Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 21 of Sexual Personae

Chapters 20 and 21 of Sexual Personae both concern literary works by Oscar Wilde; Chapter 21--the subject of this supplemental essay--is about his play The Importance of Being Earnest. Paglia describes Oscar Wilde as a Decadent androgyne, so I'll start by recapping some background on the Decadent androgyne.

 

Recap: The Decadent androgyne

Prior to the 1700s church and society defined gender roles, social ranks, career choices, etc. so rigidly that life for the common man was mostly hierarchical and Apollonian. But in the second half of the 1700s Rousseau and others argued that people should be free to decide for themselves their own career, fate, religion, etc. Since then, democratic reforms have resulted in greater personal freedom and a shift toward Dionysianism. However, extremes of Dionysian freedom eventually turn into a free fall of chaos resulting in anxiety due to the loss of order, stability, and predictability. With no guidance from society, people tend to go to excess in their life; they get pulled into drama and have difficulty finding the kinds of boundaries and structure that make for a healthy life.

 

The feature that all androgynes have in common is a desire to calm the anxiety that arises from an excess of personal freedom. The androgyne finds closure and peace by detaching himself from the world and living a life of self-completion and solipsism. With no needs or desires, the interest of the androgyne is only stirred by the exceptional: Great beauty, great ugliness, or some other form of exceptionalism or hierarchy.

 

From his bubble of detachment and self-completion, the Decadent androgyne surveys the world with Apollonian discrimination and seizes upon individual things or people that grab his attention. His main challenge is to avoid being drawn out of his bubble of detachment by obsessing over some attraction or passion. If the androgyne obsesses and over-indulges, he may get drawn into a self-destructive course of action that eventually triggers society's condemnation and punishment.

 

The androgyne of manners

In The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde portrays a specific type of androgyne that Paglia calls the "androgyne of manners." Androgynes of manners are the rich, idle aristocrats who frequent the salons and drawing rooms of high society. Paglia says that "Wilde admires 'the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing'; he declares 'cultivated leisure' to be 'the aim of man.'" (p. 531)

 

Paglia says that the character of Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray represents a prime example of an androgyne of manners. Lord Henry "is first of all the Decadent aesthete--Wild's own pose in real life. He symbolizes the aristocracy toward which the middle-class Wilde, like Balzac, aspired." (p. 531) And so the characters of The Importance of Being Earnest all follow the same aristocratic model. Paglia says, "Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, idle gentlemen about town, and Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, their well-bred beloveds, are all androgynes of manners." (p. 534)

 

Hermaphroditism of the androgyne

One of the main features of the androgyne is a certain hermaphroditic quality. As I described in the "Supplemental Essay: The Androgyne" (which is linked in the main blog in the chapter on Sensing), androgynes represent a state where masculine and feminine gender characteristics are in balance; androgyny is the middle between Dionysian and Apollonian, and it acts as a nullification of sex. Paglia says that the androgyne is a closed circle, self-contained. Androgynes have no need to seek their other half in marriage or in society at large; they are their own "other half."

 

The Importance of Being Earnest is about two men courting two women for the purpose of marriage, but Paglia points out that the characters carry out these courtship rituals out of a sense of duty to social obligation rather than any kind of sexual attraction. Paglia says, "They have no sex because they have no real sexual feelings." (pp. 534-535) 

 

As hermaphroditic androgynes, the characters are content to exist in their placid bubbles of detachment and simply go through the motions demanded by high society. On the daily level, the salon environment reinforces their androgyne hermaphroditism by masculinizing the women and feminizing the men. Paglia says that the women are masculinized by the "swordplay" of repartee and witticism, while the men are feminized by the elaborate courtesy and grace of the drawing room atmosphere. Paglia says, "The persona of Wilde's epicene witticisms conflates masculine intimidation and attack with feminine seduction and allure." (pp. 543-544)

 

