Franny Moyle by Constance: The Tragic, Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

Wildes’ favourite son, the mutual adoration between mother and child quite clear in this picture.
    In December 1885, when he was lonely in a Glasgow hotel room, having delivered another lecture, Oscar wrote and made a terrible confession to Harry Marillier. In a letter written almost exactly a year after the one he wrote under comparable circumstances to Constance, one where he had imagined their lips kissing, now Oscar confessed to a Cambridge undergraduate that for him there was no longer ‘such thing as a romantic experience’.
    Oscar revealed that for him
    there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance – that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are mere shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or what we long someday to feel. So at least it feels to me. And strangely enough, what comes of this is a curious mixture of ardour and indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last! Only one thing remains fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am sorry that it is so.
    And much of this I fancy you yourself have felt: much also remains for you to feel. There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous. 23
    It is a letter, perhaps in response to a question about romance and marriage, that admits that the infatuation he once held for his wife is passed, that in its place is a loyalty or affection that amounts to a ‘curious mixture of ardour and indifference’. The freedom and idealism of young single men reminded him of the compromise that marriage entails, and what pleasure might lie outside it.
    There is unquestionably the possibility of interpreting Oscar’s allusion to the land of strange flowers as homosexual code. To an extent the effusiveness of Wilde’s language in his romantic letters to Marillier has to be mediated by context. Oscar was one of a number of Aesthetes who adopted excessively intimate language and gestures as part of the affectation of the time.
    Nevertheless, the flirtation is palpable in the correspondence between Oscar and Marillier. Oscar was falling in love with the young man. Six months later another note to Harry seems to confirm both this and the fact that this love remained both tempting and unconsummated. ‘I had been thinking a great deal about you,’ Oscar wrote to him. ‘There is at least this beautiful mystery in life, that at the moment it feels most complete it finds some secret sacred niche in its shrine empty and waiting. Then comes a time of exquisite expectancy.’ 24
    Constance, accustomed to Oscar’s affectations, saw nothing more in his liking of Harry Marillier than just that. She continued to encourage Oscar’s young male friends, and he did not seek to conceal them from her. In fact, he continued to involve her in his socializing with them. The evangelistic enthusiasm her husband displayed in the recruiting of these apostles was, from her point of view, a positive thing. Within a month she was introducing these apostles to one another. In January she dropped Marillier a line inviting him to dine with her and Oscar at 7.30, noting ‘I have asked Douglas Ainslie also.’ 25 The boys were, after all, exactly the same age. It was perhaps on this occasion that Constance, Oscar and their young friends all drank ‘yellow wine from green glasses in Keats’s honour’. It was certainly at this dinner that Constance showed off a set of moonstone jewels that the couple were