The Omnisexual Maiden

Femininity and Desire in The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest, writes Christopher Craft in “Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest,” is “a jubilant celebration of male homosexual desire, a trenchant dissection of the supposedly ‘legitimate’ male heterosexual subject, and a withering critique of the political idea, exigent in the 1890s, that sexuality, inverted or otherwise, could be natural or unnatural at all.”[1] It is a reading of the play that bursts open the possibilities of meaning and counter-meaning, one that sees in this text, not trivial absurdity, but a liberatory queer sensibility. It also leaves open a crucial question: Where does this leave the play’s women? Are they completely excluded from this “jubilant celebration,” or are they used in the service of the play’s (male-oriented) queer impulses? And what of their sexuality? Does Wilde offer a “withering critique” of female sexual identities, or is his deconstruction limited, as Craft suggests, to the male subject? In this paper I will argue that, far from being pushed to the margins of the play, the young women of The Importance of Being Earnest are crucial to its celebration of desire. While male desire is saturated in homoeroticism, female desire defies categorization altogether, slipping seamlessly between sexual modes that range from the autoerotic to the heterosexual. It is the women of The Importance of Being Earnest whose desires are most varied and unbounded, and it is through them that Wilde most pointedly dismantles the very notion of sexual identity.

Transcribing desire and the art of autoerotica:

Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it…By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display…

-Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa [2]

ALGERNON:

Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it? May I?

CECILY:

Oh, no. (Puts her hand over it.) You see, it is simply a very young girl’s records of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.

-The Importance of Being Earnest [3]

The Importance of Being Earnest is rife with the “nonprocreative forms of creativity and pleasure,”[4] in which so much of queer theory is invested. Scholars such as Christopher Craft and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have focused on the wealth of examples of nonprocreative pleasure running throughout the play. From the unrespectable practice of “Bunburying” to the shamelessly gluttonous consumption of ostensibly civilized foods such as tea sandwiches and muffins [5], The Importance of Being Earnest brims over with forms of pleasure that are, simply put, not quite proper. Receiving less critical attention, however, has been the abundance of creative (yet not procreative) pleasures that flow and overflow throughout text, for Wilde’s play is as interested in the creation of fictions as it is in non-normative pleasures. It is on the theme of writing, in particular, that I would like to focus here–more specifically, the theme of women’s writing. By this I do not mean the infamous novel by Miss Prism that sets Jack’s entire story into motion, but rather the informal and highly creative writing of young Gwendolen and, most of all, Cecily, for in Cecily’s writing several diverse erotic impulses converge.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has figured the act of writing in 19th century texts as a possible correlative to the act of masturbation, for “in the context of hierarchically oppressive relations between genders and between sexualities, masturbation can seem to offer–not least as an analogy to writing–a reservoir of potentially utopian metaphors and energies for independence, self-possession and a rapture that may owe relatively little to political or interpersonal abjection.”[6] Thus, in the example Sedgwick gives from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Marianne’s act of writing to Willoughby is laden with sexual and emotional weight, yet Willoughby himself is conspicuously absent, leaving this sexual and emotional charge to exist between Marianne, her paper, and her sister who watches her [7].

Gwendolen and Cecily’s diary writing further articulates the parallel between masturbation and writing that Sedgwick describes–this time in a manner gleefully free of emotional weight that Marianne’s writing bears. Here the women do not simply use writing to correspond; they compose the romances of their own life, pleasuring themselves by writing and rereading their own texts. Of the pleasures of reading her own diary entries, Gwendolen says, “I never travel without my diary; one should always have something sensational to read in the train” [8]. The pleasures implied here are multiple. Gwendolen can experience the double pleasure of being reader and protagonist; she can recognize herself in what she has written while also reading something “sensational”--that is, something quite distinct from the banality of life as she experiences it firsthand.