Concerning the masculinization of the women Paglia says, "The salon dialogue of the androgyne of manners is a duel of 'cutting' remarks. Language is used aggressively as a tool of masculine warfare to slash, stab, pierce, and penetrate. [...] It is no coincidence that terms describing a witty exchange--thrust, parry, riposte, repartee--come from swordplay. [...] Thus we see how a woman of the salon who commands this sharp, challenging rhetoric is masculinized into an androgyne of manners." (p. 544) As a result, the female characters only indulge femininity as a social role, one among many that they play. Paglia says, "Never for a moment are Gwendolen and Cecily persuasively 'female.' They are creatures of indeterminate sex who take up the mask of femininity to play a new and provocative role." (p. 536)

 

Lady Bracknell is an older "masculinized woman" who presides over the affairs of the young couples and pronounces upon them. Paglia says of her: "The play’s supreme enforcer of form is the matriarch Lady Bracknell. She too is an androgyne, a 'Gorgon' with (in the original script) a 'masculine mind.'" (p. 535) "The caste system of The Importance of Being Earnest is ruled by Lady Bracknell, with her head-on Gorgonian confrontationalism. She even rings doorbells in a 'Wagnerian manner.' [...] Lady Bracknell's function as stern guardian of social convention has given her an architectural character. She is masculinized by the principle of hierarchic abstraction I saw at work in Egyptian monumentality." (pp. 557-558) Paglia notes Lady Bracknell's quality of "bitchiness": "Her self-assertions are flashes of mesmerizing female power. Male homosexuals have made 'bitchiness,' applied to dominant women, a peculiar positive. [...] I identify the locution as another hierarchism. Lady Bracknell is a bitch of this kind, unjust, immoderate, dictatorial." (p. 558)

 

Concerning the feminization of the men, Paglia says, "The male androgyne of manners combines aggressive language with a feminine manner, graceful, languid, and archly flirtatious." (p. 544) "The androgyne of manners can be seen in effete collapse in Henry Lamb's painting of Lytton Strachey turning his back to a window, his long denatured limbs draped over an armchair like wet noodles." (p. 533) "The dandified Algernon and Jack are simply supporting actors whom the women boldly stage manage."  (p. 536)

 

Paglia sums up the hermaphroditism of the characters: "The salon is an abstract circle where male and female, like mathematical ciphers, are equal and interchangeable. Personality becomes a sexually undifferentiated formal mask. Rousseau says of the eighteenth-century salon, 'Every woman at Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she.' [...] The androgyne of manners--the male feminine in his careless, lounging passivity, the female masculine in her brilliant, aggressive wit--has the profane sleekness of chic." (pp. 531-532)

 

Recap: Wilde as an Apollonian-leaning androgyne

In my notes for Chapter 20 I said that Decadent androgynes seem to fall into two camps: Dionysian-leaning androgynes versus Apollonian-leaning androgynes.

• Chapter 19 of Sexual Personae described Dionysian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Dionysian-leaning androgynes indulge their Dionysian side by seeking out commanding mother figures and becoming devoted to them. They normally repress their Apollonian side. When taken to the extreme, their Dionysian attraction to mother figures may turn into a masochistic worship of cruel, punishing mother figures in the form of female vampires.

• Chapters 20 and 21 of Sexual Personae describe Apollonian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Apollonian-leaning androgynes indulge their Apollonian side by practicing aggressive aestheticism and hierarchism. They normally repress their Dionysian side. When taken to the extreme, their Apollonian aestheticism and hierarchism may turn into hedonism, cruelty, chaos, and self-destruction.

 

Oscar Wilde was an Apollonian-leaning Decadent androgyne. This means that he indulged his Apollonian side by practicing aggressive aestheticism and hierarchism, and he repressed his Dionysian side.

 

Decadent aestheticism in The Importance of Being Earnest

Again, all the characters of The Importance of Being Earnest are Decadent androgynes. Furthermore, they represent projections of Wilde's own Apollonian-leaning tendencies. So the characters tend to exhibit a high degree of Decadent aestheticism.

 

Recapping the main features of Decadent aestheticism from my notes on Chapter 20:

• The western Apollonian eye rejects Dionysian chaos, change, nature and liquidity; instead, it prizes Apollonian hardness, artificiality, superficial beauty.

