-Western ornament. In his Woman's World review of Alan Cole's translation of Lefebure's History of Embroidery and Lace, for instance, Wilde discussed the beneficent influence of Eastern designs on European lace-making.28 In "The Decay of Lying" (1889), Wilde described the relationship between European design traditions and "Oriental" models in the following way:

The whole history of (decorative) arts in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its dislike of the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount ... we have had beautiful and imaginative work. ... But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. (CW, 979)

Wilde's rejection of mimetic realism makes him sympathetic to "Orientalism." However, "Oriental" ornament does not represent, for Wilde, a truly autonomous aesthetic tradition. As Wilde told an American audience, Asian anti-mimeticism lacks the purity of Classi- cal restraint and becomes monstrous in its too absolute distance from nature. True art, Wilde argues, must reconcile Asian abstraction with a Greek-like attention to the physical world.29 Wilde's celebrated Hellenic revival may thus more accurately be called the Hellenic

perfecting of "Oriental" aesthetics, in which European artists produce

Curtis Marez 265

the perfect harmony between Greek particularity and Asian abstraction. Thus even though Wilde cultivates a taste for Asian art forms, his appreciation of non-Western ornaments is paternalistic, subordi-

nating such objects to the greater good of his Aesthetic Empire. Wilde's interest in so-called exotic ornament implies a hierarchical

distinction between, on the one hand, the autonomous, classically derived European Fine Arts, which, he argued, existed above or beyond the marketplace, and, on the other hand, the supposedly merely ornamental or decorative crafts of the non-European world. For Wilde, non-Western ornament could serve as raw material inspir- ing the artist-critic, but it could not itself be classified as art. Ironically, the autonomy of great European art-its position beyond the marketplace-depended upon the Western artist's use of materials imported from foreign countries. Wilde's true men of culture thus rose above the market and the merely ornamental by appropriating and "improving"non-Western ornamentation. By actively furnishing his Empire with a catalogue of tasteful foreign objects-by helping to promote and institutionalize the taste for what he viewed as exotica- Wilde reformulated but substantially reconfirmed an imperial division of labor between British subjects and non-European objects."3

In the imperial geography Wilde maps, then, the Irish can become citizens of the British Empire, and by extension, the legitimate heirs of European culture, only if others are treated as objects and hence excluded from imperial citizenship: Wilde can only appear British and European in contrast to people he regards as even less British and European than himself. Even as Wilde distinguished between himself and non-Western peoples, however, English and American observers dismantled this distinction, seeing him as just another Irish savage.

WILDE IN BLACK, RED, AND YELLOW FACE

Wilde's efforts to distinguish his own presumably savage Irish identity from images of other colonial peoples met with only limited success since many of his critics continued to link him with the very types of "wildness" he was trying to transcend. During his American tour of 1882, for instance, Wilde was constantly represented with simian features. The Harper's Weekly for 28 January, 1882 even printed an engraving of "The Aesthetic Monkey"-an elegantly dressed chimp whose paw rests near a lily as he grazes raptly at a sunflower. Like numerous other caricatures, the engraving parodies Wilde's (in)famous taste for sunflowers and lilies. Even more striking was a cartoon printed in the Washington Post and later reproduced


in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that juxtaposed a drawing of Wilde and a sketch of the "Wild Man of Borneo." The attached text asks "How far is it from this to this?" The caption continues: "judging from the resemblance in feature, pose and occupation," the two "Wild" men are "undoubtedly akin. ... If Mr. Darwin is right in his theory, has not the climax of evolution been reached and are we not

ending down the hill toward the aboriginal starting point again?""' Recalling this caricature, Daniel O'Connell noted that in San Fran- cisco, Wilde was "regarded in about the same light as the Wild man of Borneo."32 As if attesting to the kinship between Wilde and the simian wild man, one observer remembered that a London zoo housed a monkey which the keepers called "Hoscar Wilde."33

Such representations were informed by fin-de-siecle images of "simian" Irishmen.34 One 1882 lithograph depicted a stereotypical, simian-jawed "Paddy" who proclaimed "Begorra and I believe I am Oscar Himself." The caricature was entitled "National Aesthetics" in an apparent jab at Irish nationalism.35 The image of the Wild(e) apeman also represented a response to a particular aspect of Wilde's aestheticism: his advocacy of anti-mimetic, anti-naturalist ornamentation seemed like "monkey-shines" to a more or less middle-class audience committed to aesthetic realism. To this audience, Wilde was not a true man of culture but instead merely "aped" culture-monkey see, monkey do. Contemporary assessments of non-Western ornament reinforced such a judgement. As the British ethnographer Sir Haddon argued, "savage" ornament remained abstract because non-European artists did not copy directly from nature but instead merely mimicked earlier naturalistic designs and thus produced a degenerate series of copies increasingly removed from nature.36 For people who denigrated so-called primitive art, Wilde's interest in non-Western ornament, despite his own claims for it, made him seem less, not more, civilized.