As for Cecily, she is so invested in the sensual experience of reading and writing about herself that she becomes distressed when she mars the visual perfection of her writing with a blot of ink. “Oh, you have made me make a blot!” she complains to Algernon. “And yours is the only real proposal I have ever had in all my life. I should like to have entered it neatly”[9]. Taking this masturbatory pleasure to its extreme, Cecily records both that which has happened to her and that which she would like to happen to her, as when she informs Algernon that, though they have, strictly speaking, only just met, according to her diary they have been engaged for three months [10]. Cecily’s writing thus serves to record fantasies for her own private enjoyment (or, in this case, for enjoyment with a partner), in which she becomes both the subject and object of her own imagined romantic scenarios. A multi-layered series of erotic relationships emerge, without Cecily necessarily ever leaving the solitude of her own room. Playing both parts in her romantic/erotic fantasy, she even goes so far as to supply the presence of her imaginary partner. As she tells Algernon, “I grew tired of asking the postman every morning if he had a London letter for me. My health began to give way under the strain and anxiety. So I wrote your letters for you, and had them posted to me in the village by my maid. I wrote always three times a week and sometimes oftener” [11]. Far from upholding standards of feminine propriety, Cecily is deeply and unabashedly invested in her own erotic inner life.

Yet as blatantly and shockingly autoerotic as Cecily’s diary writing is, it also squares neatly with late Victorian notions of woman as a naturally imitative creature [12], for in authoring her own romance, Cecily clearly draws on the images and clichés with which she is familiar. She builds her fantasy out of familiar social rituals (courtship, engagement, lovers’ quarrel, reconciliation, etc.), constructing a tale that perfectly suits the genre of “girl’s diary.” Mirroring the behaviors and emotions of her peers, Cecily is in many respects the normative Victorian image of a girl: impressionable, receptive, and derivative. Like the actress Wilde so admired, Sarah Bernhardt, and like the one he created, Sybil Vane [13], Cecily is a woman who displays the supposedly inborn feminine gift of imitation and expression, and–like Bernhardt and Vane–the equally “feminine” characteristic of utter unoriginality. 

But Cecily, unlike her theatrical counterparts, never stops playacting or emerges into reality. While Sybil retreats from graceful mimicry to unthinking banality once she steps off stage, Cecily treats the courtship and engagement that she lovingly authors in her diary, not as a flight of fancy or even a carefully crafted fiction, but as fact, worthy of being discussed with her actual suitor when he actually proposes. Similarly, when Gwendolen consults her diary for proof that it is she, not Cecily, who is engaged to Mr. Ernest Worthing, she is neither indulging in a silly game nor referring to an objective record of facts. Rather, she is turning to her text to determine reality. “If you would care to verify the incident,” she tells Cecily, “pray do so. [Produces diary of her own.]” [14]. In the context of the play, where there is little interest in privileging fact over fiction (or vice versa), Cecily’s autoerotic writing is not simply the work of an imitative or flighty girl; on the contrary, her fantasies are serious business, holding the power to shape the traditionalist bastions of courtship and marriage. 

I would argue, then, that, far from being an example of typical unthinking womanhood, Cecily very actively constructs her own sexuality and femininity out of the social categories available to her. By this I do not mean to suggest that she transcends stereotype but rather that she revels in it, taking on familiar forms, conventions, and clichés in order to derive voyeuristic pleasure from her own imitation. If, in the words of Judith Butler, “the materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms,” [15] nowhere is this more extravagantly and exuberantly so than in the case of Cecily. Quite the opposite of Helen Cixous’s women who have “written a little, but in secret,” who have “punished [themselves] for writing, because [they] didn’t go all the way; or because [they] wrote, irresistibly, as when [they] would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off,” [16] Cecily makes of her masturbation (that is, her writing), a flamboyant display in which she is both exhibitionist and voyeur, both object and author, building her own identity and pleasuring herself through a repetition of social forms and behavioral models.

Just as Wilde does not prioritize the real over the imaginative, it may also be said that he does not privilege female procreativity over autoeroticism. To treat autoerotic pleasure as The Importance of Being Earnest does–that is, not as a perversion, inversion, or step along the way to mature (partner-focused) sexuality, but as a form of eroticism that is not only valid unto itself but in fact also contains partner-focused eroticism within it–is to challenge, not just procreative heterosexuality, but the very notion of sexual identity itself [17]. Cecily’s writing becomes striking, not simply because it shows a woman interested in defining the terms of her own romantic and sexual relationships, but because that woman’s erotic energy is self-focused, self-generated, and self-sufficient.

Indeed, the importance of having a real, living love object (ostensibly the goal of mature sexuality of any variety) [18] is thoroughly obfuscated by Cecily and Gwendolen’s desire. Both have determined that they desire a man named Ernest. In fact, both are prepared to reject their suitor’s proposals on the grounds that those suitors are not named Ernest. While neither woman ever suggests that she would be so rash as to marry anyone named Ernest, there is a dangerous suggestion of indiscriminate, nonprocreative sexuality here, for Gwendolen and Cecily care less about finding a suitable husband than about finding an object to fit into their predetermined, private, erotic fantasies. 

