Six Weeks---The New Man and the London Theatre Season of 1895: Henry James, Henry Irving, Oscar Wilde

During the first six weeks of 1895, an important turn in the gender wars of fin-de-siecle Britain affected Henry James, Henry Irving and Oscar Wilde, all of whom were involved in major theatrical productions. The preceding year was an unusually tolerant one for discussions and depictions of male homosexuality. But 1894 was also the year when the "New Man"---a figure hitherto overlooked by scholarship---entered popular discourse. Conjured by reactionary journalists as the effeminate counterpart of the supposedly masculine "New Woman," the New Man was a convenient tool of antifeminist propaganda. In the fall of 1894, the New Man appeared on stage in two New Woman comedies that continued into early 1895. By then, the New Man had evolved to signify doubt in the masculine ideal of the English gentleman. In mid-February, at the premiere of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, a reporter used "New Man" to describe a klatch of well-heeled, real-life theatregoers who "astonished" him with their display of same-sex flirtation.;Henry James's Guy Domville opened at a moment of heightened gender anxiety, as represented in part by the New Man. The play's eponymous hero drew fire for rejecting his paternal heritage and spurning the traditional marriage plot. Critics castigated James as too "effeminate" for the stage, but the failure helped him resolve a crisis of gender and genre in his work, rejuvenating his fiction with new formulations of his "scenic method." Irving's King Arthur was a consummate expression of Victorian Arthurania and a spectacular reassertion of normative ideals. It linked a mythical chivalric heritage to nineteenth-century ideologies of manhood and imperialism, rebuffing calls for a "New Chivalry" free of misogyny and homophobia. Finally, this study relates Wilde's treatment of "art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction" to the evolution of the New Man from fictitious straw man to high-society sophisticate. In Earnest, Wilde's masterpiece, fictions precede and create realities until all social intercourse is exposed as performative. The New Men at the premiere continued this process by regendering the play's parody of courtship rituals---but their remarkable public appearance also portended Wilde's disgrace and imprisonment.