Various caricatures also linked Wilde with black Americans. The assumption that former American slaves "aped" Wilde's aesthetic tastes demonstrated, to some, that the two were akin. In an attempt to discredit Wilde's aesthetic theories, for example, an Atlanta reporter told the author that black women had worn sunflowers-the very flower that Wilde had famously recommended for use in art and

fashion-during their Independence Day parade.37 A satiric biography of Wilde sold on American trains similarly suggested that Wilde was an aesthetic model for black women. This pamphlet included a cartoon, captioned "A Symphony in Colour," that represents Wilde surrounded by admiring black female house servants. One of the

Curtis Marez 267

Figure 1. "A Symphony in Colour," William Figure 2. "The Aesthetic Craze," Will- Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University iam Andrews Clark Memorial Library, of California, Los Angeles University of California, Los Angeles

servants holds a lily, another a sunflower (figure 1). An 1882 lithograph entitled "The Aesthetic Craze" caricatured Wilde in this way as well. The cartoon depicts a minstrel-like character, dressed as Wilde, hold-

ing a giant sunflower. In response to this spectacle, a "mammy" figure who is doing laundry responds "What's de matter wid de Nigga? Why Oscar you's gone wild!" (figure 2). Another lithograph pictured a black man holding a white lily and announcing "Ise qwine for to

worship dat lily kase it sembles me" (figure 3). Racialized caricatures of Wilde also took the form of public performances, as when Yale students disrupted Wilde's New Haven address by arranging for a tall black servant, wearing a red necktie and a sunflower in his button hole, to lead their procession into the lecture hall.38 Not to be outdone

by their peers, Rochester students copied this prank, paying an elderly black man in Wildean attire to dance down the lecture hall aisle

carrying a huge bouquet of flowers.39 Finally, the St. Louis Post-

Dispatch went so far as to invent the story that the autographs Wilde gave to admirers were in fact copied out by John, his black valet.4" All of these incidents suggest that, at least for some contemporary observers, it was difficult to distinguish between the Irish original and black copies.The caricatures reduced Wilde and the former slaves to


Figure 3. Color lithography by E. B.

Duval, Wilde as African American, Figure 4. Wilde Dressed as a Native American, William Andrews Clark Memorial William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Uni-

Library, University of California, Los versity of California, Los Angeles Angeles

the same level: just as Wilde supposedly merely mimicked true culture, black people in turn supposedly "aped" Wilde.

Such associations were not confined to American audiences. Beneath a Punch cartoon of Wilde as a giant sunflower was amended the phrase "O, I ell just as happy as a bright Sunflower"--a sentiment which the caricature attributes to the "Lays of Christy Minstrelsy."41 In another English periodical, the figure of the black servant becomes a metonym for the aesthete he serves. This parody-a dialogue between two dan- dies-is illustrated by a cartoon of a black servant in "Oriental" dress.42 Puck even printed a cartoon of Wilde with a "pickaninny" hairdo.43

Wilde was also lampooned in caricatures which compared him to American Indians and the Chinese. The satiric biography sold on American trains ended with a drawing of Wilde dressed as a Native American (figure 4). In a move which combined racism and homophobia, Wilde was even erotically linked to a "Sioux chief' who toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show; news reporters translated the chief's speech in the show as "meaning a desire to be left alone in a forest for a few moments with Oscar Wilde."44 To many of his

contemporaries, Wilde's hair, which was quite long during his Ameri-

Curtis Marez 269

Figure 5. Wilde as Chinese, color lithograph by E. B. Duval, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles


Figure 6. "A Voluptuary," William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles

Curtis Marez 271

can tour, reinforced this association with Native Americans. A Nova Scotia pressman reported that Wilde's hair was as "straight as an Indian's."45 And in England, Puck printed a cartoon representing Wilde with a Mohawk haircut "a la Cherokee"(sic).46

To other observers, Wilde's long hair made him resemble the Chinese. One 1882 American lithograph pictures Wilde as a grotesque cartoon "Chinaman" with a pigtail and "Fu Manchu" moustache, flanked by purportedly oriental vases containing a sunflower and a lily. The sunflower, which has rats for petals, suggests stereotypes of the Chinese as parasitic vermin threatening to overrun America. The cartoon's caption reads: "No likee to callee me Johnnee, callee me Oscar" (figure 5). Following American publications, English periodi- cals similarly linked Wilde with the Chinese. In a satiric review of a London Chinese restaurant published in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News for 9 August 1894, for instance, a reviewer expressed his disappointment that the restaurant did not serve roasted dog and concluded that "even the spectacle of Oscar the Irreproachable seated on the terrace . . . fails to lure us further." The accompanying sketch, captioned "Oscar in China," depicts Wilde smoking, teacup in hand, as a pigtailed Chinese waiter looks on.47

English satirists apparently represented Wilde as "Oriental" because of his taste for Chinese opium. In a caricature of Wilde printed in the 18 May 1893 Oxford Magazine and captioned "The New Culture," Max Beerbohm represented him holding a hukha for an Oriental genie.48 Similarly, a drawing entitled "A Voluptuary" in the 14 July 1894, issue of the English magazine Pick-Me-Up pictures Wilde as a presumed Oriental.The sketch depicts him resting indo-

lently in his chair, smoking one of his opium-laced cigarettes, and proclaiming "To rise, to take a little opium, to sleep till lunch, and after again to take a little opium and sleep till dinner, that is a life of pleasure." A close examination of Wilde's face reveals cartoonish "Chinese" features-thin, slit-like eyes and prominent buck teeth (figure 6). Although I have not encountered a photo of Wilde which exhibits buck teeth, caricatures often do.49 And at least one observer remembered Wilde with the heavy lidded "almond shaped" eyes "seen sometimes in Orientals."50

What are we to make of caricatures that represent Wilde as Black, Native American, and Chinese? First, these cartoons demonstrate the simultaneous autonomy and interdependence of sex, gender, and race. In the late nineteenth century, doctors and ethnographers associated non-Western peoples with degenerate, feminine traits.51


