Are Men Gay Deceivers?

Headline from the November 18, 1909 issue of The Republican.

Though it sounds funny to our ears now, in the nineteenth century, the term 'gay deceiver' referred to a man who used his charm for personal gain. The term could most certainly be applied to Oscar Wilde's older, and more sinister, brother, Willie.

The following essay, entitled "Are Men Gay Deceivers?" was written and published by Mrs Frank Leslie on the occasion of her divorce from Willie Wilde. She was seeking a divorce because he had clearly married her for her money and refused to work, but spent all of his time drinking instead. In the almost two years it took for their divorce to be finalized, she slandered her soon-to-be ex-husband in the press, while he shacked up with his future wife, the heiress, Sophia Lees. It's hard to not read this essay as Leslie's assessment of Willie's character at this time.

ARE MEN GAY DECEIVERS?

MODERN DECEPTIONS AMONG MEN AND WOMEN.

It is a stock phrase under certain unfortunate circumstances to say that a girl has "been deceived" by some man, or to call an immoral man "a gay deveiver." Now, the question in my mind is whether this is, in the majority of cases, a correct judgement, or whether one might not better say the woman deceived herself and blinded her own eyes.

The fact is that most women are far more clear-sighted than most men, and even those of the sex who might be called deficient in intelligence are endowed with a keen, if vague, instinct which cries "'Ware, danger!" even though it is quite unable to describe the precise nature or position of the menaced trouble.

Willie Wilde by Alfred Bryan.

But a woman, no matter of what degree, so soon as she falls in love blinds herself, or rather, she sets up her own ideal of the beloved object between herself and the reality, and if she said reality only reasonably keep quiet, and not persist in destroying of stepping out from behind his shelter, all will go well.

 The trouble is that few men have enough tact to be really deceitful; few have finesse enough to enter into a woman's mind and perceive the position which she has assigned to her hero of the moment and adapt themselves to it. They try to do it, but they don't often succeed; and by way of a glittering generality on may say that men mean to be deceitful and are really transparent, and that women, while apparently most deliciously transparent, are actually subtly deceitful.

Here, I suspect that Leslie is reflecting on the beginning of her marriage, when she reported in the American press that she had married Oscar Wilde's older brother and that Willie was even more of a genius than Oscar was. It seems that she feels it would have been very easy for Willie to make their marriage work, if he had only seen what a high opinion she had of him and pretended to be clever.

Of course, like other generalities, this rule has particular exceptions; and there are men who really do deceive, and women who cannot do so. I must say that for myself I do not like either of these classes; they are out of nature, and require special study.

Like George Michael, Leslie feels that, as a rule, "There are boys you can trust and girls that you don't."

Born Miriam Florence Folline, she changed her name to retain control of her third husband's publishing empire. Willie Wilde was her fourth and last husband.

The really deceitful has a strong feminine coat of character, and this of the womanish and not womanly nature. He is a self deceiver like her, but not because, like her, he wishes to believe others better than they really are, but because he is determined to believe them as bad as he wishes them to be. He adopts a code of morals, or immorals, and various forms of casuistry persuades himself that this is not only justifiable for himself, but the actual code of others, no matter what they may profess. If he is clever, he can argue from this standpoint that black is white, and left is right, and crooked straight, with so much conviction and candor that he may often end in persuading even a woman to believe him and to adjust her own beliefs to his.

But this sort of man is unfortunately rare; the more usual form is the man who knows very well his right hand from his left, an is perfectly sure that the moon is not made of green cheese, but who wishes to make some woman believe that it is; it is rather interesting to watch the maneuvers of this class of deceivers; the casual mention of the fact to be established, let us say  of the cheesy quality of the moon; the apparent surprise and indulgent amusement when the pupil indignantly contradicts the proposition; the gentle arguments, the mock deference and respect for the feminine view so diffusely and vaguely set forth; the raillery and playful irony, often more effectual than any other weapon; the compliments so skillfully introduced, and the thoughtful pause, as if considering the true value of the pearls of wisdom let fall from the pretty lips, at which he gazes so admiringly.

