ENL 6256 WILDE, BEARDSLEY, &  LATE-VICTORIAN SEXUAL POLITICS

This course will have two central focuses:
        (1) Read, discuss, and theorize most of the works of perhaps the two most iconic figures of the Victorian fin de siècle — Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley — as a primary means of illuminating the course’s other focus.  The Wilde readings will include his poetry, short fiction (particularly the fairy tales he wrote allegedly for his two young children, but also such texts as “Pen, Pencil, and Poison” and “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”), his major critical essays (such as “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Truth of Masks”), his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his major plays (Salome, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest), and his landmark prison apologia De Profundis.  The Beardsley works we’ll study will span all six distinct Beardsley styles and will include selected illustrations from his landmark Le Morte Darthur project, selected grotesques for the famous Bon-Mots series, the notorious Salome ‘illustrations’ of Wilde’s play, numerous ‘scandalous” examples of the “Beardsley Woman,” his controversial illustrations for the major cultural journals of the period and various classics such as Mlle. du Maupin and Lysistrata, as well as Beardsley’s poems and unfinished semi-pornographic novella, Under the Hill.  We will contextualize Wilde’s and Beardsley’s works by examing works and commentaries by a few other figures. 
       (2) Working from the works of Wilde and Beardsley, to investigate how some of the key myths, movements, and figurations in late-Victorian sexual politics — particularly various narratives of Degeneration/Decadence, Aestheticism, the grotesque, etc., in relation to transfigured and ‘naturalized’ concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ (and of heterosexual and homosexual relationships).  We will try to discern how traditional Victorian gender definitions — such as males as the managers of Empire and exemplars of nationhood; and the ‘proper’ role of females as exemplars of the Feminine Ideal, “Angels of the House” — were problematized by both traditional homosexual dalliances, Gentleman’s-Club refuges, and the institution of prostitution, on the one hand, and the increasing focus on the New Woman and the Woman Question, on the other.  

Program Status:  This course can be applied toward fulfilling part of the requirements for several possible program “tracks,” including but not limited to the Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies program tracks.
 

Grading