1. Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1931), 175. H.C.’s narrative offers further evidence of the power of Wilde’s fictions to determine the real. One evening H.C. is escorted by a fellow reader of Psychopathia Sexualis to “several of the cafes where inverts are accustomed to foregather.” At one of these “trysting places,” he meets a youth who answers some of his “book-begotten queries”: “The boy-prostitutes gracing these halls, he apprised us, bore fanciful names, some of well-known actresses, others of heroes in fiction, his own being Dorian Gray. Rivals, he complained, had assumed the same appellation, but he was the original Dorian; the others were jealous imposters” (177).

2. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 83.

3. Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1931), 175–76.

4. Ibid., 179.

5. Joel Fineman, “The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest,” October 15 (1980): 79. My thinking about Wilde remains indebted to the brilliant but gnomic analysis in Fineman’s essay.

6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), 61.

7. The pseudo-opposition between “trivial” and “serious,” with which I play repeatedly in this chapter, is Wilde’s own; the subtitle of Earnest is “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.” That Wilde intended a pseudobinarism subject to parodic reversal is made emphatically clear by the subtitle of an earlier draft: “A Serious Play for Trivial People.”

8. Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” in Intentions (London, 1891); reprinted in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago, 1969), 399.

9. André Gide, Oscar Wilde: A Study, trans. Stuart Mason [Christopher Millard] (Oxford, 1905), 30.

10. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” in Intentions; reprinted in Ellmann, ed., The Artist as Critic, 305.

11. Oscar Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (New York, 1962), 185. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Letters.

12. Ed Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,” PMLA 102, no. 5 (October 1987): 801–13. During the writing and revising of this essay, I benefited enormously from Cohen’s generous conversation regarding Wilde, the trials of 1895, and the history of homosexuality.

13. Jonathan Dollimore, “Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide,” Textual Practice 1, no. 1 (1987): 56; reprinted in Genders 2 (Summer 1988): 24–41.

14. Fineman, “Significance,” 79.

15. The epigraph, from W. H. Auden, “An Improbable Life,” in Forewords and Afterwords (New York, 1973), 323, is from a review of Hart-Davis’s edition of Wilde’s letters and appeared originally in the New Yorker (March 9, 1963); it is also available in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Ellmann (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), 116–37.

16. Wilde was not, as is often assumed, convicted of sodomy; rather he was prosecuted and convicted under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized “acts of gross indecency” committed between males, whether in public or private. For an analysis of the conceptual shifts entailed by this legislation, see Ed Cohen, “Legislating the Norm,” 181–217.

17. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 207. Miller’s landmark essay “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” from which I quote here, has informed my thinking throughout these pages.

18. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 76.

19. Fineman, “Significance,” 83.

20. For more on Henry Shirley Bunbury, see William Green, “Oscar Wilde and the Bunburys,” Modern Drama 21, no. 1, (1978): 67–80. I disagree with Green emphatically on the importance and function of Bunbury, to wit: “Even allowing for the possibility that the term may have existed in the form of a private joke, Wilde had ample opportunity to avoid using it in the play if he suspected it had any homosexual connotations which might have drawn attention to him.…Wilde could have substituted another name for Bunbury.”

21. Ibid., 71.

22. Fineman, “Significance,” 89. The English colloquialism for buttocks is of course not bun but bum, but the frail consonantal difference distinguishing the two terms always remains liable to elision, especially in performance, whether in a slip of the actor’s tongue or in the labyrinth of the auditor’s ear. Bun, as I argue above, points immediately to Algy’s serious overeating and mediately to Wilde’s sexual practice, which, his biographers agree, was primarily oral.

23. André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, trans. Justin O’Brien, 4 vols. (New York, 1948), 2:410.

24. The OED citation for Banbury reads: “A town in Oxfordshire, England, formerly noted for the number and zeal of its Puritan inhabitants, still for its cakes.” See also the Mother Goose nursery rhyme “Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross.” The phonemic and imagistic affinities between Bunbury and Banbury proved too much for at least one of the typists working from Wilde’s handwritten manuscripts. In a typescript of the play dated “19 Sep. 94” by Mrs. Marshall’s Type Writing Office, Bunbury repeatedly appears as Banbury. Wilde, whose careless, looping handwriting no doubt encouraged the error, patiently restored the u’s.