Again, it may be possible to see the women’s absurd determination to marry men named Ernest as “typical” female whimsicality, but this accusation of girlish capriciousness surely seems unjust and unjustified in a play whose male characters invent convenient brothers and determine to kill off fictional invalids. This is not to suggest that Wilde intends Cecily and Gwendolen to be taken seriously, but rather that he intends them to be taken no less seriously than their male counterparts. Wilde opens up the possibility of female autoerotic pleasure just as he opens up the possibility of homoeroticism between men–through a veil (or perhaps a magnifying glass) of absurdism.

In their autoerotic writing, Cecily and Gwendolen defy the sexual taxonomies that classify subjects by the object toward which their desire is oriented. There is no single object of desire in Cecily’s writing. On the contrary, through writing, Cecily eroticizes herself, her imagined male beloved, and her real male beloved all at once. Indeed, much of the power of autoerotic sexuality is that it “run[s] so fully athwart the precious and embattled sexual identities whose meaning and outlines we always insist on thinking we know” [19]. These were the very identities that were settling into public consciousness at the same time The Importance of Being Earnest premiered and that the play itself thoroughly dismantles. In that their sexual identities are not based upon their choice of desired object, Gwendolen and Cecily are similar to the “masturbating girl” that Sedgwick describes [20]. Like Sedgwick’s “masturbating girl,” their desires run counter to the nascent binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality that was to emerge as the most recognized model of sexual identity of the 20th and early 21st century. 

Visual Pleasures and Female Homoeroticism:

CECILY

Oh! Not at all, Gwendolen. I am very fond of being looked at. [21]

Through her performance of her sexual identity via diary writing, Cecily is accustomed to watching and being watched (most often by herself). In the exchange quoted above, eager for more of this pleasure, and not one to begrudge another the pleasure of looking at her, Cecily readily offers herself up to another’s gaze. That this “other” is a woman does not seem to influence her feelings on that matter. In fact, quite familiar with the erotic charge of looking and being looked at, Cecily happily engages in this homoerotic interchange. Prefigured by Gwendolen’s heartfelt line in her Act I tête-à-tête with Jack–”I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present”[22]–Cecily’s readiness to put herself on display pushes Gwendolen’s exhibitionist impulses to a new extreme. For Cecily it is not the display of her own heterosexual performance that brings her pleasure. It is, quite simply, the display of herself. To be objectified is sheer delight–by whom, it doesn’t matter. In this case it is a woman who desires to look at her–then a woman will do just fine.

That turn-of-the-century philosophers figured lesbianism as a form of autoeroticism compounds this already blatantly homoerotic moment. A woman kissing another woman, so the argument went, was essentially the same as a woman kissing herself in the mirror [23]. Thus, in wanting to be looked at as she looks at herself, Cecily displays both narcissism and the desire for same-sex erotic contact. As for Gwendolen, her desire to look at Cecily is–following this late Victorian logic–a desire to look at herself. This notion of narcissistic feminine homoeroticism underscores both the interest in self-objectification and the sexual undercurrent of this brief but striking exchange. 

Is this, then a homosexual moment? Perhaps a more useful question would be: Does this decidedly homoerotic moment function as a coded expression of closeted sexual impulses that is made visible to those who can decode its signs? Prefaced by Gwendolen’s assertion that her mother’s strict views have rendered her short-sighted, her desire to examine Cecily up close takes on a rebellious tone, standing in opposition to her mother’s repressive parenting. Certainly, the audience has seen already that Gwendolen is a young woman who is not afraid to pursue sexual contact against her mother’s injunctions, as when, in Act I, she deliberately disobeys her mother’s orders, staying behind with Jack to catch a moment alone when Lady Bracknell leaves the room [24]. “Mamma!” she scolds when her mother returns before Jack has finished proposing, “...I must beg you to retire. This is no place for you” [25]. The audience has heard too, only seconds before she asks to look at Cecily, that Gwendolen is hopelessly attracted to effeminate men, a detail that strongly suggests an “inverted” homosexual identity.

