Literary and textual scholars have long speculated about Wilde’s intentions
+ for revising the homoerotic content of his famous novel,
In the first scene of the novel,
To interrogate Wilde’s treatment of the homoerotic elements, this paper
+ examines his revisions across the first chapter of the manuscript of
In an attempt to cut between these debates, this project first searches for a
+ structural constraint within the TEI format, and then works through this constraint
+ to analyze the homoerotic elements in Wilde’s manuscript revisions. As such,
+ this project aligns with another that uses the TEI to destabilize our current
+ understanding of Wilde’s textual and historical legacy. Jason A. Boyd’s
+ Texting Wilde Project uses the TEI to mark up the biographical information,
+ particularly references to persons, places, and events, in writings about
+ Wilde’s life. Its goal is to reveal the historical discrepencies and
+ inaccuracies across Wilde’s biography. Boyd points out that ‘Our
+ knowledge of “Oscar Wilde” is not comprised of a corpus of pure and
+ simple facts that allows us an unmediated apprehension of a real person separated
+ from us by only time, but rather this knowledge is comprised of a densely complex
+ and often contradictory accretion of texts’ (
Similar to Boyd, my project also uses the TEI to complicate the understanding of + Wilde’s textual legacy. It identifies one major constraint of the TEI: that it + works best with data that is discrete, rather than smooth data, like the + homoeroticism obscured by Wilde’s pen. Here, I apply the rigid constraint of + the TEI data structure towards marking up and analyzing this text’s + homoeroticism, which I group into the general themes of ‘intimacy’, + ‘beauty’, ‘passion’, and ‘fatality’, as well as + the pen strokes that Wilde used to strike these elements from the text. The + functionality of the TEI as a tool that bounds and labels data into discrete + elements allows me to explore the indeterminate boundaries of these queer themes in + the text. The strict nature of this tool compels literary researchers like myself to + see how working with textual data in electronic formats will surface that which + evades their grasp.
+To inform my approach for handling homoerotic subject matter within digital contexts,
+ I bring two fields, Textual Scholarship and Queer Historiography, into conversation.
+ The debates within these fields allow me to carve out a methodology for digitizing
+ what electronic editing scholar Jerome McGann calls our ‘textual
+ inheritance’ (
Those who believe that they can analyze a literary work without questioning the
+ constitution of a particular written or oral text of it are behaving as if the
+ work were directly accessible on paper or in sound waves … its medium is
+ neither visual nor auditory. The medium of literature is the words (whether
+ already existent or newly created) of a language; and arrangements of words
+ according to the syntax of some language (along with such aids to their
+ interpretation as pauses or punctuation) can exist in the mind, whether or not
+ they are reported by voice or in writing. (
Because the act of inscription involves physical tools that corrupt the + writer’s pure ideas, the writer requires an editor whose distance from the + creation of the work enables his objective evaluation of its intention. + Tanselle’s prioritization of textual recovery exemplifies the restorative + approach.
+Toward the end of the 20th century, D. F. McKenzie’s ideas about
+ ‘the sociology of texts’ challenge the claim that a single text can
+ represent an ‘ideal’ version. According to McKenzie, the book is never
+ one single object but stems from a number of human agencies and mechanical
+ techniques that are historically situated: ‘Every society rewrites its past,
+ every reader rewrites its texts, and if they have any continuing life at all, at
+ some point every printer redesigns them’ (
Two competing approaches in the field of Queer Historiography parallel the
+ ‘restorative’ and ‘productive’ approaches from Textual
+ Scholarship. Susan McCabe defines ‘Queer Historicism’ as the
+ ‘critical trend of locating “identifications” (rather than
+ identity), modes of being and having, in historical contexts’ (
Queer’s free-floating, endlessly mobile, and infinitely subversive
+ capacities may be strengths—allowing queer to accomplish strategic
+ maneuvers that no other concept does—but its principled imprecision
+ implies analytic limitations … if queer is intelligible only in relation
+ to its social norms, and if the concept of normality itself is of relatively
+ recent vintage (Locherie), then the relations between queer and the changing
+ configurations of gender and sexuality need to be defined and redefined. (
According to Traub, queerness requires historical specificity in order to be legible. + If applied ahistorically, the term ‘queer’ would lose its descriptive + value. This position aligns the historicists with the restorative impulse in Textual + Scholarship, while the unhistoricist refusal to circumscribe such a definition + recalls the productive approach.
