"The Harlot's House" (1885) is a 36-line poem in terza rima [1] by Oscar Wilde. It touches on the issue of prostitution in a style which can be seen as either Aesthetic or Decadent. It is considered one of Wilde's finest poems, and has been set to music several times.
Wandering down a city street by night, the poet and his companion stop outside "the Harlot's house", [2] hearing uproarious noise including a band playing dance-music. They see the shadows of dancers on the blinds, looking like automatons or skeletons. Sometimes one or other of them, "a horrible Marionette", [3] comes out to smoke a cigarette. "The dead are dancing with the dead", [4] the poet says to his love, but she walks inside: "Love passed into the house of Lust". [5] Then the dance ends,
And down the long and silent street,
The dawn with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl. [6]
A holograph manuscript of an early version of "The Harlot's House", dated April 1882, is preserved in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles. The final version of the poem was, according to Wilde's friend and biographer Robert Sherard, written in the spring of 1883 while the author was staying at the Hôtel Voltaire in Paris, and this account is probably accurate. [7] [8] Sherard records Wilde picking up a demi-mondaine outside a Paris music hall at this time, and the next day remarking, "Robert, what animals we are", a story which suggests the possibility that the poem reflects Wilde's own experiences. [9]
Wilde published "The Harlot's House" in The Dramatic Review on 11 April 1885, but it was never reprinted elsewhere for the rest of his life. [10] In 1899, the year before his death, he discussed with Leonard Smithers and the artist Althea Gyles the possibility of publishing "The Harlot's House". This project reached fruition, albeit without the permission of Wilde's estate, in 1904 as a pamphlet with five black-and-white illustrations by Gyles. It was reissued in a limited edition in 1905. "The Harlot's House" was collected in the 1905 US edition of Wilde's Poems and the 1908 UK one. [8] [11]
The title may owe something to Joshua 2:1, "And they went, and came into an harlot's house", [12] but more secular influences on the body of the poem have been detected from the French Decadent poets and from Edgar Allan Poe. The theme, originally medieval, of the dance of death, and some of the phrasing, may have been suggested by Baudelaire's "Danse macabre " (in Les Fleurs du mal ), Gautier's "Bûchers et tombeaux" and "Variations sur le Carnaval de Venise" (in Émaux et Camées ), Poe's "The Haunted Palace" (in "The Fall of the House of Usher") [13] [14] or his "The Masque of the Red Death". [15] Wilde seems to allude to Prince Prospero and "The Masque of the Red Death" when in the 1882 holograph manuscript he writes "the Prince's house" before crossing out "Prince" and substituting "Harlot." [16]
Literary historians disagree as to whether "The Harlot's House" should be considered an example of Aestheticism [17] or whether it was the first instance in English poetry of the French Decadent style. [18] [19] The poem uses the language of music, dance and drama, which is of the theatrical world Wilde had become involved in, to evoke a cosmopolitan scene. [8] The precise locale is not specified, but it feels more like Paris than London. [20] It treats the theme of prostitution in a way which is aestheticized, and indeed sensual, but at the same time macabre and unsettling, the poet seeming to be simultaneously appalled and fascinated, disgusted and enticed by the inmates of the harlot's house. [21] [8] [22] The poem was written at a time when there was much popular agitation against English laws which criminalized prostitutes but not their customers, and it seems to take a moral stand on this social problem. This might seem to be at variance with Wilde's declared belief in the cause of art for art's sake, but it is hardly a unique case: many other 19th-century writers who proclaimed art's independence from morality nevertheless wrote work which admits of conventionally moral readings. [8]
On first publication, "The Harlot's House" made a great stir. Wilde's friend Frank Harris later remembered the author's admirers acclaiming it. "On all sides one was asked: 'Have you seen Oscar's latest?' And then the last verse would be quoted – 'Divine, don't ye think?'". [23] Other readers were shocked at the poem's subject-matter, [24] and it was sufficiently notorious to provoke a parody, "The Public-House", published two months later in The Sporting Times . [25]
Today, it is one of the handful of poems on which Wilde's reputation as a poet rests. [26] When Penguin Books published their Major Works of Oscar Wilde only three of his poems were included, The Ballad of Reading Gaol , The Sphinx , and "The Harlot's House". [27] It has been called a stylistic and technical tour de force, [28] and has been said to have proved, along with a few others of his best poems, "his ability to compose, had he but dared, a body of poems, on themes of sin, suffering and remorse, which might have been the Fleurs du Mal of English literature". [29]
"The Harlot's House" has been adapted several times, either separately or in conjunction with other poems, by notable composers:
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married a poet, Olive Custance, in 1902 and had a son, Raymond.