• The emphasis on beauty alone displaces and shoulders out any other way of regarding things and people, such as meaning or morality or depth: "The aesthete is an immoralist." (p. 410)

 

Paglia says that Wilde presents the salon in this manner: "The salon, like the petrified object-world venerated by the aesthete, is a spectacle of dazzling surfaces. Words, faces, and gestures are exhibited in a blaze of hard glamour." (p. 532) Paglia says that when Wilde's play is staged, "Language, personality, and behavior should be so hard that the play becomes a spectacle of visionary coldness. The faces should be like glass, without gender or humanity. The Importance of Being Earnest takes place in Spenser's Apollonian 'world of glass,' a realm of glittering, sharp-edged objects." (p. 535)

 

Paglia says that the quick repartee of the salon results in superficial banter rather than deep thought. She says that the inhabitants of the salon reject the internal world (emotions, depth, sincerity) and favor the external world (witticisms and wordplay). This again is the "immorality" of the aesthete (p. 410). Paglia describes "the icy cruelty of the beau monde, to whom moral discourse is alien because it elevates the inner world over the outer. [...] Elegance, the ruling principle of the salon, dictates that all speech must be wit, in symmetrical pulses of repartee..." (p. 532) "Wilde makes speech as hard and glittering as possible." (p. 534)

 

Witticism as a form of Decadent hierarchy

Another feature of Apollonian-leaning androgynes is Decadent hierarchism. In Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, hierarchy was determined primarily on the basis of beauty. Beauty was regarded as the glamor or charisma of an attractive "personality," which denoted a high position in the social hierarchy. Paglia says, "Beauty, appealing to the pagan eye, is Apollonian hierarchy, Greek divinity." (See my notes for Chapter 20 for more on that subject.)

 

In the play The Importance of Being Earnest, however, the emphasis of Decadent hierarchism shifts to repartee and witticisms to determine one's position in the social hierarchy. Paglia says, "The persona latent in the Wildean witticism is a hierarch, the androgyne as social despot. [...] Rhetorical energy is devoted to social differentiation and segregation. Wilde's Apollonian goal was to create hierarchy through wit..." (pp. 543-545)

 

Paglia says that witticisms are used to assert caste relations in a hierarchy. "Wilde's witticisms operate by systematic 'cutting,' separating the self from communality and withdrawing it into aristocratic sequestration. Language in The Importance of Being Earnest is a mode of hierarchical placement. [...] The speakers are constantly positioning themselves at fixed distances from others. [...] The Wildean heroine is a hierarchical commentator, plotting the relations of personae on a mental map." (p. 544)

 

Again, the Apollonian androgyne rejects the internal world and embraces the external world. Paglia says, "Ideas are never developed in the Apollonian style because of its hostility to internality. The maliciously witty androgyne of manners uses language confrontationally, as a distancing weapon..." (pp. 539-540) "Language in Wilde aspires to an Apollonian hierarchism. [...] as aphorism and conversation-stopper the epigram thwarts real dialogue. [...] it glories in self-created aristocratic solitude. The epigram is the language of the Apollonian lawgiver, arbitrarily imposing form, proportion, and measure on life’s fluidity." (p. 534)

 

Paglia traces the history of British humor from Shakespeare to Restoration and Augustan wit and then to Pope and Jane Austen. Paglia says that Lewis Carroll makes comedy about convention and formality. Carroll ventures into the absurd by having Alice argue with a "snappish menagerie of potentates, human and animal, who chide her for transgressions of mysterious local codes of conduct." (p. 547) Paglia says, "The Alice books are a din of creatures, speaking as uncompromising social hierarchs." (p. 551) But Alice remains unflustered by it all. She argues incessantly with the other characters over the application of rules and manners. Paglia says, "Alice is an imperialist of custom. Thrust into an irrational dream-world, she remains serene and self-assured, a mode of well-bred composure." (p. 547)

 

Thus, comedy arises when traditional rules and manners clash with the unexpected. "In Carroll, manner and social laws are disconnected from human or 'civilizing' values. They have a mathematical beauty but no moral meaning: they are absurd. [...] In the Alice books, manners are meaningless but still retain their hierarchical force." (p. 553)

 

