Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Difference in a Desert: Julia Constance Fletcher and the Mirage of Oscar Wilde"
Shelley Salamensky
Harvard University
salamens@fas.harvard.edu
Julia Constance Fletcher met and traveled with Oscar Wilde in Italy during his undergraduate days, when he had begun to attract notoriety for his aestheticist lifestyle, dandyish dress, and fanciful talk. Fletcher, American, twenty and "determined to be a novelist," studied Wilde as a character, and within a few weeks of their time together spun out the best-selling Mirage (1878), a semi-sentimental, semi-parodic fictional travelogue starring a young, "artistic" American woman bearing Fletcher's own middle name. If Mirage barely disguises Fletcher, it makes no effort to camouflage Wilde as Claude Davenant, a garrulous, impractical, fanciful aesthete in a milieu of rougher and readier men. Constance, wooed by the odd and compelling Davenant across the deserts of the Middle East, is enraptured with his exquisite sensibilities and glorious talk, but rejects him for more mainstream, finally unsatisfying men.
Just as Mirage, as literal travelogue, may be read in terms of a figurative journey into the realm of difference, Constance's love-quest may be read in terms of another story: a fantasy of being loved by Wilde. The fantasy appears a resonant one: Other acquaintances of Wilde - Rhoda Broughton and Henry James (both clearly aware of Mirage) - would later rewrite the story, each inserting an alter-ego (Broughton's female, James's male) as Wilde's object of desire. Fletcher's original version, however, is particularly striking in figuring sexual difference in geographic and ethnographic terms.
The desert world of Mirage is founded upon paradigms of ethnic difference, which may also be read as symbolized by, problematized by and problematizing of the queer figure of Wilde. Wilde's/Davenant's sexual difference -- Fletcher hints at homosexuality as well as pedophilia, though Wilde himself reportedly seemed unaware of his own queerness at that time -- may be read as linked by the narrative to the indigenous peoples' ethnic difference, by which Constance is both attracted and repulsed. Mirage parlays East and West within standard, dichotomous orientalist tropes; however, the narrative also may be read to shuffle terms, variously repositioning and realigning Davenant with and against Constance as different, and self-different, Easternized Westerners. Outwardly bourgeois, proper Constance is drawn to the exotic, while Constance herself -- described in largely masculine terms -- is apparently sufficiently exotic as to replace men in Davenant's erotic system. (The real Fletcher published Mirage under a male pseudonym, adding another layer of sexual self-difference to the equation.) However, Constance, as woman, finally proves unable to provide Davenant with difference adequate to his likings, while Davenant and the Middle East prove too different for Constance to call home.
The narrative ends with Constance's rejection of difference in returning West to marry a manly, mainstream philistine, while the queer Davenant is emphatically remarginalized, left coupled only with himself and a fetishized Oriental carpet. Constance's subsequent, lifelong melancholia, however, may be read to subtly query the narrative's end. Mirage's multiple intersections of discursive difference and ethnic and sexual alterity provide a view into the late-Victorian complex of cultural anxieties surrounding both ethnic and sexual difference; Fletcher's travelogue, as I argue, illuminates each vis- รก-vis the other.
Shelley Salamensky
Harvard University
salamens@fas.harvard.edu
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Updated May 23, 1999