Aestheticism was an art movement in the late 19th century that valued the appearance of literature, music, fonts and the arts over their functions. According to Aestheticism, art and fonts should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to teach a lesson, create a parallel, or perform another didactic purpose, a sentiment best illustrated by the slogan "art for art's sake." Aestheticism flourished in the 1870s and 1880s, gaining prominence and the support of notable writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.
Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist, and short-story writer who is often associated with the Decadent movement.
Gyles Daubeney Brandreth is a British broadcaster, writer and former politician. He has worked as a television presenter, theatre producer, journalist, author and publisher.
Lionel Pigot Johnson was an English poet, essayist, and critic.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand and Naples, after his release from Reading Gaol on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other men in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison.
Olive Eleanor Custance, also known as Lady Alfred Douglas, was an English poet and wife of Lord Alfred Douglas. She was part of the aesthetic movement of the 1890s, and a contributor to The Yellow Book.
Robert Harborough Sherard was an English writer and journalist. He was a friend, and the first biographer, of Oscar Wilde, as well as being Wilde's most prolific biographer in the first half of the twentieth century.
Nina Antonia is an English author who has chronicled the lives and misadventures of Johnny Thunders, the New York Dolls, Peter Perrett, and Brett Smiley. Antonia's later work explored decadent and supernatural themes, which led to the novel, The Greenwood Faun, as well as the editorship of "Incurable"- The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era's Dark Angel.
Very Reverend Canon John Gray was an English poet and Catholic priest whose works include Silverpoints, The Long Road and Park: A Fantastic Story. It has often been suggested that he was the inspiration behind Oscar Wilde's fictional Dorian Gray despite evidence to the contrary. His great nephew is the alternative rock musician Crispin Gray.
The Decadent movement was a late-19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
John Evelyn Barlas, pseudonym Evelyn Douglas, was a Scottish poet and political activist of the late nineteenth century. He was a member of the decadent movement in literature, as well as a revolutionary socialist in politics. Eight books of his Swinburne-influenced verse were published between 1884 and 1893, including 1885's the Bloody Heart, 1887's Phantasmagoria: Dream-Fugues and 1889's Love Sonnets.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Hans Henning Otto Harry Baron von Voigt, best known by his nickname Alastair, was a German artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator.
The Sphinx is a 174-line poem by Oscar Wilde, written from the point of view of a young man who questions the Sphinx in lurid detail on the history of her sexual adventures, before finally renouncing her attractions and turning to his crucifix. It was written over a period of twenty years, stretching from Wilde's years as an Oxford student up to the poem's publication in an édition de luxe in 1894. The Sphinx drew on a wide range of sources, both ancient and modern, but particularly on various works of the French Decadent movement. Though at first coldly received by critics it is now generally recognized as Wilde's finest Decadent poem, and has been described as "unrivalled: a quintessential piece of fin-de-siècle art".
Charmides was Oscar Wilde's longest and one of his most controversial poems. It was first published in his 1881 collection Poems. The story is original to Wilde, though it takes some hints from Lucian of Samosata and other ancient writers; it tells a tale of transgressive sexual passion in a mythological setting in ancient Greece. Contemporary reviewers almost unanimously condemned it, but modern assessments vary widely. It has been called "an engaging piece of doggerel", a "comic masterpiece whose shock-value is comparable to that of Manet's Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe", and "a Decadent poem par excellence" in which "[t]he illogicality of the plot and its deus-ex-machina resolution render the poem purely decorative". It is arguably the work in which Wilde first found his own poetic voice.
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