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Sarah Grand and Oscar Wilde: Decadence, Desire, and the Double Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2021

Catherine Maxwell
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Abstract

It is usual to put the New Woman writer Sarah Grand alongside Oscar Wilde to mark their differences. However, this essay suggests that these two authors had more in common than at first appears, both with regards to the fashioning of their literary identities and to their literary productions. Grand's compendious best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) is usually seen as realist fiction, but its interlude titled “The Tenor and the Boy,” which was actually composed much earlier, presents a stand-alone narrative that owes more to the romance mode and is much more playful in tone and spirit. It also deals with the decadent theme of the secret double life, although crucially and dramatically Grand focuses on female subterfuge. After juxtaposing Wilde's “Lady Alroy” (1887), another text about the female double life, with Grand's interlude, I subsequently consider decadent qualities common to both “The Tenor and the Boy” and other Wildean texts including theatricality, doubling, gender ambiguity, and queer desire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue: Scales of Decadence , Winter 2021 , pp. 731 - 751
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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