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Abstract
This article examines the coverage of the Oscar Wilde trials (1895) in the French press by focusing on the newspaper Le Temps, a liberal publication aimed at the educated elite of the late nineteenth century. It sets the reportage within the context of a teratological construction of homosexuality, and argues that the purported neutrality and transparency of language in Le Temps masks a form of “journalistic prosecution” whereby Wilde’s prosecution was displaced from the legal to the journalistic realm in France. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, it further demonstrates the discursive effect of the reports via a discussion of ornamentation, decadence, and the body, and concludes with a brief glance at the relevance of the discussion to the queer politics of our own time.
Notes
* The author is grateful to Sarah Cooper and Jan-Melissa Schramm for their advice. He would also like to thank Yota Batsaki, Andrew Counter, Robert Weninger, Nicolas White, and Emma Wilson for their comments on the article.
1. H. Montgomery Hyde (ed.), The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: William Hodge, 1948), 339
.2. For a useful discussion of the passage of the Labouchère Amendment, see Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 199–205
.3. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), 331
.4. See the first chapter of Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–21
, for an illuminating reading of the encounter between Wilde and Gide. Dollimore argues that although Wilde played an important role in the development of Gide’s sexual aesthetic, Gide did not abandon the notion of an essentialist self in his work in favor of Wilde’s de-centered subjectivity.5. Elaine Sho walter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 149–50
.6. P. Villars, “Tribunaux étrangers: M. Oscar Wilde et le marquis de Queensbery,” Le Figaro, April 5, 1895
, at 3. All translations from the French material are my own unless otherwise indicated.7. Antony Copley Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980: New Ideas on the Family, Divorce, and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 1989), 135–54
.8. Robert Nye, “Sex Difference and Male Homosexuality in French Medical Discourse, 1830–1930,” 63 Bulletin of the History of Medicine 32–51 (1989)
, at 32.9. Id., at 44.
10. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), vii
.11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Robert Hurley, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 43
.12. See Pierre Guillaume, Individus, familles, nations (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1985)
; and Agnès Fine and Jean-Claude Sagoï, La population française au XIXème siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991) .13. Jacques Bertillon, Le problème de la dépopulation (Paris: Imprimerie Lahure, 1897)
.14. Id., at 46.
15. Id., at 49.
16. Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 107
.17. Patrick Pollard, “Wilde and the French,” 53 English 19–29 (2004)
.18. For helpful discussions of the history and significance of Le Temps in French journalism, see Daniela Bohnacker, “Le Monde: Portrait d’un quotidien ‘sérieux,’” in Panorama de la presse française, Ernst Ulrich Grosse and Ernst Seibold, eds. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994), 134–56
; and Jacques Thibau, Le Monde: Histore d’un journal, un journal dans l’histoire (Paris: Jean Claude Simoën, 1978) .19. Clyde Thogmartin, The National Daily Press of France (Birmingham: Summa Publications, 1998), 112
.20. Tit, “Oscar Wilde,” Le Figaro, April 9, 1895, at 1.
21. “Scandaleux procès,” Gazette de France, April 8, 1895, at 2.
22. The exact circulation figures of Le Temps for 1895 are unavailable. In June 1884, there were 30,800 copies printed, compared to 90,000 copies of the most popular paper, Le Figaro, in the same month. Pierre Albert, Documents pour l’histoire de la presse nationale aux XIXème et XXème sie`cles (Paris: Centre de documentation sciences humaines, 1977), 47
.23. “Le procès Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, April 5, 1895, at 3.
24. Id., at 4.
25. “Le procès Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, April 21, 1895, at 3.
26. “Le procès Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, April 7, 1895, at 3.
27. Paul Roche, “Oscar Wilde jugé par le Docteur Max Nordau,” Le Gaulois, April 10, 1895, at 1–2.
28. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 43
.29. Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 111–27
.30. Le Temps, April 5, 1895, at 3.
31. “Le procès Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, April 13, 1895, at 3.
32. Id., at 4.
33. “Deuxième procès d’Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, May 24, 1895, at 3.
34. Schor, supra note 29 at 116.
35. Rae Beth Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
.36. Schor, supra note 28 at 45.
37. Nye, supra note 8 at 44.
38. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 206
.39. Id., at 208.
40. Id., at 209, 210.
41. Id., at 213.
42. Quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.K. Huysmans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 87
.43. Id.
44. Nicolas Harrison, Circles of Censorship: Censorship and its Metaphors in French History, Literature, and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 62–3
.45. For an example of the homoerotic investment in boxing, and of the wider sexual signification of the hand in the British context, see William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 26–73
.46. Le Temps, April 21, 1895, at 3.
47. “Autour du procès Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, April 26, 1895, at 3.
48. Sinfield, supra note 10 at 96.
49. Rouche, supra note 27 at 1.
50. Huysmans, supra note 38 at 78.
51. Nicholas White, The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 127–50
.52. Huysman, supra note 38 at 213.
53. Le Temps, April 5, 1895, at 3.
54. Le Temps, April 21, 1895, at 2.
55. Id., at 3.
56. Id., at 2.
57. “Le procès d’Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, April 28, 1895, at 3.
58. “Deuxième procès d’Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, May 25, 1895, at 3.
59. “Deuxième procès d’Oscar Wilde: le verdict,” Le Temps, May 27, 1895, at 3.
60. Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993), 207
.61. Id., at 195.
62. Id., at 187.
63. Id., at 185.
64. Le Temps, April 13, 1895, at 3.
65. Id.
66. “Le procès d’Oscar Wilde,” Le Temps, May 1, 1895, at 3.
67. Le Temps, April 21, 1895, at 3.
68. Le Temps, April 28, 1895, at 3.
69. Le Temps, May 27, 1895, at 3.
70. For a detailed discussion of the development and meaning of the duel in Europe, see Victor Gordon Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
.71. Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 194
.72. Donna Andrew, “The Code of Honour and its Critics: the Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700–1850,” 5 Social History 409–34 (1980)
, at 423.73. Id., at 431.
74. Recounted in Robert Baldick, The Duel:A History of Duelling (London: Chapman & Hall, 1965), 94
.75. Kiernan, supra note 70 at 269.
76. Nye, supra note 16 at 192.
77. Id., at 188.
78. Le Temps, April 13, 1895, at 3.
79. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, J.B. Foreman, ed. (London: Collins, 1990), 1095
.80. Id., at 1094.