Harlot House Life in Victorian

Harlot House

Life in Victorian England was a study in contrasts. From 1837 to 1901 the lengthy period of British prosperity at home engendered a burgeoning middle class, a set of social and cultural reforms, and with the supposed Pax Britannica a more inward focus on morality and social justice. Writers like Charles Dickens argued for the betterment of the lower and working classes, yet there was a clear hierarchical system in place. Colonialism was at its height, and the British viewed anyone other than Caucasians as being intellectually inferior. Women were gaining ground, but still relegated to a certain stance within society -- particularly the upper middle and aristocratic classes. So, too, did an organized template of how to live a proper life, how to dress correctly, act correctly, live correctly -- all within the bounds of a society that had the same desires, foibles, and inadequacies as any other society before and after.

Enter Oscar Wilde, married but only emotionally and physically satisfied with homosexual encounters. Wild was a vapid critic of Victorian culture, often guised in humor which, for the most part, made him the darling of aristocratic society. After all, was it not "civilized" to be introspective? So, too, Wilde was a master at the double-entendre', slyly inserted to make his cynical point. For instance, in The Harlot's House, the first stanza refers to loud musicians playing Strauss' "Treues Liebes Herz," a popular waltz of the time, meaning "True Loving Heart," clearly juxtaposition from what might be expected at a house of ill repute.

Similarly, references to women are almost indicative of the "wanton woman" in the bedroom and the "virgin" in public. Women are caricatures of reality -- marionettes, clockwork puppets, and after the ethereal "phantom" lover which moves from death into "the house of lust." And, like the dialog in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the reality of the world never matches the anticipated pleasure of the night.

The Harlot's House is seemingly musical, yet is a very real portrait of Victorian society -- the outer strata clean, neat, and orderly, reviving the Gothic and the traditions of the past and the capitalistic glory of the present, with the dark underside of the slums, the docks, and the numerous inhabitants on the covert side who barely existed and fed their unhappiness with gin. Nothing could epitomize this more than to compare A Tale of Two Cities with the two realities present in The Harlot's House.

Witness the formal and "stately saraband," in contrast with thin and shrill laughter, hardly in place in a house of ill repute. And yet, the clockwork puppet, certainly but a shadow of a living woman, can only try to sing, try to move out from the shadows, out from the stereotype crushing her. The horrible marionette, in contrast, rather than singing, smoked its cigarette and tried to pretend it was alive. Finally, the utter hopelessness of the dark side of Victorian society comes out with the phrase, "The dead are dancing with the dead, the dust is whirling with the dust," evoking the funeral speak of "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and the dead -- the underside of society, those with whom the proper Victorian had little use, pass from love to lust, from light to dark, tire of the game as they do the synthetic waltz, their shadows morphing into nothing as they continue to wheel and whirl, finally weary of it all.

The literary images of this poem, coupled with the drawings by Althea Gyles, certainly focus upon the hypocrisy of the social caste and cultural mores of the time. Wilde, likely being familiar with these types of establishments, seems to believe that while the aristocracy would "slum" to these areas for entertainment, they viewed the inhabitants as little more than silhouettes of real people; yet with the same desires and longings. However, rather than being able to offer something true and meaningful, they are relegated to focus on the lustful nature, the fleeting glances and actions of pleasure, certainly not the overt sense of love. Finishing the poem, one cannot help but be filled with the pathos of the inhabitants, lacking any life force, but still attempting to dance a part of the world. For Wilde, society's view of lust is empty and lifeless, too, removed from the innocent and the truth of real love. Yet, too, he seems to say that the pleasures of the flesh are desired by all -- fleeting and ever out of reach.