These specialists imagined the so-called savages as frivolous and effeminate, with a penchant for extravagant ornamentation, such as glass beads, feathers, and other feminine finery. The caricaturists produced popular versions of these supposedly scientific discourses when they compared Wilde, with his sometimes long hair and his flowers and silk stockings, to non-Europeans, particularly non- Western women. His editorship of Woman's World, with its focus on non-Western ornament, must have reinforced these assumptions. Wilde's contemporaries often described him as both "feminine" and "savage."52 Responses to Wilde's trial, for example, mobilized vis- ceral, anti-Irish sentiments in which Wilde's homosexuality represented a foreign contagion that threatened England. After the first trial, The National Observer congratulated Lord Queensberry and the court "for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents. The obscure imposter, whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices, his follies and his vanities, has been exposed."53 While homophobia remains the dominant theme of such bile, racism reinforced hostile assessments of Wilde's sexuality. The editorialist in The National Observer, for example, contended that Wilde's conviction had "re- vealed" a vain "imposter," an Irishman who merely "aped" English civilization. Because Wilde inhabited volatile, criss-crossing border zones of both sexuality and race, his critics reacted by reasserting fixed boundaries between Ireland and England, and between Trinity Dublin and Oxford.

Second, the caricatures demonstrate the threatening implications of Wilde's aesthetic theories for dominant middle-class values. His championing of anti-mimeticism, artificiality, laziness, lying, and decay explicitly challenged dominant English and American notions of realism, naturalism, the work ethic, sincerity, and progress. Many Americans and Western Europeans believed that non-Western peoples represented, like Wilde, the antithesis of these values. Stereotypes of the lazy black and the indolent Chinese recall Wilde's puncturing of middle-class pieties concerning the value of disciplined labor; his famous polemic against the work ethic helps explain why caricaturists depicted him as a bad example for non-Western servants, as in the sketch of Wilde distracting black female servants from their work. In the background of this drawing, a busy black butler literally looks down upon Wilde and his admirers. A second cartoon juxta- poses an indolent black "Oscar" with a black woman washing clothes. These caricatures suggest that Wilde's critique of the work ethic was

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read as an attack on the values underwriting a division of labor that constructed non-Western peoples as supposedly natural reserves of labor power.

The final point to be made concerning the caricatures is a corollary of the first two. These parodies attest to an economy of racial representation which both enabled and countered Wilde's attempts to reproduce an inclusive, British and European cultural tradition. Armed with his aesthetic theories, Wilde endeavored to transcend the limits of his colonial origins and acquire the privileges of membership in an Aesthetic Empire which could represent the Irish as well as the English. Wilde's efforts to overcome his inferior Irish origins by constructing a European cultural identity could not, however, guarantee that English and American audiences would accept him as an equal. On the contrary, no matter how perfect his English accent became, to many observers Wilde remained an Irishman trying to ape his betters. The caricatures, in other words, attempt to deconstruct Wilde's displacement of his Irish savageness onto non-Western peoples by reconstructing the Irish as racialized colonial subjects. What this dynamic therefore makes visible is the process whereby the "unstable equilibrium" of racial categories is constantly contested and reformulated.54

In the final section, my understanding of Wilde's Irish trajectory, his formulation of a British and European identity, and the caricaturist's deformation of that identity will guide my reading of Dorian Gray. I will argue that Dorian's opium addiction becomes a foil for Wilde's redemptive appropriation of non-Western cultures: Dorian's dependency orientalizes him, threatening to dissolve his British identity. The fact that this racialization narrative mimics Wilde's own story illustrates the singular persistence-however reformulated or reformulateable-of racial economies in late-Victorian culture.

THE CONSOLATION OF ART AND THE PAINS OF OPIUM

Psychoactive drugs, it has been suggested, are the glue of empires-particularly if one extends the list of psychoactive drugs beyond opiates, alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee and chocolate to include sugar and some spices. As commodities, psychoactive drugs are readily used up, they create their own demand, people will pay far more than their production costs for them, and they are relatively transportable or at least their supply can often be controlled. On the other hand . . . psychoactive drugs can also play their part as empires come unstuck.

Robin Room55

Colonialism and Wilde's Opium Smoke Screen 274

When Wilde wrote Dorian Gray, the medical and moral panic over opium use had reached unprecedented levels.56 Opium critics represented addiction to the drug as a form of racial contagion akin to miscegenation; English reformers deemed the drug especially perni- cious because it suggested the possibility of a quasi-racial transfor- mation or degeneration. The use of words like "taint" and "adultera- tion" to describe opium's effects in the bloodstream indicates the phantasmatic connection between fears of miscegenation and concern over the use of a dangerous foreign substance. Since scientists performed little new drug research in the period, critics relied

heavily upon literary representations of addiction.57 These literary depictions of opium use generally conflate two fears-the fear of blood-mixing in the individual English body and the fear of a foreign invasion of the national body.58 While Thomas De Quincey's Confes- sions of an English Opium Eater may have initiated this tradition, beginning around 1860 and continuing into the twentieth century, English readers consumed various representations of so-called oriental drug use. A partial list of such representations would include accounts of the Prince of Wales's visit to a den in the 1860s, Dickens's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), various journalistic "exposees," the Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip," and, of course, Dorian Gray. Wilde himself visited an opium den while touring the San Francisco Chinatown in 1882.59

