From: roger@quantime.co.uk (Roger Phillips)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Oscar Wilde and Green Carnations
Date: 13 Aug 92 09:57:50 GMT
Reply-To: roger@quantime.co.uk (Roger Phillips)
Organization: Quantime Ltd, London (software for market research)

In article <1992Aug13.034537.22099@microsoft.com>,
georgere@microsoft.com (George V. Reilly) quotes
Richard Ellman's biography of Wilde:
>   The theatre was fully booked for the first performance
>   [of _Lady_Windermere's_Fan_], on 20 February 1892.  ...
>   [Wilde] sent one [ticket] to the young artist Graham
>   Robertson and asked him to participate in a little
>   subplot.  Robertson was to buy a green carnation at
>   Goodyear's in the Royal Arcade---'They grow them
>   there,' said Wilde---and to wear it at the performance.
> ...
> Wilde and his friends wore green carnations on other occasions
> too, such as the opening night of _The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest_,
> three years later.
> 
> Furthermore, a friend of Wilde's, Robert Hichens, wrote
> _The_Green_Carnation_ (published in September 1894), which
> "pretended to be a parody  [of Wilde and Douglas's
> relationship], but was more like a documentary."

And from Neil Bartlett's intriguing _Who Was That Man?_:

    [Salome', speaking to the Syrian captain:] You will do this
    thing for me... and to-morrow when I pass in my litter
    beneath the gateway of the idol-sellers, I will let fall for
    you a little flower, a little green flower.

With all her great wealth, what the princess offers him, the morning
after, is a little green flower.

After the theatres had closed, Wilde was to imagine his London as an
oriental, a foreign city, with a white dome in the moonlight, a night
sky like a jewel and the scent of jasmine.  In the darkness of this
oriental night I notice the detail that I have been looking for.  Why
does she specify that the flower must be green?  Why so precise a
detail in such a lurid spectacle, promising everything and delivering
nothing?
...

The flowers that Beardsley drew for the Princess were never drawn
from life, and indeed the flower that she promises her soldier, the
flower she promises me, is a little green flower; it is the most
unnatural flower possible.  It is an artist's flower; luxurious,
fantastic, beautiful.  It is a work of art.  It will never come to
fruition.

    It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is
    sterility.  A work of art is useless as a flower is useless.
    A flower blossoms for its own joy.
        [O.W. letter to R. Clegg, April (?) 1891]
...

The man who actually wore a green flower (it was a green carnation,
and he first wore it sometime in the early 1890s) was Oscar Wilde.
Some anecdotes claim that he invented and popularized the flower, but
it seems more likely that he stole the fashion from Paris, where, it
is said, the flower was the insignia of homosexual men.  I have never
been able to find any proof of that story; but it is certain that
Wilde and his supporters wore the flower at the first night of _Lady
Windermere's Fan_, 20 February 1892.  The _Ladies' Pictorial_ for
March of that year denounced the green carnation as suggestively
_unmanly_, but _The Artist_, in its April issue, announced the
literal and unenigmatic details of this curious bloom's creation.  It
told you how to make your own:  _The green carnation to which we have
referred is a white carnation, dyed malachite green.  The dye ascends
the petals by capillary attraction, and at the end of twelve hours
they are well tinged.  A longer immersion deepens the tint._

With just such unnatural care are our signs perfected.  The little
green flower is evidence of far more than apocryphal sartorial
outrage.  Its perfume lingers; by wearing it Wilde ceased to be an
individual homosexual with a flair for creating his own public image,
and subscribed to a homosexual fashion.  He declared himself to be
one of an anonymous group of men for whom the wearing of the green
carnation _meant_ homosexuality.

    He slipped a green carnation into his evening coat, fixed it
    in its place with a pin, and looked at himself in the glass,
    the long glass that stood near the window of his London
    bedroom.  The summer evening was so bright that he could see
    his double clearly, even though it was just upon seven
    o'clock.  There he stood in his favourite and most
    characteristic attitude, with his left knee slightly bent,
    and his arms hanging at his side, gazing, as a woman gazes at
    herself before she starts for a party.
        [Robert Hichens, _The Green Carnation_, R.  Smythe,
        London 1894.  Lady Bracknell, ransacking the library
        in the final scene of _The Importance of Being
        Earnest_ for a clue as to Ernest's true identity ...
        finds a copy of Hichens's book.  "This treatise, `The
        Green Carnation', as I see it is called, seems to be
        a book about the culture of exotics." The book was a
        commercial success, but was withdrawn from
        publication in the spring of 1895, when anything
        hinting at homosexual connections became very unfunny
        and _very_ unfashionable.]

[Whew!  Must go to work and earn some money now.]
-- 
Roger Phillips                            roger@quantime.co.uk
"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
and that is not being talked about." -- Oscar Wilde
Newsgroups: soc.motss