SOURCE: Paglia, Camille. “Wilde and the English Epicene.” Raritan (winter 1985): 85-109.

In the following essay, Paglia explores what she calls the “Androgyne of Manners” in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

Oscar Wilde is the premiere documenter of a sexual persona which I call the Androgyne of Manners, embodied in Lord Henry Wotton of The Picture of Dorian Gray and in the four young lovers of The Importance of Being Earnest. The Androgyne of Manners inhabits the world of the drawing room and creates that world wherever it goes, through manner and mode of speech. The salon is an abstract circle in which male and female, like mathematical ciphers, are equal and interchangeable; personality becomes a sexually undifferentiated formal mask. Rousseau says severely of the eighteenth-century salon, “Every woman at Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she.” The salon is politics by...