Reformers constructed the stereotype of opium as a "yellow peril" in response to a new fin-de-siecle colonial geography. During the 1880s and 1890s, England was increasingly intermixed with and dependent upon non-Western cultures. As Eric Hobsbawm argues, European colonization increased sharply in this period: roughly between 1880 and 1914, active policies of "formal conquest, annexation and administration" replaced earlier policies which simply assumed the "economic and military supremacy" of capitalist, Western Euro-

pean countries. During these years, one-fourth of the world's land mass was divided or redivided among half a dozen states. For Britain in this period, India was the crown colonial jewel. Perceived inter- ests in India required a global expansion of British military and economic power. To maintain access to the region, British strategists sought control not only over "the short sea routes to the subcontinent (Egypt, the Middle East, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and South

Arabia), and the long sea-routes (the Cape of Good Hope and

Singapore), but also over the entire Indian Ocean, including crucial sectors of the African Coast and its hinterland." As a result, improve-

Curtis Marez 275

ments in transportation and communication exposed British consumers to goods from around the world. Manufacturers and consumers became increasingly dependent on materials from the non-Western world, like rubber (the Congo, the Amazon), copper (Chile, Peru, Zaire, Zambia), and diamonds (South Africa). More and more, British grain and meat came from European settlements in Australia and the Americas. Near the turn of the century, some of the first tropical and sub-tropical fruits appeared on European tables, as did increasing amounts of more traditional colonial goods such as tea, coffee, and cocoa.60 Perhaps even more to the point in the present context, in the last third of the nineteenth century, London was the center of the international drug trade, with most of the world's supply of raw drugs passing through the auction houses of Mincing Lane.61

Along with new goods, colonial expansion also brought new problems, including fears of political overextension, supposed foreign invasion, domestic unrest, and racial dissipation or contagion- forms of decay from both without and within.62 Of particular concern to Londoners was the increasingly visible presence of the Chinese in the East End. During the 1880s and 90s, Chinese emigration to England, particularly London, greatly increased. By 1881 there were over 665 Chinese in England, up from 147 twenty years earlier. Close to four hundred Chinese were living in London in 1891, and most of these lived along two narrow East End streets, Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway.63 Though by American standards the London Chinese population was comparatively small, to many En- glish people the Chinese nonetheless appeared to constitute a threat to public safety. Fear of the Chinese helps explain the fin-de-siecle outcry over opium, for even though opiates were widely available throughout the nineteenth century, they were only perceived as a problem when coupled with increasing Chinese emigration to Lon-

don.64 As Marek Kohn writes, the Chinese opium dens in the East End "threw fears of racial degeneracy into relief," suggesting that the drug had the power "to turn English folk Chinese-to act as a fluid medium for the transmission of foreignness."65 Reformers, government officials, and members of the press feared that opium- induced racial contagion would inevitably trickle upwards, moving from the Chinese to the white working class before finally infecting the middle class.66 Opium, I would argue, thus encapsulated the conditions of a relatively new imperial geography in which the masters of European culture found themselves increasingly dependent upon the non-Western world for goods and labor.67


In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde reflects upon such changes in the colonial landscape by foregrounding ostensibly exotic goods, particularly intoxicants. His characters consume Turkish cigarettes, coffee, tea, cocoa, and, of course, opium. Wilde begins his novel by plunging the reader into an environment heavy with opium smoke and the weight of non-Western art objects:

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey- sweet and honey-colored blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremu- lous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. (CW, 18)

Here Lord Henry imagines the scene as a sort of painted Japanese screen; the "Japanese effect" distracts his attention, however briefly, from the particularities of his West London setting, and transports him to another world. While his "oriental" fantasy literally rests upon a Persian divan, it also floats upon a cloud of cigarette smoke heavily "tainted" with opium (CW, 19). In this way, Wilde associates the consumption of non-Western artifacts with the consumption of opium and suggests that both allow Lord Henry to escape from his immediate surroundings.68

Eventually, both opium and non-Western art will serve the same purpose for Dorian, intermittently allowing him to escape his past. Indeed, tragic events seem to stimulate Dorian's taste for both exotic ornamentation and opium. After Sybil Vane's suicide, for instance, Dorian consoles himself by studying unusual textiles, such as Delhi muslins, Dacca gauzes, and cloth from Java and China. Dorian also finds relief in the "monstrous" musical instruments he loves to "touch and try" (CW, 106-7). After murdering Basil Halward, Dorian has recourse to the numbing effects of opium, which he stores in an appropriately exotic container, an elaborate gold-dust lacquered Chinese box (CW, 139). And in chapter sixteen, Dorian travels to an East End opium den hoping to purchase forgetfulness, if not forgiveness: "There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new"(CW, 140). While on his way to

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the East End, he compulsively repeats to himself Lord Henry's formula "To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul," hoping that, with the help of opium, he may realize at least the first half of this chant.

While there are good reasons for comparing Dorian's art objects and his opium-both are exotic, foreign substances-such a comparison partially obscures their different historical meanings.69 Around the turn of the century, non-Western ornament and opium were beginning to represent opposing social values: while the possession of the first could potentially attest to one's cultured love of beauty, the possession of the second might indicate a dangerous, or at the very least suspect, taste for supposedly foreign sensations. Even though Wilde suggests that both opium and non-European ornament produce similar states of transcendent forgetfulness, he ultimately distinguishes between the negative, debilitating effects of the first and the positive, liberating potential of the second. Whereas the taste for non-Western musical instruments ennobles Dorian in Wilde's eyes, a taste for opium ultimately degrades him.