+Heather Love refocuses this methodological debate to emphasize the relationship
+ between the critic and the object of study. Love makes the argument that, although
+ the queer historian cannot validate the queerness of the past, the project of queer
+ history must continue. Love explains that ‘Queer history has been an education
+ in absence: the experience of social refusal and of the denigration of homosexual
+ love has taught us the lessons of solitude and heartbreak’ (
Plagued by the problem of what to do with the past, the critic’s impulse to + ‘rescue’ queer figures evokes Tanselle’s aim to recover the ideal + text in scholarly editing. Love, however, asserts that this rescue is + impossible:
+Such is the relation of the queer historian to the past: we cannot help wanting
+ to save the figures from the past, but this mission is doomed to fail. In part,
+ this is because the dead are gone for good; in part, because the queer past is
+ even more remote, more deeply marked by power’s claw… Such a rescue
+ effort can only take place under the shadow of loss and in the name of loss;
+ success would constitute failure. (
Perhaps this impossibility allows the critic to rethink how she might preserve the
+ queer textual inheritance: accepting queerness as something that eludes containment
+ compels her to explore how queerness escapes certain kinds of analyses. Love
+ suggests ‘a mode of historiography that recognizes the inevitability of a
+ “play of recognitions” but that also sees these recognitions not as
+ consoling but as shattering’ (
My work encoding Wilde’s revisions to the manuscript plays against the
+ long-standing ‘recovery’ project about Wilde’s intentions as he
+ revises
Created specifically for working with literary material, the TEI enables researchers
+ to describe, transcribe and edit print text or manuscripts in electronic format. The
+ TEI enables users to ‘mark up’ aspects of literary texts that they think
+ are important, such as structural elements (chapters, paragraphs, line breaks),
+ physical details about the text (revisions, illegible text) or conceptual elements
+ (persons, geographical locations). To mark up these elements, encoders use
+ ‘tags’, such as
Image of the manuscript and diplomatic transcription of
+
In the encoding, the
TEI documents resemble an ordered hierarchy containing a nested tree structure, with
+ one ‘root’ component and several ‘branches’, known as
+ ‘nodes’. The TEI requires all elements in the text to be contained as
+ discrete nodes within this bounded structure, and elements cannot overlap unless the
+ inner element is fully nested within an outer element. Though the strict tagging
+ structure of the TEI forces encoders to organize textual elements as discrete,
+ ordered data, it also enables them to create their own labels for the elements.
+ Perhaps the most useful aspect about the TEI is this customizability, which it
+ inherits from its parent language, eXtensible Markup Language (XML). As an
+ ‘extensible’ language, TEI users can create their own tags to describe
+ the particular elements they wish to encode.
Unlike many standardization efforts, the TEI … explicitly accommodat[es]
+ variation and debate within its technical framework. The TEI Guidelines are
+ designed to be both modular and customizable, so that specific projects can
+ choose the relevant portions of the TEI and ignore the rest, and can also if
+ necessary create extensions of the TEI language to describe facets of the text
+ which the TEI does not yet address. (
Because TEI is built from a language that allows its users to build their own version + of that language, there is potential for representing the elements necessary for a + project by customizing these elements on a project-by-project basis.
+As queer studies scholars may know, however, some textual elements will resist
+ containment within any kind of category. Accordingly, there are a number of projects
+ that explore the potential of the TEI for ‘queer encoding’, such as the
+ encoding of queer gender. The
[T]he deeper we got into mark-up, the more evident it became that the categories + and hierarchies available to us were inadequate for our task… to identify + a male subject who at times presents himself as masquerading as a woman, at + others as being inhabited by one, and who eventually becomes a woman, in a life + history narrated retrospectively from the perspective of Lili Elbe. (Caughie and + Meyer, 2018: 231)
+The TEI forces these scholars to consider the ways that computation works on a deeper + level to reify gender as essential. In particular, the fixity that the TEI imposes + upon Elbe as a queer subject brings out the ways that gender is situated and + relational across this text.