Later in life, Mrs Frank Leslie fashioned herself the Baroness de Bazus. 

Then comes the personal appeal: "If anybody could convince me, it certainly would be you, and your arguments are so strong and so well put that I am half inclined to accept them in spite of my own reason, and yet I can't but see that there is a very, very cheesy look to the moon, and so many people older and perhaps wiser than either of us have believed it. Don't you think you are perhaps a little prejudiced? I wish we could think alike upon this as upon so many other matters. Now don't you se," this and this?

Victorian advice on handkerchief flirting.

Probably at this point of the game the game the woman who is in love begins to finger the handkerchief with which she will presently blind her own eyes; she listens more to the compliments and personal appeal than to the arguments; she begins to take note of the hyacinthine locks, the careful moustache, the white teeth, the handsome hand of her companion-but shall I tell you where she did not look? It is into his eyes; for although I have seen a great many men trying to deceive, I have never seen one who could bring his eyes into full subjection. He may open them wide and stare you boldly in the face; he may raise them to your own with elaborate candor; he may gaze upward at the ceiling or outward at the sky, or downward in pensive consideration, but I have never yet saw an eye absolutely successful in deceit; and I believe that if Marguerite had looked Mephistopheles full in the eye, and meant to read the truth there, he would not have had power to conceal it; and if he could not, less expert "gay deceivers" need not try to. But if the woman is not in love she is very much tempted to laugh aloud and say: "What a clever special pleader you are! You ought to be a lawyer; but all the same, you don't believe a word you're saying and neither do I. We both know perfectly well that the moon is not made of green cheese, and never was, and never will be. Why pretend it is? 

 I say the woman may be tempted to make this little speech, but if she is a wise woman she will resist the indulgence, for she knows perfectly well that to mortify a man's amour propre is to lose that man's allegiance, whatever that may be. Every man is born with the belief that he is intellectually full-blooded specimen of his sex he carries that belief to his grave; and it is very commendable that he should do so, for one likes to see landmarks respected.

1890s ideal of the perfect man.

 Now, of course, if the woman sees through the man's sophistry, and laughs at his attempts to deceive her, it is flinging confetti or even mud-pellets at the landmarks; it is disturbing tradition and suggesting that she actually knows as much and is quite as clever as her traditional lord and master. Therefore the clear-headed woman never laughs at the man's attempt to deceive, unless  she is ready to be rid of him, and even then it is not a good plan, for no wise woman wishes to sow dragon's teeth in her own path; no, as a general thing she gently deceives him, but not herself; she listens to his arguments, she looks sweetly considerate over his propositions, however absurd; she appears to be on the point of yielding while fixed like a rock in her own position. When tired of the situation, she ends it by murmuring, with pretty deference: "There's a great deal in what you say, and I never looked at the question from your point of view; of course you have studied these matters a great deal more than I, and you have a much wider opportunity of observation-but-well, I must think it over; and certainly I shall look at the moon with different eyes from what I ever did before." But sometimes, alas! one only wishes the man could and would be more deceitful than he tries to be. Most men, when in a candid mood, confess that there are depths in the masculine nature which few, perhaps no women, can fathom; that they are of coarser fiber and more earthly material than women are, and that no woman ever enters into their temptations or realizes their possibilities. All this may be so; if they say so of themselves, one is bound to believe it, for surely no man can be suspected of deceit in this direction. But if these depths do exist, one would wish them to be securely and constantly concealed. the oubliettes in the Imperial Palace were so well disguised that the innocent guests walked over them quite unconsciously, and if some sinister rumor of their existence came to unwilling ears, it could at least be dismissed with the verdict, not proven. But if people insist upon glass windows over their oubliettes, and call upon you, as you gayly tread parlor-floors, to gaze upon the unclean depths below, one wishes that such people were wise enough to at least try to be deceitful. Again, a man is ignoble; he is dishonest in his affairs, he is cowardly, he is disloyal, he is purse-proud, or perhaps he has rheumatism, or colic, or some other distressing complaint not necessarily apparent. Well, let him cover up both his mental and his bodily diseases and deficiencies while in society, and refrain from obtruding sentiments, theories or symptoms with which the companion of the moment can not agree or alleviate. But if he is not wise enough to do this, he may, perhaps never suspect that he ought to have done so, for one of the most charming and most dangerous traits in a woman's nature is her power of sympathy and her dread of giving pain.