Wilde's own borrowing of aesthetic models from "dead or dying" non-Western cultures determined the sharp distinction he made between the appropriation of non-European artifacts, on the one hand, and the assimilation of opium, on the other. Because Wilde presumed that non-Western cultures were no longer living, he believed that artists could unproblematically appropriate exotic objects so as to inject European culture with new aesthetic life. Wilde's work in this area helped popularize the premise that non-European peoples had died so that Europeans might live-that they had sacrificed their lives so that their ornamental remains might redeem Western culture. Wilde constructed a unified European identity, I have argued, through literary and journalistic writings which fostered a taste for deracinated non-Western goods. While composing Dorian Gray, Wilde borrowed heavily from a South Kensington publication on the historical and geographical evolution of music.7" In the passages on South America which Wilde incorporated into Dorian Gray, the South Kensington catalogue repeatedly indicated that collectors discovered the objects under discussion in ancient tombs.71 Like Wilde, museum collectors apparently found the works of ancient Aztecs and Mayans more interesting then those of living South Americans.

In chapter 11 of Dorian Gray, Wilde writes approvingly of Dorian's taste for the "luxury of the dead" (CW, 109): Dorian finds his instruments "either in the tombs of dead nations or among the


few savage tribes that have survived contact with western civiliza- tions" (CW, 107). Note that Wilde characteristically reverses conven- tional assumptions concerning the source of cultural contagion-it was in fact the so-called savage tribes who suffered through cross- cultural contact, not the Europeans. Nonetheless, he implies that the extinction of these peoples-as well as the presumed future extinction of the few remaining tribes-confers a distinctive rarity upon their artifacts: the savage's loss is European civilization's gain. Once these artifacts from "dead and dying" cultures have been liberated from their particular cultural and historical contexts, Dorian, like Wilde, can employ them to help obliterate memories of the past.72

A similar deracination of opium, however, proved almost impos- sible since the drug was intimately associated with the perception of an immediately menacing Chinese presence in London. The close popular link between opium and "the yellow peril" explains Wilde's juxtaposition of non-Western art and the drug. Whereas Wilde suggested that the appropriation of non-Western artifacts injected new life into a moribund aesthetic tradition, and in this way produced a sphere of European autonomy and freedom, he believed that opium had the opposite effect-that it threatened to taint European "blood" and to reduce Europeans to a state of dependency. By juxtaposing "dead" non-European cultures to the "living" issue of Chinese opium, Wilde attempted to avoid the type of dependence on otherness which plagues Dorian: Wilde's negative representation of Dorian's opium addiction allows him to represent his own assimilation of non-Western cultures more positively.

Thus in Dorian Gray's opium den chapter, Wilde demonizes Dorian's drug addiction so as to sanction his own use (or abuse) of non-European ornament. Wilde accurately places his opium den in the quays of London's East End docks, home to visiting sailors-

notably South East Asian sailors-and the Chinese merchants who catered to their needs. Dorian finds himself poised on the precarious border of the British Empire, where the silhouettes of incoming and

outgoing ships are visible on the horizon (CW, 142-43). Situated in this way, the den enables Wilde to reflect upon the powerful yet vulnerable solidity of the Empire in the face of newly fluid borders. The den's inhabitants represent various border crossings and mixups. As Dorian enters the den, his attention is drawn to a group of

apparently oriental sailors: "Some Malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove playing with bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered." Also "chattering" away at the bar are two

Curtis Marez 279

prostitutes, one of which has "a crooked smile, like a Malay crease," suggesting that she may have contracted a case of foreignness from either the opium or the sailors. Behind the bar is "a half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster," who "grinned a hideous greet- ing" (CW, 142-43). All of these characters are monstrous revisions of Wilde's earlier representations of non-Western art and peoples. The half-caste, for example, recalls chapter eleven's "slim turbaned Indians (who) blew through long pipes of reed or brass" (CW, 106). The prostitute's smile is similarly suggestive: the phrase "Malay crease" or "kris" referred at the time to a Malaysian knife famous for its wavy edge, thus recalling Dorian's collection of exotic artifacts.73 The Malay sailors with their bone counters echo the South American Indians Wilde describes in the novel who long ago made flutes from human bones (CW, 106-7). Perhaps more important, the Malays also recall the Chinese sailors Wilde encountered in San Francisco during his American tour. As he told various audiences,

When I was in San Francisco, I used to visit the Chinese theaters for their rich dresses, and the Chinese restaurants on account of the beautiful tea they made there. I saw rough Chinese navvies, who did work that the ordinary Californian rightly might be disgusted with and refuse to do, sitting there drinking their tea out of tiny porcelain cups, which might be mistaken for the petals of a white rose, and handling them with care, fully appreciating the influence of their beauty. . . . If these men could use cups with that tenderness, your children will learn by the influence of beauty and example to act in like manner.74

Here, however, their white, flower-like tea cups have been replaced with the more ominous bone counters.