+Other scholars find advantage in the TEI’s strict data structure. While the TEI
+ limits what constitutes a person—as an entity with one sex, for
+ example—it also enables an approach toward personhood as multiple. Like
+ Caughie and Meyer, Marion Thain also works to encode the diaries of a complex
+ writing subject: the late 19th-century English poet, Michael Field. Michael Field is
+ a pen name for the lesbian couple, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, which
+ signifies ‘the assumed names of two separate women, as well as appearing to
+ signify one single male identity’ (
[T]he proliferation and slipperiness of names is no mere childish caprice but a
+ core part of the articulation of queer: an unhinging of ‘given’ or
+ apparently predetermined identity through a strategy that articulates identity
+ as constantly shifting, constructed, and performative. Text encoding can, in a
+ simple but powerful way, help us explore and map this crucial strand of queer
+ identity construction across the diary. (
Thain’s approach harnesses the hierarchical nature of the TEI to list the
+ various references to each personage within the
+
Why do Caughie and Meyer struggle to encode Elbe’s identity while Thain appears
+ to succeed with Fields’? While a queerness like Fields’ might be
+ delineated and contained, in Elbe’s there is a quality of blending which the
+ markup, by its nature, means to separate and fix. As Flanders points out, markup is
+ a tool for naming, bounding, and containment, and therefore registers information in
+ distinct components (
For Wilde’s text in particular, I created a customization that explores the
+ potential of semantic labelling against the demands for fixity and structure within
+ the TEI schema. My customization registers physical and conceptual changes to the
+ manuscript by creating two new attributes to mark the revisions. First, to mark the
+ physical traces of Wilde’s pen as he struck out portions of the text, the
+ custom attribute, ‘strokes’ (
In what follows, I detail how this customization registers the elisions of + homoeroticism in the manuscript as Wilde prepared it for publication. The goal of + this work is not to establish a formal method for marking queer elements, rather, it + is to surface a resistance in the text: an indeterminacy that resists capture by the + TEI data structure. Here, the difficulty is in engaging the boundedness of the TEI + elements, which encapsulate data, with the indistinctiveness of the queerness of the + text, which resist demarcation. The four themes of ‘intimacy’, + ‘beauty’, ‘passion’, and ‘fatality’ constitute a + spectrum of smooth information that threatens the confines of the TEI tags. To add + another layer of ambiguity, the number of pen strokes also resists easy demarcation: + they can be difficult to enumerate and their boundaries often fail to map with the + themes. Therefore, in order to mark up this text, I impose decisions on the + data.
+The evocative opening scene, which consists of a lively dialogue between Basil + Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton, sets the tone, reveals character dynamics, and lays + out some of the conflict for the ensuing story. In these first few pages, Basil + appears to be a sympathetic, sensitive, albeit slightly exasperated artist, who + confides in his close friend Lord Henry the powerful influence that Dorian Gray has + had upon his life and work. Lord Henry, by contrast, appears as an affable and witty + gentleman aesthete, who counters Basil’s sincerity with offbeat observations + and paradoxical aphorisms. From the revisions made to this opening scene, a few + general patterns emerge. First, the revisions work to stifle the emotional tension + and physical affection in the dialogue between Basil and Lord Henry, replacing it + with a lighter or more neutral tone. Because these revisions generally shore up the + friendship between Basil and Lord Henry, conveying fondness in their rapport, they + are encoded according to the theme of ‘intimacy’. Second are the themes + of ‘beauty’ and ‘passion’, which mostly concern revisions + where Dorian is reformulated from a romantic object into an artistic subject for + Basil’s painting. Third, and finally, is the theme of ‘fatality’, + which emerges in moments where Basil struggles to explain the consuming and + self-destructive effects of Dorian’s influence on his life.
+On the theme of intimacy, Wilde’s pen slashes through evidence of physical + contact between Basil, Lord Henry, and Dorian. This includes the following: + ‘taking hold of his [Lord Henry’s] hand’ (9), Dorian’s + ‘cheek just brushed my [Basil’s] cheek’ (20), Basil and Dorian + ‘sit beside each other’ (22). Additionally, the dialogue between Basil + and Lord Henry develops intimacy through their tone and subtle mannerisms, which + facilitates Basil’s confession of his feelings for Dorian. In some cases, + Wilde diminishes this intimacy in their conversation with the effect of mitigating + the sense of foreboding that surrounds Basil’s attraction to Dorian. Here, + Wilde replaces tense pauses with laughter or exchanges dramatic statements and + descriptions with more playful ones. One such example occurs when Basil struggles to + convey his reasoning for refusing to exhibit Dorian’s portrait:
+‘The reason why I will not exhibit this picture, is that I am afraid that I + have shown in it the secret of my own soul.’