She feels for the man who is making himself ridiculous as he would be quite incapable of feeling for himself, and she gently guards him from perceiving his own folly, even while she is dimly conscious that no human power could make him see it. I have seen a very clever woman listening with serene patience and apparent interest to a deluded individual who was explaining the wonderful system he would adopt if he were Secretary of the Treasury, and winding himself up in such a spider's web of words that he finally turned very red and moist, and stammered into silence, with a suspicious glance at the gentle face beside him, upon which, however, not a trace of a smile could be observed as the candid voice replied: "I don't wonder you despair of making me understand. I never could get hold of politics, and am glad all these matters are in your hands rather than mine."

Do you call this woman deceitful? Well, so do I-admirably, generously, charmingly deceitful; and if that man went away comforted in his soul rather than humiliated and stung, was it not well for him and also for her?

When Leslie begins speaking about Titanias, I have to wonder if she is thinking of the woman Willie is living with at the time and will eventually marry. If she is, I suspect she feels more sympathy than jealousy.

Sometimes, of course, the sympathetic in the woman degenerates into weakness; and I have seen nice women behave in anything but a nice manner, simply because they did not wish to mortify their male companions by showing that they felt shocked at their language and manners. In fact, I think women seldom enjoy or wish to indulge for their own pleasure in objectionable pursuits; they simply allow themselves to be led by their companionship, and will, out of real goodness and delicacy, pretend to be bad and coarse. But to return to the first point, of what deceit a good woman will cultivate when she is in love. It is one of the most painful, or rather, pathetic, sights in life to see some lovely, piquant, little Titania trying to impress both the world and herself with the idea that Nick Bottom is a hero, and the ass' head is the true model of an Adonis. How wistfully she watches him in society; how she hovers around his conversations, darting in now and again with some word or hint, or little laugh or gesture, that seems to interpret his platitudes or errors into capital jests and hidden bits of wisdom. How she finishes out his sentences, and suggests to his dull brain something to say next. How lovingly she listens to the dullest and most prolix harangues; how she puts a noble construction upon his most ignoble deeds, and tells everybody how prudent he was in not making that investment, or helping this imposter, or subscribing to their plan, when all the world knows he was saved from loss in these directions by the pigheadedness that never allows him to do what anybody asks him to do.

Shakespeare's Titania depicted by Edwin Landseer in his painting
Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Dear, deceitful little Titanias! What a multitude of them there are, and how I love them, even while they always remind me of an old Dutch tomb whereon are sculptured two delicate little angels tugging away at the soul of an uncomfortable old alderman who declines to budge an inch.

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Marriage Really Was The Answer To Everything

Eight posts ago, I started a series on 1890s male sexuality, and expected to wind up characterizing the 1890s gentleman and his sexy self as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but the novel itself can be read as a critique of societal expectations of male sexuality.

The strange sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature gives us the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its posing and eliding of the issue of man, sliding as it does between male and human, between a sexual-instinctual problematic of masculinity and an undifferentiating psychological recognition of the beyond of consciousness, of ego and id. The story starts from the exclusion of the woman which is the condition of a questioning of the man and also its limitation, the specifics of difference are pulled back into general themes. The title, in fact, is misleading or, to put it another way, is itself one of the precautions and a symptom of the problem of representation: nothing about the story is really strange other than that it should be thought strange, the strange case of male sexuality is precisely unstrange by being made into this strange case which comes out of, works with the assumptions of, the given system of representation. Male sexuality is neither the foregone conclusion of animal passion nor the horror of an unspeakable darkness but once it is envisaged within this system that is all that can be said, all that is allowed.

