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Notes on Oscar Wilde's Transatlantic Gender Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2012

MICHÈLE MENDELSSOHN
MICHÈLE MENDELSSOHN
Affiliation:
Mansfield College, University of Oxford. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

For decades now, Oscar Wilde has been celebrated in academic and popular circles as a transgressor of gender boundaries and a devotee of the woman's world and an “appreciative inheritor of women's culture.” What has been underappreciated, however, is that Wilde also acted as an advocate of gender binaries in ways that significantly challenge this reputation. This article argues that Wilde's writings reveal a traditionalist critique of American gender politics that reflects his concern over the management of cultural institutions and values, and the increasingly precarious place of men within them. Rather than locating these anxieties in Britain, Wilde displaced them onto the United States, a country whose cultural institutions he had become intimate with during a year-long lecture tour in the early 1880s. By exposing and problematizing Wilde's response to the late nineteenth-century crisis in masculinity and his disappointment at the failure of American men to take their place in society as arbiters of taste, this article underscores the need for a nuanced reassessment of Wildean gender politics. At stake here are fundamental questions about how a transgressive politics sits alongside traditionalism, and how a conservative gender bias in transatlantic fin de siècle culture operated even in the period's progressive circles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 155 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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2 Ibid., 139.

3 Ibid., 172.

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