+Lord Henry hesitated for a moment. ‘And what is that?’ he asked, in a + low voice. ‘I will tell you,’ said Hallward, and a look of pain came + over his face. ‘Don’t if you would rather not,’ murmured his + companion, looking at him. (9)
+The revised version in the manuscript, incorporating the deletions and interlinear + additions, reads:
+‘The reason why I will not exhibit this picture, is that I am afraid that I + have shown in it the secret of my own soul.’
+Lord Henry laughed. ‘And what is that?’ he asked. ‘I will tell + you,’ said Hallward, and an expression of perplexity came over his face. + ‘I am all expectation Basil,’ murmured his companion, looking at + him. (9)
+Here, several changes mitigate the emotions of the scene. First, rather than + ‘hesitate’, Lord Henry ‘laugh[s]’, and he no longer speaks + ‘in a low voice’. The effect is to overwrite a previously intimate + moment with levity. Basil also exchanges his facial expression from one of agony to + confusion when ‘a look of pain’ transforms into ‘an expression of + perplexity’. Lastly, Lord Henry, rather than sympathizing with Basil or + excusing his obligation to explain himself, instead encourages him to speak: + ‘I am all expectation, Basil’. Together, these changes work to obscure + Basil’s internal suffering with the effect of lightening the mood of the + scene.
+Another example similarly tempers the intense, emotional energy while also mitigating
+ a sense of anxiety or foreboding. It occurs on the following page, where Basil is on
+ the verge of revealing the reasons behind his attraction to Dorian. The original
+ dialogue proceeds: ‘Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward’s
+ heart beating, and he heard his own breath, with a sense almost of fear. “Yes.
+ There is very little to tell you,” whispered Hallward, “and I am afraid
+ you will be disappointed. Two months ago…”’ (10). The
+ manuscript’s revised version reads: ‘Lord Henry felt as if he could hear
+ Basil Hallward’s heart beating, and he wondered what was coming. “Yes.
+ There is very little to tell you,” whispered Hallward rather bitterly,
+ ‘and I dare say you will be disappointed. Two months ago…”’
+ (10). Here, rather than draw attention to Lord Henry’s breathing, Wilde
+ mentions Lord Henry’s ‘wonder’ about Basil’s pending
+ explanation, which shifts Lord Henry’s sense of anticipation from fear to
+ curiosity. Wilde also makes slight changes to Basil’s delivery: in the revised
+ version, Basil speaks ‘rather bitterly’ and uses the expression ‘I
+ dare say’ rather than ‘I am afraid’. Both changes diminish the
+ confessional tone that originally precedes Basil’s revelation about Dorian
+ Gray. In this change, and in the aforementioned passage, the close rapport, the
+ ‘intimacy’, between Basil and Lord Henry enables Basil’s
+ confession about the self-consuming qualities of his feelings for Dorian, which
+ suggests a connection to the theme of ‘fatality’. The data structure of
+ the TEI, however, fails to capture this complicated dynamic because the
+
Throughout this chapter, Wilde often swaps out words with the effect of diluting or + diverting their original connotation. He focuses this type of revision on + Basil’s dialogue, when Basil speaks about his passionate attachment to Dorian + and the effect of Dorian’s beauty upon his art. Here, Wilde trades expressive + nouns with words that convey relatively weaker or more generalized ideas. For + example, in the sentence ‘Every portrait that is painted with passion is a + portrait of the artist, not of the sitter’, Wilde replaces + ‘passion’ with ‘feeling’ in the manuscript (9), exchanging + the romantic connotation of ‘passion’ with the more neutral one of + ‘feeling’. Additionally, on the theme of ‘passion’, Wilde + substitutes words and phrases which connote a strong sense of romantic passion for + ones that instead suggest an aesthetic interest. One line, prior to revision, reads: + ‘I knew that I had … come across someone whose mere personality was so + fascinating that it would be Lord over my life, my soul, my art itself’ (11). + Wilde revises this line to: ‘I knew that I had come face to face with someone + whose mere personality was so fascinating that it would absorb my nature, my soul, + my art itself’ (11). Here, Wilde swaps out ‘life’ for + ‘nature’, with the effect of subscribing Dorian’s influence to his + ‘nature’, that is, part of his personality or behavior, rather than + encompassing his ‘life’. Wilde also replaces ‘be Lord over’ + with ‘absorb’, which maintains Basil’s sense of submission to an + external force without the patriarchal designation in ‘Lord’. These + changes, which are encoded under the theme of ‘passion’, diffuse a + consuming quality in Basil’s attraction into a sensitivity to Dorian’s + aesthetic influence. Like the revisions to the theme of ‘intimacy’, the + subtle changes of word choice in this section also begin to gesture to the theme of + fatality, which fully develops over the next several pages.