In all three descriptions of the opium den inhabitants, Wilde zooms in on savage mouths and teeth, suggesting not only that Dorian is unable to assimilate non-Western cultures, but also that non-Western cultures threaten to swallow him up. Dorian's addiction represents his dependence upon non-Western goods: he cannot consume the drug in the privacy of his apartment, secluded from the world around him, but is instead compelled to leave his home in the West End and journey eastward, toward the docks which open out onto vast foreign lands. Whereas Dorian can enjoy "savage" musical instruments in relative social isolation, his consumption of opium requires that he confront his position in a global economy with links to non-Westerners like the Malay sailors. Positioned within an increas-

ingly global market, Dorian's aesthetic autonomy seems to evaporate.


He has set out for the den hoping to cure the soul by means of the senses, but finds that he is unable to transcend his dependence upon a sensual, non-Western good-opium.

These opium den revisions of Wilde's previous representations of non-Western art graphically demonstrate the ambivalences inherent in his Aesthetic Empire. Although Wilde valorized non-Western design as a supplement to a European aesthetic heritage, he was horrified when otherness became a necessary supplement-an addiction to difference which threatened to dissolve the personal freedom and artistic autonomy Wilde associated with Empire.7" He imagined a world in which non-Western ornament became an "art for Empire's sake" by supporting the institutions of a European "art for art's sake" movement; opium, however, threatened to undermine that vision of Western autonomy and transcendence, reversing the relationship of mastery.

From Wilde's perspective, then, Dorian is flawed because he fulfills only one half of Lord Henry's mantra: "To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." While Dorian sells his soul to sensual pleasure and becomes a dependent,Wilde recoiled from such dependence, claiming also to cure the senses by means of the soul. Although Wilde conceded that sensual properties could cure the soul, he implicitly criticized his hero, maintaining that ultimately the relation between sense and soul should be reversed, for the spiritual properties of the cultured man must purify the raw material of sensation.

This purification process required that Wilde construct, so to speak, a British soul that would allow him to employ non-Western art in abstraction from its social and material histories. Since his theory of the artist-critic's transcendent aesthetic position presumed the coherence and autonomy of a distinctly British-and by extension European-artistic tradition, dependence upon non-Western cultures potentially threatened to dilute the Empire's independent purity. As a response to this threat, Wilde turned Dorian's addiction into a sort of smoke screen, constructing the opium den as a sphere of dependency which, by contrast, made Wilde's appropriation of non- Western ornament appear as an autonomous judgement of taste. Dorian's addiction, in other words, allowed Wilde's own dependence on racial otherness to emerge as an autonomous assertion of will, the Empire's self-coronation. Wilde's deconstruction of his colonial sub-

ject position and subsequent reconstruction of an identity as an autonomous artist-critic ultimately reflected and extended the late

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nineteenth-century establishment of autonomous aesthetic institutions. The objectification of non-Western cultures also consolidated the apparent autonomy and coherence of the Empire. The taste for exotica that Wilde helped disseminate, in other words, ultimately reinforced the forms of objectification which Fanon argued are the preconditions for colonial exploitation.76

Of course Wilde's position as spokesman for empire proved vulnerable. His trial, imprisonment and public vilification attest to the limited power of an "Aesthetic Empire" to protect him from homophobia. While I would not want to diminish the centrality of this fact-both for Wilde's day and our own-I would only add that Wilde's fate was significantly determined by racism as well. Indeed, I would suggest that Wilde refracts his own racialization through his character, Dorian. Early in Dorian Gray, we learn that, despite his aristocratic veneer, Dorian's background is rather suspect. Dorian's mother was Lady Margaret Devereux, the daughter of Lord Kelso; yet his father was so disreputable (or at least insignificant) that his name is never recorded. We only learn that Lady Margaret eloped with "a penniless young fellow; a mere nobody, ... a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something of that kind" (CW, 39). Later, Dorian will guarantee his social prominence by conveniently forgetting this lowly paternal heritage. Dorian's forgetfulness recalls Wilde's own experiences at Oxford, where he says he "forgot" his Irish accent.77 Dorian's origins, in other words, represent a transposition of Wilde's own trajectory. This trajectory leads Dorian to the opium den, where he encounters the "colonial" identity Wilde had tried to erase: if the toothsome Malay sailors are Wilde's others, they also constitute so many self-portraits. As I have already noted, one American portrait of Wilde explicitly compared him to a Malay, the "Wild Man of Borneo."

If Wilde attempted to represent empire by mastering non-Western art forms, in the end he found that racial caricatures proliferated beyond his control, recalling him to his "proper" colonial place. The opium den in Dorian Gray thus represents the rage of Caliban who, when gazing into the mirror of Empire, cannot avoid seeing an Irish face.

University of Chicago

NOTES I would like to thank a number of people who read and commented upon different

drafts of this essay, including Alyson Bardsly, Kate Brown, Bill Brown, Catherine Gallagher, David Lloyd, Shelley Streeby, and Irene Tucker. I delivered a version of


the paper before the American Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago and am grateful to the group's members for their insightful remarks. Finally, I want to thank the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library both for their support of my research and for the permission to reproduce several images.

1 The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 139- 40. Hereafter I will abbreviate this text as CW and refer to it parenthetically in the text.

2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of Califor- nia Press, 1990), 175.

3 Sedgwick, "Up the Postern Stair: Edwin Drood and the Homophobia of Empire,"

in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), 180-200.

4 For an important theoretical discussion of race as a relatively autonomous

structuring category, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986).

5 See L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1971).

6 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), 6; see also Joyce's "Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome," in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), 201-5.

7 Here I am thinking of the work of Homi K. Bhabha, especially "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation," and "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 139-70 and 85-92.

