When Robert S. Hichens published his roman à clef, or novel with a key, The Green Carnation, he joined others in mimicking the famous style of Oscar Wilde, arguably England’s best-known writer at the end of the 19th century. Wilde, a gay novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and epigrammatist, had charmed some members of high society, while infuriating others, with his outlandish dress and outspoken irreverence for anything not supportive of his aesthetic lifestyle.

Most critics agree that of all the pastiches in the style of Wilde, Hichens’s holds up the best, but his attitude toward Wilde is never made clear in the novel. Published anonymously, the novel elicited expressions of gratitude to Hichens from both Wilde and his lover, Alfred Douglas.

As with any roman à clef, The Green Carnation contains a key to the identity of the real people its characters represent. Wilde is represented by Esmie Amarinth; his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, by Lord Reginald Hastings; Lord Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, is labeled simply “elderly gentleman”; and several other minor characters correspond to members of London’s society easily recognizable by readers. Hichens even includes Wilde’s famous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), renaming it The Soul of Bertie Brown.

In a simple plot, Esmie romances Reggie, who romances Lady Locke. Most of the action takes place at the country home of Lady Locke’s cousin, Mrs. Windsor, who invites several friends to her manor to practice being rustic. Lady Locke is described as “sensible,” with “calm observant eyes, and a steady and simple manner.” That observant and sensible personality causes her to reject Esmie Amarinth and all of his followers, including Reggie, as unnatural men who will never understand women.

The green carnation with its fake, loud color, worn by Esmie and his faithful followers, symbolizes what seems to Lady Locke a pretentious, contrived approach to life. After attending an opera, she tells her cousin that she noticed “about a dozen” green carnations, worn by men who all looked alike with “the same walk, or rather waggle, the same coyly conscious expression, the same wavy motion of the head… Is it a badge of some club or some society, and is Mr. Amarinth their high priest? They… all seemed to revolve round him like satellites around the sun.” Clearly, Lady Locke represents that aspect of society who perceived Wilde as an influence that constricted men’s minds rather than broadening them.

During the country retreat, readers enjoy a deluge of the type of epigrams for which Wilde was famous, including: “That is really the secret of my pre-eminence. I never develop. I was born epigrammatic, and my dying remark will be a paradox”; and “Thank Heaven! there [sic] are no nightingales to ruin the music of the stillness with their well-meant but ill-produced voices. Nature’s songster is the worst sort of songster I know.”

But when he speaks with Lady Locke regarding what he calls the “value of doubt,” she remains unconvinced. In her response to his remarks about Reggie being unlike anyone else, living “for sensations, while other people live for faiths, or for convictions, or for prejudices,” she questions whether simply “being what others are not” is a sign of intelligence.

Reggie’s actions convince Lady Locke that he should not marry her when she sees how easily he gains her son’s attentions. In the rejection scene, Lady Locke tells Reggie that he interests her, but she is convinced he does not love her; he does not love anything. When she adds, “I can never love an echo, and you are an echo,” he defends his imitation of Esmie’s style, adding “expression is my life.” It is that very expression that Lady Locke regrets.

Hichens leaves readers unsure of his attitude toward Esme/Wilde. While Esme seems to cause Reggie’s failure at loving a woman, it is Reggie, not Esme, who is rejected. Esme also appears sympathetic at one point in the novel when, as he listens to young choirboys sing, he mourns the loss of his youth that had “left him alone with his intellect and his epigrams. Sometimes he shivered with cold among those epigrams. He was tired of them.”

Readers at the century’s end would see no such regret or weariness in Oscar Wilde, however, and might have wondered whether the novel represented Esme’s regret correctly as he gazed at the young boys. Whatever Hichens’s true attitude, events leading up to Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexual acts in 1895 would change society’s acceptance of all things Wildean. Following his conviction, The Green Carnation was withdrawn for a time. In the later 1948 edition, Hichens explained that he met Wilde through Douglas and found him to be a kind person.

Bibliography
Pritchard, David. Oscar Wilde. New Lanark, Scotland: Geddes & Grossett, 2001.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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