Not Oscar Wilde

Unlike his co-accused, Alfred Taylor, there is no evidence that Oscar Wilde had any interest in cross-dressing, on stage or off.

Despite this, a photograph purporting to be Wilde appearing as the lead role in his play Salome appeared in a book review in Le Monde in 1987. Richard Ellman, already terminally ill, was finishing his seminal biography of Oscar Wilde, when his editor was in Paris and saw the issue of Le Monde. He sent it to England where Ellman’s publishers, sensing a literary scoop, included the photograph and labelled it “Wilde in costume as Salome”. A French photo-archive was credited, but there was no discussion of the photograph in Ellman’s text. It was placed immediately after a caricature drawn by Alfred Bryon that depicted Wilde as Lady Windermere smoking a cigarette.

The photograph from France was widely reproduced in the 1990s, taken to be Oscar in drag. Such was Ellman’s reputation that no one checked the provenance of the photograph. This was a ‘fact’ that seemed to confirm then current ideas of sex and gender.

 Alice Guszalewicz as Salome in Strauss' opera

Elaine Showalter in her Sexual Anarchy, 1990, wrote

“[Aubrey] Beardsley’s conflation of Wilde and Salome, of female corrosive desire and male homosexual love, brings to the surface the play’s buried and coded messages. There is a mystery here as well. In the late Richard Ellman’s massive biography of Wilde, there is a remarkable photograph taken in Paris inthe 1890s of Wilde himself posing as Salome.”

Marjorie Garber in her Vested Interests, 1992, wrote of the photograph:

“The drag Salome is not a send-up but a radical reading that tells the truth. For the binary myth of Salome – the male gazer (Herod), the female object of the gaze (Salome), the Western male subject as spectator (Flaubert, Huysman, Moreau, Wilde himself) and the exotic, feminized Eastern Other – this myth, a founding fable of Orientalism, is a spectacular disavowal. What it refuses to confront, what it declines to look at and acknowledge, is the disruptive element that intervenes, the scandal of transvestism. It is no accident that the Salome story conflates the myths of Medusa and Narcissus, the decapitated head and the mirror image. … The story of Salome and her mesmerizing Dance of the Seven Veils has become a standard trope of Orientalism.”

On the other hand , Alan Sinclair in his The Wilde Century, 1994, wrote:

“Consider, again, the wide acceptance of a supposed photograph of Wilde, bewigged and bejewelled, in costume as Salome.. John Stokes [in a letter to the London Review of Books 27 Feb 1992] points out that this is almost certainly not Wilde, and when you look again, is is not very much like him. It is part of the modern stereotype of the gay man that he should want to dress as a woman, especially a fatally gorgeous one. Our cultures observe the Wilde they expect and want to see.”

Other people also looked more closely at the photograph and realized that the face did not actually look like that of Oscar Wilde. In particular, Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, worked with Dr. Horst Schroeder of Braunschweig University, and they were able to identity the photograph as of the Hungarian singer Alice Guszalewicz appearing in a 1906 production of Strauss’s opera version of Salome. They were also able to correct other errors in Ellman’s biography such as the claim that Wilde suffered from syphilis.

James Campbell comments:

 “This misidentification of Wilde as theatrical cross-dresser is, I think, more than just an error. … The fact that Wilde’s cross-dressing seemed to fit so seamlessly (as it were) into the biography and required no explanation indicates both that inversion remains operative in later, mostly unarticulated understandings of homosexuality, and that the distinction between effeminacy and inversion is potentially quite important to Wilde’s sexuality.”

• Richard Ellman. Oscar Wilde. Random House, 1988: plate facing p429.
• Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. Viking, 1990: 156-7.
• Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Routledge, 1992: 339-40, 342-5.
• Alan Sinfield. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. Cassell, 1994: 6.
• Horst Schroeder. Alice in Wildeland. Braunschweig, 1994: 33.
• “Wilde as Salome?“. Times Literary Supplement, 22 July 1994.
• Merlin Holland. “Biography and the art of Lying“. In Peter Raby (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge University Press, 1997: 10-12.
• Steven Morris. “Importance of not being Salome”. The Guardian, 17 Jul 2000. Online.
• James Campbell. Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen and Male Desire: Begotton, Not Made. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015: 85-6.
• Clair Rowden. Performing Salome, Revealing Stories. Routledge, 2016: 15-20.
• Helen Davies. “The Trouble With Gender in Salome” in Michael Y Bennett. Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Rodopi, 2011:56-69.