FOR ART'S SAKE - Ghent University Library

GHENT UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY

2008-2009

FOR ART’S SAKE

COMPARISON OF OSCAR WILDE‘S THE PICTURE OF DORIAN

GRAY AND OUIDA‘S UNDER TWO FLAGS

Hanne Lapierre

May 2009

Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial

Dr. Kate Macdonald fulfilment of the requirements

for the degree of ―Master in de

Taal- en Letterkunde:

Engels-Spaans‖.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Kate Macdonald who oversaw the building up of the main

body of the text. Her remarks were very helpful for writing the final version of this paper.

I also thank Dr. Andrew King for giving me access to some of his interesting books

on Ouida and for his remarkable enthusiasm on the subject.

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction ..............................................................................................1

2. On Ouida…………………………………………………………………4

3. Aestheticism……………………………………………………………..13

3.1. Introducing Aestheticism 13

3.2. The Origins of Aestheticism 15

3.3. Aspects of Aestheticism 17

3.3.1. Aestheticism as a View of Life 17

3.3.2. Aestheticism as a View of Art 21

3.3.2.1. The extraordinary status of the artist 21

3.3.2.2. An unlimited devotion to art 23

3.3.2.3. Rejection of conventional moral values 24

3.3.2.4. Superiority of form over content 30

3.3.2.5. Conclusion 33

4. Consumer Culture……………………………………………………...34

4.1. The Rise of Consumer Culture 34

4.2. Advertising 42

4.3. The Commodity 49

4.3.1. Use Value and Exchange Value 49

4.3.2. Being vs. Having 52

4.3.3. Having vs. Appearing 53

4.4. Criticism on Consumer Society 55

4.5. Commodification of Everyday Life 60

5. Gender and Sexuality…………………………………………………...64

5.1. Cross-gendered Characters 69

5.2. Homoeroticism 72

6. Conclusion……………………………………………………………....76

Works Cited 80

Attachments

1. INTRODUCTION

The nineteenth-century author Oscar Wilde hardly needs an introduction. Famous

for his frequently-cited witty epigrams, his eccentric appearance and audacious manners,

and his homosexual relationship with the student Lord Alfred Douglas, which led to his

imprisonment in 1895, the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, among many others, has

built up a notorious reputation in literary history. Though in his day his work was

frequently ridiculed and morally disapproved of, today his novels are still widely read.

After his education at Oxford, where he first became familiarised with the aesthetic

theories of Walter Pater, a man who would deeply influence his later artistic career, Wilde

used his talent as a brilliant conversationalist to enter the world of the British artistic elite.

Wilfrid Blunt, a contemporary of Wilde, wrote: ―The fine society of London and especially

the ‗Souls‘ ran after him because they knew he could always amuse them, and the pretty

women all allowed him great familiarities‖ (Blunt cited in Fortunato, 4). After a lecture

tour in the United States, Wilde started his writing career. His famous society stage

comedies (for example, Lady Windermere‘s Fan), were hugely popular with the Victorian

audience but his collections of short fiction written earlier were less successful (Dowling

2001, iii). Although his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) earned him a reputation

as a serious artist (Dowling 2001, iii), the scandal it provoked is as legendary as the novel

itself.

In his book The Eighteen-Nineties, Holbrook Jackson states that ―[t]he Eighteen

Nineties were so tolerant of novelty in art and ideas that it would seem as though the

declining century wished to make amends for several decades of intellectual and artistic

monotony‖ (18). This is a typical reaction of Victorian journalists and literary critics who

examined a fixed canon of high-standard authors. However, when crossing the boundaries

of this literary canon and looking at less famous authors, it becomes clear that the years

leading up to the 1890s were not as monotonous as Jackson claimed. One such author who

has, until very recently, been neglected by literary criticism is Ouida. Her novels have

often been condemned as mere popular fiction without any originality. In Victorian

Wallflowers (1934), Malcolm Elwin criticises Ouida‘s novels by saying that:

The type of mind which could be entertained by Ouida‘s novels, without

feeling impatience at their artificiality and indignation at the author‘s

estimate of the reader‘s intelligence, was the type of mind for which the

circulating libraries ordered their supplies and the cheap monthly magazine

was created in the final decades of the Victorian era. (311)

Nevertheless, when comparing her fiction to Wilde‘s novel the striking similarities

between both cannot be overlooked.

The main intention of this thesis is to study the similarities as well as the

differences between Ouida‘s novel Under Two Flags (1867) and Wilde‘s The Picture of

Dorian Gray (1890)1. Through this comparison I intend to investigate whether Ouida has

influenced Wilde to a great extent, or whether the differences rather outnumber the

similarities and the resemblance between the two novels can be understood as a similar

reaction to the revolutionary changes take took place in Victorian society. In the first

chapter I investigate how it is possible that an author such as Ouida, whose fiction shared

so many characteristics with Wilde‘s, has been almost completely ignored by literary

criticism. The next three chapters will be dedicated to the comparison of Under Two Flags

and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Similarities can be found first of all in their views on art

and their alliance to the theory of aestheticism. Their lives and their works were centered

upon a complete devotion to beauty and art. Secondly, their reactions to the development

of the growing consumer society were comparable. An anxiety that literature would soon

1 A plot summary of both novels can be found in the attachments.

be subjected to consumer culture‘s laws of demand and supply can be detected in both

novels. Finally, resistance to traditionally prescribed gender roles from the middle of the

nineteenth century also characterised their novels. Ouida‘s novel Under Two Flags

resembles Wilde‘s both in the portrayal of characters, major motives and use of language:

in evaluating Ouida‘s novel as work of literature we can observe significant literary

responses to aestheticism and social criticism within the genre of popular fiction that was

commercially highly successful, even if critically ignored.

2. ON OUIDA

Ouida is the pen name of the English novelist Marie Louise Ramé, born in 1839 in

Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk. With twenty-four novels, two volumes of essays and a great

number of short stories to her name, she was one of the first British female best-selling

authors. Abandoned as a child by her father, she lived alone with her mother and

grandmother and supported her family with the profit from her writing. In times where

women were supposed to remain in the private domestic sphere of their husband‘s home,

her self-sufficiency was regarded as scandalous. In her maturity she had an eccentric and

independent lifestyle that stood in sharp contrast with conventional Victorian moral codes

for women: she lived a life that others could only fantasise about for themselves. As well

as supporting her mother, her literary earnings were necessary to cover the costs of her

extravagant lifestyle. In Ouida: The Phenomenon (2008), Schroeder and Hodges Holt state

that:

[T]he young author moved to the luxurious Langham Hotel, where she spent

money recklessly, behaved outrageously, and hosted elaborate dinner parties

and evening receptions, often smoking cigars with the men. […] She

demanded to be addressed as Madame de la Ramée or Madame Ouida, and

her voice was unpleasantly rasping and her appearance eccentric. (16)

Also in her writing career, she did not conform to Victorian moral principles. In

Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1973), Martha Vicinus explains that

―The cornerstone of Victorian society was the family; the perfect lady‘s sole function was

marriage and procreation […]. All her education was to bring out her ―natural‖ submission

to authority and innate maternal instincts‖ (x). Ouida attempted to expand the subject

matters for women writers beyond these themes of marriage and domestic work. Schroeder

and Holt affirm that ―[Ouida] was similar to contemporaries as Flaubert and Zola in her

bold depiction of explicit sexual scenes and her use of sexual metaphors‖ (13). However,

in order to be able to write about what they want, women should first of all be emancipated

from the authority and oppression of men. In her plea for the sovereignty of women, Ouida

stood not alone. Already in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in her A Vindication of the

Rights of Women:

Ah! why do women, I write with affectionate solicitude, condescend to

receive a degree of attention and respect from strangers, different from that

reciprocation of civility which the dictates of humanity and the politeness of

civilization authorise between man and man. (64-5)

She insists on the fact that women‘s dependence on their husbands is a form of ―legal

prostitution‖ (165) and that they should demonstrate their capability of acting as a rational

and intellectual being rather than cultivating the stereotype of the woman as a weak,

vulnerable and sentimental person. According to Wollstonecraft, women should at all

times strive to reach equality with men:

Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as

nurses. […] Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue, if they

were educated in a more orderly manner […] Women would not then marry

for a support, as men accept of places under government, and neglect the

implied duties; nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence […] sink

them almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by

prostitution. (156)

Mary Wollstonecraft‘s revolutionary ideas inspired many women in the second half

of the nineteenth century, especially those belonging to the group of New Women. In her

book, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (1996), Sally Ledger

lists as the main concerns of the New Woman ―employment and education opportunities

for women; the competing demands of wage-earning work and motherhood; sexual

morality and freedom; the feminist interrogation of socialism and other political creeds‖

(6). The New Woman examined the nature of women (women as rational or as sentimental

human beings) and challenged the Victorian conception of women as inferior to men. They

wanted to end the suppression of women by enabling them to become financially

independent from their husbands. In ―The New Aspect of the Woman Question‖ (1894),

one of the first texts that introduces the New Woman phenomenon, Sarah Grand explains

how man has deliberately deprived women of proper education in order to prevent them

from revolting against his authority.

He narrowed our outlook on life so that our view of it should be all

distorted, and then declared that our mistaken impression of it proved us to

be senseless creatures. He cramped our minds so that there was no room for

reason in them, and then made merry at our want of logic. (272)

According to Grand this oppression has lasted long enough, and women should now stand

up for themselves and claim authority over their own lives. ―[W]omen do not care to see

life any longer in a glass darkly. Let there be light‖ (276).

It is true that Ouida shared several ideas with these New Women in that she

―[revises] gender stereotypes such as the domestic angel, the adventuress, and the dandy in

her early fiction‖ (Schroeder & Holt, 13) and that she describes ―the fantasies of female

empowerment and […] marital ennui in her later works‖ (14). Nevertheless, Ouida‘s

fiction does not fit entirely within New Woman‘s writings. In her article ―The New

Woman‖ (1894), a response to Sarah Grand‘s contribution to The North American Review,

Ouida shows herself very hostile towards this New Woman. Grand refers to two types of

women that men can understand as ―the cow-kind of woman‖ and the ―scum-woman‖

(270-71). Ouida uses these tags to highlight the lack of literary talent that characterized

many of these New Women:

The elegance of these appellatives is not calculated to recommend them to

readers of either sex ; and as a specimen of style forces one to hint that the

New Woman who, we are told, ‗has been sitting apart in the silent

contemplation all these years‘ might in all these years have studied better

models of literary composition. (Ouida, 610)

She criticizes the New Woman for claiming to be superior to men instead of their equal.

She does not understand why these manlike women, who have no knowledge of how to

dress and how to behave in public, insist on gaining the same political rights as men.

Political power, in her opinion, should be appointed to an elite of intellectuals. Rather than

being a New Woman, Ouida should be categorised within a group of writers which Talia

Schaffer has labelled ―female aesthetes‖. These writers saw the creation of art as an end

itself: life should be dedicated to the pursuit of beauty, and their art should serve no other

function than that of being beautiful. In this quest for beauty, they should invoke their

creativity to transform sensuous experiences into a work of art. Since women should focus

primarily on their senses and their emotional inner life in order to create great works of art

rather than on their intellect, political influence should not be amongst their ambitions.

Now, why can‘t this orator learn to gesticulate and learn to dress, instead of

clamouring for a franchise? She violates in her own person every law, alike

of common-sense and artistic fitness, and yet comes forward as a fit and

proper person to make laws for others. (613)

The main difference between the New Woman and the female aesthetes like Ouida

was indeed that the New Woman used her art as a means to engage in political matters

whereas the female aesthete focused mainly on art as an end itself. In The Forgotten

Female Aesthetes (2000), Talia Schaffer asserts that

While New Women […] spoke out forcefully about women‘s cramped lives,

their female aesthetic counterparts seemed to care more about strange

moonlit sins than women‘s material conditions. […] Female aesthetes were

New Women inasmuch as they participated in a rebellious cultural clique,

wrote unconventional literature, and supported themselves. But they

departed from the New Women movement in their affinity for artistic

products that often carried nostalgic, apparently apolitical or even

conservative ideologies. […] (20)

This does not mean that female aesthetes completely ignored the humble position of

women during the Victorian age nor did they overlook the progressive views on the

emancipation of these women presented by New Women. Through their art they wanted to

educate women and wanted women to be able to align themselves with men. However,

they only wanted to be on the same level as men in order to gain literary recognition and to

be allowed to support themselves through their writing. They had no aspirations

whatsoever for political rights. Ouida wanted to reconfigure predominant gender categories

but only as a function of her art and her personal freedom. She wanted to transform women

from being artistic subjects (as actresses were frequently regarded not as artists but as the

creation of the writer) to being the creators of art.

Since she distanced herself so sternly from these New Woman writers, Ouida was

evidently excluded from New Woman criticism. More remarkable is that she has also been

excluded from contemporary criticism. Although she was a best-selling author in her own

time, Ouida has never been taken seriously by modern critics and has until very recently

been ignored as an aesthetic author. This can partially be explained by her antipathy

towards the New Woman writers. It was their advocacy for political rights that helped New

Women to obtain a place in literary history. They contributed more explicitly to the

emancipation of women, whereas Ouida only opened doors in the literary field. She is not

considered to be an author who truly contributed to women‘s struggle for emancipation as

she emphasised artistic creation rather than political action. Nevertheless, there are more

factors at play to explain her exclusion from contemporary criticism.

More than violating the social roles that were imposed on women, Ouida also rebels

against Victorian morality in general. The Victorian moral code required that people lived

a virtuous life and that all transgressive behaviour should be banned from the public

sphere. ―Homoeroticism, incest, rape, marital abuse, seduction, adultery, voyeurism, and

prostitution appear repeatedly in her fiction along with a kind of paedophilia‖ (Schroeder

& Hodges Holt, 13). Her novels featured adventurous heroines and powerful aristocratic

males who abuse the ignorance of the virtuous young girls and go unpunished. Ouida was

severely criticised by contemporary critics who saw her as an immoral author, corrupting

the reader‘s mind. The critic Edward G. Salmon noted in his article ―What girls read‖

(1886) that ―[i]t is a long jump from Aesop to ‗Ouida‘ and to place Miss Sarah Doudney or

Miss Anna Beale between Aesop and ‗Ouida‘ may at least prevent a disastrous moral fall‖

(in King & Plunkett eds, 71). As a response to this criticism and to avoid censorship Ouida

used a particular experimental style to divert the attention from the fact that she was

discussing unacceptable topics.

[They, Ouida and other aesthetes] attempted to write about sexual desire,

illicit yearnings, repression, and repulsion. To do so they pioneered stylistic

innovations, including impressionistic reveries, paradoxes, streamlets of

consciousness, fantasy landscapes, shifting narrative sympathies, abrupt

mood changes, elaborate symbolism, and nonlinear plots. [A]s long as

women were writing in a pretty style, readers might not notice what they

were actually describing. (Schaffer, 5-20)

An additional criticism on Ouida‘s literature drew on the supposed ignorance of

women and their inability to create good literature. In her early period (when she wrote

Under Two Flags (1867)) she could be described best as a female aesthetic author who

wrote in the genre of the ‗sensation novel‘. Deborah Wynne states in The Sensation Novel

and the Victorian Family Magazine (2001) that ―[s]ensation fiction usually centres on

mysteries, often based on crimes and scandals, which disrupt the domestic lives [... ]‖ (4)

and they were regarded as ―a tasty alternative to the bland fare of the domestic novel‖ (4).