8 D. G. Boyce, "'The Marginal Britons': The Irish," in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920, ed. Robert Colls and Phillip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 234-5.

9 Gladstone in a speech before the House of Commons, 8 April, 1888. Quoted by D.G. Boyce, 235.

10 See Arnold's "On the Study of Celtic Literature"(1866) and "The Incom- patibles"(1881), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962), vols. 3 and 9. I am indebted to David Lloyd's reading of Arnold in Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 6-13.

11 My description of the colonial elite's conflicted identity has been informed by

Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1967) and Frantz Fanon's "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness" and "On National Culture," in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 148-248.

12 Lloyd, 61. 13 Lloyd, 68-69. 14 Yeats often disdained what Wilde called the "gross popular appetite" of the

middle classes or, as the poet called it in "September 1913," the culture of the

"greasy till." In early essays Yeats, like Wilde, revised Matthew Arnold's "On the

Study of Celtic Literature." For example, see "The Celtic Element in Literature" (1897, 1902), in Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 173-88. Yeats is perhaps closest to Wilde in "Ireland and the Arts," written in 1901 but first published in the 31 August, 1904 United Irishman (203-10). Like Wilde in "The

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Soul of Man Under Socialism," Yeats here argues that mercantilist values have stunted the public's powers of aesthetic "appreciation," or in Wilde's language, aesthetic "receptivity." This early version of Yeats's cultural nationalism, though formally similar to Wilde's notion of Empire, remains opposed to Wilde's theory of a "British" aesthetic tradition which subsumes Ireland. "I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands of miles away, would still be in their own country" (205-6). Wilde aimed his trajectory in a different direction, endeavoring to purge the colonial memories he carried with him.

15 Richard Pine, Oscar Wilde (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1983), 14. 16 E. H. Mikhail, Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London:

MacMillan Press, 1979), 1:19. 17 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 38. Wilde

sometimes lapsed into Irish idioms while writing but he made every effort to expunge such usages. See Pine, 9-10.

18 Mikhail, cited by Pine, 24. 19 This comparison is especially apt given Wilde's admiration for the British Prime

Minister. After leaving Oxford, Wilde sent several sonnets to Gladstone. During the

1880s, the two men met and enjoyed one another's company. In July of 1881, Wilde sent Gladstone his first volume of poems "as a very small token of my deep admiration and loyalty to one who has always loved what is noble and beautiful and true in life and art, and is the mirror of the Greek ideal of the statesman." Wilde later inscribed a copy of "The Happy Prince" to the Prime Minister-"to one whom I, and all who have Celtic blood in their veins, must ever honor and revere, and to whom my country is so deeply indebted." See Ellmann, 82 and 108; and Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hurt Davis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 79, 218.

20 Ellmann, 196. 21 For Wilde's political creed see Ellmann, 196. 22 Quoted by Ellmann, 269-70. 23 Howard Brooker and Peter Widdowson, "A Literature for England," in Colls

and Dodd, 117, 122. 24 Brooker and Widdowson, 126. 25 Noteworthy in this context is his poem "Ave Imperitrix" ([1880] CW, 712). For

Wilde's identification with Ireland and Irish home rule see Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 215, 224-26; and the San Francisco Chronicle, cited in Wilde, Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Robert D. Pepper (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, publication 142, 1972). Wilde often praised, in Arnoldian fashion, the "Celtic race," with its supposed proximity to nature and facility for imaginative work. See Wilde, Irish Poets, 28, 34; the Denver Tribune, 13 April 1882 (clipping at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library); and the introduction to Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks, ed. and introduced by Michael S. Helfand and Phillip E. Smith II (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 80-81. In reviews of Yeats, Wilde lauded the author's essentially "Irish or Celtic character," and his ability to represent "our Irish folklore." See Reviews by Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross

(London: Methuen and Co., 1908), 437-39. See also a second laudatory review of


the Oisin poems, 523-25. When English censors banned his Salome, Wilde point- edly declaimed "I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in artistic judgement. I am not English-I am Irish-which is quite another thing" (quoted in Mikhail, 1:188).

26 Thomas F. Plowman, Pall Mall Magazine (Jan. 1885), 39. 27 Kevin O'Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada (Toronto: Personal Library, 1982), 158,

168-69, 170-73. 28 This review originally appeared in Woman's World for November, 1888 but is

reprinted in Wilde, Reviews, 327. 29 Wilde makes these claims in a typescript of "The English Renaissance" at

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Univ. of California at Los Angeles. 30 Such an objective orientation toward non-Europeans parallels what Fanon

writes of the Antillean who objectifies the "savage" Senegalese. In both cases, as Fanon aptly puts it for the present context, "the other only comes on the stage to furnish it" (Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markham [New York: Grove Weidenfeld Press, 1967], 212). See also Fanon's "Racism and Culture," in Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Weidenfeld Press, 1967), 33-35.

31 The two preceding caricatures are reproduced in Lewis and Smith, facing 82, and 101.

32 Daniel O'Connell, "An Echo of the Days When Oscar Wilde was a Guest at the Club," San Francisco Chronicle, 24 October, 1897 (clipping at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library).

33 Mikhail, 2:300. 34 See L. Perry Curtis, "Simianizing the Irish Celt," in Apes and Angels: The

Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), 29-57.

35 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Collection of Wildeana, Univ. of California at Los Angeles.

