Oscar Wilde: Quite Another Thing

Abstract

In his 1933 biography of Oscar Wilde, G. J. Renier notes that his subject ‘was not effeminate. He was powerful, robust, and Irish.’ It is clear that Renier regards the charge of effeminacy — whether personal or artistic — as a serious one; he dismisses The Picture of Dorian Gray by saying that it merely ‘gives one the sense of ease one experiences in the presence of a beautiful and empty-headed woman with whom one is not forced to live’. However, his insistence on Wilde’s Irishness is double-edged. We are told that the young Oscar wooed London ‘with the wit, the charm and the good complexion of his compatriots’; but — however clean-limbed they may be — Renier finds the Irish thoroughly undisciplined. He bravely faces the problem of Wilde’s sexual preferences by declaring that the homosexual temperament was present in him to a fairly marked degree, though not to such an extent that it prevented marriage and procreation; ‘but’ — and here, so to speak, is the rub — ‘upon this temperament was superimposed a lack of self-control due to his nationality’. Renier does not presume to offer a solution to the Irish problem, but he does chance his arm on the sexual one. ‘It is not by persecution’, he warns us, ‘but by science that the mass production of homosexuals will be averted.’¹