The main component of a sensation novel is a stirring plot which is supposed to captivate

the reader from beginning to end. Sensation authors, especially women, were said to focus

exclusively on an exiting plot with unexpected twists and turns, with an abundance of

feminine emotions and passionate love relations. In other words, they brought only

excitement, no emotional depth. The critic Henry Longueville Mansel in his article

‗Sensation Novels‘ condemns these novels in saying that ―[e]xcitement and excitement

alone, seems to be the great end at which they aim – an end which must be accomplished at

any cost by some means or other […]‖ (King and Plunkett eds, 55). All sensation novels

are created according to the same pattern; there is no innovation or creativity whatsoever:

No divine influence can be imagined as presiding over the birth of this

work, beyond the market-law of demand and supply […] Each game is

played with the same pieces, differing only in the moves. We watch them

advancing through the intricacies of the plot, as we trace the course of an x

or y through the combinations of an algebraic equation […]. (56)

Due to their inherent subjectivity and incapability to overcome their strong emotional

outbursts, women were deemed to be incapable of creating a high standard of literature.

This criticism is no longer, nor has it ever been, accurate and it is necessary that

female authors are evaluated according to the same parameters as male authors in order to

do away with the association of females with popular literature and males with high

literature. Nevertheless this dichotomy was a reality in Victorian England and was

reinforced by a new development in the British literary scene that emerged from the 1870s

onwards: the rise of a literary canon. A number of exclusively male authors became the

general standard to which all forms of high art should be measured.

Many of the first historians of aesthetic culture were men who had

participated in that circle: Holbrook Jackson, Max Beerbohm, Osbert

Burdett, Richard Le Gallienne, W.B. Yeats. These men constructed a story

of aestheticism that centered on their own and their friends‘ achievements.

As a result, the first histories of the 1890s offer a skewed image of the

[aesthetic] movement, which was perpetuated in subsequent scholarship.

(Schaffer, 6)

The selection of the most central, most typical and most important books of the aesthetic

movement was determined by a circle of male artists and it was impossible for women to

gain access to this group and to give to their works a well-deserved place in literary

history.

The lack of interest towards Ouida‘s novels was perpetuated in education:

professors of literature and linguistics only relied on the authority of these canonical

authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens. ―The canon‘s privileging of well-

known male figures ended up valorising traditionally masculine concerns, making women

writers‘ interests seem irrelevant to the ―great‖ concerns of literature […]‖ (Schaffer, 9).

It has been made clear that Ouida faced many obstacles that prevented her from

being recognized as a competent novelist, worthy of a place in aesthetic literary theory.

The destruction of traditionally prescribed gender roles as well as her violation of

Victorian morals brought her considerable criticism from contemporary reviewers. Harriet

Waters Preston confirms that ―[e]verybody reads her twenty or thirty books. The critic

reads with a shrug, and the moralist with a sigh; the grave student with an apology, and the

railroad traveller with an ostentatious yawn; the schoolgirl […] with a bated breath and

shining eyes […]‖ (Schroeder and Holt, 24).

What is more, her intermediate position between New Woman writers and

canonical male authors resulted in her exclusion from being a subject of literary study.

However, when we compare Ouida with a male Victorian aesthetic writer, Oscar Wilde,

her exclusion from the literary canon can no longer be justified. Contemporary critics

already noted a remarkable resemblance between these two authors. Julian Hawthorne

wrote in his article ―The Romance of the impossible‖ (1890 in Lippincott‘s Monthly

Magazine) that ―Mr. Wilde‘s writing has what is called ‗colour,‘—the quality that forms

the mainstay of many of Ouida‘s works, —and it appears in the sensuous descriptions of

nature and of the decorations and environments of artistic life‖ (in Beckson ed. 79-80). In

this study of Wilde and Ouida, it will become clear how many striking similarities can be

discovered between The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Under Two Flags (1867).

3. AESTHETICISM

3.1. INTRODUCING AESTHETICISM

When Ouida wrote Under Two Flags in 1867, her novel already portrayed the

handsome dandies that would later crowd the novels of writers such as Oscar Wilde and

J.K. Huysmans. Bertie Cecil lavishes in luxury and lives a life centered on the pursuit of

pleasure and happiness; in other words he prefigures ―the golden lads, the Dorians, of male

homoerotic fiction‖ (Schaffer 2000, 124). With the portrayal of her female characters, who

value a man according to the cost of the gifts he provides them with, she ―popularized the

glamorous world of aesthetic fashion and decoration‖ (Schaffer 2000, 122) years before

the peak of the aesthetic trend in the 1890‘s.

Twenty-three years later, in 1890, Oscar Wilde published the first edition of his

novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott‘s Monthly Magazine. This publication met

with a lot of criticism in a wide range of newspapers. They found that the story of the rich,

young man who remains indifferent about all the harm he created was an advocacy for a

life based on sin and immorality. In 1890, Punch, referring to the poisonous book

introduced in the 10th

chapter of the novel, claimed that there was ―more of ‗poison‘ than

of ‗perfection‘ in Dorian Gray‖ (in Karl Beckson ed, 77) and the Daily Chronicle states

that ―[d]ullness and dirt are the chief features of Lippincott’s this month‖ and that ―[t]he

element in it that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr Oscar Wilde‘s

story of The Picture of Dorian Gray‖ (in Beckson ed, 72). But the most stern criticism

came from the St James‘s Gazette in replying to the subject matter that,

Théophile Gauthier could have made it romantic, entrancing,

beautiful. Mr. Stevenson could have made it convincing, humorous,

pathetic. Mr. Anstey could have made it screamingly funny. It has

been reserved for Mr. Oscar Wilde to make it dull and nasty. (in

Beckson ed, 70)

Despite of all this criticism, Oscar Wilde is now considered as one of the most important

writers of the British Aesthetic movement. And precisely this alliance to the theory of

aestheticism and his role in the aesthetic movement is a first factor that links Wilde‘s The

Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) with Ouida‘s novel Under Two Flags (1867).

Aestheticism in Victorian Britain advocated a complete devotion to beauty and art

and manifested itself in music, literature and the visual arts. It was intended to liberate art

from the moral restrictions imposed by Victorian society. Art was to serve no other

function than the act of being beautiful.

German and French aestheticism helped to form the foundation of what would

become British Aestheticism. In France, Théophile Gautier promoted the phrase ‗l‘Art

pour l‘Art‘ (‗Art for Art‘s sake‘) and Gustave Flaubert expressed his aspirations to write a

book about nothing, a book that would be appealing for its formal qualities and internal

force only. In Germany, Emmanuel Kant‘s definition of beauty as a subjective force and

his theory of the sublime have been of importance for the development of an aesthetic

philosophy.

In reality we should not refer to an aesthetic ‗movement‘ in British aestheticism. In

his book Aestheticism (1969), R.V. Johnson explains that ―an aesthete is often defined as

somebody who appreciates beauty […] [but] [n]ot everybody who values the arts and the

experience of beauty would give them a paramount and exclusive importance among

human activities‖ (10-11). He clarifies that John Ruskin, for example, believed that

―beauty is an indispensable value – to appreciate it is essential for the good life; but it

cannot be separated from the other values of goodness and truth‖ (Johnson, 11). Where

Ruskin thinks that art had a clear moralistic function, William Morris felt that art should

serve a propagandist purpose in distributing the socialist doctrine, and even another

significant writer, Walter Pater, felt that art is primarily an element of beauty and should

not be corrupted with ethical or political instructions. (Johnson, 11). Therefore, ―[i]t seems

desirable to limit aestheticism so as to exclude thinkers who, while they valued art and the

beauties of nature, did not elevate them to a position of supreme – or even exclusive –

importance in the conduct of life‖ (Johnson 11-2).

3.2. THE ORIGINS OF AESTHETICISM

Aestheticism is said to have developed out of the art and the philosophy of the

Romantic movement that sought to liberate itself from the rules of classicism, principally

in poetry. One of the six great Romantic poets, William Wordsworth, ―set himself in

opposition to the literary ancient régime, those writers of the eighteenth century who, in his

view, had imposed on poetry artificial conventions that distorted its free and natural

expression‖ (Greenblatt ed, 9). Analogically, the aesthetes strived for an autonomy of art.

Art for Art‘s sake was born of Romanticism and its cause was at first

identical with that of the mother movement: the need of reaction against the

narrow rules of classicism, the proclamation of ‗art libre‘, of art that would

be delivered from the trammels of traditional rhetoric and poetics. Art,

which had thus gained independence within its proper limits, turned,

through natural development, into an art that proclaimed itself independent

also from the trammels of morality, politics, religion, science, in a word,

into Art for Art‘s sake. (Ojala, 19-20)

Thematically, the Romantics influenced the aesthetes on two levels. In their poetry

and prose the celebration of beauty was important : ―A thing of beauty is a joy forever: / its

loveliness increases ; it will never / Pass into nothingness […]‖ (Keats, ―Endymion‖ 1846).

In his article ―The Tomb of Keats‖ (1877), Oscar Wilde called Keats ―a Prince of Beauty‖

(The Irish Monthly, 476-8), and in his lecture on ―The English Renaissance of Art‖ (1882),

he said that:

[I]n the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his

unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the

imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-

Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to

speak. (95)

A second element that aestheticism borrowed from the Romantics was the value

they attached to the power of imagination. With the emphasis on imagination, the

Romantics meant to reject the strict rules that classicism had imposed on art (Johnson).

This sense of imagination can also be found with the aesthetic artists, as explained by

Irving Singer in ―The Aesthetics of ‗Art for Art‘s Sake‘‖ (1954): ―the imagination enabled

one to contemplate the flow of sense-experience without any consideration of the purposes

or consequences of anything. Beauty could be perceived only when the understanding was

subordinated to the imagination‖ (346). In other words, for the aesthetes, the imagination

enabled them to liberate their sensory perceptions into their art, but in order to do so, they

should leave their rational considerations behind and focus uniquely on their imagination.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Lord Henry announces that ―beauty, real beauty,

ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration,

and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all

nose, or all forehead or something horrid‖ (9). Nevertheless, not all people can transform

their sensory perception through their imagination into a work of art. Already in the artistic

philosophy of the Romantics, the poet was described as a visionary prophet who could see

further than ordinary reality. Also in aestheticism, ―the artists were commonly thought of

as in a class apart, and ‗artist‘ acquired a special and frequently honorific sense‖ (Johnson,

37).

The Aesthetes were also inspired by the painters and writers of the Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood, especially by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti argued in favour of the artist‘s

―exclusive loyalty to his personal vision‖ (Johnson, 45). The imaginative process that

anticipates the creation of a work of art should not be interrupted by the need to convey an

instructive ethical message. In ―The English Renaissance of Art‖(1882), Wilde cited the

Pre-Raphaelites and stated that ―they found a stronger realism of imagination, a more

careful realism of technique, a vision at once more fervent and more vivid, an individuality

more intimate and more intense‖ (95). The work of both the Romantic poets and the Pre-

Raphaelites stimulated the development of aesthetic ideas.

3.3. ASPECTS OF AESTHETICISM

3.3.1. Aestheticism as a View of Life

R.V. Johnson has noted a distinction between ―aestheticism as a view of life‖ and

―aestheticism as a view of art‖ (1). To live in the spirit of aestheticism was to live a life

dedicated to beauty and to the arts, to the extent that life itself becomes art. Walter Pater

was the first to suggest this way of life in his work Studies in the History of The

Renaissance (1873), particularly in the book‘s conclusion. A lifestyle exclusively fixated

on artistic creation, with the elimination of all moral boundaries was, of course, perceived

as scandalous in Victorian England, where there were strict limitations on self-expression

and where to live virtuously was the highest end in life. Consequently Pater suppressed his

―Conclusion‖ in the next edition of the book, since ―it might possibly mislead some of

those young men into whose hands it might fall‖ (in Benson, 46). It might trick men into

letting their actions be determined primarily by the senses in stead of relying on rational

reflexion for making decisions.

In Studies in the History of The Renaissance Pater states that our physical life as

well as our emotional life is subjected to constant change, that there is a constant ―passage

and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations‖ (237) and that the only certain element

is death. He alludes to Victor Hugo in saying that ―we are all under sentence of death but

with a sort of indefinite reprieve […] we have an interval, and then our place knows us no

more‖ (238). And during this interval between birth and death we should live life to the

fullest, enjoying every moment, ―for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new

impressions‖ (237) in order to ―[t]o burn always with this hard, gemlike flame‖ (236).

Accordingly, Pater‘s view of a successful life is one of absolute devotion to art and beauty

and destined for the search of aesthetic experiences: ―For art comes to you proposing

frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply

for those moments‘ sake‖ (239).

Studies in the History of The Renaissance had an enormous impact on the 19th

century aesthetes, in particular on Oscar Wilde who borrowed a phrase from Swinburne to

call it ―the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty‖ (in Ellmann ed., 229).

The Picture of Dorian Gray reflects Wilde‘s interpretation of Pater‘s study. Due to the

influence of the book that he received from Lord Henry, Dorian embraces numerous new

experiences to the point of becoming addicted to new sensations and extraordinary events.

He goes from studying new perfumes to a devotion to music, from the study of jewelry to

the collection of tapestries, and so on, and so forth. At this point he realizes:

Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that

was to re-create life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism

that is having, in our own days, its curious revival. […] Its aim, indeed, was

to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as

they might be. […] [I]t was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the

moments of a life that is itself but a moment. (146)

In Under Two Flags (1867) Bertie ―Beauty‖ Cecil, the protagonist shows his

agreement with the main statement of Pater‘s Renaissance since he supports the value of

art for its own sake, and refuses money for his carved chess figures: ―I [Venetia Corona]

can well understand that he does not care to part with such masterpieces of his art; and that

he would not appraise them by their worth in gold only shows that he is a true artist, as

doubtless also he is a true soldier‖ (306).

In their own lives, both Wilde and Ouida tried to maintain an aesthetic standard of

living. Wilde was famous as a dandy. Chambers‘ Journal of Popular Literature Science and

Arts (1861) defined the dandy as ―a person scrupulously careful of his personal

appearance, delicate as to his boots, faultless as to his neck-tie, and immaculate in the

matter of his lemon-coloured kid gloves‖. In The Life of Oscar Wilde (1902), Robert

Harborough Sherard describes Wilde‘s dress:

He adopted as the ‗aesthetic costume‘ a velvet coat, knee-breeches, a loose

shirt with a turn-down collar and, a floating tie of some unusual shade,

fastened in a Lavaliére knot, and he not unfrequently appeared in public

carrying in his hand a lily or a sunflower which he used to contemplate with

an expression of the greatest admiration. Let it be added to this that he wore

his hair long, and was clean-shaven as to his face […]‖ (161).

Ouida also aimed to live a life in the realms of art.