In The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde preserves Carroll's focus on convention and formality carried to the point of absurdity, but he adds a new element: Scandal and gossip. Paglia says that Wilde "sexually volatizes English wit. The charming banter of the celibate Austen and Carroll becomes epicene in Wilde because of his sexual experience, which shifts him into Decadence. [...G]ossip intensifies the aura of glamour that signifies prestige in the salon. [...] The erotic excitation of scandal and gossip leads to the volatility of Wildean wit. Words cast off their moral meanings and escape into the sexually transcendental, leaving only vapor trails of flirtation and frivolity." (pp. 556-557)

 

However, Paglia notes that sexual gossip and scandal result in witticisms about aggression and hierarchy rather than witticisms about love and sex. Paglia talks about "gossip as a form of erotic displacement." In gossip, words replace sexual action. As a result, "Western culture fuses eroticism with verbal aggression." (p. 556) This serves the purpose of freezing out Dionysian emotion, chaos, and liquidity and replacing it with Apollonian hardness and hierarchy. Paglia says, "The wonderful airiness of The Importance of Being Earnest comes from the way it diverts potentially sinister sexual relations into comedy. Mating is accomplished with dreamlike ease. Chthonian danger and murk are transmuted into glittering Apollonian words and gestures." (pp. 560-561)

 

Decadent ritual & form

Another feature of Apollonian-leaning androgynes is Decadent ritual & form. As I said above, the feature that all androgynes have in common is a desire to calm the anxiety that arises from an excess of personal freedom. Ritual and form do this by making life concrete and predictable. A life of ritual and form doesn't require deep thought or analysis; it just requires a knowledge of the appropriate social customs.

 

Paglia says, "Wilde's play is governed by the formalities of social life, which emerge with dancelike ritualism. The key phrase of the English fin de siecle was Lionel Johnson's maxim, 'Life must be a ritual.' In Dorian Gray, Wilde says, 'The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality.'" (p. 535)

 

In Decadence, the only things that matter are appearance, hardness, artificiality, and superficial beauty. The passive androgyne simply watches life from his bubble of detachment, and he imagines that everyone else does the same: They all watch him in turn. So the androgyne puts a premium on how he will appear to an admiring audience. Paglia says, "Matters of form are uppermost, in life and death. Emotion is nothing, the public impression everything. [...] Every event occurs with naked visibility on a vast, flat plain. Life is a play scrutinized by a ring of eyes. Dorian Gray contains a major Wildean principle: 'To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.'" (p. 537) 

 

In other words, when you master public form and ritual you become impervious to censure by others and thus avoid anxiety; you "escape the suffering of life." It's a manifestation of the androgyne's Decadent aloofness and self-completion for the purpose of avoiding anxiety. The androgyne doesn't have to care or feel or exert himself on behalf of anyone or anything; he just has to look good. Paglia says, "Late Romantic spectatorship is an escape from suffering because affect is transferred from the emotional and tangible into the visual. No wounds can pierce the glassy body of the Wildean androgyne." (p. 537)

 

Of course, when form and ritual are elevated to such a great height, they become empty of meaning. But that is part of the comedy of The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde borrows the absurdism of Lewis Carroll's Alice books to illustrate the lightness and emptiness of a class of aristocracy who have no purpose in life but to look good. Paglia says, "Language and ceremony unite to take hierarchy to its farthest dazzling point, until it becomes form without content, like the lacy latticework of a snowflake. Thus the play’s characters have abnormal attitudes, reactions, and customs and embark upon sequences of apparently irrational thought, for they are a strange hierarchic race, the aristoi." (p. 554)

 

Paglia says that The Importance of Being Earnest "is inspired by the glamour of aristocracy alone, divorced from social function. Here it departs from Augustan literature, which celebrates Anne's wise and stable rule. In Wilde, no collective benefits flow from throne or court, where the upper class is at perpetual play. [...] Society is divorced from practical reality. Class structure in Wilde exists as art, as pure form. In Earnest [...] order is admired not because it is right or just but because it is beautiful. In fact, order here makes no intellectual sense at all, In Carrollian terms, it is absurd. [...] Aristocracy in Earnest satisfies aesthetic and not moral demands." (p. 554) 

 

The repressed Dionysian (the daemonic)

As I said above, Wilde is an Apollonian-leaning androgyne. He indulges his Apollonian side by practicing aggressive aestheticism and hierarchism, and he represses the Dionysian element--the worship of punishing mother figures. (See my notes on Chapter 20 for more on that.)

