Intro
We imagine that Oscar Wilde lived in the most fabulous of closets. He belonged to a school of art called Aestheticism. This school of art focused on the surface as the essence of things—what you wear, how you speak, how you smoke, what art you like.
Wilde had a lot to hide. But he hid himself away in fashions that were both exciting and dangerous. His closet was a "glass closet," to borrow a term from Eve Sedgwick.
For Sedgwick, being in the closet changes language. It changes not just what you say but how you say it. It changes your body, too. What you wear, how you stand, how you shake hands, and how long you hold someone's stare are all a part of the closeted performance of sexuality.
And if we know one thing about Victorians, gay and straight, it's this: they hid things very well. If those lovely men and women had an adage, it would go something like: if you can't speak the ugly truth, decorate it.
The art of language was all about ornamentation—a witty turn of phrase, a metaphor, a euphemism. When an artist can't just come right out and say it, whatever it might be, he disguises it with language. And Oscar Wilde always loved a good masquerade party.
Innuendo and allusion helped Wilde explore themes that were taboo without getting into too much trouble. For a while, anyway. He thought his language was pretty safe in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but he was wrong. Dude got put on trial.
Quote
Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
Analysis
It takes a lot of practice to be a fabulous fibber. Sedgwick tells us the closet requires a type of performance "initiated as such by the speech act of a silence." How can you speak a silence? You cover it with well-crafted language. And boy, does Wilde ever do that.
Here, Wilde's character Lord Henry says, "Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us." One easy reading of this statement is that Wilde's talking about his own sexuality.
What's cool about this part of Sedgwick's queer theory is that it encourages us to use History and the events of a person's life in our analysis of his writing. Wilde put a lot of his own feelings into the speech of his character Lord Henry, who ends up like a kind of ventriloquist dummy. The public trials of Oscar Wilde revealed that he was indeed a man who had sex with other men.
Big whoop, right? But Wilde's brilliant use of ornamental and coded language responds to the public discussion about him.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful."
But Wilde knew completely yielding to his temptations could be deadly. So, instead, the coded dialogue Wilde wrote for Lord Henry comes to comprise the author's closet. He makes a statement while trying not to say too much.
Want a more contemporary example of how silences around sensitive topics end up shaping what they do say? Consider this. When faced with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
In this comment, he relies on a legal definition of "sexual relations." He's clearly trying to divert our attention away from whatever sexy activities he actually engaged in with Ms. Lewinsky. Clinton's silence about those real acts was covered up by his particular use of legal language.
Sedgwick teaches us how to read silences. In particular, she teaches us how to understand "spoken" silences, like Clinton's and Wilde's. Who knew there was so much to say about keeping quiet?