Ouida‘s adherence to the code of aesthetic beauty was so strong that she not

only wrote it – she lived it. She moved to Italy where she lived in a grand,

decaying mansion; she designed her own clothes and had Worth produce

them; she painted; and she collected china. (Schaffer 2000, 155)

Their characters led similar lives and, being invented, could go beyond anything

their creators could achieve themselves. Dorian is a beautiful young man who makes his

equally exquisite portrait age in his place so that he will be forever young. To reiterate his

obsession with his own physical appearance, he also spends amounts of time choosing

clothes, and has a fascination with expensive fabrics and exotic perfumes. In Under Two

Flags Beauty is fixated on perfect appearance and clothes. In a conversation with the

Seraph he remarks:

[W]e might have a Joint-Stock Toilette Association, for the purposes of

national art, and receive Brummagem to show it how to dress; we might

even succeed in making the feminine British Public drape itself properly,

and the B. P. masculine wear boots that won't creak, and coats that don't

wrinkle, and take off its hat without a jerk, as though it were a wooden

puppet hung on very stiff strings. (101)

Wilde and Ouida both had an obsession with beautiful artefacts to decorate their

lives. Even when they could no longer afford it, keeping up appearances took priority over

the actual state of their finances. In Ouida: The Passionate Victorian (1951), Eileen

Bigland explains that ―[w]hen Ouida received a cheque she simply had to spend it all at

once, usually on some costly bit of bric-à-brac which had caught her fancy‖ (200). The

same can be said of Beauty and his family: ―Life was very pleasant at Royallieu. […] Its

present luxury was purchased at the cost of the future, and the parasite of extravagance was

constantly sapping, unseen, the gallant old Norman-planted oak of the family-tree (UTF,

46)2. The designs of their editions were also directed by aesthetic values: Wilde thought

that ―a beautiful binding is ‗a homage to genius‘‖ (Ojala, 89).

2 UTF: Under Two Flags (Ouida. Under Two Flags. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.)

Both Wilde and Ouida intended to transform their lives into a work of art up to the

point that Wilde claimed in The Decay of Lying (1891) that ―Life imitates Art far more

than Art imitates Life […], the basis of life […] is simply the desire for expression, and Art

is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained‖ (19).

The aesthetes made every effort to heighten the level of artificiality in their lives as a way

of making them more pleasant and beautiful. Ouida took the statement of ―Life imitates

Art‖ quite literally when she ―would dress in the costumes she gave her heroines, carry

their particular flowers, and use their characteristic gestures […]‖ (Schaffer 2000, 156).

3.3.2. Aestheticism as a View of Art

3.3.2.1. The extraordinary status of the artist

More than a lifestyle, aestheticism was an artistic style. The ability of the artist to

see beyond ordinary reality has already been discussed as a legacy from the Romantic

authors. It was a frequent thematic element in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and

Under Two Flags (1867). In ―The Aesthetics of ‗Art for Art‘s Sake‘‖ (1954), Irving Singer

affirms that:

The artist is different from other men in having a predominance of sensuous

intuition or creative imagination. […] The word ‗artist‘ was coming to stand

for a special kind of individual, the man of sensitivity, refined tastes and

creative talents, the man in whom the imagination was most highly

developed. In short, the term ‗artist‘ was being re-defined in accordance

with the views of the Art for Art‘s Sake theorists. (345-7)

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Basil Hallward paints the famous portrait

that will show the marks of old age, while Dorian will remain forever young and beautiful.

When he sees his portrait for the first time, Dorian experiences a sensation of utter joy: ―[it

was] as if he had recognized himself for the first time‖ (32). But more than just age, it will

also show the mutilation of Dorian‘s soul. Where the person Dorian can remain aloof when

it comes to his appalling behaviour (for example, his brutal rejection of Sibyl Vane), the

portrait will show the marks of degradation. Thus, it is suggested here that Basil has the

ability to look into Dorian‘s soul and see the young man as who he truly is: a boy who has

been manipulated by Lord Henry (―Nothing can cure the soul but the senses‖ [28]), and

tricked to believe that he sins would forever remain the burden of his portrait.

Similarly, when Beauty is in Algeria, his carved chess figures serve a very

important purpose.

Skill, grace, talent, invention whose mother was necessity, and invention

that was the unforced offshoot of natural genius, were all at work; and the

hands that could send the naked steel down at a blow through turban and

through brain could shape, with a woman's ingenuity, with a craftsman's

skill, every quaint device and dainty bijou from stone and wood, and many-

colored feathers, and mountain berries. […] The chessmen had been about

with him in so many places and under canvas so long, from the time that he

chipped out their first Zouave pawn, as he lay in the broiling heat of Oran

prostrate by a dry brook's stony channel, that he scarcely cared to part with

them. (277)

Day after day, Beauty is involved in thrilling and adventurous battles as a soldier for the

French Foreign Legion, but despite the violence and adrenaline of these fights he maintains

an air of serene tranquillity. Only when working on his art he feels truly alive. Beauty has

no fear of death, since he believes that this life has nothing left to offer him. But when he

carves his chess figures, he feels that he is in touch with his soul. On the inside he is still a

gentleman, and therefore the delicate creation of these sculptures (rather than the brutal

behaviour required of him in battles) reflects the delicacy and refinement of his previous

life in England. His art reveals who he really is.

3.3.2.2. An unlimited devotion to art

This dedication to art, as a means to make life more beautiful, is for the characters

in the novels a way to escape the ugliness of the outside world (as Dorian says to Basil:

―You are too much afraid of life‖ [124]). Through their art they create an alternative to

reality: an artificial reality. Basil Hallward is obsessed with the version of Dorian Gray that

he has painted on his canvas: he has created this ideal Adonis with whom he has to a

certain extent even fallen in love with.

I had drawn you as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman‘s

cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had

sat on the prow of Adrian‘s barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile. […]

And it had all been what art should be unconscious, ideal, and remote. One

day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait

of you as you actually are […]. (PDG, 129)3

Similarly, Beauty creates his chessmen as a way to escape the violence of the

battles in Algeria. ―[T]he white men were in ivory, the black in walnut, and were two

opposing squadrons of French troops and of mounted Arabs. Beautifully carved, with

every detail of costume rigid to truth, they were his masterpiece‖ (UTF 277). These figures

are static versions of the soldiers that surround him, and he can control them according to

his own free will. However, Basil Hallward looses himself completely in the artificial

version that he has created of Dorian and constantly lives in his artificial world, refusing to

face reality. This is not the case for Beauty. In Ouida‘s narrative, real passion will

overcome artificiality and the logical outcome of aesthetic ideals. When Beauty falls in

3 PDG = The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Middlesex: Penguin, 1982)

love with Venetia Corona, he resolutely chooses the real world when he tells her his real

name: he does not feel that he has to hide or escape reality anymore.

3.3.2.3. Rejection of conventional moral values

In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde states that ―[t]here is no

such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is

all‖ (5). With this statement he announces the main criterion for what his novel was to be

harshly criticized by the majority of Victorian art critics: its rejection of contemporary

moral values. In ―Art and Morality‖ (2005), Mathew Kieran argues that ―the moral

character of a work may affect its aesthetic character, hence a didactic work may be

clumsy and artless, but there is no internal relation between its moral character and its

value as art‖ (453). Art has no other purpose than being beautiful, and moral or ethical

values would be a restraint imposed on the creativity and freedom of the artist. In other

words, the artist is able to challenge all possible ethical taboos as long as it benefits his

aesthetic programme.

The Victorian society expected novels to portray immoral acts and characters with

an appropriate punishment. To give an example, Thomas Bowdler published The Family

Shakespeare in 1818 with the meaningful subheading: ―in which nothing is added to the

text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read

aloud in a family‖. Bowdler celebrates Shakespeare‘s great talent: ―Shakespeare,

inimitable Shakespeare, will remain the subject of admiration as long as taste and literature

shall exist […]‖ (viii). Nevertheless, his writings contain, according to Bowdler, a great

number of phrases (of which ―no example can […] be given for an obvious reason‖ [x])

that are not appropriate in literature for women or children. These expressions were only

introduced by Shakespeare to ―gratify the bad taste of the age in which he lived‖ (viii).

Nonetheless,

neither the vicious taste of the age, nor the most brilliant effusions of wit,

can afford an excuse for profaneness or obscenity; and if these could be

obliterated, the transcendant genius of the poet would undoubtedly shine

with more unclouded lustre. […] I can hardly imagine a more pleasing

occupation for a winter‘s evening in the country, than for a father to read

one of Shakespeare‘s plays to his family circle. My object is to enable him

to do so without incurring the danger of falling unawares among words and

expressions which are of such a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of

modesty, or render it necessary for the reader to pause, and examine the

sequel, before he proceeds further in the entertainment of the evening. (viii-

xi)

Books were seen to have a great influence on the public‘s mind, and should

therefore, at all times, aim to instruct knowledge, morals and ethical values. Even worse

than Shakespeare, with his number of expressions that could not be tolerated in a decent

Victorian household, were writers who excluded any sense of morality from their works.

The Scots Observer (1890) asserts that The Picture of Dorian Gray is:

[F]alse to morality—for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does

not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health, and

sanity. […] Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for

none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he

takes on tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own

reputation and the public morals. (in Beckson ed. 75)

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, moral behaviour is indeed very hard to detect.

Dorian is influenced by Lord Henry‘s epicurean philosophy and lives a life devoted to the

pursuit of pleasure. Although he is not completely indifferent to the deformation of his

portrait due to his evil acts, he does not escape Lord Henry‘s influence, and remains

convinced that he is only to be concerned with his own happiness. When Sybil Vane

commits suicide after Dorian has rejected her, at first he feels guilt, but eventually he

chooses not to be emotionally touched by her death: ―It is one of the great tragedies of the

age. […] [Sybil] lived her finest tragedy. […] She passed again into the sphere of art‖

(123). She should not be mourned since she died a beautiful death and shall now be

immortal forever as a work of art. At the end of the novel Dorian receives the punishment

of death, but he dies without repentance. He has looked for the last time at the disfigured

portrait, but he does not stab it in the heart out of guilt for all the lives he has ruined. He

destroys it out of remorse for the harm he has done to himself, because he can not bear the

foulness that he has inflicted on his own soul.

Only one character can be seen as even more repulsive, from a Victorian point of

view, than Dorian himself, and that is of course the originator of all the damage, Lord

Henry. He fills Dorian‘s mind with his theories on how one‘s actions should only aim to

reach delight and enjoyment:

I can sympathize with everything, except suffering […] It is too ugly, too

horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern

sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the

joy of life. The less said about life‘s sores the better. […] Humanity takes

itself too seriously. It is the world‘s original sin. If the caveman had known

how to laugh, History would have been different. (48-9)

In this pursuit of enjoyment one should not be hindered by anything or anyone: one should

always focus exclusively on one‘s own desires: ―‗To be good is to be in harmony with

one‘s self,‘ he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed

fingers. ‗Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One‘s own life – that is the

important thing‘‖ (90).

It is in this absence of moral behaviour that we can distinguish a difference between

Wilde‘s novel and Under Two Flags in their use of aestheticism. As Wilde was to do,

Ouida wrote fiction that challenged the Victorian code of morality. In Ouida The

Phenomenon (2008), Nathalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt observe that ―legendary

for her audacity, eccentricity, and extravagance, Ouida in both her fiction and her life,

embodied the contradictory ideologies of the Victorian age‖ (9). Ouida‘s heroes also

pursued a life filled with pleasure and they are unconcerned with an ethical evaluation of

their behaviour. The critic Vincent E.H. Murray ―went so far as to state that because the

motto of Ouida‘s heroes is ‗to enjoy,‘ he predict[ed] ‗that the society which reads and

encourages such literature is a ‗whited sepulchre‘ which if it be not speedily cleansed by

the joint effort of pure men and women, will breed a pestilence so foul as to poison the

very life-blood of our nation‖ (Schroeder and Holt, 24).

However, the sins committed by the Ouidean heroes do not remain unrepented. The

many years spent on African soil can be interpreted as a cleansing journey which turns

Bertie into a better person. At home, he lived a life filled with luxury and he had an affair

with two mistresses (a married woman and a very young ballerina). ―Life petted him,

pampered him, caressed him, gifted him, though of half his gifts he never made use; lodged

him like a prince, dined him like a king […]‖ (UTF 54). But Bertie Cecil is punished for

his vanity by the harsh conditions at the battle field in Algeria. At the end of the book he is

rewarded with a marriage to Venetia Corona and he is reinstated as Lord Royallieu. In

―The origins of the Aesthetic Novel: Ouida, Wilde and the popular Romance‖ (2003),

Talia Shaffer affirms this by saying:

[W]here the silver-fork dandy novels [such as Disraeli‘s Vivian Gray

(1826-27) and Bulwer-Lytton‘s Pelham (1828)] tend to be Bildungsromans,

showing the dandy‘s progress towards civic responsibility, Ouida‘s dandy

novels have a more circular structure, in which the dandy loses paradise

only to earn it back at last. (Schaffer 2003, 215)

Bertie becomes a better person since he is able to put aside his vanity as well as his

forbidden homoerotic feelings towards his best friend Philippe, nicknamed ‗the Seraph‘.

He marries Venetia Corona, the Seraph‘s sister, and at last acknowledges the value of a

legitimate, meaning non-homosexual and not adulterous, relationship.

Cigarette, the youthful French female soldier who behaves more like a young boy

than like a lady, undergoes an important, morally upgrading evolution. In the beginning of

the novel she is presented as an adventurous woman who has countless sexual adventures

and drinks and smokes excessively, in other words, a young woman that could not be

further away from the Victorian ideal of the angel of the house. However, she falls madly

in love with Bertie and becomes aware of her deep desire for warmth and love. As the

plotline proceeds she learns to behave more womanly, to blush and cry, and to experience

the true sentiment of love: ―[m]en by the score had wooed her love […] and now he—he

whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an

emotion she had never known‖ (UTF 459). Nevertheless, Cigarette dies at the end of the

novel, throwing herself in front of the firing squad in order to save Bertie‘s life. ―Cigarette

is too revolutionary for the novel to contain her; she dies in a spectacular act of self-

martyrdom […] a death that both salvages and disposes of this troublesome character‖

(Schaffer 2000, 126).

This evolution in the plotline towards a virtuous ending, where all challenging

characters are, or given a chance to regret their sins, or killed off, clearly contrasts with

Wilde‘s linear plotline of The Picture of Dorian Gray, where no evolution can be detected,

save in the mutilation of Dorian‘s soul. Dorian is not forced to leave his comfortable home

and no woman is able to let him see the damage he has caused.

Dorian‘s lifelong training [does not] have the emotional meaning it has in

Ouida‘s fiction. Dorian undergoes a discipline in suffering like any Ouidean

dandy, but the whole point of the novel is that it fails to change him at all.

He is not remotely purified by the experience. And whereas […] Cecil has

to learn to do without [his] rosewater and narghiles and satin pillows,

undergoing a brutal sensory deprivation, Dorian gets to keep it all. He may

be hideously unrecognisable in death, but he still has his priceless rings on.

(Schaffer 2003, 219-20)

What is more, Lord Henry‘s (and Dorian‘s) insistence on individualism is not

followed by Bertie. Lord Henry is only concerned with his own well-being and is, in a

way, literally acting out the basic message of Walter Pater‘s The Renaissance. ―Wilde

established the connection to Pater primarily, as Ellmann points out, by having Lord Henry

speak ‗many of Pater's sentences,‘ or, at least, many sentences that echo Pater‖ (Riquelme,

621). Bertie on the other hand, although egocentric in the beginning of the novel, sacrifices

himself in order to save Lady Guinevere from public disgrace and to prevent his younger

brother from being sent to prison. Although Ouida frequently wrote about progressive

themes such as homosexuality, extravagant sexual behaviour, independence for women,

etc., she made sure that the resolution to the story was instructive as to which characters

should be interpreted as examples for good behaviour, and which characters should at all

times be condemned for their actions. The question remains as to whether Ouida supported

the ethical lessons that she included in her books, or if she was only adhering to the

Victorian values as a way to avoid censorship.