25. This line, spoken by Miss Prism about Ernest (whom, of course, she has not met), does not appear in the canonical three-act Earnest with which most readers are familiar; it is to be found, rather, in the various manuscript and typescript drafts of the so-called “original” four-act version. There is, I believe, no single text qualified to make “legitimate” claim to definitive status, a belief that requires at least a brief explanation of the textual confusions surrounding Earnest. When in 1898, après le deluge, M. Melmoth sought to publish Mr. Wilde’s farce, his only recourse to “the play itself” was to a truncated or castrated copytext, George Alexander’s prompt copy, which had provided the basis for the short-lived 1895 production. Since Wilde’s own drafts and copies of Earnest had been auctioned off in the bankruptcy proceedings following his imprisonment, “Alexander’s manuscript,” as Wilde called it, was for all purposes the only extant text upon which to base the published version of 1899. The problem with Alexander’s typescript is that it contained substantial cuts, some authorial and some not, including, most famously, the excision of an entire scene in which Algy is almost arrested for Ernest’s outstanding debts; this cut was essential to the structural reorganization of four acts into three. That Alexander’s emendations were significant there can be no doubt; upon seeing the play on opening night, Wilde (whom Alexander had dismissed from rehearsals) is reported to have remarked: “My dear Aleck, it was charming, quite charming. And, do you know, from time to time I was reminded of a play I once wrote myself, called THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST.” Quoted in A. E. W. Mason, Sir George Alexander and the St. James Theatre (New York, 1969), 79. Not until the 1950s would the various working manuscripts and typescripts of the “original” four-act versions begin to surface, so that, by way of a temporal inversion that Wilde surely would have delectated, Earnest is a work whose lost origins postdate its publication by some fifty years.

With due respect, then, for such vertiginous reversals, and for the problematics in authorization they imply, I refer throughout this essay to both the canonical three-act version and the antecedent four-act versions without worrying the issue of textual authority. If this runs counter to sober scholarly method, so much the better, since it acknowledges the elusive present-absence of “the text itself,” which like Bunbury is always “somewhere else at present.” Unless otherwise specified all references here to the four-act version are to The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People in Four Acts As Originally Written by Oscar Wilde, ed. Sarah Augusta Dickson, 2 vols. (New York, 1955); hereafter this text will be cited as Dickson. Miss Prism’s line as quoted above can be found in Dickson, 1:77. See also The Definitive Four-Act Version of The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Ruth Berggren (New York: 1987), 23–41.

26. H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (New York, 1975), 187.

27. Dickson, 1:146. This line occurs during a wonderful bit of stage business in which, while Jack and Lady Brancaster (as she is called in the four-act versions) are discussing “the painful circumstances of [Jack’s] origin,” Algy and Cecily are hiding “Behind [a] screen…whispering and laughing.” As the good lady speaks, Algy’s attempts to silence or “hush” Cecily interrupt her discourse; annoyed by these intrusions into her speech, Lady Brancaster complains: “It is clear that there is someone who says “Hush” concealed in this apartment. The ejaculation has reached my ears more than once. It is not at any time a very refined expression, and its use, when I am talking, is extremely vulgar, and indeed insolent. I suspect it to have proceeded from the lips of someone who is of more than usually low origin.” In this brilliant and, sadly, excised tableau, Wilde compactly stages the sociopolitical operations of Bunburying representation, in which a discourse of social rectitude is interrupted or saturated by an “ejaculation” that can be heard but not seen. As the screen behind which Cecily and Algy are sporting very nicely materializes the strategy of visual occlusion, so does the transposition of “hush” and “ejaculation” make audible, as laughter, the Bunburying operations by which a silent or secret erotics may be mouthed but not quite bespoken. We should note in passing, too, that Wilde here anticipates the more than audible ejaculation with which Roland Barthes closes The Pleasure of the Text (New York, 1975): cinema, Barthes writes, “succeed[s] in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss” (67). Barthes’s text will hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text as Pleasure.

28. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford, 1981), 79.