 

Wilde repressed the Dionysian element, but he was also aware of it. The Dionysian vampire was a commonplace in the French Decadent movement. In 1893, midway between and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Wilde wrote a one-act play called Salomé. Paglia says that Salomé "capsulizes the French Decadent tradition of the femme fatale"; it explores the relationship "between man and chthonian woman." (p. 562)

 

The plot concerns the death of John the Baptist. Paglia says, "Sex hovers in a static, sterile trance. Salomé is a Late Romantic vampire, fixing John with her aggressive Medusa-eye and driving him into the terminal passivity of death." After John is beheaded, "Salomé seizes the head and kisses and soliloquizes to it, like Hamlet in the graveyard. Like Rachilde's Raoule, she makes love to the dead." (p. 563) (See my notes for Chapter 16 for that last reference.)

 

Salomé, however, was a one-off experiment for Wilde, an attempt to try his hand at a different style of literature. The theme of the Dionysian vampire is otherwise completely absent from Wilde's literature; Paglia notes that "the chthonian is literally an alien realm" for the Apollonian-leaning Wilde. 

 

So how does Wilde deal with the repressed Dionysian in The Importance of Being Earnest?

 

Paglia says that The Importance of Being Earnest "purifies woman of her chthonian taint by turning her into the crystalline androgyne of manners. Now woman's vampire-command of the plane of eye-contact is an instrument not of sexual obsession and enslavement but of pursuit of the chic. Wilde's female hierarchs rule the salon of Apollonian sunlight, not the dark womb-world of objects without contour." (p. 565)

 

Like the vampires of the Dionysian-leaning androgynes, Wilde's women are powerful insofar as they are placed on a higher plane than the men. Paglia says that "Wilde gives his women a rhetoric more 'experienced' than their male suitors'. [...] Woman is complex, man simple. [...] The men love and are loved, but they are dealt with by the women, who predict their every move. The women dictate the structure and pace of relationship." (p. 559) 

 

Paglia calls it a drama of "rapacious female will." She describes the "female coercion" and "nascent maternal tyranny" of the women. (p. 561) But Paglia says that Wilde manages to defuse this sexual imbalance with comedy. Minor clashes of manners are played out as though they are harrowing encounters and rites of passage: "Comedy is produced by a diminution of the scale of epic combat." (p. 561) In Wilde's Apollonian-leaning world, female power is expressed not through vampirism but rather through bossiness and manipulation. Paglia says that the men are ruled "not by a daemonic vampire of the continental Decadence but by the pert English girl of literary tradition. The women are eager to marry--probably in order to dominate!" (p. 560)

 

Again, this comic effect is accomplished by converting the Dionysian vampire into the Apollonian androgyne of manners and converting aggression into comedy. Paglia says, "Wilde's epicene formalism and visionary materialism bring everything hidden and internal into dazzling visibility. Sexual turbulence never disturbs the play's smooth, urbane surface. [...] Wilde's epicene wit keeps female chthonian power in check by turning all four principals into the glass-bodied androgyne of manners." (pp. 561-562)

 

Paglia notes that this represents a departure from the normal order of drama and comedy. She says, "Drama is a mode of Dionysian vocalism, while Apollonian works are characterized by silence and visual clarity. Earnest, with its Apollonian formality and delimited language, is an attempt to cut off the Dionysian roots of drama and create an Apollonian theater, as coldly outlined as an objet d'art." But Paglia goes on to say that this is a losing battle in the long run: "[N]ature is still chthonian, in all her cruelty and barbarism. Wilde, trying to remove the chthonianism from nature, trivializes her, an error for which he will later suffer." (p. 565)

 

Wilde's downfall

Paglia says that Wilde's "error" consisted of being so excessively Apollonian in his life and aesthetics that he was in denial about the "chthonian power" of the Dionysian, which he mostly repressed. His repressed Dionysian eventually emerged in daemonic form to trip him up.