3.3.2.4. Superiority of form over content

In Aestheticism (1969), R.V. Johnson introduces the dominance of form over

content as one of the key components of the aesthetic doctrine. ―Aestheticism commonly

attaches a high value to ‗form‘ in art, the value of a work of art being dependent on form

rather than on subject-matter‖ (14). Just as Basil Hallward is only interested in Dorian‘s

looks, failing to see the ugliness of his character, Wilde does not search for beauty in the

content but in the form. He believes that an excellent style and an appropriate and witty

language use makes a thrilling plot with numerous twists and turns superfluous.

Indeed when we look at the plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray it becomes clear that

most of it is made up of dialogue. We read how Lord Henry explains his philosophy with

his typical witty epigrams, how Basil struggles with his feelings for the young Dorian Gray

and how Dorian himself is able to endure ―the self-inflicted physical torture of suffering,

because he transfers all that onto the picture‖ (Shaffer 2000, 220). Real action (Dorian‘s

encounters with his mistresses, the high-society dinner parties and the journeys made by

Dorian and Lord Henry) is reduced to an absolute minimum to the point that the average

reader will conclude that hardly anything happens. At all times, when there is a possibility

for real action, Wilde will insert a twist in the story that will do away with this. When

James Vane is about to leave for Australia, he asks his mother a question that she had been

dreading for years:

Were you married to my father?

She heaved a deep sigh. It was a sigh of relief. The terrible moment, the

moment that night and day, for weeks and months, she had dreaded, had

come at last, and yet she felt no terror. Indeed in some measure it was a

disappointment to her. The vulgar directness of the question called for a

direct answer. The situation had not been gradually led up to. (PDG 81)

In Oscar Wilde: A Study of the Man and His Work (1913), R. Thurston Hopkins explains

that ―[t]o the mother, with all her love of all that is theatrical and melodramatic in life, this

blunt question, affording no possibilities of a ‗scene,‘ came as a great disappointment. She

could but answer, ‗No‘‖ (43). Here Wilde could have let this conversation develop into a

theatrical argument with the possibility of the son murdering his mother in an outburst of

rage. He does not, however, choose to create this fight, but instead reduces the action to a

simple comment on the simplicity and silliness of the lower working class. Also when the

same James Vane returns and threatens to kill Dorian, he is conveniently shot by accident

on a hunting trip. Wilde has deliberately avoided any possibility of sensation, giving

priority to formal (aesthetic) quality.

Again, we can note here another important difference between Under Two Flags

and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ouida dedicated a great amount of attention to the formal

qualities of her novel: she used the same epigrammatic language as Wilde would go on to

popularise, and adopted an formal narrative style. However, content is of great importance

in her novels. Deborah Wynne states that ―Ouida, like [Mrs. Henry] Wood began her

career as a sensation writer‖ (36). In her analysis of the sensation novel in the book The

‗Improper‘ Feminine (1992), Lyn Pykett provides a description of the genre:

The distinctive features of this new novelistic mode were its passionate,

devious, dangerous and not infrequently deranged heroines, and its

complicated, mysterious plots – involving crime, bigamy, adultery, arson

and arsenic. (47)

Indeed, action is an indispensable component in the plot structure of the Ouidean

novel. In Algeria, Bertie has to face violent battles daily, and then there is still the past that

haunts him and the threat that the truth will come to the surface. But more than just

physical action, also the emotional inner struggles of the characters are highlighted and

exposed in theatrical terms. Especially for Cigarette it is difficult to control her passions as

her love for Bertie remains unanswered:

‗When he called me unsexed – unsexed – unsexed!‘—and with each

repetition of the infamous word, so bitter because vaguely admitted to be

true, with her cheeks scarlet and her eyes aflame, and her hands clinched,

she flung one of the ivory wreaths on to the pavement and stamped on it

with her spurred heel until the carvings were ground into powdered

fragments –stamped, as though it were a living foe, and her steelbound foot

were treading out all its life with burning hate and pitiless venom. (275)

Wilde believes that the content of a novel is merely an instrument that carries his

witty language and epigrams. A beautiful style and language use is the real work of art, the

subject matter of the novel is only secondary. In Black and White (1892) a reviewer of

Lady Windermere‘s Fan asserts that ―it is obvious that Mr. Wilde regards a play as a

vehicle merely for the expression of epigram and the promulgation of paradox‖ (in

Beckson ed. 139). Also Ouida ―gave her characters a remarkable epigrammatic language‖

(Schaffer 2000, 122). But her language was not as refined as Wilde‘s and she was often

ridiculed for ―her errors in grammar, for her faulty usage of foreign words, for her

repetition, and for her immorality‖ (Schroeder and Holt, 24). Nonetheless, her novel

focuses on more than style alone, and her intriguing plotlines can make up for her

shortcomings on a formal level. Schroeder and Holt explain:

In 1895 G.S. Street published ‗An Appreciation of Ouida.‘ […] Street

admitted that Ouida has weaknesses in style, but he stated that she is no

worse than other contemporary novelists or journalists. He excused her

errors because of her energy and force: ‗I do not suppose that Ouida is a

scholar, but I am sure that the scholarship that is only just competent to get a

familiar quotation aright is not a very valuable possession. In fine, I respect

an unrestrained and incorrect eloquence more than a merely correct and

periphrastic nothingness.‘ (25)

3.3.2.5. Conclusion

The study of aestheticism in the works of Oscar Wilde and Ouida has shown that

both novels are very similar, especially in terms of character portrayal, theme and

philosophical background. Looking at the differences however, Ouida‘s is a more

moderate aestheticism compared to Wilde‘s since the insistence on art does not imply the

absence of moral lessons, and formal characteristics are of equal importance as a thrilling

plotline. Since Ouida wrote this novel in the 1860‘s, before aestheticism became a

movement in Britain, she was anticipating many of the later movement‘s ideals in her

fiction, despite her professional constraints. As a woman working as an independent writer,

she needed to consider audience expectations and she could not afford a scandal such as

the one that was later provoked by Wilde‘s novel.

4. CONSUMER CULTURE

4.1. THE RISE OF CONSUMER CULTURE

In 1853, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about his journey to the city of Manchester:

From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows out to

fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here

humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here

civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into

savage. (quoted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006),

1556)

This account accurately reveals the overall atmosphere of the age. Although the poor

working conditions of the factory labourers and miners overshadowed the idea of unlimited

progress, the Victorian age (1830-1901) was a period in which technological innovations

carried industrial productivity to an astonishing height and revolutionary inventions

brought Britain fame as ―the pivotal city of Western civilization‖ (NAEL4, 979).

In the previous century, new technological devices helped to accelerate the

production process. ―[M]achinery to speed up spinning and weaving processes was

developed in England in the eighteenth century (NAEL, 1556). In addition, François

Crouzet asserts in The Victorian Economy (1982) that ―[the use of] coal in the iron and the

exploitation of a new source of energy, steam, […] led to a radical transformation of the

methods and structure of industry‖ (Crouzet, 2). In the nineteenth century, the opening of

railway system enabled the export of goods to increase in value.

By 1900 England had 15,195 lines of track and an underground railway

system beneath London. The train transformed England‘s landscape,

4 The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Greenblatt, Stephen ed. The Norton Anthology of English

Literature. Vol. D. New York: Norton, 2006.

supported the growth of its commerce, and shrank the distances between its

cities. […] England‘s technological progress, together with its prosperity,

led to an enormous expansion of its influence around the globe. (982-5)

Furthermore, nineteenth-century England also witnessed an enormous growth in

population5. ―In only 110 years, from 1801, the year of the first census, to 1911, [Britain‘s]

population almost quadrupled, and within the span of Victoria‘s reign it rather more than

doubled, with a continuous rise […]‖ (Crouzet, 9). For these people, more work

opportunities were created since the technological innovations allowed the launch of new

factories, mines and shops. Between 1841 and 1921 the total number of employed males

rose from 5,093,000 to 13,670,000 (Mitchell, 104) and the high demand for labourers also

required a high number of women to go to work in factories or into domestic service

(1,815,000 in 1841 as opposed to 5,684,000 in 1921 [Mitchell, 104]).

The second half of the nineteenth century was seen especially as a time of

prosperity since working conditions for factory workers and miners had upgraded and a

―succession of Factory Acts in Parliament [had] restricted child labour‖ (NAEL, 985). In

other words, an exceptionally expanded population was enjoying more employment

possibilities than in the past and was, as a consequence, wealthier, given that the wages had

also increased. Poverty was still a serious issue, since the wealth was very unequally

spread, but it is certain that the general standards of living had greatly improved since the

beginning of the 19th

century. Crouzet adds:

This induced a diversification and elaboration of the social structure and

occupational hierarchy, partly as a result of the development of the middle

classes but also partly from a less elementary stratification of the working

5 For an overview of the population growth between 1801 and 1900, see Table 1 (Attachment 3).

classes, which ceased to be an indeterminate mass of ‗labouring poor‘ –their

designation at the outset of the nineteenth century. (14)

This population growth in combination with the technological modernizations and

new industries provided the perfect circumstances for the development of British consumer

culture. ―[T]echnical progress and economic growth amassed wealth, created employment

and led to such an increase in productivity that the goods and services available per head of

population multiplied several times over […] and all this in spite of an unprecedented rate

of population growth‖ (Crouzet, 14). By the second half of the nineteenth century people

had become wealthier and, especially in middle and upper class environments, had new

desires for products and goods other than those that were essential for everyday use. In Just

Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (1985), Rachel Bowlby explains

that ―[t]he second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical shift in the concerns of

industry: from production to selling and from the satisfaction of stable needs to the

invention of new desires‖ (2). Since more and new products were available, people tried to

improve their daily life through the consumption of goods, and London, as ―the queen city

of the world‖ (NAEL, 988) provided many new commodities ready to be consumed. ―The

exhilarating sense of London‘s delights reflects in part the proliferation of things:

commodities, inventions, products that were changing the texture of modern life. England

had become committed not only to continuing technological change but also to a culture of

consumerism, generating new products for sale‖ (NAEL, 988).

These alterations in society were accompanied by changes in the organisations of

shops and by different shopping behaviour. In Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord

Henry makes a sharp evaluation of England in a conversation with the Duchess of

Monmouth:

‗Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys. You, as a good Tory,

must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues made

our England what she is.‘

‗You don‘t like your country, then?‘ she asked.

‗I live in it.‘

‗That you may censure it the better.‘

‗Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?‘ he inquired.

‗What do they say of us?‘

‗That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop.‘ (PDG, 215-16)

In the nineteenth century we see the rise of permanent shops that specialised in certain

products. ―Goods could now be selected in person from the range of fixed shops rather

than from local merchants or travelling salesmen‖ (Mulcahy & Wheeler, 21). Towards the

end of the nineteenth century, the arrival of the department store signified the definite

ending of the old market structure. ―No longer do goods come to the buyers, as they had

done with itinerant hawkers, country markets or small local stores. Instead, it is the buyers

who have taken themselves to the products: and not, in this case, to buy, but merely to see‖

(Bowlby, 1). In these department stores, a wide range of goods were displayed: ―the only

characteristic unifying [them] […] was that they were all for sale‖ (3). Going to a shop was

no longer done out of necessity, but was seen as a leisure activity. As a consequence,

people were now inclined to buy certain goods that they didn‘t actually need: ―Impulsive

buying replaced planned buying‖ (3). People used to go to a particular shop with the

intension of buying a certain product. Since these specialised shops had been added to as

well as replaced by department stores where a wide variety of items were displayed,

shoppers could walk around without a fixed idea of what they wanted and could end up

buying more than they would have purchased at a smaller shop.

These changes in the arrangement of shops also caused transformations in shopping

behaviour. Bowlby claims that ―the principle of entrée libre or open entry did away with

what had previously been a moral equation between entering a shop and making a

purchase. At the same time, a fixed price policy supported by clear labelling, put an end to

the conventions of bargaining which focussed attention on shopping as paying.‖ (3-4).

Shopping became for the first time a leisure activity through which women could escape

from solitude and monotony at home, without acting immorally or causing a scandal. The

Victorian author C.J. Hamilton described the image that most young girls held of ‗modern‘

shops: ―A LONDON SHOP!—To be in a London shop seems to many a country girl the very

summit of her ambition. To be inside those huge plate-glass windows, with beautiful new

things on every side, and well-dressed people coming in and out all day, what a delightful

life a London shop-girl must lead!‖ (in Beetham and Boardman eds., 77).

The book trade also received a large boost in the nineteenth century as a result of

this increasing desire to buy life that held more than necessities. The general increase in

spending money made it possible for the middle and working classes to buy more books.

This was also fuelled by the considerable growth in literacy: ―it is the Victorian period in

particular that witnesses watershed moments in education history, such as the signing of

the Education Act of 1870 (and subsequent Acts) which made elementary education all but

universal‖ (Fortunato, 12). Women‘s education also improved, for instance with the

founding of Queen‘s College for Higher Education in 1848 by professor F.D. Maurice.

Weedon confirms that ―population growth and improving literacy rates combined to

increase the potential market for books‖ (52) and Campbell asserts that by the end of the

nineteenth century, ―the annual publication of new works [had] quadrupl[ed]‖ (26). In

1894, the novelist and journalist Walter Besant wrote:

And the habit of reading, as the most delightful form of recreation, went on

growing. People read faster as well as more; they devoured books. No purse

was long enough to buy all the books that one could read; therefore they lent

to each other; therefore they combined resources and formed book clubs;

therefore the circulating libraries came into existence. (in King and Plunkett

eds. 157)

To make books available to a much wider public, many publishing houses, printers

and bookstores attempted to lower the costs. The new steam press was able to produce a

thousand sheets an hour, paper was no longer handmade but produced by machines

(Altick) and ―the substitution of cheaper bindings for leather helped reduce book costs in

the century‘s second quarter‖ (Altick, 278). But what was probably the most revolutionary

innovation was the publication of the ―guinea-and-a-half three-decker‖ novel (Altick, 279).

The first novel to appear in this format was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

(1836-7), by Charles Dickens. Its long plotline was divided over three physical volumes,

and the abrupt ending of the first volume made readers anxious to buy and read the next

one (Altick, 279). For the publishing houses, the three-decker volume format was a

lucrative business model since a novel in three parts guaranteed the sale of three books

instead of one. For the readers, the ‗three-decker‘ brought great advantages because the

cost of owning such a story could now be split over a longer period of time, ―thus [it

appealed] to the great body of middle-class readers who could afford to spend a shilling

every month but not to lay out a cool guinea or a guinea and a half at a time‖ (Altick, 279).

More readers would now be inclined to buy books in stead of borrowing them from a

library, given that ―[i]t took a degree of self-discipline few men possessed to listen to one‘s

friends speculating on what would happen in Mr. Dickens‘ next number and yet delay

one‘s own reading of the book until […] it was complete, bound, and available in the

circulating library‖ (Altick, 280).

However, this growth of the book trade often had negative consequences for the

quality of the books produced. First of all, the three-decker format implied that the author

had enough material to keep the story interesting in order to persuade the reader to buy all

three parts. Not all nineteenth-century authors had the skills to do so. The increase in books

available had also resulted in a very large increase in the first mass audience, who had a

wider range of tolerance for literary quality and particular styles of fiction. Literature was

now no longer aimed uniquely at an elite of educated readers, but became available for a

much more diverse audience. Consequently, the high demand for novels allowed authors to

write as a lucrative business, rather than as an artistic vocation. In her article ―The

Tendencies of English Fiction‖ (1885), Ouida affirmed that ―[f]iction has come to be

regarded in England as among the professions or trades, by which any person possessed of

an average education and intelligence can earn his bread. […] Fiction is no longer a

daughter of the Muses and the Graces, but a mere slave of the lamp and the quill‖ (214).