29. See note 25 above.

30. Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried, 2 vols. (Paris, n.d.) 389. This privately printed text, which appears to be a pirated edition of another book also issued anonymously under the same title by the Ferrestone Press (London, 1912), claims to be the most “complete and accurate account of this long and complicated case. Special care, it will be seen, has been devoted to the elucidation of abstruse legal points.…The evidence of witnesses, together with the prolonged cross-examination of Wilde in each of the three trials, is given as fully as possible, with due regard to discretion.” I cite this text by page number only, since the two volumes are consecutively paginated.

31. Three Times Tried, 355.

32. I encountered this passage while reading Ed Cohen’s doctoral dissertation “Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of the Discourse on Male Sexuality” (Stanford, 1988), to which I remain indebted. I quote with permission of the author.

33. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name (Boston, 1970), 95.

34. Philip K. Cohen, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (Rutherford, N.J., 1979), 217.

35. Three Times Tried, 203.

36. Queensberry’s “Plea of Justification” is reprinted as appendix A in H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1962), 323–27. The 1843 Criminal Libel Act, the statute under which Wilde sued Queensberry for accusing him of “posing as a somdomite [sic],” permitted the defendant (Queensberry) to place before the court a document, or “Plea of Justification,” supporting the allegation for which the libel suit was being prosecuted.

37. Three Times Tried, 191.

38. Jonathan Culler, “The Call of the Phoneme” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (New York, 1988), 3.

39. Ibid., 14.

40. Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” in Poetry and Prose, ed. Mona Wilson (London, 1970), 500; quoted in Culler, 6–7.

41. Hichens’s travesty of the Wilde-Douglas affair was originally published anonymously (London, 1894); for Wilde’s bemused response to The Green Carnation, see Letters, 373.

42. Dickson, facsimile typescript of act 4, 2:34; also Berggren, p. 190.

43. That Wilde was familiar with the specialized vocabulary of the Urning is beyond dispute: “A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet put in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms” [Letters, 778].

44. Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” in The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), 4.

45. The pun thus also slyly alludes to our culture’s paradigmatic instance of “trivial” meeting: the terminal convergence of father and son at the crossroads called Phokis, where Oedipus meets his father and his fate. “If I understand you,” says a darkening Oedipus to his mother Jocasta, “Laios was killed/At a place where three roads meet.” Trivial indeed. Against the background of these tragic resonances, we may read Wilde’s earnest and trivial pun as a gay countersign to the murderous seriousness of Oedipal heterosexuality. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1969), 37.

46. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, 1991), 41–62; all further quotations from Barthes in this paragraph refer to these pages.

47. Mary McCarthy, “The Unimportance of Being Oscar” in Ellmann, ed., Oscar Wilde, 108.

48. No doubt McCarthy would have intensified her antipathy for Wilde’s “private joke” had she known, or cared to know, that the Ernest/Earnest/Urning pun did not originate with Wilde; that it made its literary debut two years before Wilde began work on Earnest; and that Wilde stole—or, as literary critics like to say, “appropriated”—the pun for the transvaluing purposes of his own genius. A little less “private” than McCarthy would like to believe, the wordplay first appeared in a volume of poetry called Love in Earnest (London, 1892) by the Uranian writer John Gambril Nicholson. A collection of sonnets, ballads, and lyrics, Love in Earnest included a poem of pederastic devotion entitled “Of Boys’ Names”:

Old memories of the Table Round      In Percival and Lancelot dwell, Clement and Bernard bring the sound      Of anthems in the cloister-cell,      And Leonard vies with Lionel In stately step and kingly frame,      And Kenneth speaks of field and fell, And Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

One name can make my pulses bound,      No peer it owns, nor parallel, By it is Vivian’s sweetness drowned,      And Roland, full as organ-swell;      Though Frank may ring like silver bell, And Cecil softer music claim,      They cannot work the miracle,— ’Tis Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

Cyril is lordly, Stephen crowned      With deathless wreaths of asphodel, Oliver whispers peace profound,      Herbert takes arms his foes to quell,      Eustace with sheaves is laden well, Christopher has a nobler fame,      And Michael storms the gates of Hell, But Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

envoy.      My little Prince, Love’s mystic spell Lights all the letters of your name,      And you, if no one else, can tell Why Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

49. Dickson, 1:111.

50. Hyde, Oscar Wilde, 333.