I love-love-love this passage in Stephen Heath's "Psychopathia sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case." I love the essay for what it is, and love this passage for how it speaks to this series of posts. For over a month now, I've been talking about male sexuality as if there is some difference between male sexuality and human sexuality, and I've been trying to limit the discussion of female sexuality. Picturing sexuality as animal passion, is it wrong to assume that there was any difference in sexuality 120 years ago? Surely, as animals we can't have changed that much.

Eugen Sandow

I began this series by discussing 1890s male body image. The ideal male form was characterized as much by ability as it was by form. Form, they had discovered, could be sculpted, and doctors were already refusing to treat obese patients.

In my discussion on sexual orientation, I showed you how they were inventing the modern concept of homosexuality. Men having sex with other men wasn't new, but the act of letting the action define who one was was new. Identities carry power. As a heterosexist society, 1890s London mobilized to limit the power of homosexual identities by outlawing it, and redefining it as a form of mental illness.  In spite of the homophobia that this gave rise to, I think that homosexual men in the 1890s were better off than the men who had no labels because they must have felt less alone.

Which brings me to my post on masturbation: everybody did it, but Victorians worked very hard to make each other feel bad about it. The rumors about what masturbation could do to your health were almost as bad as the remedies for masturbators. It was during this post that I felt the most like I would end up with a Jekyll and Hyde conclusion because it seemed that people feared sex so much that the most reasonable personal solution was to keep it a secret.

Thankfully, that's not generally what they were doing. Homosexuality wasn't the only new identity an 1890s guy could wear. People were trying out aestheticism, being a Bohemian, they were even switching religions, and inventing new religions. In many ways, the 1890s were like the 1960s, but people dressed better. It seems that they were even beginning to understand that the identity of 'man' or 'woman' is one that we create for ourselves, but the full realization of that notion still seems a long way off.

There were both male and female prostitutes, just like there have always been, but the motivation of male prostitutes was perceived differently from the motivation of female prostitutes, much the same way the idea of being a male porn star today is quite different from the idea of being a female porn star. My discussion on prostitution made it clearer to me that the main difference between 1890s male sexuality and 1890s female sexuality was the concept of agency.

Men were perceived as having these out-of-control sex drives, whereas women weren't supposed to have a sex drive at all. What little sex education existed in the 1890s existed exclusively for young men. On the other hand, all responsibility for the transmission of STDs fell on the heads of female prostitutes.

In many ways the increase in religious and spiritual feeling at the end of the 19th century can be linked to the Darwinian Revolution and the need some people felt to differentiate themselves from animals. Sex was viewed as a baser instinct, an act they had in common with every other mammal on the planet. Morality was used to condemn anything they didn't like, and science was frequently used to back those notions up. Disease could then be read as a moral failing, linked to the degeneration (rather than upward evolution) of mankind.

I couldn't talk about 1890s male sexuality without talking about women. Women were cast into a separate sphere, dressed up as a morally-outstanding potential wife/mother, taught to refuse all sexual advances, and portrayed as the antidote to all male sexual problems.

If Eugen Sandow was the perfect man, the perfect woman knew nothing about sex and was a virgin until the horrible night that she got married. Her life's ambition was to become a mother. The perfect woman had no aspirations outside of keeping a perfect house to raise her perfect children in. She would refuse sex to her husband whenever he asked for it, and would refuse to take her clothes off when they did it.

If you were a man and were less than perfect in any way, common sense of the day suggested you find that woman and marry her straight away because she would cure your masturbating, she would reduce your sex drive, and she would shape you into the kind of man who could carry a family of six on his shoulders.

Basically, women were needed to balance out the baser instincts of male sexuality and to harness his ambitious nature, while directing him along the right path in life. That path steered clear away from pornography, masturbation, and dirty pictures, and on toward a bland diet, lots of exercise, and kids to ignore. The kids were her responsibility.