In this model of homosexuality-as-inversion, homosexual desires are understood to be unfortunate variations on “normal” heterosexual ones [26]. In this paradigm, “[d]esire between [men] requires the interposition of an invisible femininity, just as desire between [women] requires the mediation of a hidden masculinity” [27]. Thus Gwendolen’s interest in effeminate men becomes an indication of her lesbian inversion. Gwendolen (so this logic goes) likes men who remind her of women. Furthermore, by looking Cecily over with the kind of interest generally reserved for young male suitors who ought “naturally” to appreciate Cecily’s physical charms, Gwendolen misappropriates male characteristics.

But if the late Victorian era “superscribed conventional gender norms upon sexual relationships to which those norms were [...] irrelevant,” figuring the “female ‘husband’” in a lesbian relationship as “dominant, appetitive, masculine, and ‘congenitally inverted’” while figuring the female “wife” as “quiescent, passive, only ‘latently’ homosexual, and as Havelock Ellis argues, unmotivated by genital desire,” [28] then Cecily and Gwendolen do not make for a very convincing inverted lesbian duo. For one thing, Cecily, with her active interest in herself as an erotic object and her declaration that she is “very fond of being looked at” is hardly “quiescent” and “passive.” For another, the ease with which Cecily and Gwendolen, even at their most desirous moments, can slip into stereotypes of womanly vanity, frivolity, and romanticism marks them as decidedly feminine.

Indeed, Wilde is quite insistent upon the predictability of their feminine temperaments. “Cecily and Gwendolen are perfectly certain to be extremely great friends,” Jack predicts early in the play. “I’ll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.” To which Algernon responds, “Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first” [29]. This is in Act I. By Act III, Gwendolen and Cecily are trading barbs. “Detestable girl!” Gwendolen declares in an aside [30]. Precisely one reconciliation and two pages later (“My poor wounded Cecily!” Gwendolen coos; “My sweet wronged Gwendolen!” Cecily replies), Gwendolen bursts out with the long-awaited punchline: “You will call me sister, will you not?” [31] To say that these women easily fulfill the gender expectations laid out for them is to understate the point. Cecily’s construction of herself through her diary, and her self-conscious awareness of it as “a very young girl’s record of her thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication,” [32] further insist upon her as a carefully constructed caricature of typical girlishness. This, as well as the utter reliability with which both women fulfill Algernon’s somewhat misogynistic predictions, renders them sufficiently feminine to make inversion out of the question.

As much as Cecily and Gwendolen’s autoerotic diaries align them with Sedgwick’s “masturbating girl” Marianne, their sexual identities are too numerous to comfortably pin down. Their erotic activities are not limited to their masturbatory writing, thus they cannot fit the 19th century sexual identity of “onanist,” [33] which, like most sexual identities, is assumed to exclude all others. When the opportunity comes to look or be looked at by another woman, Cecily and Gwendolen are eager to participate; they are not exclusively drawn to solitary forms of sexuality. Additionally, Cecily and Gwendolen are never banished from normative gender roles; their autoerotic activities and homoerotic exchanges co-exist quite happily with their identities as personable, respectable, marriageable young women [34]. In fact, the socially sanctioned and sexually marginal thrive on each other. When Algernon and Cecily share the details of their three-month-old courtship, they happily let Cecily’s autoerotica shape their story. Likewise, the particulars of their engagement influence Cecily’s writing, as when she transcribes Algernon’s words while he proposes. Here the text feeds their courtship just as their courtship feeds the text:

ALGERNON:

…I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly (Takes out his watch and looks at it.)

CECILY:

(After writing for some time, looks up) I have not taken down ‘hopelessly’. It doesn’t seem to make much sense does it? (A slight pause.)

ALGERNON:

(Starting back) Cecily!

CECILY:

Is that the beginning of an entirely new paragraph? Or should it be followed by a note of admiration?

ALGERNON:

(Rapidly and romantically) It is the beginning of an entirely new existence for me, and it shall be followed by such notes of admiration that my whole life shall be a subtle and sustained symphony of Love, Praise, and Adoration combined. [35]

Cecily alters Algernon’s words to suit her text, while Algernon transforms her questions about textual formatting (clearly as important to Cecily’s overall sensual experience as making sure that the page is blot-free) into a metaphor for heteronormative love. Cecily’s sexual identity as a writer/masturbator collaborates fully with her identity as a well-mannered heterosexual young woman who receives proposals from gentlemen.