 

Spelling it out in more detail: Paglia says that Wilde's conscious Apollonian outlook was key to his literary success: "Wilde's writing must be hierarchical in order to be beautiful. He has to kill emotion with Apollonian cruelty." (p. 571) But ultimately an excessively Apollonian outlook that banishes the Dionysian becomes so one-sided--so hard and glittering--that it becomes "brittle." Paglia says, "Wilde had developed his personality to so high a degree of tension that all of nature and culture pressed intolerably on the bounds of self. High comic repartee is sometimes called 'brittle,' suggesting its glittering, crystalline character. The brittleness of worldly wit comes from its tightness and narrowness, its willful condensation and contraction." (p. 570)

 

Wilde's Apollonian one-sidedness was driven by the androgyne's desire to avoid anxiety, be self-complete, and live passively in a carefree bubble of detachment. His literary characters reflect this outlook. In Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry escapes the destruction that occurs to Dorian and Basil simply by refusing to be drawn into their drama. (See my notes for Chapter 20 for more.) And in The Importance of Being Earnest, the aristocratic androgynes of manners all float through life without drama, content simply to exist in a world of gossip and witty repartee in salons and drawing rooms. 

 

Unfortunately, in real life Wilde was unable to follow the example of his own characters. It seems that his own Dionysian side ambushed him. As Paglia describes (starting on p. 524), a few years after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde fell in love with an aristocrat, Lord Alfred Douglas, and subsequently became so embroiled in Douglas' affairs that Wilde eventually outraged high society and ended up in jail. As Paglia describes it, "Douglas childishly goaded Wilde to file an ill-advised lawsuit for libel against his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, first of a rapid series of events leading to Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment for homosexuality, from which he never recovered. He died prematurely three years later, at forty-six." (p. 524)

 

In other words, Wilde was drawn out of his androgyne bubble of detachment by Dionysian emotions--an infatuation with Douglas, his rage against Queensbury--which led to his self-destruction. Paglia says that his Apollonian ideas of social hierarchies and cynical aesthetics led to ruin because they were excessively idealistic and didn't take into account the chthonian realities of life: "In his fall, his Apollonian system was overturned and demolished. It all began with a self-deceiving literalization. Earnest's glittering great chain of being is a visionary construction and not the actual social world of law, finance, or aristocracy. Wilde knew this. But intoxicated by his supreme artistic success, which had brought Dorian Gray into being as Lord Alfred Douglas, he sought institutional power to his own selfish ends. Enraged against Queensberry, Wilde stepped over the line from fiction into reality, from which he never returned." (pp. 567-568)

 

Once in jail, Wilde recognized that he had engaged in hubris. All his life he had thumbed his nose at society's rules from the heights of his cynical Apollonian detachment. But in pursuing a doomed agenda against Queensberry he had appealed to the legal system for protection, and society seized upon that moment of vulnerability to take its revenge on him. (p. 568)

 

In jail, Wilde attempted to re-engage society by embracing the Dionysian feminine: He wrote a long letter, which was subsequently published under the title De Profundis, renouncing his earlier Apollonian cynicism and embracing Dionysian empathy and sentimentality. Paglia says, "Crushed by conviction and imprisonment, Wilde undergoes a revolution of principles. De Profundis contains one of the most extraordinary recantations in the history of art. The pitiless sophisticate now embraces suffering as the highest human experience." Wilde wrote, "I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great Art.'" (p. 568)

 

Paglia says, "In prison, the amoral worshipper of beauty passes from Apollonian cruelty [...] to Dionysian empathy, province of the mature heterosexual woman, his own potent mother. Woman is internality, both procreative and emotional. De Profundis ('from the depths') was written in tears and at the midnight hour, not in Apollonian sunlight. It descends into the murky, fluid female world of brooding invisibility [...] Wilde's Decadent biography fulfilled Huysmans' prophetic pattern: the man warring against mother nature suffers ignominious defeat and must surrender himself to her for healing and detoxification." (p. 569)

 

Paglia compares Wilde to the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth was one of the early Romantic passive males in thrall to the Great Mother. The theme of Wordsworth's poetry was Romantic femininity and sentimentality. Virility and action are renounced so as not to awaken the daemonic side of nature. Wordsworth's male characters are sexless and quiescent to the point of immobility. Suffering is exalted, to the point where the poet himself becomes the punishing agent crushing his own characters in his art and sentimentalizing them in their suffering. (See my notes on Chapter 11 for more on Wordsworth.)