We know, of course, from the biographies of nearly every writer ever mentioned in this blog that, even if this was the ideal, it was almost never the reality, and more married couples lived apart in England and Wales than in any other part of Europe. Like Jekyll and Hyde, there were probably some men who lived double lives, just as there are today, but for the most part, people couldn't help being whoever they were, even if society was working really hard to make them feel bad about it.

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A Woman Called Horniman

Annie Horniman

William Butler Yeats was in his mid-twenties, living in London, had joined the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, when he met a rich older lady, who fell in love with him. The feeling was not mutual, but she pursued him the way he pursued Maud Gonne, and he benefitted financially from the relationship.

Annie Horniman was known as one of the 'Grand Dames' of 1890s London, though she would probably be called a 'cougar' today because she had a thing for young male artists. Today, we remember her primarily for her contributions to the world of theatre, most of which were made in pursuit of Yeats.

Of course, she loved theatre for the theatre as well. Her father thought is was sinful, but, when she was fourteen, her German governess secretly brought her and her mother to a production of the Merchant of Venice, which left a big impression on young Horniman. Her rebellious nature didn't end there. She supported women's suffrage, wore flamboyant clothing, smoked cigarettes in public, and somehow earned the nickname 'Hornibags.'

Horniman also pursued alternative religions, which is how she met Yeats through the Hermetic Order.

Charming young William Butler Yeats

According to William Michael Murphy in Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives (1995):

[Horniman] shared [Yeats'] interest in occult studies and in the drama and provided the financial help necessary for the staging of one of his early plays. She was a strait-laced, opinionated, righteous woman with a high opinion of her own talents that was shared by nobody who knew her. She possessed on deficiency in the pursuit of her dreams: she hated the Irish People, like many English middle-class possessors of inherited wealth believing herself inherently superior to the unwashed peasants who lived across the Irish Sea. She pursued Yeats as zealously as he pursued Maud Gonne, and with as much success. But because of her persistence she was to become one of the most influential participants in the formation of an Irish Theatre.

The theatre referred to there is the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

In founding the Abbey, Yeats made an enemy out of Horniman. She invested a significant portion of her inheritance into the project, but he left her out of the circle of power (maybe because it was an Irish theatre project, and she hated the Irish). Consequently, Yeats wasn't the only young artist in her life. According to Murphy, Horniman's money gave her a sense of superiority over the young people she pursued, as they became increasingly dependent on her.

James Agate, a theatre critic, once said that her high-minded theatrical ventures had "an air of gloomy strenuousness" about them, but they are what won her honour and acclaim. She is one of the very few people to have both joined an occult society, and still have been awarded the Companion of Honour, which she earned in 1933.

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Tex

In so far as he wished to be remembered at all, it was not as a man of letters, but as a friend, a connoisseur of life, a man of sympathy un-aging and zest unstaled, a lover of simple jests, a laughing philosopher. - Stephen McKenna

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

A Dutch journalist, literary critic and publisher, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos was best known for his work as a translator. It's unclear how they met or what they had in common, apart from writing and a love for the same woman.

Teixeira moved from Amsterdam to London with his family in 1874 when he was nine years old. There, he studied at the Kensington Catholic Public School, before attending the Jesuit school Beaumont College. Much the way Bram Stoker became involved with the Lyceum, Teixeira became involved with the Independent Theatre Society - only Teixeira didn't become obsessed. He also worked as the London correspondent for a Dutch newspaper, while editing other journals.

Fluent in English, French, German, Flemish, Dutch, and Danish, Teixeira became the official translator of the works of Maurice Maeterlinck, and would go on to translate Émile Zola, Alexis de Tocqueville, Maurice Leblanc, and many others.

In the 1890s, Teixeira was leading a group that sought to translate the canonical works of fiction by Continental authors for the English reading public. There, he oversaw the translation and publication of six banned novels by Émile Zola.