+In addition to words associated with ‘passion’, Wilde often replaces the
+ word ‘beauty’ in Basil’s references to Dorian. In doing so, Wilde
+ neutralizes the power of Dorian’s physical allure. For example, Wilde changes
+ ‘Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose
+
Removing associations with beauty and passion is part of Wilde’s larger effort + of aestheticizing Dorian, transforming him from an erotic object into an aesthetic + object. At the end of the first chapter, Basil implores Lord Henry to refrain from + influencing the impressionable youth. The original version reads:
+‘Don’t take away from me the one person that makes life lovely for + me. Mind, Harry, I trust you.’ He spoke very slowly, and the words seemed + wrung out of him, almost against his will.
+‘I don’t suppose I shall care for him, and I am quite sure he + won’t care for me,’ replied Lord Henry smiling, and he took Hallward + by the arm, and almost led him into the house. (27–28)
+Lord Henry’s assurance that neither he nor Dorian shall ‘care for’ + each other characterizes Basil’s passionate feelings for Dorian as a kind of + general possessiveness. However, the source of Basil’s anxiety is specified + with the next revision:
+‘Don’t take away from me the one person that makes life absolutely + lovely to me, and that gives my art whatever wonder or charm it possesses. Mind. + Harry, I trust you.’ He spoke very slowly, and the words seemed wrung out + of him almost against his will.
+‘What nonsense you talk,’ said Lord Henry smiling, and, taking + Hallward by the arm, he almost led him to the house. (27, 27B)
+In this revision, Basil attributes an aesthetic value to Dorian, asserting + Dorian’s importance for his art, giving it ‘whatever wonder or charm it + possesses’. Lord Henry’s response moves from reassurance to dismissal, + rejecting Basil’s anxiety as ‘nonsense’ and ending the scene on a + slightly humorous note. Across these changes, Wilde refocuses Basil’s jealous + passion into an anxiety about losing Dorian as an artistic subject. Additionally, + the shift from sincere reassurance to light-hearted repartee in Lord Henry’s + response evacuates the strong emotional tone of the scene, replacing it with + friendly banter. The effect is to divert Basil’s passion for Dorian toward + aesthetic appreciation.
+Wilde’s efforts in redirecting Basil’s passion toward artistic ends is + inextricable from the attempts to soften Basil’s intense and consuming + devotion to Dorian, which emerges in references to Basil’s troubled state of + mind. One example occurs when Basil recounts his first time meeting Dorian: ‘I + had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite + sorrows. I knew that if I spoke to him, I would never leave him till either he or I + were dead. I grew afraid, and turned to quit the room’ (12). Here, + Basil’s passion swells with an intense, life-threatening quality that + Wilde’s pen works to mitigate by removing the association with death. He + crosses through ‘never leave him till either he or I were dead’ and adds + ‘become absolutely devoted to him, and that I ought not to speak to + him’. Wilde again tempers this self-consuming quality of Basil’s + devotion when he changes the phrase ‘I could not live if I did not see him + every day’ to ‘I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see him every + day’ (17). By shifting the focus from Basil’s ‘life’ to his + happiness, Wilde dilutes the profound peril that Basil’s passion has + generated.
+The TEI data structure reinforces the difficulty of disambiguating the revisions
+ within the themes of passion and fatality. In the phrase discussed above,
+ ‘look of pain’ is revised to ‘an expression of perplexity’
+ (9).
Text encoding for page 9 detail.
+My final example concerns a longer passage that was heavily revised in the
+ manuscript.
‘You remember that landscape of mine… It is one of the best things I + have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray + sat beside me, and as he leaned across to look at it, his cheek just brushed my + cheek. The world becomes young to me when I hold his hand, as when I see him, + the centuries yield up all their secrets!’
+‘Basil, this is [illegible] you must not talk [illegible] [illegible] his + power, [indecipherable] to make yourself the [illegible] slave! It is worse than + wicked, it is silly. I hate Dorian Gray.’
+Hallward got up from the seat, and walked up and down the garden. A curious smile + curled his lips. He seemed like a man in a dream. After some time he came back. + ‘You don’t understand, Harry…’ he said. ‘Dorian + Gray is merely to me a motive in art. He is never more present in my work then + when no image of him is there. He is simply a suggestion, as I have said, of a + new manner. I see him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and + subtleties of certain colours. That is all.’