The writer was transformed from being an artist, to being a labourer in ―the fiction

industry‖ (Sutherland). Novels could be written according to a fixed pattern and need not

be part of an author‘s personal and unique style, but instead followed the reader‘s

expectations. Bowlby states:

The ‗absolute‘ value of ‗art for art‘s sake‘ versus de monetary values of

commerce became a standard opposition in contemporary debates, and the

difference between ‗authentic‘ and ‗enslaved‘ literary labor became a lived

contradiction for working artists and writers throughout the century. […]

[C]ommerce [was made] into a matter of beautiful images and culture into a

matter of trade, a sector of commerce […]. (9)

Ouida, and many authors with her, attacked the influence of consumerism in the literary

world. She refused to be reduced to being a mere labourer and feared that the novelists

who were only interested in profit making were debasing the status of the writer as an

artist.

The mere association, as convertible terms, of work and imagination is

ridiculous. The moment that a writer sits down to his bureau as punctually

as a clerk to his desk he becomes a mere clerk, and the kind of literature he

produces can only be monotonous and insipid, created as the child cuts out

perforated wood with his little saw, according to directions, and calls it

carving. (Ouida 1885, 223)

Authors who considered themselves as belonging to the elite, saw the status of the

artist being degraded as more and more novels were published that were commercial items

rather than real works of genius. When Matthew Arnold wrote Culture and Anarchy (1867-

68) for example, he was alarmed by this ―crisis of authority, a fear that uncultured,

uncritical writers were making statements about culture and society in a way formerly

reserved to authoritative ‗sages‘ like himself‖ (Fortunato, 23). By the end of the nineteenth

century, books were regarded as mere commodities that were to be sold by the millions.

What used to be an object that brought prestige to the owner was now available for the

mass of consumers. In Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry‘s words most

likely reflect Wilde‘s when he claims: ―Of all people in the world the English have the

least sense of the beauty of literature‖ (PDG, 51). In Under Two Flags, the novel is simply

associated with other consumer items: ―Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where

his elbows leaned; scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, the cigarettes, and the gold

essence-bottles with which it was strewn‖ (UTF, 89).

There is a missing link between the buyers and that which was bought. To

understand how these consumer articles were brought to the public, and how it came that

people felt the need to consume in order to improve their lives (while, in the past,

consumption was determined by necessity) the role of advertising must be examined.

4.2. ADVERTISING

A great difference between the department store of the second half of the nineteenth

century and the traditional shop that it superseded was that at the department stores, the

goods were for the first time ‗put on display‘. Products were arranged to look beautiful and

desirable. Special glass cabinets in combination with artificial lightning made the goods in

the display windows more attractive to potential costumers. ―Commodities were put on

show in an attractive guise, becoming unreal in that they were images set apart from

everyday things, and real in that they were to be bought and taken home to enhance the

ordinary environment‖ (Bowlby, 2). The visual presentation of the merchandise detached

the products from their essence: they were transformed into objects of fantasy and desire.

This process can be explained by looking at the Great Exhibition of 1851. In The

Commodity Culture of Victorian England (1991), Thomas Richards clarifies that ―the

Great Exhibition of 1851 was the first outburst of the phantasmagoria of commodity

culture. It inaugurated a new way of seeing things that marked indelibly the cultural and

commercial life of Victorian England and fashioned a mythology of consumerism that has

endured to this day‖ (18). In this gallery over seven thousand objects were exhibited and

over six million visitors came to look at the novelties. People were enthralled by all these

beautiful objects brought together in a beautiful location (a greenhouse with ―successively

receding stories of glass and iron‖ [Richards, 19]). Here again, the way in which the

objects were displayed influenced the way in which they were perceived by the spectator.

―[T]his new way of seeing things was the product of the new kind of place in which things

could be seen. […] Under a single ceiling, surrounded by trees and flooded with light,

commodities appeared to have come out of nowhere, radiant and ordered into departments

that fixed the place of each article‖ (Richards, 18-20). After her visit to the Great

Exhibition, Ouida wrote in her diary: ―Oh it was Eden itself. […] [O]h that silver and

ebony inkstand with a deer and a fawn and the inkstands formed of stumps of trees all in

chased silver—it did not look at all like what it was, it was lovely‖ (quoted in Schroeder

and Holt, 11). The Great Exhibition, together with the display of goods in the department

stores, exemplifies the contradictory nature of Victorian consumer culture. First of all, it

displayed the objects at an aesthetically pleasing level of attraction, rather than a functional

one, and made a commodity, in the eyes of the spectator, ―not look at all like what is was‖.

Consumer society also ―evoked the fantasy of acquisition while emphasizing

inaccessibility‖ (Miller, 3). In department stores in particular this becomes clear when ―the

invisible wall of solid crystal, [the display window], was seen to encourage an increasing

distance between people […] producing desire and disenchantment‖ (Miller, 5). All these

commodities evoke fantasies of purchase and possession with the spectators, but at the

same their distance is emphasised since all the objects are too wonderful and too expensive

for ordinary people to afford, leaving the spectator with an unsatisfied desire.

Early 19th

-century print advertisements drew on the same strategy for promoting

articles as the department stores. ―[A]dvertising implied new methods of marketing aimed

at selling the ‗image‘ of a product along with, or as part of, the thing itself‖ (Bowlby, 18).

Advertisements used evocative images: the products depicted were used by beautiful or

heroic people and associated with positive circumstances. In Consuming Angels:

Advertising and Victorian Women (1994), Lori Anne Loeb gives a number of examples:

Keating‘s Powder featured cameos of sleeping children […]; images of

consumptive war veterans alternated with illustrations of mythical figures

wielding shield in the battle against disease. […] Biscuit manufacturers

favoured illustrations of tea parties or children‘s schoolroom antics. Soap

companies attracted consumers with nostalgic images of Elizabethan

courtiers or pictures of provocatively dishevelled women. (Loeb, 6-7)

Again, a sense of desire is opposed by an impression of inaccessibility. People feel the

need to consume as a way to upgrade their lives to the same level as the lives of the people

depicted on the advertisement. However, at the same time, they have to acknowledge that

the circumstances in which the product is represented are ideal ones and that this status can

never be achieved by the simple acquisition of particular creams, corsets or objects to

decorate one‘s house. Nevertheless, women did buy those products and appeared to be

satisfied with ―creat[ing] the illusion of the ‗perfect lady,‘ a beacon of Victorian affluence‖

(Loeb, 10). For, as Katherine Montwieler accurately states, ―[i]f contemporary conduct

books taught women to be happy in their station in life, contemporary advertisements

taught women that happiness could be acquired through the purchase of material

possessions‖ (43).

A remarkable factor within advertising was that people would not only promote

goods and products, they would also promote themselves. Oscar Wilde was particularly

competent as a self-advertiser. He would associate himself with a group of people of high

standing, and as a result try to achieve their support for the publishing of his works. As a

talented conversationalist he was able, as a young Oxford graduate without any influential

connections, to become part of the circles of the artistic elite. An important element in

Oscar Wilde‘s self-advertisement was the elite social group who called themselves ―The

Souls‖. In Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde,

Paul L. Fortunato clarifies that ―elite society was in constant contact with leaders in the

arts, a fact that allowed many artists of low estate to rise quickly. […] The Souls prided

themselves on being large-minded enough to associate with people who did not have

means but had culture. […] [Wilde] used these acquaintances to […] name-drop.‖ (3-7).

Ouida also understood the advantages of having acquaintances in high society. She

would host dinner parties and invite numerous respectable ladies and gentlemen who

would then promote her as an artist. In an article for The North American Review Ouida

evaluated the positive and negative aspects of possessing a well-known name. Although

she feared that fame involved a threat to one‘s privacy, she also acknowledged that it

brings a great number of opportunities with it.

To possess a name which is an open sesame wherever it is pronounced is not

only agreeable, but is often useful. It opens doors easily, whether they be of

palaces or of railway stations; it saves you from arrest if you be sketching

fortifications; it obtains kudos for you from everyone, from ministers to inn-

keepers; in a word, it marks you as something out of the common, not likely

to be meddled with or neglected with impunity. (Ouida 1885, 213)

Through their association with the elite, Wilde and Ouida made themselves famous

in high society surroundings. Their aim was, however, not only to appeal to a small elite

audience but also to a mass audience. Ouida‘s sensation novels enjoyed a great success

with a large middle-class audience, making Under Two Flags a best-selling novel. Oscar

Wilde was the editor of the magazine The Woman‘s World which was a ―fashion magazine

for women‖ (Green, 102). It consisted of ―an exchange of ideas about femininity, dress,

aesthetics, literature and society […]. The Woman’s World addressed an élite but

expanding readership of middle and upper class educated women […]‖ (Green, 102).

Wilde also wrote articles and reviews for newspapers such as The Pall Mall Gazette which

―consciously sought out a mass audience by including sensational elements, heavy doses of

feature writing […] and a more accessible layout‖ (Fortunato, 21).He also organised

various lectures in America and in Britain where he addressed a mass public on topics such

as dress and interior decoration.

[I]t was lecturing both in America and in Britain, that early on earned Wilde

the most money that gave him his public reputation. This was not for the

most part lecturing to Oxford-educated academics or cultivated artistic

elites. In this popular lecturing, he had a largely middle-class audience, and

one in whom the majority of attendees were often women. (Fortunato, 19)

His popularity had reached a very high level to the extent that in a letter to The St. James‘

Gazette, he correctly asserts: ―I think I may say without vanity—though I do not wish to

appear to run vanity down—that of all men in England I am the one who requires least

advertisement‖ (quoted in Fortunato, 11).

In these attitudes towards the mass audience, we can again distinguish the

opposition between an invitation into a world of fantasy while at the same time

emphasising its distance and inaccessibility that is so typical of Victorian consumer

society. On the one hand, a mass audience, consisting mostly of middle class readers, was

approached by Wilde and Ouida and was invited into a world of culture, which was up to

that time reserved for the wealthiest, and better educated, classes. On the other hand,

however, Wilde and Ouida‘s elitist attitude towards literature, and art in general, still kept

them at a distance from this mass audience. It was said of Oscar Wilde that, ―whenever he

faced a choice between two opposites, he chose both‖ (Fortunato, 15). This was exactly

what he did with his approach towards consumer culture. Wilde, just as Ouida, was an

aesthete who, as has been noted previously, perceived the artist as ―a special kind of

individual, [a] man of sensitivity, refined tastes and creative talents‖ (Singer, 347). Only

refined and cultivated men (and women) held the authority to express their views about art

since they were the only ones that truly understood art. Therefore, Wilde and Ouida felt a

strong antipathy towards writers who debased the reputation of the artist by writing

literature simply to cater to the needs of a mass audience who appreciated novels for their

exciting and romantic plots rather than for their complex content or stylistic innovations. In

Under Two Flags, Ouida shows Bertie, the materialistic guardsman who is primarily

concerned with his own well-being (at least at the onset of the novel), reading novels by

Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail, a popular French novelist who entertained the mass

audience of Victorian consumer society. Also, later in the novel, she depicts the generals of

the French Foreign Legion as men who think of popular authors as the greatest artists in

the field of literature: ―‗Faith!‘ laughed Chanrellon, regardless of the General‘s

observation, ‗if we all published our memoires, the world would have a droll book. Dumas

and Terrail would be beat out of the field‘‖ (UTF, 258).

Nevertheless, in spite of their rejection of the materialistic nature of consumer

society and their criticism of readers who consumed novels for mere entertainment rather

than appreciating them for their high artistic value, these writers did aim to reach a mass

audience. Ouida and Wilde simultaneously rejected and embraced a mass audience and this

contradictory position can be explained by several factors, the first being financial. As

Fortunato explains, ―Wilde had no intention to become a starving artist‖ (2). Wilde had left

Oxford in 1879 and was expected to support himself. ―His inherited land in Ireland turned

out to be almost worthless [and] [h]e had failed to secure himself an academic career at

Oxford‖ (17). A lack of funds forced him to direct his novels and plays to an elite as well

as to a mass audience. Ouida‘s financial situation was even more difficult. Not only did she

have to support herself, she was also in charge of supporting her mother and grandmother.

However, she was well aware of her financial rights as an author and would engage in

intense discussions with her publishers to get what she wanted. In a letter to the publisher

of her novel Held in Bondage (1863), she wrote:

I would suggest that we should follow the usual course; - £50 paid down to

me at once, not to be returned in any event; and a half share of the profits to

me afterwards. The copyright of the work to be yours for one or two years,

during which period however you should never issue it in any cheaper form

than a shilling edition, into which form I wish to pass as soon as the Library

Edition has been sold off; at the end of that time the copyright to revert back

to me. (Ouida quoted in Terry, 36).

Apart from the need for financial support, Ouida and Wilde saw it as their

responsibility as aesthetes to educate the uncultivated middle classes. In their novels, they

were participating in a ―movement of social reform, not so much of political change as of

cultural and moral change by means of educating the middle classes‖ (Fortunato, 20).

Although, theoretically, they rejected consumerism, they did show the middle classes how

to reach a higher level of refinement, for instance with suggestions about how to behave in

public, and which commodities to buy in order to come across as a man (or woman) of

culture. In Under Two Flags, Bertie Cecil discusses the possibility giving the lower class

an education in taste and manners:

Now look here; nine-tenths of creatures in this world don‘t know how to put

on a glove. It‘s an art, and an art that requires long study. If a few of us were

to turn glove-fitters when we are fairly crashed, we might civilise the whole

world, and prevent the deformity of an all-fitting glove […] Think what we

might do for society […] We might open a college where the traders might

go through a course of polite training before they blossomed out as

millionaires; the world would be spared an agony of dropped h‘s and bad

bows. (UTF, 100)

4.3. THE COMMODITY

A study of consumer society would not be adequate without discussing the

component that was at the centre of it: the commodity. In Fictions of Commodity Culture

(2003), Christopher Lindner defines consumer culture, or ―commodity culture‖ as ―a

culture organised around the production and exchange of material goods‖ (3). These

material goods consisted of clothes, furniture, jewellery, paintings, rugs and all other items

that could be used to decorate oneself or one‘s home. By the 1850s, ―the commodity so

saturated and engrossed Victorian society that it even came to stand as an icon of nation‖

(Lindner, 4). Also books took up the emergence of ―commodity culture‖ as a central

theme. ―[T]he commodity figures throughout the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries as a living object of consumer fetish that excites desires yet strangely denies

satisfaction‖ (Lindner, 3). The novels The Picture of Dorian Gray and Under Two Flags

illustrate the importance of the commodity in nineteenth-century consumer culture and

discuss the effects it had on society. An excellent theory of the function of commodities in

society and the subsequent commodification of everyday life is provided by the French

writer and Marxist philosopher Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

4.3.1. Use Value and Exchange Value

Debord correctly touches upon consumer society‘s obsession with quantity. ―The

commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it

develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative‖ (19). To satisfy the needs of the

consumers, a very high amount of new commodities is created. In earlier times, people

would buy products only to ensure the survival of their families. But with this abundance

of commodities now available to them, people buy goods to enrich their lives. ―Exchange

value could arise only as a representative of use value, but the victory it eventually won

with its own weapons created the conditions for its own autonomous power‖ (Debord, 23).

