Wilde identifications: queering the sexual and the national in the work of Eve Langley.(lesbianism literary themes)(literary influence of Oscar Wilde)(Critical Essay)

To come to the work of the novelist Eve Langley is to come to a body of texts by a still marginalised figure in Australian literature--a writer who has always attracted critical attention but still continues to slip from view in contemporary discussions about identity, difference and otherness in Australian literary studies. In all only two of Langley's novels ever made it to publication: The Pea Pickers (1942), which shared the Prior Prize with two other novels, and White Topee (1954), which was published to much less acclaim. `Wild Australia', the third novel in the series, was rejected by Angus and Robertson because it was felt to be too difficult and too avant-garde in structure and content to attract any kind of readership. (1) Part of Langley's lack of favour, to be sure, is a result of the perceived `taint' of auto/biographical `excess' that has and continues to render many female novelists marginalised in all kinds of literary traditions.

Langley undoubtedly presents difficulties, not least in the sticky, inextricable link between her own life, its troubled gender identity, incarceration in a mental health institution in New Zealand, the deed-poll name change to Oscar Wilde, her reclusive end in isolation in the Blue Mountains, and her textual record of her protagonist Steve's itinerant wanderings through Gippsland and New South Wales in the 1920s. Yet it is exactly this complex relationship of life-in-text and text-in-life that poses such profound questions about identity, gender, sexual, Australian, human, and makes Langley's work so important within the body of Australian literature. In recording the life and times of cross-dressing itinerant land-worker Steve in a series of ten novels produced from the late 1940s onwards, Langley narrativises both early twentieth-century Australian identity and complex dysphoric versions of sexual and gender identities. She offers up Steve as the archetypal Bildungsroman hero who, in the specific and complex circumstances of early twentieth-century Australia, has more questions to ask than most about herself and her country and the ways in which the past impacts upon both: `Now what lies ahead to relate me to the past ... to Time, O Proust. I was always on the lookout for something to indicate to me the remote past. What had I been? Who was I? Who had I been? (`Wild Australia' 114).

Langley's final act of changing her name to Oscar Wilde by deed poll in 1954 was the seemingly logical end point of an obsession with Wilde that had become a guiding motif in her work. (2) The figure of Wilde is constructed through a kind of accretion in her novels: in The Pea Pickers Steve lists Wilde as one of the literary geniuses who inspire her; in White Topee he is reincarnated in the infant Steve on a hot afternoon in Manildra in 1904; by the end of `Wild Australia, (3) he has taken over Steve's body, his memories of fin-de-siecle London, Ireland and Reading Gaol merging with her consciousness in 1920s Gippsland. Langley wrote to her editor Nan MacDonald in 1954:

 
   I have had drawn up a deed poll, changing my name irrevocably from Eve 
   Langley to Oscar Wilde ... You will now have to give in and admit. `That 
   person, however, IS NOW Oscar Wilde. It is for literary purposes only, and 
   yet again, it is not for literary purposes either. It is for health reasons 
   mainly. (4) 

Herein lies the problem. What should we make of Langley's use of Wilde? Is the adoption of the Wilde persona for literary purposes, or health reasons? Lucy Frost has argued that we must extract `textual Eve' from `material Eve' whose `body', with its inscriptions of paranoia and delusion, `infects' the reception and critical reading of her texts (`Body' 50-56). By contrast, Robyn Colwill takes issue with readings of Langley that over-read the health reasons at the expense of the literary. As her careful and illuminating contextual reading makes clear, Langley's textual adoption of the `Wilde' persona is both intensively researched and saturated with meaning (10-27). In her desperation for publication Langley rewrote `Wild Australia' excising the `Wilde' material in order to calm her rattled editors at Angus & Robertson. Yet the first version of `Wild Australia', with its strange merging of the consciousnesses and voices of Steve and Wilde, is a richly suggestive text that deserves and rewards critical attention. The novel details Steve's final separation from her sister Blue after their several pea-picking seasons together, her solitary search for work and the space to write, and the ever-stronger emergence of the `Wilde' persona through her consciousness. At the centre of the novel, Steve's lonely, arduous journey across the Australian Alps, made against all advice, serves as a symbol for the quest for identity that is the heart of the text's concerns. Unlike the previous novels, `Wild Australia' is a novel sited in multiple temporal and spatial locations, spanning past and present, and Australia, Ireland and London. The text represents a maturing of Langley's talents and demonstrates much more fully the extent of her insights about herself and her cultural context. One of the greatest challenges it poses to its readers is how to interpret the nuanced use of Oscar Wilde as metaphor and narrative device. Examining the first manuscript draft of `Wild Australia', the text which properly represents Langley's schema, this article will pose the question `Why Wilde'? Why this seemingly belated appropriation in the 1950s, when the European fin de siecle was long finished and at a profound colonial remove from the paradigmatic Decadent? What I hope to show is that Langley's identification with and deployment of the persona of `Wilde' in the first draft of `Wild Australia' is, amongst other things, a strategy through which she becomes able to articulate marginalised sexual and national identities in a dominant cultural context in which they are otherwise compromised and made invisible.

`Wilde Identifications I': Langley's lesbian subtext

My first move is to put Langley's use of Wilde into dialogue with Anglo-American lesbian modernism. (5) There is a striking resonance between Langley's cross-identification and similar identifications with/deployments of Wilde in the work of lesbian modernists such as Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney. In a similarly anachronistic context of the first two decades of the twentieth century, Wilde functions within the lesbian modernist imaginary as a cultural signifier of resistance and dysphoria; to quote the infamous lesbian modernist patron Natalie Barney, `when at fifteen I read Oscar Wilde's short stories, my artistic vocation was decided' (qtd. in Jullian). The portraiture of the lesbian modernist painter Romaine Brooks, which records lesbian subjectivity through various cross-dressed subjects, is marked by its identification with decadence and dandyism. For Brooks, who had an affair with Wilde's niece and was briefly engaged to Lord Alfred Douglas, identification with Wilde and the movement of Decadence was `a negative exultation of those who are solitary and adrift' (qtd. in Elliott and Wallace, 33). As Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace have shown in their work on lesbian modernists such as Brooks, Barney and Barnes, `Wilde' becomes a ...