Thus, unlike Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne, these women need not be punished for their desires or their actions, chastised with illness, or reduced to a single socially prescribed sexual identity at the expense of all other eroticism [36]. What separates Cecily and Gwendolen from “masturbating girls” is their ability to be voraciously desirous without marking themselves as deviant. These women, who without hesitation engage in forms of autoeroticism and homoeroticism, are never barred by the play, the other characters, or by the force of their own “perverse” or “inverted” desires, from participating in socially sanctioned performances of sex and gender.

 Paradoxically, it is this very ability to move between identities that makes Cecily and Gwendolen subversive. In following their desires without ever coming into conflict with socially sanctioned femininity, they become far more dangerous than a woman with a single deviant sexual identity ever could be, for, if they do not appear deviant, they cannot be marginalized. If seemingly respectable young women can desire in ways that so thoroughly escape the confines of marriage-oriented heterosexuality without ever being forced either to renounce heterosexuality or renounce those desires that do not conform to it, then the assumptions underlying sexual difference, deviance, and normativity are called into question. In Cecily and Gwendolen, Wilde does the unthinkable: he creates two young women whose erotic impulses do not dictate their social identities.

Eroticism without borders:

Of course, this potentially dangerous detachment of sexual desire from sexual identity is both defused and made possible by the humor of The Importance of Being Earnest. The pleasure of laughter and, even more importantly, the assurance that the play is nothing more than a trifle, a “trivial play for serious people,” as its subtitle announces, merely intended in good fun, eclipse the subversive implications of Cecily and Gwendolen’s unabashed eroticism even as they enable it. Wilde may be subverting his culture’s notions of sex and sexuality, and the emerging and soon to be deeply rigidified notion of sexual identity, but neither the concepts and norms that are subverted nor the act of subversion itself is to be taken too seriously. 

Meanwhile, given license to do as they please under the guise of comic absurdity and the reassuring fulfillment of gender norms, Cecily and Gwendolen are free to upend sexual categories as they see fit. Furthermore, their unquestionable femininity renders them deceptively unthreatening. Indeed, it is quite natural to forgive them their caprices; they are only girls. Ironically, however, one of the very qualities that establishes Cecily and Gwendolen as capricious girls–their witty, self-assured way of expressing themselves–may also be taken as an indication of their deviance. In their 1895 book The Female Offender, Cesare Lombroso and Gugliemo Ferrero included hypotheses about the criminal tendencies of women who enjoyed sex. In addition to being “weak in maternal feeling” and “inclined to dissipation” these women were “excessively erotic…astute and audacious” [37]. Cecily and Gwendolen are nothing if not astute. And, though not unconventional, they are most certainly audacious in the sense of being high-spirited. They are, as well, more than a little erotic in their habits and attitudes. Cecily and Gwendolen, then, bear the late Victorian markers of sexual drive thought to accompany feminine inversion. Yet they are not masculinized criminals like the female offenders, nor are they pitiable damsels made ill by their own excesses, like Marianne. They are simply two charming young women liberally enjoying indiscriminate eroticism. 

The indiscriminate nature of this eroticism is clear, not just in the fluidity of Cecily and Gwendolen’s sexual identities, but in the fluidity of the partners’ identities, as well. Though it would be going too far to see any implication of polyandry in the play, there is a way in which, for much of Act III, Cecily and Gwendolen each have more than one male love interest at once, for both are engaged to men named Ernest while they accept proposals from two men by the names of Algernon and Jack. True, Cecily and Gwendolen both believe their real fiancés to be named Ernest, but thanks to the play’s detachment of name from identity, it appears that Cecily and Gwendolen find themselves romantically entwined with more men than they have intended (or at least with more names than they had intended). If Cecily’s diary entry recording her one-woman performance of courtship with an imaginary man named Ernest is to be taken as seriously (or as lightly) as the two-person performance of courtship that transpires onstage between her and a man named Algernon, then she has, more or less, become engaged twice, each time with equal enthusiasm.