The objects for sale no longer serve their original purposes, they only exist as commodities

to be bought. People would no longer buy china to invite guests for tea. They would

exhibit it in their living rooms. In other words, their original function is substituted by a

decorative function and ―an object‘s value lay in its ornamental properties, not in its

usefulness‖ (Montwieler, 44).

In Bertie Cecil‘s home, an enormous amount of goods is assembled and organised

around the different rooms. However, in his room we will not find a tasteful arrangement

of decorative items, since he wants to fill his house with as many expensive articles as

possible as a way to display his wealth. As a result, commodities are chaotically spread

around in his bedroom. In Beauty‘s eyes, quantity and expensiveness seem to be the major

factors to determine one‘s good taste.

A Guardsman at home is always, if anything, rather more luxuriously

accommodated than a young Duchess, and Bertie Cecil was never behind

his fellows in anything; besides, he was one of the cracks of the Household,

and women sent him pretty things enough to fill the Palais Royal. The

dressing-table was littered with Bohemian glass and gold-stoppered bottles,

and all the perfumes of Araby represented by Breidenback and Rimmel. […]

The hangings of the room were silken and rose-colored, and a delicious

confusion prevailed through it pell-mell; box-spurs, hunting-stirrups,

cartridge cases, curb-chains, muzzle-loaders, hunting flasks, and white

gauntlets, being mixed up with Paris novels, pink notes, point-lace ties,

bracelets, and bouquets to be dispatched to various destinations, and velvet

and silk bags for banknotes, cigars, or vesuvians, embroidered by feminine

fingers and as useless as those pretty fingers themselves. (UTF, 2)

When Venetia Corona sets her eyes on Bertie‘s carved chessmen, she is less attracted to

them for their artistic value than for their value as a commodity that can be put on display.

She would like to have them as a part of her collection. When Cigarette enters Venetia‘s

tent, she sees that ―[it] had been adorned with as much luxury as was procurable, and with

many of the rich and curious things of Algerian art and workmanship, so far as they could

be hastily collected by the skill and quickness of the French intendance‖ (UTF, 532).

However, when Bertie offers Venetia the carved chess figures as a gift, she refuses. Clearly

it would be inappropriate to accept a gift from someone below her rank (since she does not

yet know that Bertie is actually an aristocrat). Nevertheless, an additional reason for her

not accepting the carved figures could be that if the chessmen were given to her for free,

this would lower the value of the commodity since they would no longer have a monetary

value.

Dorian‘s addiction to expensive and luxurious things can be noted in his ―elaborate

dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool‖ (106), his ―onyx-paved bathroom‖

(106) and his ―luxuriously-cushioned couch‖ (108). He becomes a collector of expensive

commodities and studies history only to gain knowledge of the material possessions of a

number of important historical figures.

He longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun

[…]; the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden

bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of Pontus

[…]; and the coat that Charles of Orleans wore […]. Catharine de Médicis

had a mourning-bed made for her of black velvet powdered with crescents

and suns. Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his

apartment. (PDG, 153-4)

He spends a whole year collecting artefacts that resembled the luxuries associated with

these historical figures. In this way he can restore all these elements that have been lost in

history, and be able to associate himself more closely with these important individuals and

to elevate himself to their status.

4.3.2. Being vs. Having

Consumption has become an addiction for Dorian Gray and Bertie Cecil. ―Since

human wants are insatiable, man finds himself always in a condition of scarcity‖ (Gagnier

cited in Molloy, 254). Nevertheless, people had to make choices from the wide range of

goods available. It were these choices that would determine one‘s status and taste. ―A new

kind of man was created: one who was civilised by virtue of his technology and whose

advanced stage of development was signified by the boundlessness of his desires. He must

choose from a universe of goods on display, and his status, his level of civilisation (his

‗tastes‘), were revealed by his choices or preferences‖ (Gagnier 1997, 21). Consumer

society caused ―an evident degradation of being into having—human fulfilment was no

longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed‖ (Debord, 10). In other

words, a person‘s identity was from now on defined by his or her possessions.

I have already noted that Bertie Cecil and Dorian Gray surrounded themselves with

beautiful and expensive artefacts to display their good taste, their ―connoisseurship‖.

However, Ouida and Wilde go even further in linking a character‘s personality to their

possessions. In Under Two Flags, Bertie Cecil stages his own death in the train crash in

order to avoid prosecution and at the same time to save Lady Guinevere‘s honour. He has

to flee to Algeria and to ―[lay] aside forever his identity as Bertie Cecil‖ (265). When he

leaves for Algeria, he leaves ―the baggage where it was jammed among the debris‖ (263).

He leaves his material possessions behind, symboling his old life that he now has to

abandon. Two corpses in the train wreck are later identified as Bertie Cecil and his servant

Rake, based on the luggage that was left behind.

―Marseilles train smashes; twenty people ground into indistinguishable

amalgamation; two of the amalgamated jammed head foremost in a carriage

alone; only traps in carriage with them, Beauty‘s traps with name clear on

the brass outside, and crest clear on silver things inside; two men ground to

atoms, but traps safe. (193)

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward‘s portrait, a material object, shows the real

character of Dorian. While Dorian does not age at all, the portrait bears the effects of his

cruel behaviour. ―Finally he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In the

dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-colored silk blinds, the face appeared to

him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there

was a touch of cruelty in the mouth‖ (103). Dorian transfers all his feelings, anxieties and

doubts on to the portrait. He reduces his own personality to the status of a commodity and

at the end he seems to come one with the portrait: when he wants to stab the picture in the

heart, he stabs himself.

4.3.3. Having vs. Appearing

In the nineteenth century, more and more people became aware of the shift of

―having into appearing‖ (Debord, 11) that characterised Victorian consumer culture. Since

a person‘s identity depended more and more on their possessions, they could purchase a

wide range of expensive goods to gain more public recognition and a higher status.

However, not all people had the means to spend large amounts of money on clothes and

decorations. Consumer society provided the perfect solution to that problem. Fortunato

explains that ―middle-class women could not afford dresses from Maison Worth or

tapestries from Morris and Company. But they could purchase the mass-produced versions,

available at department stores like Liberty and Co. and Collinson and Lock […]‖ (53). For

these middle classes, imitations of couture gowns and artworks were made. In this manner,

people of the lower classes were able to create the illusion of holding, or owning, a higher

social status than they actually had.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry is arguing about a very audacious

women with Lady Narborough:

‗But I remember her very well at Vienna thirty years ago and how décolleté

she was then.‘

‗She still is décolleté‘, he answered, taking an olive in his long fingers; ‗and

when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an édition de luxe of a bad

French novel. She is really wonderful and full of surprises. Her capacity for

family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair

turned quite gold from grief.‘ (197)

Similarly in Under Two Flags, the Zu-Zu, one of Bertie‘s mistresses, ―had translated from

a sphere of garret bread-and-cheese to a sphere of villa champagne and chicken‖(5). She is

a gold-digger who spends Bertie‘s money rapidly:

The Zu-Zu and her sisterhood plunge their white arms elbow-deep into so

many fortunes, and rule the world right and left as they do, they could also

sound their H's properly, and knew a little orthography […] Author and

artist, noble and soldier, court the Zu-Zu order now as the Athenians

courted their brilliant έταίραι; but it must be confessed that the Hellenic

idols were of a more exalted type than are the Hyde Park goddesses! (61)

These two descriptions explain how people of lower classes could create the appearance of

being distinguished and refined persons by altering their external appearance. In Wilde‘s

novel, the lady turns to clothing, and in Under Two Flags, the Zu-Zu who started off as a

simple ballet dancer, works her way to the top by using her lover‘s money to buy good

clothes and an expensive apartment and by altering her pronunciation.

However, these two abstracts also show that Ouida and Wilde are rather critical of

these two women‘s ‗disguises‘. Even in her fine dress, the woman Lord Henry is

describing can not hide her indecency and also the Zu-Zu can not rid herself of her dialect

which reveals her low descend: ―[O]f slang she had, to be sure, a répertoire, but to this was

her command of language limited. She dressed perfectly, but she was a vulgar little soul

[…]‖ (60). Rather than being supportive, Ouida and Wilde show themselves critical

towards this tendency of lower classes to consume in order to gain more social prestige.

Paul Fortunato explains: ―[Wilde implied] that people should not try to be ―artistic‖—they

should not try to be anything that is judged externally at all. That is, he says that ‗all

imitation in morals and in life is wrong‘‖ (Fortunato, 26).

4.4. CRITICISM ON CONSUMER SOCIETY

In Novels Behind Glass: Commodity, Culture and Victorian Narrative (1995),

Andrew H. Miller states: ―[A]mong the dominant concerns motivating mid-Victorian

novelists was a penetrating anxiety […] that their social and moral world was being

reduced to a warehouse of goods and commodities, a display window in which people,

their actions, and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others‖

(6). Ouida and Wilde promoted themselves as true connoisseurs, people with an exquisite

taste ―for artefacts such as blue china, Japanese art, Queen Anne furniture and exotic

clothing that was mocked by aestheticism‘s detractors but promoted by Aesthetes like

Wilde [and Ouida]‖ (Molloy, 252). Now that mass-produced imitations of these products

had become available for a large group of consumers, the original expensive objects had

decreased in value. People belonging to the middle and working classes were now able to

decorate their houses in a tasteful manner without spending a large amount of money.

Connoisseurs perceived this as a threat to their authority. They criticised the community of

consumers for purchasing a massive amount of goods without being familiar with their true

value as works of art.

As a consequence, Ouida and Wilde criticised their protagonists for their

materialism and their excessive consumption. Dorian Gray and Bertie Cecil are presented

as shallow consumers who are only concerned with purchasing as many commodities as

possible. They are not interested in their artistic significance, only in their economic value.

As a reaction to the critics who condemned his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray for the

absence of a moral message, Oscar Wilde wrote in a letter to The St. James‘ Gazette:

[T]hey [the public] will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is

this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. […]

Yes, there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray—a moral which the prurient

will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are

healthy. (Ellmann, 240-41)

Wilde asserts that there was indeed no moral warning inscribed in his novel. There is

however, an economic warning: the excessive consumption of goods and products is

unacceptable. The painter Basil Hallward‘s excessive consumption consists of his

adoration of Dorian. ―Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most

extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. […] I

worshipped you. […] I wanted to have you all to myself‖ (PDG, 128). This extreme

admiration towards Dorian Gray is not tolerated in the novel and results in Basil‘s murder.

In Under Two Flags, Bertie undergoes a serious change towards the end of the

novel. In the beginning he is presented as a light-hearted, egocentric character. But he is

punished for his materialism by his forced departure to Algeria. Also Dorian is punished

for his materialism and ―over-consumption‖. While Dorian lives his extravagant life, his

portrait becomes more and more hideous by the day. Initially, he is able to hide the portrait

away in the attic and escape his bad conscience. Nevertheless, when James Vane turns up

and faces Dorian with all the harm that he has caused, Dorian becomes desperate. As a last

resort, Dorian flees to the opium dens, also a place of excessive consumption.

‗To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the

soul.‘ Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again

now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror

where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins

that were new. (204)

For Dorian there is no escape from the world of consumerism. He lives in a social

environment that celebrates consumption, and is influenced to a very large extent by Lord

Henry who proclaims a life where one should constantly consume new products, objects

and experiences. At the end of the novel, Dorian has learned nothing since he still claims

that ―[i]t was the portrait that had done everything‖ (PDG, 245).

The great difference between Bertie and Dorian lies in the setting and in the people

that surround them. While Dorian is allowed to stay in his comfortable environment, Bertie

is forced to flee to Algeria. The radical shift from a luxurious setting at Royallieu, where

money is spent recklessly, to the harsh conditions in Algeria provokes a change in him.

Deprived of all luxury, he is able to overcome his own shallowness. Although, when he

receives money from a local merchant he still feels ―a keen pang of the old pride that

would not wholly be stilled‖ (UTF, 274), nevertheless, he spends all the money on some

cooled wine to ease the pain of a dying soldier.

What is more, while Dorian‘s materialism and selfishness is continually encouraged

by Lord Henry, Bertie is confronted with Cigarette, a young French vivandière who

renounces all material possessions. At the hospital Cigarette looks after the dying soldiers

and makes sure that their last days pass as comfortable as possible:

[M]en would tell in camp and hospital, with great tears coursing down their

brown, scarred cheeks, how her touch would lie softly as a snowflake on

their heated foreheads; how her watch would be kept by them through long

nights of torment; how her gifts of golden trinkets would be sold or pawned

as soon as received to buy them ice or wine […]. (UTF 343)

However, when visiting the hospital, all Bertie talks about are the beautiful gifts that Lady

Venetia Corona brought the soldiers. This shows that his old materialistic way of life still

typifies him. It is only at the end, when Cigarette sacrifices her own life, something that is

worth more than the most expensive commodity, to save his, that he is able to take a

distance from his materialistic and egocentric view of life. Where Dorian is trapped in a

consumerist environment, Cigarette offers Bertie a way out. When he is back in England

with Venetia Corona as his wife he concludes: ―‗It was worth banishment to return […] It

was worth the trials that I bore to learn the love that I have known‘‖ (UTF, 606).

Although the criticism of Ouida and Wilde on consumer society is noticeable, it is

not straightforward. This has again to do with the expectations of a very diverse audience.

Ouida and Wilde mocked consumerism in their fiction, but they bore in mind that a large

part of their audience consisted of middle-class consumers. In Idylls of the Marketplace:

Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986), Regenia Gagnier explains how novelists

combined criticism of a particular group of people while at the same time entertaining

them:

The situation is one in which an outsider has to a stunning degree taken

upon himself the reflective apparatus of the dominant group and then used

this apparatus to mock the group on, and with, its own terms. The use of

such tactics endears the speaker to the group at the moment he mocks it.

This is the technique of ironic reference: the use of popular symbology by

its critics in order to be both commercially competitive and critical.

(Gagnier 1986, 8)

Ouida and Wilde would use popular expressions as a way to gain the audience‘s sympathy

and to be able to criticise them without the possibility of creating a scandal.

What is more, Ouida and Wilde were not as detached from and as opposed to

consumer society as they claimed. In The Art of Popular Fiction: Gender, Authorship and

Aesthetics in the Writing of Ouida (2008), Carla Molloy accurately states:

―[C]onnoisseurship—the purchase and collection of art commodities—is at bottom nothing

more than a form of aesthetic consumption‖ (252). Ouida and Wilde‘s fascination with

beautiful artefacts was justified by claiming that these objects served to decorate their

lives, just as the aesthetic code prescribed it. Their collections were ways to express

themselves as aesthetes who were not interested in the commercial value of the artefact but

in its intrinsic value as a work of art. This was true to some extent, but these connoisseurs

could not liberate themselves completely from the desires that consumer society

introduced, and connoisseurship was often exploited as an excuse for participating in

consumer culture. ―Ouida thus provides a justification for indulging in expensive tastes and

pleasures. Doing so is merely appreciating human achievements and works of art,

something in the order of duty‖ (Fortunato, 50-1).

We can conclude that Ouida and Wilde indeed introduced a severe criticism of

consumer society in their novels. So severe that in his letter to the St. James‘ Gazette,

Oscar Wilde referred to it as the only moral present in the novel. However, their criticism

of consumerism always has to be measured against their involvement in consumer society.

