Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T04:07:38.088Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Facing Wilde; or, Emotion's Image

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rochelle Rives
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Oscar Wilde's face was simultaneously maligned and celebrated by the “sciences” of physiognomy in the nineteenth century and, after the trials of 1895, in depictions that link Wilde to a pathologically expressive personality type. Personality and modern vision converge in the subject of Wilde's face, and their relation is illuminated by recent debates about affects and the emotions as well as by the theories of visual modernity advanced by Charles Baudelaire, Max Beerbohm, and E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris . Whereas early caricatures of Wilde invest the image with a readable psychology or interior, later depictions maintain a fiction of readability linked to a purely physiological notion of abnormal personality.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Emotions , October 2015 , pp. 1363 - 1380
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Allport, Gordon. “The Glands Regulating Personality.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology 17.2 (1922): 220–22. Print.Google Scholar
Altieri, Charles. “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys.” Critical Inquiry 38 (2011): 878–81. Print.Google Scholar
Bartlett, Neil. Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde. London: Serpent's Tail, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Baudelaire, Charles. “On the Essence of Laughter.” “The Painter of Modern Life” and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Mayne, Jonathan. London: Phaidon, 1995. 147–65. Print.Google Scholar
Beall, Edgar C. The Life Sexual: A Study of the Philosophy, Physiology, Science, Art, and Hygiene of Love. New York: Vim, 1905. Print.Google Scholar
Beerbohm, Max. “The Spirit of Caricature.” Pall Mall Magazine 22.93 (1901): 121–25. Print.Google Scholar
Bell, Charles. The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. 1844. N.p.: Ulan, 2012. Print.Google Scholar
Berman, Louis. The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Print.Google Scholar
“A Bit of Information about Controversy Two.” Collections Blog. Ohio Hist. Soc., 25 Feb. 2012. Web. 15 Apr. 2013.Google Scholar
Blanchard, Mary Warner. Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Fawcett, Carolyn. New York: Zone, 1991. Print.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Connolly, William E. “The Complexity of Intention.” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 791–98. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtis, L. Perry Jr. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington: Smithsonian Inst., 1971. Print.Google Scholar
Delaporte, François. Anatomy of the Passions. Trans. Emanuel, Susan. Ed. Meyers, Todd. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Duchenne de Boulogne, G.-B. The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. 1862. Trans. and ed. R. Cuthbertson, Andrew. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print.Google Scholar
Foldy, Michael. The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Frank, Adam, and Elizabeth, A. Wilson. “Like-Minded.” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 870–77. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Ed. Strachey, James. New York: Norton, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. Crick, Joyce. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Market Place: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H., and Kris, Ernst. “The Principles of Caricature.” The Gombrich Archive. U of Birmingham, 2005. Web. 17 Apr. 2013.Google Scholar
Gross, Daniel. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. New York: n.p., 1916. Print.Google Scholar
Hartley, Lucy. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Kendry, Chas. Ye Soul Agonies in Ye Life of Oscar Wilde. New York: n.p., 1882. Print. Wildeana Collection. William Andrews Clark Memorial Lib., U of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Lewis, Wyndham. The Art of Being Ruled. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011): 434–72. Print.Google Scholar
Logan, Rayford. The Betrayal of the Negro: From R. B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. Chicago: Da Capo, 1965. Print.Google Scholar
Marcovitch, Heather. The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde's Performance Theory. New York: Lang, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Marez, Curtis. “The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde's Opium Smoke Screen.” ELH 64.1 (1997): 257–87. Print.Google Scholar
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massumi, Brian “Sensing the Virtual: Building the Insensible.” Hypersurface Architecture. Ed. Stephen Perrella. Architectural Design 68.5–6 (1998): 16–24. Print.Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Smith, Colin. London: Routledge, 1962. Print.Google Scholar
“Oscar Wilde in America.” Houston Daily Post 23 June 1882. Print. Wildeana Collection, William Andrews Clark Memorial Lib., U of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Papoulias, Constantina, and Callard, Felicity. “Biology's Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect.” Body and Society 16.1 (2010): 29–56. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rev. of An Ideal Husband, dir. Oscar Wilde. Lika Joka 12 Jan. 1895: 244. Wildeana Collection. William Andrews Clark Memorial Lib., U of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherard, Robert Harborough. The Life of Oscar Wilde. New York: Mitchell, 1906. Print.Google Scholar
Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Susman, Warren. “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture.” New Directions in American Intellectual History. Ed. Higham, John and Conkin, Paul K. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. 212–26. Print.Google Scholar
Symons, Arthur. “Sex and Aversion.” The Memoirs of Arthur Symons. Ed. Beckson, Karl. University Park: Penn State UP, 1977. 137–40. Print.Google Scholar
Tomkins, Silvan. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: The Complete Edition. New York: Springer, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Penguin 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Rev. 4th ed. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley, 2009. Print.Google Scholar