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UVM Theses and Dissertations

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Format:
Print
Author:
Bardenwerper, Annie
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2012
Degree:
MA
Abstract:
With a penchant for scandal, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was drawn to the sumptuousness of Roman Catholicism in an Anti-Catholic England. Yet, Wilde's handling of Catholic tropes is often used by critics as a window into Wilde's own religious experience or overshadowed by a thematic discussion of Wilde's ethics. Straddling these extremes in her own destabilization of binarisms, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explores Christianity in The Epistemology of the Closet, which includes her influential analysis of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. In my thesis, I will build off of Sedgwick's reading that claims Catholicism functions as displacement for homosexuality, a reading that conflates the spectacle of homosexuality and that of Christianity. Modifying Sedgwick's notion of the spectacle, I will argue that Wilde's Catholicism does not function as a closet, a product which is created and maintained by a heterosexist system. Rather, Wilde subverts the entire system by decorating that carefully controlled closet with a scandal that can 'speak its name, ' or at least has one: Catholicism. Exploring the "Diversion" of Catholicism in a way similar to Sedgwick's "Spectacle" of Christianity, I will begin my thesis by first examining Wilde's utilization of Roman Catholic tropes in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I will illustrate my notion ofdiversion in Wilde's most accessible example before applying it to his lesser known poems and fairy tales. In these shorter works, Wilde dramatically adorns Sedgwick's glass closet with religious themes and imagery, implicating an unknowing audience inhis homoerotic celebration of the body. Finally, reading Salome through this lens will explore how Wilde uses language to suggest the unfixed nature of both sexuality and spirituality; this chapter will suggest that the body functions as point of intersection between religion, aestheticism, and eroticism. By exploring how Wilde uses Catholicism to parallel and critique the spectacle of homosexuality, my thesis will push for the elevation of Wilde's lesser-known texts as a way to better understand Wilde's subversive navigation of the glass closet in his more famous works.