4.5. COMMODIFICATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

In Victorian consumer society, not only goods are consumed but also people. A

person is often debased to the status of a commodity. In Under Two Flags, Bertie

consumes women. He has an extramarital relationship with two women, Lady Guinevere

and the Zu-Zu. ―Marriage is a luxury Bertie cannot afford; therefore, he cultivates the

polite ostentation of affairs with beautiful women—relationships that offer the pretense of

romantic commitment through opulent displays that gratify his own taste for luxury‖

(Schroeder and Holt, 72). Lady Guinevere is trapped in a loveless marriage with a rich lord

whom she married only for his money. She needs Bertie as her lover to escape the chains

of marriage from time to time, but she is not interested in a permanent relationship since

she is too much in love with her husband‘s wealth and social status. This situation suits

Bertie just fine: he sees Lady Guinevere as a luxury item that is fashionable for some

occasions but that can be easily cast aside at any time.

Cecil could, when needed, do the Musset and Meredith style of thing to

perfection, but on the whole he preferred love à la mode; it is so much easier

and less exhausting to tell your mistress of a ringing run, or a close finish,

than to turn perpetual periods on the lustre of her eyes, and the eternity of

your devotion. (UTF, 57)

Bertie‘s other lover, the Zu-Zu, adapts her lifestyle to the norms of consumer society. ―Zu-

Zu embraces the forces of commodification and display, allowing herself to be

commodified as a prostitute and willingly identifying herself with objects of luxury as one

of her few methods of empowerment‖ (Schroeder and Holt, 73). The Zu-Zu accepts

Bertie‘s gifts in exchange for her attention. She presents herself as an article of trade that is

available on the market for anyone who has a good price to offer.

Nevertheless, when he flees to Algeria, ―Bertie encounters characters who

challenge the cultural paradigms of a commercial society that objectifies humanity‖

(Schroeder and Holt, 74). Cigarette refuses to be commofied: she has no interest in money

or material property and the men that she chooses for herself are simple soldiers.

―Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous little Friend of the Flag to

dance for them, and had failed; but, for a set of soldiers, war-worn, dust covered, weary

with toil and still with wounds, she would do it, till they forgot their ills, and got as

intoxicated with it as with champagne‖ (UTF, 221). A character as Cigarette cannot be

tolerated in the consumer society that Ouida depicts in her novel, and therefore she is at the

end conveniently killed off. ―As a woman who defies prevailing gender codes and refuses

to participate in her own commodification as marriageable material, she will remain

forever outside the hearth of Western society‘s domestic economy‖ (Schroeder and Holt,

76).

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the young actress Sibyl Vane suffers a similar fate.

Dorian loves her, not for her personality, but for her artificiality.

‗Tonight she is Imogen,‘ he answered, ‗and tomorrow night she will be

Juliet.‘

‗When is she Sibyl Vane?‘

‗Never.‘ (PDG 63-4)

At first, Dorian rejects Lord Henry‘s presentation of women as ―a decorative sex‖ (56).

However, this changes when Sibyl Vane performs poorly on purpose on the night that

Dorian goes to see her act in the company of Lord Henry. She refuses to be characterized

as an artificial object, her love for Dorian made her choose reality over artificiality. But

Dorian had never loved her, except as an aesthetic object.

‗You have killed my love,‘ he muttered. […] ‗You used to stir my

imagination. Now you don‘t even stir my curiosity. […] I loved you because

you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you

realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the

shadows of art. […] Without your art you are nothing. […]‘ (99-100)

Unable to live in a society that would force her to live as an artificial object, Sibyl Vane

commits suicide.

But not only women are depersonalised in the two novels. Dorian is objectified into

the portrait. His picture will bear the marks of old age while his own face and body will

remain forever young. By transferring his feelings of guilt and malice onto the portrait,

Dorian actively participates in his own commodification. For Basil Hallward, Dorian has

never been more than an aesthetic object: ―I am no more to you than a green bronze figure‖

(PDG, 34). The pseudonyms given to a number of characters (Prince Charming, the Jew,

etc.) adds to the objectification of the character. In a conversation with the Duchess of

Monmouth Lord Henry states: ―It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving

lovely names to things. Names are everything. […] The man who could call a spade a

spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for‖ (215). By taking

away a name, one takes away a part of an identity and adds to the objectification of that

person. In Under Two Flags many characters suffer the same objectification. Bertie Cecil

and the Marquis of Rockingham are also known as ―Beauty‖ and ―The Seraph‖. These

pseudonyms limit their personality to one aspect of their physical appearance: their beauty.

When Cigarette asks Lord Rockingham his name, he answers: ―Well—some call me

Seraph‖ (460), to which she replies: ―Ah! You have petits noms then in Albion! I should

have thought she was too sombre and too still for them‖ (460). Cigarette‘s refusal to be

commodified is hindered by Bertie‘s frequent nicknaming: he calls her ―little one‖, ―Petite

Reine‖, ―Little Leoparard‖. She is outraged because he refuses to accept her as a real

individual, but Bertie is too influenced by consumerism to understand her cry for attention.

The commodification of individuals shows that Victorian consumer society did not

only cause changes in the market structure and in the organisation of shops and shopping

behaviour. Everyday life was also marked by revolutionary changes. Their novels present

an image of ―the complicated Victorian reactions to the new phenomenon of commodity

culture‖ (Schroeder and Holt, 11). On the one hand, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Under

Two Flags give a critical evaluation of consumer culture with the punishment of the

materialistic characters. However, at the same time, Ouida and Wilde were deeply marked

by consumer society themselves and they were ―required to negotiate between their moral

condemnation [of consumer culture] and their implication in what they opposed‖ (Miller

quoted in Schroeder and Holt, 12).

5. GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Ouida and Wilde wrote their novels at a time when revolutionary social changes

were taking place in 19th-century British society. A reformation of education had led to a

higher literacy rate, the industrial revolution had brought numerous technological

innovations and had caused a higher prosperity which allowed the growth of an

international consumer culture. But also at a personal level people were affected by these

transformations in society: more job possibilities were created in the new factories and the

increased personal wealth led to a new shopping behaviour. These numerous

transformations, both in society and in everyday life, caused people to question other

values and institutions that had been fixed for a long time. One of these institutions was the

family and the role of men and women in it.

In The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, Anthony S. Wohl explains:

Whether valued as a nursery of civic virtues or as a refuge from the tensions

of society, the family was worshipped throughout the Victorian period; it

was more than a social institution, it was a creed and it was held as a dogma

carrying all the force of tradition that family life distinguished England from

less stable and moral societies. (10)

Within the middle-class family there were certain generally accepted gender roles. Where

the husband was free to leave the protective atmosphere of the home, the wife was

supposed to remain in the private sphere at all times. It was the man who would go to work

and provided an income, whereas the woman had to take care of the household. ―The

perfect lady under these conditions became the woman who kept to her family, centering

all her life on keeping the house clean, the children well disciplined and her daughters

chaste‖ (Vicinus, xiv).

Not only were these gender roles socially accepted, they were supported by early

scientific evidence. In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin claims that the external

features of men and women support the different roles appointed to them. He presents ―the

greater size and strength of man, in comparison with woman, together with his broader

shoulders, more developed muscles, rugged outline of body, his greater courage and

pugnacity‖ (628) as a result of the hard labour that man had to perform during the era of

the ―barbarous nations‖. Darwin believed that in civilised society, men was still in need of

these physical traits since he still had ―to work harder than the women for their joint

subsistence‖ (228). However, not only in their physical appearance but also in their mental

capacities, men differ from women: ―The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the

two sexes is shewn by man‘s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than

can woman- whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of

the senses and the hands‖ (629). Darwin‘s claims can be understood as a justification of the

prescribed gender roles. These differences between men and women had been generally

accepted for a long time, even by women: ―Mrs. Ellis, a popular writer of etiquette books,

counselled the unhappily married woman to remember that her ‗highest duty is so often to

suffer and be still‘‖ (Ellis quoted in Vecinus, x). Nonetheless, by the end of the nineteenth

century, many of the stable values and institutions had been subjected to a great amount of

criticism, and their survival could no longer be taken for granted.

Although the Victorian age was an age of optimism (due to the great progress

created by the many technological, industrial and commercial innovations), it was also an

age of uncertainty. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle (1991),

Elaine Showalter explains:

If the different races can be kept in their places, if the various classes can be

held in their proper districts of the city, and if men and women can be fixed

in their separate spheres, many hope, apocalypse can be prevented and we

can preserve a comforting sense of identity and permanence in the face of

that relentless spectre of millennial change. (4)

Whereas in the past, laws, religious dogmas and social roles had been blindly accepted by

the general public, people had now started doubting these ―fixed truths‖. The publication

of Darwin‘s On The Origin of Species (1859) caused a crisis in religious thought and the

development of a consumer society allowed people to climb the social ladder (or at least to

create the illusion of doing so) through the acquisition of expensive commodities.

Moreover, the expansion of the British colonial empire brought some new anxieties:

―[F]ears not only of colonial rebellion but also of racial mingling, crossbreeding, and

intermarriage, fuelled scientific and political interest in establishing clear lines of

demarcation between black and white, East and West‖ (Showalter, 5).

In the light of these crucial transformations in society, it should not come as a

surprise that men and women also started questioning their respective gender roles. One of

the first works that had advocated for more rights for women was Mary Wollstonecraft‘s A

Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). When her work was published people were

shocked with her radical reproach towards men. ―Women are told from their infancy,‖ she

claims, ―that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of

temper, outward obedience […] will obtain for them the protection of man […]. How

grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic

brutes! (126-27). Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, more and more women

became aware of the unjust, humble position of women. More and more criticism was

directed towards the inferior position of women, both by men and women, which led to a

series of political and legal reforms that provided women with more rights and liberties.

The ―Custody Act‖ (1839) allowed divorced women to have custody of her children under

seven years old and with the acceptance of the ―Married Women‘s Property Acts‖ (1870-

1908), married women had now the right to own property (NAEL, 990-91).

However, not everyone agreed with these new liberties granted to women. A

comparison of Of Queens‘ Gardens (first published in 1865) by John Ruskin and The

Subjection of Women (1869) by John Stuart Mill shows two conflicting opinions on the

―Woman Question‖ and ―compressed within these two statements is nearly the whole

range and possibility of Victorian thought on the subject‖ (Millet, 63). Ruskin defends the

traditional believes that evaluate men as inherently different from women:

Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man‘s power is active,

progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer,

the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for

adventure, for war […] But the woman‘s power is for rule, not for battle, –

and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering,

arrangement and decision. (90)

Mill showed himself radically opposed to this argument in stating that ―[it does not] avail

anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions and

position, and renders these appropriate to them‖ (20). Mill argues that although gender is

biologically determined, the different roles attributed to men and women are socially, and

not biologically, established. Ruskin, on the other hand, goes on to say that the woman

should remain at home to be protected from the dangers of the ―outer world‖: ―This is the

true nature of the home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but

from all terror, doubt, and division‖ (91). Mill alternatively argues that, since women are

not less intelligent than men, they should be given the same professional opportunities as

men. ―To Englishmen this, [the fact that Britain is governed by a female monarch], does

not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used to it; but they do feel it

unnatural that women should be soldiers or members of Parliament‖ (12).

These contradictory reactions towards the place and status of women in society

show that it was particularly difficult for women to create their own identity. Nevertheless,

it must be stressed that not only women suffered a crisis of identity. Showalter explains:

The redefinition of gender that took place at the turn of the century, was not

limited to women. Gender crisis affected men as well […] It is important to

keep in mind that masculinity is no more natural, transparent, and

unproblematic than ‗femininity.‘ It, too, is a socially constructed role,

defined within particular cultural and historical circumstances […]‖ (8).

Not all men were comfortable in their authoritarian position: now that old certainties such

as racial divisions and class boundaries gradually had become less strict, they too began to

question the validity of gender boundaries. ―Opportunities to succeed at home and in the

Empire were not always abundant; the stresses of maintaining an external mask of

confidence and strength led to nervous disorders […], [and] suppressing ‗feminine‘

feelings of nurturance and affection created problems for many men as well‖ (Showalter,

9). Just as women aspired to gain rights that were traditionally prescribed for men (such as

the right to vote, the possibility of a higher education, etc.), men desired the right to act

according to the codes of behaviour that were restricted for the female sex. The boundaries

between masculinity and femininity started to blur, and rather than ―a battle between the

sexes‖ it would be more truthful, according to Showalter, to speak of ―a battle within the

sexes‖ (9).

In this period when the established gender stereotypes were strongly criticised,

Ouida and Wilde wrote their novels. Under Two Flags and The Picture of Dorian Gray are

deeply affected by the crisis of gender and the socially constructed gender roles. Both of

them reflected on the crisis of masculinity and femininity by portraying sexually

ambiguous characters. Their characters are struggling with their contradictory feelings in

an attempt to construct their own sexual identity. Both novels reflect the insecurity of the

age in which rebellion against traditional gender roles is combined with an anxiety for

social and moral condemnation.

5.1. CROSS-GENDERED CHARACTERS

Wilde and Ouida, like many other Victorians, felt the need to criticise conventional

gender stereotypes. In their novels, they attempted to represent the confusion and

uncertainty that rose in the nineteenth century as a result of the fading of these socially

prescribed gender roles. Schroeder and Holt state that ―Ouida modifies the stereotypes […]

by masculinizing the women (both ‗pure girls‘ and ‗wicked women‘), who frequently

possess a power denied to most Victorian females, and feminizing the males, who are more

often proud, dissolute, and cruel […]‖ (28). In ―Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian

Criticism: Swinburne and Pater‖ (1996), Thaïs E. Morgan links the exploration and

challenging of gender boundaries to the Aesthetic movement. Pater and Swinburne, ―as

leading Aesthetic critics during the 1860s […] celebrated androgynous beauty and evoked

homoeroticism in an attempt to reimagine masculinity at the margins of conventional

middle-class notions of manliness‖ (140). Swinburne constructed the character of the

―masculine androgyne‖ which ―incorporates qualities culturally associated with femininity

while subordinating them to a fundamentally masculine figure‖ (143). In his poem

Hermaphroditus (1866), Swinburne reflects on the blurring of the boundaries between

masculinity and femininity:

Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,

Yet by no sunset and no moonrise

Shall make thee man and ease a woman‘s sighs,

Or make thee woman for a man‘s delight.

To what strange end hath some strange god made fair

The double blossom of two fruitless flowers? (34-38)

The protagonists of Under Two Flags and The Picture of Dorian Gray are both male

dandies with a high quantity of feminine traits. Just as Pater and Swinburne, Ouida and

Wilde aimed ―to revalorize the category of effeminacy, which is culturally marked as

negative, by aestheticizing it and thus remarking it in positive terms‖ (Morgan, 145). The

description that Lord Henry gives of Dorian makes the reader imagine a young girl rather

than a man: ―Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet

lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair‖ (PDG, 23). Dorian sips hot chocolate, wears

beautiful clothes and jewellery and dreads the day when he will notice his first wrinkle.

Since he receives money from his guardians he does not have to work and every aspect of

physical labour is reduced to a minimum. Also Ouida ―uses the dandy to depict conflicting

gender, sexual and artistic identities for Victorian men‖ (Schaffer 2000, 125).

[Beauty] was incorrigibly lazy, and inconceivably effeminate in every one

of his habits; […] he suggested a portable lounging-chair as an improvement

at battues, so that you might shoot sitting; drove to every breakfast and

garden party in the season in his brougham with the blinds down lest a grain

of dust should touch him; thought a waltz too exhaustive, and a saunter

down Pall Mall too tiring, and asked to have the end of a novel told him in

the clubs, because it was too much trouble to read on a warm day. (UTF, 69)

His nickname ―Beauty‖ reflects his sexual ambiguity: ―Bertie is a manly man in races or

hunting but becomes ―Beauty‖ full of feminine delicacy, in everyday life (Schaffer 2000,

126).

