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

Until this point in their lives Otho had pursued a series of choices that had closely mirrored Constance’s own. He had married within days of his sister, and she thought that he had, like her, married for love. Now, just like Constance and Oscar, Otho and Nellie had had two sons. Otho Junior and Fabian Lloyd were born within months of their cousins Cyril and Vyvyan. But in 1887 Constance received an extraordinary piece of news regarding Otho. He was leaving his wife for another woman.
    Otho’s second child, Fabian, was born in May 1887. Within just two months of what should have been this happy occasion, Otho deserted Nellie and moved in with someone else. To make matters worse, this woman, Mary Winter, was a close friend of Nellie’swhom she had befriended while at finishing school in Lausanne. 28 And it was in this Swiss city that Otho and Mary were now temporarily living together.
    â€˜What fatality has overtaken you? Will you not write and tell me how this all is,’ Constance wrote desperately to her brother in July.
    If you care to write privately I will show your letter to no one, not even Oscar. I cannot think that you realise in counting the cost, what a burden you have thrown on poor little Nellie. She writes so very sweetly and kindly but she is such a child quite unfit to take charge of two children, two boys, entirely by herself with no father’s care. I imagined that you had such an intensely strong feeling of the duties of parents that you would not have so deserted the little ones. Is it forever, or is there no chance that you will some day return to her? Do tell me. You have always been so dear to me that I cannot bear to think that you will not write to me now. 29
    While Otho’s marriage fell apart, Oscar and Constance patched up the frictions that had emerged between them around the time of Vyvyan’s birth. It would be a mistake to see Oscar’s early frustrations and his affair with Robbie Ross as marking the end of his marriage in all but name. It would also be a mistake to think that Oscar would see his enjoyment of homosexual sex as being in conflict with his marriage. He managed to reconcile his different appetites and aspirations. Whatever distractions Oscar was finding, unlike his brother-in-law, he did have a strong sense of parental and marital duty. He also continued to love his wife.
    Nevertheless, the sexual aspect of their relationship never properly recovered after the birth of their second child. Oscar’s new sexual preference for men no doubt informed this, but there may have been post-natal medical issues on Constance’s side that were also a contributing factor. Constance seems to have accepted the diminished physical passion in her marriage, reassured that at least the emotional and social bond between her and Oscar remained. She had a husband who was committed and affectionate, which was more than Nellie now had. Constance acknowledged as much somewhat pointedlywhen she wrote to Otho and told him that ‘Oscar and I are very happy together now.’ 30
    Whistler would note that Oscar was ‘a bourgeois malgré lui’, 31 and that was the nub of it. Oscar was the married man, his wife, children and home the cathedral he had built around him. His relationship with men would be kept both discreet and discrete. From now on a clandestine version of Oscar would quietly seek to fill that ‘secret sacred niche’. This private version of Oscar, visible to us from the perspective history can offer, was apparent neither to the majority of his contemporaries at this stage nor to Constance. And it seems that once Oscar had realized that is was possible both to live a bourgeois married life and to have a secret existence, to have his cake and eat it, then his relationship with his wife improved.
    In a gesture that must have reassured Constance of his sense of familial responsibility, Oscar redoubled efforts to secure proper full-time