Scarlet Carsons, Men in Masks:

The Wildean Contexts of V for Vendetta

Abstract

This essay traces Oscar Wilde’s iconic presence in queer comics, beginning with the 1981- 1988 series V for Vendetta and ending with the 2005 film version of the same, exploring in between the varied and surprising ways in which contemporary artists and filmmakers have taken up and transformed the ‘Wilde figure’. I expose an undercurrent in queer activist art that has, since the early 1980s, increasingly imagined Wilde as a physically imposing and ideologically incendiary agent of social transformation. In this progressive refashioning of Wilde from martyred gay saint into aesthetic super-hero, we can observe a long-defanged aspect of the Wilde figure –Aestheticism – being re-imagined by late twentieth-century artists as a potent, even violent force for social change. Therefore, V for Vendetta can be understood as offering a pop-cultural antecedent to more recent critical work within Victorian and Modernist literary studies that challenges the more traditional conception of Aestheticism as politically and socially disengaged.