At the turn of the century, he married Willie's widow, Lily, becoming step-father to the most infamous Wilde of the next hundred years.

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Someone You Shouldn't Have Fallen in Love With

Willie Wilde

Many a well-known hostess fell before Willie [Wilde]'s charms: one of them Mme Gabrielli sent him, according to Constance Wilde, 'wine, tonics, and bangles'.  - Joan Schenkar

Sometimes, I'll be reading and a word will make me stop. In the sentence above, I stopped several times at the word "fell." Why do we fall in love? Schenkar is talking about Victorian women, falling had other connotations for them... "fallen" women.

Ethel Smyth

I don't think Schenkar intended for that sentence to give me so much pause. People are "falling" for or "falling in love" with other people all the time! The women who fell for Oscar Wilde's older brother, Willie, didn't go on to lead the life of a fallen woman, as our contemporary understanding of Victorian morality indicates they should have. and Shenkar certainly doesn't imply that they did.

Mrs. Frank Leslie

Shenkar does go on to discuss Willie's relationship with the suffragette, Ethel Smyth. Smyth ended her engagement to Willie, then lead a long and happy life, which included artistic successes and love affairs straight through to her 70s. Willie's first wife travelled and flourished financially after their divorce. Divorcing Willie won her sympathy in the press, rather than condemnation, but she did own more than a few newspapers. Willie's second wife doesn't seem to have had much drama in her life, after Willie's passing, but had a long and happy marriage with Dutch translator, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.

I find Willie in the biography of his daughter and other histories, like that of his first wife, which all combine to paint a picture of a hideously charming womanizer. A kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Willie demonstrated incredible courtesy and outrageous disrespect to the women in his life, including his mother. Like Barney Stintson, I imagine Willie even had a playbook, well-memorized before attending the dances and dinner parties of 1890s London. He slept with as many pretty and rich Victorian women as he could. The latter showered him with gifts and even forgave his attempts to commit bank fraud on their savings accounts.

Dolly Wilde (Willie's daughter)

The image of falling and the long culture of blaming women for indiscreet sexual encounters make me picture the women Willie met as the 1890s equivalent to the women Barney Stintson picked up on the series: How I Met Your Mother, but that simply was not the case. Beautiful, intelligent and wealthy women clearly fell for Willie's charms. He wasn't someone they should have fallen in love with, and may have changed their lives forever; Willie's second wife had a child by him. When the relationship ended, the women in Willie's life were still beautiful, intelligent and wealthy (if they started out that way). The term "fallen" simply does not apply here. Rather than finding the women that Willie preyed on as footnotes in a history of his sexual conquests, I look for him in the footnotes of their biographies because they have biographies and Willie doesn't.

Maybe it's time to question the narrative that a mistake, like Willie, was the end for any good Victorian woman.

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Perverted Biographies of Marie Corelli

Like any other kind of writer, historians want to make their writing interesting. So, what is so-and-so had sex with so-and-so? That would be interesting!

Clearly, historians can be perverts too. This is one of my favourite examples of sexualized history in the blogosphere.

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

We don’t have evidence that Wilde and Whitman had sex. It would be weird if we did. They had the opportunity to have sex and Wilde liked to imply that Whitman kissed him, but a kiss is just a kiss and Wilde preferred younger, less hairy men.

I bring this up to talk about Marie Corelli and her companion, Miss Bertha Vyer. Some biographers and historians like to think they were lesbians. Why?

There are lots of reasons. An early biographer (1903) wrote:

Miss Corelli’s sole companion after her convent school-life, with the exception of Dr. Charles Mackay [her father], was her devoted friend, Miss Bertha Vyver, daughter of the Countess Vyver, a not unimportant personage at the court of Napoleon III. The friendship between Miss Vyver and Miss Corelli has always been of the closest description.

The “closest description,” eh? Wink-wink, nudge, nudge!