+‘Then why won’t you exhibit his picture?’
+‘Because I have put into it the romance of which I have never dared to + speak to him. He knows nothing about it, but the world might guess it, where + there is merely love, they would see something evil, where there is spectacular + passion, they would suggest something vile.’ (20–21)
+The TEI surfaces Wilde’s layers of revision in this passage (see
Text encoding for pages 20–21.
+Text encoding for pages 20–21, continued.
+While the first paragraph is legible, the next one, by contrast, is almost completely
+ blotted out. It consists of Lord Henry’s condemnatory and jealous
+ protestations: ‘his power’, ‘to make yourself the …
+ slave!’ and ‘I hate Dorian Gray’. Here, Wilde obscures the
+ fatalistic connotations of Basil’s passion, which exasperate Lord Henry.
+ Accordingly, the
Most of the third paragraph is preserved, presumably for how it furthers + Dorian’s aestheticization. Here, Basil elaborates upon Dorian’s + aesthetic influence, which inspires his apprehension of the natural world. In the + following paragraph, however, Wilde again obscures much of language, which revolves + around the themes of passion and fatality. On the theme of fatality, the small + adjustment of ‘would’ to ‘might’ eliminates a sense of + inevitability about Basil’s feelings for Dorian. On the theme of passion, the + revelatory line: ‘where there is merely love, they would see something evil, + where there is spectacular passion, they would suggest something vile’ is + completely struck out. This statement clarifies Dorian’s importance for Basil + as the source of a powerful allure that suffuses Basil’s art with beauty. + Notably, the strokes over the phrase ‘suggest something vile’ are + doubled, which cannot be encoded in the TEI without separating the revision into two + instances. As with the deletion of ‘look of pain’ (9), marking each + element here with precision would require separating into distinct entities what is + in fact one act of revision that contains plural implications. It would involve + resolving Wilde’s perhaps indeterminate motives into a single intention.
+On one level, the TEI encoding reinforces the claim by Lawlor, Frankel, and Bristow + that Wilde diminishes the homoerotic elements by transforming Dorian from an erotic + into an aesthetic object. This goal is achieved in three ways: first, by easing the + tension surrounding his dialogue with Lord Henry; second, by emphasizing Dorian as + an ideal subject for art; and finally, by removing the destructive connotations of + Basil’s attachment to Dorian. On a deeper level, however, the existing textual + scholarship has yet to contend with the complex ways in which Wilde’s + intentionality is distributed among the revisions. To resolve some of the difficulty + with encoding this text, one might employ more precise qualitative markers such as + ‘tension’ in addition to ‘intimacy’, or ‘ardor’ + and ‘devotion’, in addition to ‘passion’, for example. But + creating more tags would dilute the analytical utility of the TEI encoding, which is + meant not meant to be exhaustive. In this project, the TEI reveals that the themes + of intimacy, beauty, passion, and fatality operate in intransigent or inscrutable + ways: at times they are plural, co-existing within a single line of text; more + often, they are inextricable, with one enabling the other, like intimacy and passion + which enable fatality; at other times, they enfold one within the other, + encompassing a plurality of intentions. The TEI, which requires strict + disambiguation, surfaces how these themes work together in ways that cannot be + captured by its data structure.
+As Heather Love points out, queerness will be ‘always bound up with loss’
+ and the attempt to ‘rescue’ or ‘recover’ it will only lead
+ to inevitable failure (
See McKerrow, Bowers, and Tanselle.
+As the condition of rescuing his lover Eurydice from Hades, Orpheus must not look + at her until they exit the Underworld and re-emerge into the sunlight. Unable to + restrain himself, Orpheus turns to gaze at Eurydice as they are about to pass + through the threshold. In this glimpse he manages to catch of his lover, she is + already shrinking away into the darkness where she will be forever + imprisoned.
+See Frankel, pp. 40–54, for a more complete accounting of the role of John + Marshall Stoddart (Wilde’s publisher) in preparing the typescript for + publication.
+See Wilde, O and M P Gillespie, pp. 358–374, for a selected list of
+ full-length reviews from
See Wilde, O and M P Gillespie, pp. 3–4.
+I am grateful to Jason A. Boyd for making this suggestion.
+See Wilde, p. 9. Manuscript image available here:
See Wilde, p. 20. Manuscript image avaible here:
The author has no competing interests to declare.
+