The Other’s Other:
Neo-Victorian Depictions of Constance Lloyd Wilde Holland
Keywords:
abuse, aestheticism, biofiction, gender, Constance Lloyd Wilde Holland, performativity, re-marginalisation, sexual transgressiveness, traume, Oscar WildeAbstract
This essay discusses a selectiveness bordering on (re-)discrimination in neo-Victorian texts’ reclamation of relativised and marginalised women and wives of the nineteenth century, especially the ‘helpmeets’ of the men whose works helped shape our understanding of it. It argues that such biofictive texts as Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde mystery series (2008-ongoing), Stefan Rudnicki’s Wilde (1998), Clare Elfman’s The Case of the Pederast’s Wife (2000), and Thomas Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1998), texts that revivify Oscar Wilde and Constance Lloyd Wilde Holland, reinscribe Constance’s marginality in order to recover Oscar Wilde from the victimisation he endured in his era.