36 Alfred C. Haddon, Evolution in Art As Illustrated by the Life-Histories of Designs (1895; New York: AMS Press, 1979).

37 Mikhail, 1:99. 38 Lewis and Smith, 128-29. 39 Lewis and Smith, 156. 40 Lewis and Smith, 211. 41 Punch, 25 June, 1891, reproduced in Lewis and Smith, 27. 42 The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Collection of Wildeana, Univ. of

California at Los Angeles. 43 January, 1882, reproduced in Douglas Cruickshank, "The Fantastic Envelope:

An Account of Oscar Wilde's Invention of Himself and his Travels through America," Fessendan Review 12, 59.

44 Lewis and Smith, 37. 45 Mikhail, 1:106. 46 Punch, January, 1882, reprinted in Cruickshank, 59. 47 Unidentified clipping, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Univ. of

California at Los Angeles. 48 The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California at Los

Angeles, holds the original Beerbohm drawing. 49 See, for example, the Beerbohm and Hodges drawings in Ellmann, 492-93. 50 Mikhail, 2:299.

Curtis Marez 285

5' See Sandra Siegal, "Art and Degeneration: The Representation of 'Decadence"' in Degeneration: the Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia Univ, Press, 1985), 119, 219; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siecle (New York: Viking Press, 1991), 1-18.

52 Mikhail, 2:300. 53 Pine, 106. 54 Omi and Winant, 78-79. Of course Omi and Winant situate the "unstable

equilibrium" of racial meanings in relationship to postwar America, arguing that "these conditions have not existed at all times and all places." Nonetheless, given the historical persistence in England of "the Irish Question," Omi's and Winant's term seems apt in the present context.

55 Robin Room, "Drink, Popular Protest, and Government Regulation in Colonial Empires," Drinking and Drug Practices Surveyor 23 (1990), 5.

56 Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987); Terry Parssinen and Karen Kerner, "Development of the Disease Model of Drug Addiction in Britain, 1870-1926," Medical History 24 (1980): 275-96, as well as Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society. 1820-1930 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983). For a contemporary account, see Seymore J. Sharkey, "Morphomania," The Nineteenth Century (1887): 229-44.

57 Michael Montagne, "The Influence of Literary and Philosophical Accounts on Drug Taking," The Journal of Drug Issues 18 (1988): 229-44; see also Parssinen, Secret Passions.

58 Marek Kohn, "The Orient Within," Narcomania (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 31-49.

59 Lewis and Smith, 248. 60 The information in this paragraph is from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire,

1875-1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). For the quotations see 57, 59, 63, 66, and 68.

61 Parssinen, Secret Passions, 15-16. 62 See Showalter, 1-18. 63 K. C. Ng, The Chinese in London (London: Institute of Race Relations, 1968),

5-11. 64 Parssinen, Secret Passions, 22-41; Berridge and Edwards, 195-205. In the 1850s

and 60s there was some concern over opiate use among the working class in Britain, particularly the practice of using drug preparations to quiet infants. Such concern, however, was relatively short-lived, whereas the supposed Chinese opium menace preoccupied public discourse from the roughly the 1880s through the 1920s. For an analysis of the infant doping scare, see Berridge and Edwards, 97-105.

65 Kohn, 12. 66 Berridge and Edwards, 199-200; Parssinen, Secret Passions, 104-5. 67 Hobsbawm, 56-83. 68 Dramatizing Wilde's own aestheticization of non-Western peoples, Lord Henry's

opium-abetted imagination wanders from the room's "Japanese effect" to the image of Japanese painters. In this way, Wilde reproduces a process of cultural appropriation whereby Europeans obscured the differences between non-Western ornaments and the people who produced them. Although Lord Henry fantasizes about both


non-European art and artists, he imagines the latter as bloodless ("pallid") "jade- faced" objets.

69 Sedgwick, for example, compares opium and "the commodity-based orientalism of Dorian Gray," suggesting that the two represent roughly equivalent means for

affirming and occluding male/male desire. See "Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Senti- mental Relations of the Male Body" in Epistemology, 175.

70 Isobel Murray, notes to The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Oxford University of Press, 1974), 245.

71 Carl Engel, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode Publish- ers, 1874).

72 To be sure, Dorian's collection, which includes flutes made from human bones, is distinctly gruesome, perhaps recalling the violent history of imperial appropriation. Sedgwick argues that the exotic commodities in chapter eleven "testify ... to the overt atrocities they sometimes depict, and most of all to the 'monstrous, 'strange,' 'terrible' (I use the Wildean terms) exactions of booty in precious minerals, tedious labor, and sheer wastage of (typically female) eyesight, levied on the Orient by the nations of Europe" ("Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations of the Male Body" in Epistemology, 175). However, Wilde more or less

safely contains such recollections, by displacing the violence into the distant past. In

any case, Dorian does not associate the instruments with European imperial violence but rather with the picturesque "monstrosities" supposedly characteristic of non-Western peoples.

73 See the Oxford English Dictionary. 74 O'Brien, 62-63. 75 My discussion of opium as a necessary supplement has been influenced by

Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 63-171, and "The Rhetoric of Drugs," an interview with Autrement, trans. Michael Israel, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 5 (1993), 1-25. See also Curtis Marez, "The Coquero in Freud: Psychoanalysis, Race, and International Economies of Distinction," Cultural Cri- tique, 26 (1994), 65-93.

76 Franz Fanon, "Racism and Culture," in Toward the African Revolution, 33-35. 77 Quoted by Ellmann, 38.

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Opium, Sex & Colonialism