“I am afraid it is quite clear, Cecily,” says Gwendolen upon learning that neither Jack nor Algernon has or is a brother named Ernest, “that neither of us is engaged to be married to anyone” [38]. Yet she might just as easily say that they are both engaged to be married to everyone, for the lines of identity are so hopelessly crossed that a web of engagements and erotic attachments leaves each woman with anywhere from zero to four fiancés, depending upon one’s perspective. Cecily is engaged to an imagined man named Ernest, as well as to a real man named Ernest, who is actually a man named Algernon pretending to be the fictional brother of his friend (who will eventually turn out to be his real brother) who is named Jack…but who, we will learn at the end of the play, is actually named Ernest. Meanwhile, Gwendolen is, according to her diary, also engaged to a man named Ernest. At the same time, she is actually engaged to a man named Jack…who is actually named Ernest. Cecily and Gwendolen both are and are not engaged to the same man, and that man both is and is not his own brother.

While this is not to imply that there is a suggestion of literal multiple suitors (Cecily does, after all, believe that she is getting engaged to the same man twice), it is simply to point to the remarkable sense of fluidity and multiplicity that pervades the courtships in this text. “This ghastly state of affairs is what you call Bunburying I suppose?” [39] Jack moans in the midst of the confusion, and, if to Bunbury is to venture into “the sidelines of pseudonymous desire,” [40] if it is the queer complement and “hidden but irreducible supplement” to heterosexual hierarchies, [41] then this is indeed an excellent example of Bunburyism, for it is safe to say that something very queer has transpired between these four people. 

That there is a question of identity, not just in the context of romance, but of kinship as well, is significant. These characters, who are all bound to each other through a series of erotic and romantic relationships, are also bound by equally convoluted lines of kinship. There is, for instance, the question of Cecily’s relationship to Jack. Reading aloud from Jack’s cigarette case, Algernon lays out their relationship: “From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack,” the cigarette case reads [42]. The text of the cigarette case, however, is as unreliable as the text of the women’s diaries, for shortly after Algernon has read the inscription aloud, he begins to insinuate that Jack might have–or be perceived as having–some sort of sexual relationship with his “niece.” “Have you told Gwendolen yet that you have an excessively pretty ward who is only just eighteen?” he asks [43]. Cecily may be Jack’s niece, but she is young and she is a woman, and that, apparently, is enough to open up the possibility of erotically charged contact between them.

Granted, the distinction between “niece” and “ward” is an important one, for Cecily is not Jack’s niece in any literal or biological way. But the text itself confounds the meanings, not only of proper names, but of the labels by which different relationships are expressed and delineated:

GWENDOLEN:

Of course you are quite sure, quite sure that it is not Mr. Ernest Worthing who is your guardian?

CECILY:

Quite sure. (A pause.) In fact, I am going to be his. [...] Mr. Ernest Worthing and I are engaged to be married. [44]

“Guardian” may be substituted for “uncle”, but it may also be substituted for “wife.” It may be familial or romantic, male or female, old or young. Such is the meaning of the word “guardian” and the terms of the Victorian ward-guardian relationship, but in Wilde’s insistence on the instability of meaning and the unreliability of labels, there seems to be an elision between familial relationships tha exclude sexual contact and pseudo-familial relationships that do not.

This elision, and the continued possibility of incest that it implies, are made possible by the play’s refusal to prioritize literal reality over masquerade or masquerade over metaphor. If a friend who impersonates one’s imaginary brother can turn out to actually be one’s literal brother, and if a stranger who is engaged to one’s imaginary fiancé turns out to be one’s sister-in-law, is it not possible that a ward is a niece? And if a ward is a niece, then does Cecily end up married to her uncle?

Add to this what Sedgwick has described as the “very gay-marked” connotations of “aunt” and “uncle” [45] and it appears, as Sedgwick has also observed, that lines of kinship and desire are being explicitly drawn on top of each other [46]. What is of particular interest to me here, however, is the degree to which the women become implicated in this set of homoerotic relationships between men. It is Cecily, after all, who is called an aunt and desires an uncle. Easy though it may be to see in Cecily a coded reference to homosexuality in which she operates as a thinly-veiled stand-in for a young man attracted to his “uncle,” her own erotic interests are far too potent and varied for her to neatly fill this symbolic function. This woman–whose erotic inner life includes the pleasure of watching and the pleasure of being watched, the pleasure of homoerotic contact and the pleasure of heteroerotic contact, the pleasure of reality and the pleasure of fantasy–resists this kind of symbolic reduction.