Since Dr. Charles Mackay welcomed Miss Vyver as his “second daughter,” they have never been separated. In all her daily life, not the least the nursing of Dr. Mackay through his long illness, Miss Vyver has been by her side helping her in home difficulties and trials as help can obly be given by one with whom there is perfect sympathy. Miss Vyver has seen every detail of all the work the novelist has done, and to-day the friendship between the two is closer and dearer than ever for the years that have passed, and the sorrows and joys that have been borne in company.

Ok. The author doesn’t come out and say they had sex, but this kind of narrative led to the belief that Corelli was a lesbian, though she never self-identified as one and fell in love with a man three years later. That romance didn’t last. He was married and didn’t return her feelings, but, with the support of her good friend, Corelli gradually moved on.

Is it possible that Corelli was gay? Who cares? Is it possible that she and Vyver had sex? Certainly, but what difference does it make.

Two people can be good friends and never have sex. Look at Watson and Sherlock Homes! Wink-wink, nudge, nudge!

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How to Flirt Like a Victorian

Strict codes of etiquette, in the late nineteenth century, meant there were lots of ways to say I love you, without actually saying it. Because marriage was so important, saying it to the wrong person could ruin a woman’s life. The process of courting was a complex risky business and these guidebooks, from the late nineteenth century, must have only made things harder.

By nonchalantly carrying your hat in your left hand, you could accidently tell a potential suitor that you hated him. If you put your gloves away, he might think you are mad! Twirl your fan in your left hand and he’ll think you want to get rid of him. The handbook on fan flirtation was originally created by a Parisian fan shop. I suspect the others have similar origins. Here's one if you're curious!

Of course, I also have to wonder about the effectiveness of these tactics. If you are trying to send the message on purpose, wouldn’t your suitor have had to memorized the same instructions as you?

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The Most Valuable Poem in the World?

This week a poem that Oscar Wilde wrote in college sold for almost €80,000. Aside from the bitter irony that, in the latter part of the 1890s, Wilde was so desperately poor that he sometimes could not afford to eat dinner at all and relied on free meals, I think it's excellent that his poetry is so valuable at this point in the history of homosexuality. I'm not sure, however, that the poem itself has anything to do with homosexuality, but it does present an early version of a theme that would reoccur in Wilde's writing on love.

The poem was called, "Heart's Yearnings" and was written in 1873.

Heart's Yearnings

Surely to me the world is all too drear,

To shape my sorrow to a tuneful strain,

It is enough for wearied ears to hear

The Passion-Music of a fevered brain,

Or low complainings of a heart's pain.

My saddened soul is out of tune with time,

Nor have I care to set the crooked straight,

Or win green laurels for some pleasant rhyme,

Only with tired eyes I sit and wait

The opening of the Future's Mystic Gate.

I am so tired of all the busy throng

That chirp and chatter in the noisy street,

That I would sit alone and sing no song

But listen for the coming of Love's feet.

Love is a pleasant messenger to greet.

O Love come close before the hateful day,

And tarry not until the night is dead,

O Love come quickly, for although one pray,

What has God ever given in thy stead

But dust and ashes for the head?

The message of this poem is simple; he hopes to fall in love before he dies. The idea of waiting for Love has always appeared in art. Yet, the line I like best is: "My saddened soul is out of tune with time." Wilde often felt out of tune with time, in love, art, and other matters. Here, I think that line means that he's sad about love before love has given him the chance to be sad about it. It makes me think of a line in a song by Bjork: "I miss you, though I haven't met you yet."

Still, the price this poem sold for works out to €220 per word and more than three times the price that a poem by Yeats sold for at the same auction, making it the most valuable poem in the world - not long after the U.K. legalized same-sex marriage. The context of this sale gives an entirely different resonance to the idea that Wilde's "saddened soul [was] out of tune with time," whether he was writing about homosexuality at the time or not.

Because I am a person interested in all of the minute details of these writers' lives, my remaining question about the poem is whether or not this was before he met Florence Balcombe. I've been searching for the dates of their relationship, but can't seem to pin it down. Let me know, if you know and I will update this post, when I have that information.

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