Constance Wilde: A Victorian 'Mrs Jimmy Savile'?
Well I've now typed up the first draft of the new edition of The Coward Does it with a Kiss. I've made a few changes along the way – not to the storyline of course, we all know how that pans out, but to Constance Wilde's commentary on the events leading up to her husband's arrest and trial. As I've said before, we now know quite a lot more about her than was the case back in 1990, including the nature of the illness that plagued her on and off for the last ten years of her life; and Franny Moyle's excellent Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde, published in 2011, quotes at length from letters which weren't in the public domain when I was writing the original.
Two characters in particular were denied their full due in 'my' Constance's story, and I've hastened to make amends. The first is Lady Georgina Mount-Temple, who became a second mother to her and to whom she turned for comfort and advice on a regular basis; although aware that she was an important friend, I had not realised how much of a spiritual and maternal influence she became, or how frankly Constance confided her marriage troubles to her. The second is Arthur Humphreys, the manager of Hatchards Bookstore, with whom Constance fell madly in love in the year leading up to Oscar's trial; I had left their affair unconsummated, but Franny Moyle believes there is sufficient evidence to assume that it was, and I could not deny 'my' Constance the happiness of a second, though brief, sexual relationship after so many years of enforced celibacy. I have kept the (fictional) repercussions of that relationship as regards Oscar's fate, and the central theme of Constance's quest for a handle on her own identity as she examines and re-examines her actions, reactions, motives, objectives and crucially, her subconscious awareness of her husband's sexual orientation. The question of who betrays whom with a kiss is still, in Constance's mind, an open one; she sees the subtler shading between the black and white.
The general public of the day, of course, saw the picture starkly in black and white. Mrs Oscar Wilde was the innocent dupe of a monstrous, unnatural husband, and her refusal to divorce him in the face of immense family pressure was a mystery to many. It's hard for us to comprehend fully how humiliating it must have been for her to be the wife of such a pariah as Oscar became; 'It must have been,' commented Charlie Raven recently, 'rather like being the wife of Jimmy Savile.'
'Ewww,' I responded, instantly recoiling from the comparison – for nowadays, from our enlightened perspective, we see Oscar Wilde as the victim of an unjust law and a blinkered legal system, and any such comparison seems downright offensive. We do not like to dwell on the fact that many of the 'renters' who found themselves between Oscar's sheets were adolescent boys, and most of us are blissfully unaware that the Criminal Law Amendment Act under which he was prosecuted (Section 11 of which criminalised all sexual acts between men) was also responsible for raising the age of consent for young girls from thirteen to sixteen – thereby saving, in theory at least, thousands of children from abuse.
Like Constance's contemporaries we like to see things in black and white, and if we have to acknowledge a grey area we mutter something about having to take into account the mores of the time... as long as that time is sufficiently distant for present-day lawsuits to be out of the question, that is. I don't know about Harvey Weinstein, but here in Britain convicted sex offenders Rolf Harris, Max Clifford and Garry Glitter have all, at some point, fallen back on the 'autres temps, autres moeurs' defence. Much as we condemn the harsh and discriminatory law that consigned Oscar to prison, he could still be on thin ice today if he were living, and his past were to come under scrutiny; and poor Constance might, just might, find herself in a very similar position to the one she found herself in over a century ago.
It's an uncomfortable thought, isn't it?
Two characters in particular were denied their full due in 'my' Constance's story, and I've hastened to make amends. The first is Lady Georgina Mount-Temple, who became a second mother to her and to whom she turned for comfort and advice on a regular basis; although aware that she was an important friend, I had not realised how much of a spiritual and maternal influence she became, or how frankly Constance confided her marriage troubles to her. The second is Arthur Humphreys, the manager of Hatchards Bookstore, with whom Constance fell madly in love in the year leading up to Oscar's trial; I had left their affair unconsummated, but Franny Moyle believes there is sufficient evidence to assume that it was, and I could not deny 'my' Constance the happiness of a second, though brief, sexual relationship after so many years of enforced celibacy. I have kept the (fictional) repercussions of that relationship as regards Oscar's fate, and the central theme of Constance's quest for a handle on her own identity as she examines and re-examines her actions, reactions, motives, objectives and crucially, her subconscious awareness of her husband's sexual orientation. The question of who betrays whom with a kiss is still, in Constance's mind, an open one; she sees the subtler shading between the black and white.
The general public of the day, of course, saw the picture starkly in black and white. Mrs Oscar Wilde was the innocent dupe of a monstrous, unnatural husband, and her refusal to divorce him in the face of immense family pressure was a mystery to many. It's hard for us to comprehend fully how humiliating it must have been for her to be the wife of such a pariah as Oscar became; 'It must have been,' commented Charlie Raven recently, 'rather like being the wife of Jimmy Savile.'
'Ewww,' I responded, instantly recoiling from the comparison – for nowadays, from our enlightened perspective, we see Oscar Wilde as the victim of an unjust law and a blinkered legal system, and any such comparison seems downright offensive. We do not like to dwell on the fact that many of the 'renters' who found themselves between Oscar's sheets were adolescent boys, and most of us are blissfully unaware that the Criminal Law Amendment Act under which he was prosecuted (Section 11 of which criminalised all sexual acts between men) was also responsible for raising the age of consent for young girls from thirteen to sixteen – thereby saving, in theory at least, thousands of children from abuse.
Like Constance's contemporaries we like to see things in black and white, and if we have to acknowledge a grey area we mutter something about having to take into account the mores of the time... as long as that time is sufficiently distant for present-day lawsuits to be out of the question, that is. I don't know about Harvey Weinstein, but here in Britain convicted sex offenders Rolf Harris, Max Clifford and Garry Glitter have all, at some point, fallen back on the 'autres temps, autres moeurs' defence. Much as we condemn the harsh and discriminatory law that consigned Oscar to prison, he could still be on thin ice today if he were living, and his past were to come under scrutiny; and poor Constance might, just might, find herself in a very similar position to the one she found herself in over a century ago.
It's an uncomfortable thought, isn't it?
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