 

Prior to his downfall, while still at his Apollonian peak, Wilde had often ridiculed and satirized Wordsworth in his own literature. At that time Wilde had no sympathy for Wordsworth's femininity and exaltation of suffering. But Paglia says that Wordsworth and Wilde actually "possessed virtually identical creative psychologies": They both had "an uncontrolled feminine element of sentimental pathos." (p. 570) Paglia says that this "feminine element of sentimental pathos" was manifest in Wordsworth, whereas in Wilde it was largely repressed and only came out in force after his imprisonment. Paglia said that Wilde's innate sentimentality showed up prior to his downfall in some passages of his literature and also in his poetry, which tended to be "puerile or, more precisely, girlish." (p. 570)

 

But after Wilde was humiliated and jailed, Wilde basically became a mirror image of Wordsworth. Paglia says De Profundis represents "a regression to prehistoric matriarchy," a return to sentimental thralldom to the ancient Great Mother. Paglia says that critics have missed the Great Mother primitivism in De Profundis because Wilde devotes much of the text to the subject of Jesus Christ. But Paglia says that the discussion of Christ in De Profundis is largely symbolic. Paglia says, "Christ is the ultimate male heroine, the passive public sufferer," and ultimately Wilde is really talking about himself--pilloried, humiliated, and crucified by Victorian-era Great Britain. In other words, "the long disquisition on Christ is lugubrious and self-indulgent. [...S]elf-pity is the Romantic male heroine's mesmerizing litany and modus operandi." (p. 569)

 

So Wilde flip-flopped from extremes of Apollonian aestheticism and hierarchism to extremes of Dionysian empathy and sentimentalism at the end of his life. However, Paglia suggests that Coleridge would have set a better example for Wilde to emulate during his life: Coleridge managed to find the middle ground between the two polar extremes. (p. 565) Coleridge tried to write Apollonian redemptive literature, but at the same time he registered and reflected the true strength of the Dionysian feminine. The result was tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian and a measure of truth-telling in his literature insofar as he tried to deal with both honestly and reconcile them.

 

To spell it out a bit more: In my notes for Chapter 12 I said that Coleridge wanted to turn his poems into Apollonian parables of Christian redemption, but the daemonic Dionysian element was always too powerful, leading to a collapse of the poem at the end. Coleridge saw the chthonian horror in nature that Wordsworth and Wilde could not acknowledge. In Christabel, Coleridge didn't even try to redeem the poem and its characters with a Christian ending. The lesbian vampire Geraldine seduces the victim Christabel, and that is the end of it. Paglia calls Christabel "lurid pagan pictorialism. It is an epiphany of evil." (p. 331) (See my notes for Chapter 12 for more on Coleridge.)

 

So if Wilde had been more like Coleridge and had had a greater awareness of the Dionysian side of life to the extent that Coleridge did, it would perhaps have saved him from the hubris of one-sided, "brittle" Apollonianism. Paglia says, "Wilde was undone by his simplistic view of nature, whose chthonian ferocity he never imaginatively grasped." (p. 570) Wilde's extreme Apollonianism made him blind to the danger of his own repressed emotions.

 

Paglia says that a greater awareness of the Dionysian would also have awakened Wilde to the beauty of the Dionysian side, which the Apollonian Wilde could only experience as "puerile and girlish" sentimentality. It would have broadened his artistic scope beyond books and plays and perhaps turned him into a great poet as well. Paglia says, "The repulsiveness of procreative nature is the crucial first principle of Decadent beauty. [...] Wilde, by blinding himself to the chthonian, severed himself from the primal sources of Decadent beauty. Thus his poetry and prose-poems are weak and inconsequential." (pp. 570-571)​

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Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

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~Posted March 27, 2026