However, Bertie differs from Dorian in that at the end of the novel he becomes

more masculine as a result of his experiences in Algeria. He is involved in fierce battles,

has to endure the harsh living conditions of Algeria and is forced to become more

masculine in order to survive. Venetia Corona says to him: ―The existence you lead in

Algeria must be very terrible to you, though it is greater, in truth, than your old years of

indolence‖ (UTF, 498), and at the end he admits: ―It has been well for me that I have

suffered these things‖ (UTF, 605). Dorian on the other hand, cannot rid himself from his

feminine features. Whenever he faces a difficulty he runs away from it and starts to cry.

Even at the very end of the novel his personality is still made up of a combination of

masculine and feminine characteristics. At the end his downfall is not a heroic death (as is

the case with most men in Under Two Flags) but he stabs himself to death and dies with a

high, terrifying cry: ―The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants

woke, and crept out of their rooms‖ (PDG, 247).

Cigarette can be analysed as the counterpart of Bertie. She is a sexually hybrid

woman: on the one hand she drinks, smokes, has numerous sexual encounters with men

and fights courageously on the battlefield. But on the other hand she searches for love and

kindness. ―She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquettish, she was

mischievous as a marmoset; she would swear, if need be, like a Zouave; […] she could toss

off her brandy or her vermouth like a trooper […]. And yet with all that […] she had the

delicious fragrance of youth, and had not left a certain feminine grace behind her‖ (UTF,

199). Due to her hybrid nature Cigarette struggles to find her own identity: she is torn

between her feelings for Bertie and her will to preserve her liberty. This results in a love-

hate relationship with Bertie. When he calls her unsexed, she reacts furiously: ―Unsexed?

‗Pouf! If you have a woman‘s face, may I not have a man‘s soul? It is only a fair exchange.

I am no kitten, bon zig; take care of my talons!‘‖ (UTF, 233). Her great dilemma is that

―her love (the force of her feminine side) requires that she gives up her freedom and

independent identity‖ (Schroeder and Holt, 77). It seems that Cigarette‘s dilemma reflects

the predicament that Ouida faced in her own life. Schroeder and Holt refer to John

Sutherland when they say that ―[Ouida] projected herself both into the characters of

Cigarette and the Princess Venetia‖ (70). The first represents Ouida‘s longing for

independence and freedom as an artist, the latter stands for her deep desire for love. Her

passionate infatuations with different men ―suggest a profound desire to conform to

conventional romantic ideals of love and marriage‖ (17). When Cigarette sacrifices her

own life to save Bertie‘s, she is replaced by Venetia Corona. Her last deed not only saves

Bertie‘s life, but also gives him the opportunity to retrieve his masculinity. Cigarette was

too independent to be a fitting wife for Bertie, with her elimination she allows Venetia

Corona to take her place and to be a good wife. Only in the traditional gender role of the

husband is Bertie able to regain his masculinity.

5.2. HOMOEROTICISM

A consequence of the disruption of traditional gender roles and the corresponding

fading of the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, was sexual attraction

between members of the same sex. Thaïs E. Morgan clarifies:

In the case of Victorian Aestheticism, a group of male writers, some of

whom already have authority within the dominant culture (for instance,

Tennyson), share varying degrees of interest in homoeroticism, which they

express in their work. […] Thus as male Aesthetes interested in extending

the boundaries of masculinity, [they] foster a minoritizing discourse about

art and artists in which male beauty and male-male desire are validated and

preferred over the heterosexual norm as the cultural ideal. (141)

Nevertheless, there were also female Aesthetes who took up homoeroticism as a

major motive in their novels. In Under Two Flags, Bertie‘s servant Rake is faithful to him

with an adoration that transcends the boundaries of male friendship. When Bertie has to

flee the country, Rake insists on accompanying him. Beauty refuses, but he begs

desperately to allow him to come along. ―[A]nd stick to you I will, till you kick me away

like a cur. The truth is, it‘s only being near of you, sir, that keeps me straight; if I was to

leave you I should become a bad ‗un again, right and away. Don‘t send me from you, sir,

as you took mercy on me once‖ (UTF, 179). The flight to Algeria can be seen as an erotic

journey for Rake because he is now able to spend even more time with his master than

before. He can sleep in his tent and fight battles by his side. He is also the only one who

knows the secret of Bertie‘s previous life which brings them even closer together. The

exotic setting is suggestive of homosexual desire since ―Algiers […] was particularly well

known for accommodating homosexual activities‖ (Schaffer 2003, 217). Between Bertie

and the Seraph, the reader senses a sexual tension that suggests that also their relationship

is based on more than just friendship. When he heard the news of Bertie‘s death, ―the

Seraph mourned him with passionate, loving force, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt‖

(265). When the Seraph unexpectedly shows up in Algeria, feelings surface which Bertie

thought he had repressed:

[Bertie:]‗Are you sure he will not return?‘

[Cigarette:]‗Not he. They are gone to eat and drink. I go with them. What is

it you fear?‘

‗My own weakness.‘ (UTF, 448).

Nevertheless, homosexuality is not tolerated in Ouida‘s novel. Rake is punished for his

illegitimate and ―unnatural‖ desires when he dies during a battle. Although Rake‘s death is

very distressing for Bertie, it can be seen as the elimination of a troublesome character that

might have tempted Bertie into sinful acts. Bertie is able to control his passions and is

rewarded eventually with a happy marriage to Venetia Corona, but only after having

survived the torment of a soldier‘s life in Algeria.

The Picture of Dorian Gray also uses homoeroticism as a motif. Its homoerotic

content became the main source of criticism against the novel, especially after Oscar Wilde

had been convicted (in 1895) for having a homosexual relationship with a student at

Oxford, Lord Alfred Douglas. For the painter Basil Hallward, what started with an

adoration of Dorian‘s beauty became an obsession. He wants to be around him constantly

and becomes jealous when Dorian is with Lord Henry Wotton. When Hallward talks to

Dorian about his fascination for him, Dorian does not comprehend the impact of the

painter‘s words.:

‗My dear Basil,‘ said Dorian, ‗what have you told me? Simply that you felt

that you admired me too much. That is not even a compliment.‘

‗It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have

made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never

put one‘s worship into words.‘ (PDG, 130)

Basil, just as Rake, is punished for his homosexual desires when he is stabbed to death by

Dorian. However, Hallward is not the real villain in the novel; Dorian is. After the murder,

Dorian reacts with an indifference that horrifies the reader: ―How quickly it had all been

done! He felt strangely calm, and, walking over to the window, opened it, and stepped out

on the balcony‖ (PDG, 177). The reader is so perplexed by Dorian‘s uncaring reaction to

the murder that he has just committed, that he or she instantly forgets Basil‘s immoral

behaviour and sees him as an innocent victim rather than as a criminal. In this way, Oscar

Wilde transforms the punishment of Basil for his homoerotic desires into a defence of

homosexuality.

Where Ouida condemns homoeroticism, Oscar Wilde defends Basil Hallward‘s

innocence. However, this statement should be moderated. It is true that Ouida denounces

homosexuality at first sight. But a closer reading shows that the characters are not as

severely punished as it would seem. When Rake dies, he lies in the arms of his true love,

Bertie. Rake knows that a real relationship between them will never be possible and

therefore a death so close to his beloved master is the greatest ‗consummation‘ of their

relationship that he could ever expect. When Bertie falls in love with Venetia Corona and

starts a legitimate relationship with her, it is not a coincidence that ―her delicate face […]

[looks] almost exactly like the Seraph‘s‖ (UTF, 129). ―Marriage with Venetia Corona

simultaneously rewards Bertie for having achieved an acceptably masculine heterosexual

persona and satisfies his desire for the Seraph in a culturally acceptable way‖ (Schaffer

2000, 125).

The nineteenth-century concerns about the definition of gender categories are

omnipresent in these two novels. Ouida and Wilde criticise a society that forces people into

a particular role according to their gender. They explore the possibility of annihilating

these gender roles by allowing their characters to transgress the boundaries of their own

gender. The effeminate dandies and the cross-gendered Cigarette that populate Ouida and

Wilde‘s novels defy these gender roles both in their appearance as in their behaviour. In

these novels, the distinction between men and women becomes less obvious, and as a

result the sexual attraction between the characters is no longer exclusively orientated

towards members of the opposite sex. Both implicitly and explicitly, Ouida and Wilde

formed a counter discourse against the dominant discourse that treated men as inherently

different from women and that presented heterosexuality as the desirable, not to say

compulsory, sexual orientation.

6. CONCLUSION

In his novel Victorian Wallflowers (1934), Malcolm Elwin gives a particularly

critical review of Ouida ‗s fiction:

Collins, Mrs. Wood and Ouida were novelists who successfully capitalized

the degenerate taste of the uncultured public. [… Ouida] totally lacked any

sense of humour, plot, and character; she had no knowledge of lower-class

humanity, apart from her personal affectation for Italian peasants. Her sole

themes are love and intrigue, concerned only with grand people of rank,

who behave so improbably and belong to a world so hopelessly artificial,

that they assume the extravagance of caricature. (20-311)

Ouida was often criticised for her characters‘ simplicity, for her grammatical and

syntactical mistakes and for her limited knowledge of aristocratic manners and habits

(Schaffer 2000, 123). Critics generally categorise her novels as popular fiction, not worthy

of serious academic research. Consequently, it may come as a surprise that an author such

as Oscar Wilde, whose novels are an established part of the literary canon and as a result is

regarded as belonging to the nineteenth-century artistic elite, did not disapprove of her

novels. In his review of Ouida‘s novel Guilderoy (1889) for The Pall Mall Gazette, he

explains that he does acknowledge the novel‘s imperfections since ―[t]he central figures

are exaggerated […]‖ and he ―must admit that [he has] a faint suspicion that Ouida has told

it to us before‖ (141). Nevertheless it also has ―some remarkable rhetorical qualities, and a

good deal of colour‖ (144) and ―with all its faults, which are great, and its absurdities,

which are greater, [it] is a book to be read‖ (145).

When comparing Wilde‘s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) to Ouida‘s

Under Two Flags (1867), it becomes clear why Wilde defends her fiction. He praises her

novel since he ―was certainly aware of Ouida‘s importance to his own art‖ (Fortunato, 58).

Although the novels‘ differences can not be overlooked, they share very similar ideas on

narrative style and literary themes.

Both Under Two Flags and The Picture of Dorian Gray can be placed within the

genre of the aesthetic novel (Schaffer 2003, Fortunato 2007, Johnson 1969). Both in their

lives and in their art Wilde and Ouida promoted a total devotion to beauty. Their personal

lifestyle reflected their commitment to art as they surrounded themselves with beautiful

objects, wore beautiful clothes and spoke eloquently. But also in their novels, a dedication

to art can be noted in the depiction of artists as humans with superior visionary qualities, in

the symbolisation of art as a sanctuary in which people can retreat to escape the ugliness of

the outside world, and in a superiority of form over content.

Not only their ideas on art were similar, their views on the developments in

nineteenth century British society are also strikingly comparable. The growth of a British

consumer society had a great impact on their works. Ouida and Wilde were concerned that

the growing book trade would reduce the status of the artist to that of a mere labourer.

They were both hesitant over their rejection or their support of this new consumer culture:

they disapproved of the materialism that had developed as a result of the explosion of new

commodities for sale, but at the same time they were tempted by this consumerism which

offered them more possibilities to decorate their own lives.

Finally, the growing questions in the middle of the nineteenth century about

dominant gender roles provoked a similar reaction from both authors. With the creation of

cross-gendered characters, Wilde and Ouida challenged the existing gender categories that

separated men as inherently different from women, thereby questioning the validity of

these socially prescribed gender roles.

To claim, as Talia Shaffer does, that ―Dorian Gray is a pastiche of Ouidean

elements‖ (Schaffer 2003, 213) might be a downgrading of the novel‘s originality. It is,

however, clear that Wilde‘s characters and narrative style did to a great extent undergo a

similar evolution to that of Ouida. Schaffer accurately asserts that Ouida was ―the first

writer to delineate the particular dandy identity that would come to be associated with the

fin de siècle, [the period in which The Picture of Dorian Gray was written]‖ (Schaffer

2003, 214). Ouida‘s characters are young men who are interested primarily in their own

welfare and pleasure. They attach a great value to luxury and leisure activities and are

―inconceivably effeminate in every one of [their] habits‖ (UTF, 69). They express

themselves in an epigrammatic, witty style, which would later characterise Dorian Gray‘s

discourse.

Nevertheless, it is also important to take notice of the various differences between

and within the novels. Schaffer notes this when she says: ―And yet what is also vividly

obvious about Dorian Gray is how much it does not resemble the Ouidean model‖

(Schaffer 2003, 218). Ouida lets her characters plunge into the most evil sins and vices, but

they always get the chance to recover their honour and to return to their lives of luxury.

Bertie Cecil‘s materialism, egocentricity and sexual eccentricity is punished with his exile

in Algeria, but, with the help of characters such as Venetia Corona, he is able to regain a

respectable status as Lord Royallieu. Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, did not censure any

of Dorian‘s vices, but Dorian is also unable to purify his soul and eventually dies as a

sinner. While Ouida disposes of all the troublesome characters that would stand in the way

of Bertie‘s return to respectability, Wilde keeps the instigator of all Dorian‘s evil deeds,

Lord Henry, alive.

Keeping in mind the many differences between Under Two Flags and The Picture

of Dorian Gray, Ouida‘s real influence on Wilde appears questionable. Schaffer notes as

the main innovations made by Ouida to the figure of the dandy, innovations that were later

supposedly taken up by Wilde, his ―focus on art and scholarship‖ and his ―exquisite taste‖

as a contrast to the ―political aspirations and intellectual might‖ that characterised the

earlier dandies from novels such as Bulwer-Lytton‘s Pelham (1828) and Disraeli‘s Vivian

Grey (1826-27) (Schaffer 2000, 215). Would it then not be more sensible to argue that this

shift in interest was a logical consequence of changes in society, and that Ouida merely had

time on her side? In the developing 19th

-century consumer society, books were reduced to

mere commodities. Novelists became anxious that their status as artists would be corrupted

by low-quality writers who saw literature as a lucrative business, rather than as an artistic

vocation. It seems only logical that Ouida, as an aesthete, would transform the typical

dandy personality into an instrument with which she could criticise the consumer culture

that was threatening her authority as an artist. Wilde, an aesthete as well, would share her

concerns and create similar characters, not necessarily by looking at Ouida‘s novels as a

model, but with the same intention of challenging materialism.

Rather than arguing that Ouida‘s novels have deeply influenced Wilde‘s The

Picture of Dorian Gray, I believe that it would be better to claim that Ouida and Wilde‘s

fiction is intensely typified by the age in which they lived. The fact that they both created

dandy figures who are drawn more to art than to politics reflects their similar reactions, as

aesthetes, to nineteenth-century consumerism and the commodification of art. In my

opinion, presenting Ouida‘s novel as a model for Wilde‘s would be downgrading the

originality of both.

This does not mean however, that I agree with critics who characterise her novels

as mere popular entertainment. Ouida‘s fiction is as valuable for academic research on the

aesthetic novel as is Wilde‘s. The similarities in their views of art and of culture show that

they were both equally concerned with the value of art and its place in society. Besides,

when Oscar Wilde‘s novel met with much harsh criticism, Ouida rightfully asserted that

―[she] did understand it‖ (Fortunato, 57).

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