This is not to suggest that the work of queer scholarship has reduced the women of The Importance of Being Earnest to the status of metaphorical men, nor that the intention of all such scholarship is to decode fixed homocentric meanings hidden within the text (though indeed it has been the intention of some). On the contrary, the overall effect of this work has been to open up the possibilities for meaning, and to emphasize the degree to which these extravagant excesses of meaning, these signifiers that signify more than they will admit to, constitute the driving linguistic and erotic energy of The Importance of Being Earnest. 

My purpose in demarcating a space for the young women of this play is simply to examine the ways in which their erotic energy is separate and distinct from (though related to) the play’s pervasive male homoeroticism and gay punning. Saturated in homoeroticism and “gay-marked” (that is, marked by male gayness) though The Importance of Being Earnest may be, Cecily and Gwendolen display a kind of sexuality all their own–one that escapes classification and that may best be described as insouciantly omnisexual. Writes Craft:

…Wilde writes against all essentialist notions of being, inverted or otherwise, and refuses to identify subjectivity and sexuality, insisting instead on the irreducible difference between [...] For what Wilde seeks in desire is not the earnest disclosure of a single and singular identity, the deep truth of sex, but rather something less and something more: the vertigo of substitution and repetition. [47]

Though Craft situates this constant movement of “substitution and repetition” first and foremost in the play’s male homoeroticism, nowhere is the refusal of essentialist sexual identity clearer than in Cecily and Gwendolen. These women are implicated in every form of eroticism The Importance of Being Earnest has to offer, including those, like male homosexuality, from which they ought, logically, to be excluded. These two decidedly feminine young ladies, whose desires fly in the face of sexual categorization, are neither inverts nor are they deviant. It is through their “normalcy” that The Importance of Being Earnest is at its most delightfully subversive and subversively delightful. In detaching sexual identity from the performance of gender, Wilde is at his most radical yet least threatening. For it is this detachment that most seriously endangers assumptions about gender difference and essentialized identity, but it is this same detachment that allows Cecily and Gwendolen’s repeated transgressions of heteronormative sexual identity to be balanced by their reassuring performances of socially mandated femininity. It is this boundless desire contained within normatively gendered subjects that remains as surprising and titillating today as it was a century ago. While the identities of “onanist” and “invert” may be lost to time, their legacy persists, not only in their more enduring contemporaries like “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” and “bisexual,” but in the very notion that sexuality is best understood by dividing it into categories—categories that Cecily and Gwendolen, with their celebration of unbounded erotic desire, render utterly superfluous.

1 Craft, “Alias Bunbury,” 23.

2 Cixous, 876, 880.

3 Wilde, Act III, p. 357.

4 Sedgwick, 112.

5 For a discussion of Wilde’s “transposing [of] sexual and gustatory pleasures” see “Alias Bunbury,” 28.

6 Sedgwick, 111.

7 Ibid. 112.

8 Wilde, Act III, 358.

9 Ibid. 359.

10 Dijkstra, 120.

11 Dijkstra’s Chapter V, “Women of Moonlight and Wax: the Mirror of Venus and the Lesbian Glass,” further details the relationship between feminine imitation and concepts of the actress in the late Victorian period.

12 Wilde, Act III, 363.

13 Butler, x.

14 Cixous, 876-77.

15 Sedgwick, 117.

16 Ibid.

17 Sedgwick, 113.

18 Ibid. 118.

19 Wilde, III, 362.

20 Wilde, III. 331.

21 Dijsktra, 152.

22 Wilde, I, 329.

23 Ibid. 331.

24 Craft, “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips,” 114.

25 Ibid. 115.

26 Ibid. 120.

27 Wilde, I, 337.

28 Wilde, III, 364.

29 Ibid. 366.

30 Ibid. 357.

31 See Sedgwick, 116 for a discussion of onanism as a sexual identity.

32 The same could, in fact, be said of the men, whose homoerotic exchanges do not seem in any way to conflict with their desire to marry women.

33 Wilde, III, 358.

34 Sedgwick, 120.

35 Quoted in Dijkstra, 158-59.

36 Wilde, III, 367.

37 Ibid.

38 Craft, “Alias Bunbury,” 22.

39 Ibid. 27.

40 Wilde, I, 324.

41 Ibid. 337.

42 Ibid. 336.

43 Sedgwick, 59.

44 Ibid. 70-72.

45 Craft, “Alias Bunbury,” 22.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1(1976): 875-93.

Craft, Christopher. “Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest.” Representations 31 (1990): 19-46.

—. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8 (1984): 107-33.

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.