Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde Ilya Parkins Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde. Paul L. Fortunato. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xi + 162. $110.00 (cloth). Paul L. Fortunato’s investigation of Oscar Wilde seeks to situate Wilde firmly as an exponent of what Fortunato names “consumer modernism.” Defining his project against Wilde critics who view the author’s work as a sustained critique of mass culture, Fortunato proposes that the development of an aesthetics and ethics of consumption is key to understanding Wilde’s trajectory. The book is thus primarily engaged in a retrieval of an “aesthetics of surface [that Wilde] theorizes by building a philosophy of art through an analysis of consumer fashion” (viii). To build a study that is rooted in mass rituals and everyday practices, Fortunato is largely concerned with those critical objects that are usually seen as peripheral to Wilde’s career. What this means is that several chapters of the book focus on the social milieus of which Wilde was a part, with Fortunato arguing that “Wilde was a professional networker,” (1) who depended for his success upon his contacts in the worlds of both mass culture and high society: “in order to be most fully himself, he needed an immediate relationship to the cosmopolis” as a commercial center (2). Discussion of social networks in Chapter One provides, for Fortunato, the necessary background to a study of the early years of Wilde’s career, with a focus on his much-neglected journalism. The analysis of Wilde’s journalism begins with Chapter Two, “Newspaper Culture in the Pall Mall Gazette Years (1884–1890).” Here, Fortunato’s primary interest is in situating Wilde in the context of the developing new journalism of the 1880s. He argues that an understanding of Wilde’s journalistic work is imperative for an accurate picture of Wilde: “We fail to understand what is most powerful about his well-known books and plays if we ignore their connection with his journalistic-critical work; both aspects of his career are animated by the self-same aesthetic concerns and the same engagement with mass culture” (17). Fortunato thus traces the contours of an ephemeral aesthetics of surface and sensation in Wilde’s popular criticism, aiming, one surmises, to connect these with the author’s later fiction and dramaturgy. [End Page 623] The interest in journalism is carried through Chapter Three, “The Woman’s World (1887–1889) as Fashion Magazine and Modernist Laboratory.” Fortunato traces Wilde’s relationship with female aesthetes and examines how their philosophies of gendered aestheticism—which he reads as validating feminized and trivialized activities such as interior decoration and self-fashioning—find their way into print in Woman’s World under Wilde’s editorship. Chapter Four, on “Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: The Aesthetics of Fashion in Baudelaire, Wilde, and Tomson/Watson,” is a closer examination of what Fortunato deems to be a coherent aesthetic philosophy in the popular criticism of these three figures, and proves to be the most suggestive chapter of the book. Moving away from journalism, Fortunato turns, in the final two chapters, to the operation of this aesthetics of fashionable surfaces in Wilde’s early play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. He posits that the work is “an explicitly anti-Ibsen play” (101), arguing that its popular form derives from Wilde’s interest in repudiating the gravitas associated with Ibsen’s dramas. The production of the play, a seemingly “conventional” study in self-fashioning, in fact is a potent social vehicle because of the connections it instantiates between drama and the fashion, design, and “star” industries. In the final chapter, Fortunato suggests that Lady Windermere’s Fan is a modernist innovation not only because of the circumstances of its production, but because the character Mrs. Erlynne is a modernist artist engaged in fashioning both herself and the play’s audience. This chapter seems, albeit implicitly, to bring elements of sociological analysis to bear on the philosophy suggested by the text; Fortunato theorizes about the social functions of ritual, “identity as a spectrum of performance,” and “the image as culture-shaper” (124, 132...