The Green Carnation Book

Let me just start off by refuting the official summary, which states that "Gay men in turn-of-the-century Paris wore green carnations in their buttonholes." Wilde wore a green carnation and encouraged his devotees to wear them on at least one occasion, but it was never a widespread practice and its connotations with homosexuality were established long afterwards. It is tempting to regard Wilde as a prototype gay activist, proudly queer, suffering prison rather than deny his true nature, but like most 19th century homosexuals, Wilde did not make his nature widely known. In fact he perjured himself in his eagerness to deny his homosexuality, and was "outed" by his prison sentence. No one can blame him for lying in a court of law; two years of hard labour was very often fatal, and his friends did not expect him to live more than six months in jail.

Back to the novella. It is a straight-out parody of the Aesthetic Movement and of Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Douglas aka Bosie in particular. No doubt it was more hilarious to the 19th-century reader, much the way today's barbs about hipsters or emo kids will be meaningless in 100 years. But in their day, the Aesthetics were much mocked, and satirical cartoons of Wilde and dismissive reviews of his lectures were published in many newspapers.

The plot is fairly flimsy; the elder society man Esme Amarinth has corrupted young Reggie Hastings until he, too, is intolerable - daring in his wit, sometimes amusing, yet also petulant and shallow and extremely vain about his handsome appearance, which he bolsters with all the care afforded to a young aristocrat. Reggie meets Lady Locke at a country house party; she becomes superficially enchanted with his good looks, but ultimately dissuaded by his shallowness and rejects him.

Hitchens' writing seems to suggest that Hastings was not such a bad sort until he fell in with the degenerate Amarinth. This is somewhat a reversal of the real-life Wilde and Bosie, for, although the former was much older, it was the latter whose lured Wilde into increasingly dangerous waters; "feasting with panthers," as Wilde described his sexual liasons with valets and boot blacks and the lower class of rent boy. Amarinth's dialogue is so derivative of Wilde's quips that he is clearly a parody of the great writer, but unlike Hastings, Bosie was already thoroughly corrupted when he met Wilde and began their famous affair.

There may be some coded references to homosexual but nothing terribly overt, probably more recognizable to the 19th century reader than to the modern one, but the idea of a louche, libertine older man corrupting a fresh-faced younger one is certainly a Victorian trope with strong underpinnings of homosexual threat.

Never averse to a bit of free publicity, Wilde appeared to take the publication of The Green Carnation in good stride, even sending a congratulatory telegram to the young Hitchens. But once disaster struck and Wilde was on trial, Hitchens withdrew the novella immediately, appalled that it might be used to cause further damage to Wilde's reputation. Because of the trial and imprisonment, and what we know today of Wilde's life, The Green Carnation is hopelessly dated. We can never return to that time when the brilliant young Aesthetic Wilde was mocked for his long hair and love of beauty and any hints that he was a "Mary Ann" were mostly harmless. We can't read this book the way it was intended to resonate; inevitably we'll think of Wilde's trial and imprisonment that ensured he died a young but broken man. For that reason, I recommend this for Wilde fans, or scholars of the Aesthetic movement, and not for fans of 19th century fiction.