I am not going to try and analyze this intimacy, and I make no charge but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. Secondly, I come to the more painful part of this letter-your intimacy with this man Wilde. The hereditary of malicious temperament continues here as his father wrote to Douglas: Douglas came from a long line of chronically vicious and violent mad-men, brutes who brawled in streets and slit their own throats in suicide. People started to gossip and Douglas’s father, the Marquis of Queensberry began a public execution of Wilde after being outraged by the oddity of his son and the company he choice to keep. The love that Wilde and Douglas shared was still, as Wilde infamously wrote in his poem ‘Two Loves’, a love that dared not speak its name let alone scream its name from the rooftops of raging queens, so suspicions of sin and sodomy flared up in their immediate environment. For Wilde, although desire is deeply at odds with society in its existing forms, it does not exist as a pre-social authenticity: it is always within, and informed by, the discrimination which it also transgresses. He set out to demystify the prevailing order of stern social conduct and tried to transgress the constraints of culture (nature versus reality) and break away from the slavery of custom. Wilde’s struggle for his own autonomy and individualism became a theme in his plays, he wrestled with his own need for radical personal freedom and a need for society itself to be radically different, the first being inseparable from the second. It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. It can only be understood by those who have read the Symposium of Plato, or caught the spirit of a certain grave mood made beautiful for us in Greek marbles. The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, transposed to a minor key. You send me a very nice poem, of the undergraduate school of verse, for my approval: I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits : I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse, or someone whom the great god of Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love. Douglas and Wilde finally had a place that they could house their love, a language that they could communicate in and a creative process they could systematise to suit their desires: I hold it to be noble – more noble than any other forms’.Īccording to Plato’s Symposium (the Ancient Greek origin of the concept of platonic love) there are two accounts of Aphrodite’s birth one is that the Goddess of Love is created from Zeus and Dione, (the more modern assumption) and one is that she was born from Uranus (the Heavens) and so ‘the female has no part’ in this birthing – basically highlighting the dichotomy between ‘common’ and ‘heavenly’ love. In 1898 Wilde wrote ‘to have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. English advocates used it to liberate themselves from the homosexual strait-jackets on sale during the Victorian era. Oscarĭouglas predominately wrote Uranian poetry, which was used as a modem to include homosexual gender variant females, construing a voice that refers to the third sex, someone with ‘a female psyche in a male body’ who is sexually attracted to men. Always, and with devotion - but I have no words for how I love you. London is a desert without your dainty feet… Write me a line and take all my love - now and for ever. Douglas was a selfish, spoilt ‘mummy’s boy’ who spent his money on gambling and a harem of boys, he was always in feud with his father, and undoubtedly he was difficult to love, but the and Wilde both shared a fascination with schoolboys, and each other, and decadence, manifesting a ‘lad’s love’ members-only-club where they penned sonnets and smoked pipes, and wrapped themselves up in the charm of Uranian poetry.
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