Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde: Ideal and Real Marriage

Abstract

Any study of the relationship of gay writers to the discourse on heterosexual marriage in modern drama must begin with Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), but while Wilde was basking in his all-too-brief success as a West End playwright, Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) was writing one of the works that would make him both a canonical gay writer and a champion of marriage reform. Both Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter were born of privilege and became distinguished university graduates, but they took opposite paths. Carpenter imported the muscularity, homoeroticism, and democratic spirit of American poet Walt Whitman to Britain while Wilde famously tried to export his aestheticism to America. Carpenter spent his life speaking and writing in support of socialism; Wilde wrote essays in favor of socialism but was too much of an individualist to be part of any movement. He was sympathetic to Carpenter’s writings on socialism but found them too solemn. Both, in very different ways, became gay icons: Wilde as martyr, Carpenter as champion of homosexual rights. While Wilde became a symbol of excess and depravity for his time and place, Carpenter was seen by many radicals and homosexuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the visionary who would lead to a more enlightened attitude toward homosexuality.

As long as man is only half-grown and woman is a serf or a parasite, it can hardly be expected that Marriage should be particularly successful.

Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming-of-Age

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Lord Darlington in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan