In 1882, Oscar Wilde was a witty young man with an Oxford degree and a slim book of poems to his name. With only this modest set of qualifications, he undertook an ambitious lecture tour of North America, where he shared his expertise on interior decoration, aestheticism and “The English Renaissance of Art.” At the outset, he was idealistic that his aesthetic message would be “the beginning of a great movement” of cultural and aesthetic renewal in the United States.Footnote ¹ But Americans’ reactions were not always positive – not least because the American aesthetic movement was already in full swing and hardly needed Wilde to set it in motion. Growing irritated by Americans’ indifference towards his sunflower and velvet revolution, Wilde signed a letter home “Yours (from Boeotia)”Footnote ² – a provenance intended to signal to his correspondent the similarity between the United States and the Greek province whose inhabitants were proverbially dull and stupid. Things improved, however, and midway through his tour Wilde declared that he had “already civilised America.”Footnote ³

Upon returning to England in 1883, Wilde lectured on his “Personal Impressions of America.” Although he initially praised the United States, he acknowledged that advancing this opinion was not in his own best interest since “English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization.”Footnote ⁴ English visitors such as Frances and Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens had, he knew, made much of their impressions of the United States as “unreal and imaginatively unavailing.”Footnote ⁵ In later essays, Wilde changed his mind (or bowed to his English readership's preferences). The American man was, Wilde said, a “Philistine,” who treated “the Old World as if it were a Broadway store.”Footnote ⁶ He was “rough in manner, and deficient in the picturesque insincerity of romance, yet he is invariably kind and thoughtful, and has succeeded in making his own country the Paradise of Women.”Footnote ⁷ The “American Invasion” of England (and all that was positive about America) was “purely female in character … The poor American man remains permanently in the background.Footnote ⁸ These observations are reflected in Wilde's plays and stories, where American women tend to retain their superiority, while American men show poorly – or not at all.

Taking the conjunction between Wilde's American tour and his interest in gender politics as its point of departure, this essay considers Wilde's ambivalence towards middle-class American men. Why does Wilde portray American women positively, and men negatively? Why does he believe that American men have abdicated to women – as if following the example of King Lear without taking any lessons from his tragedy? Why did Wilde predict that within a century “the whole culture of the New World will be in petticoats”?Footnote ⁹

Wilde's valuation of women was, for his time, a positive one, particularly when measured in terms of his support for “the ‘feminine’ in all its guises,” male or female, as John Stokes suggests.Footnote ¹⁰ This attitude is exemplified in his approach to women's publishing in the late 1880s. One of Wilde's first decisions as editor of the Ladies’ World was to modify the name to the Woman's World. The former title was “too feminine, and not sufficiently womanly,”Footnote ¹¹ he said. The magazine needed to become more serious and responsible, to reflect “a high standpoint, and deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel.” Still, Wilde's feminist sympathies were often at odds with the masculinist agenda at work in his plays and trials, as Kerry Powell points out in his 2009 study, Acting Wilde.Footnote ¹²

Celebrated today in academic and popular circles as a transgressor of gender boundaries and an “appreciative inheritor of women's culture,”Footnote ¹³ Wilde's localized advocacy of traditional gender binaries will come as a surprise to many. The argument presented here is that Wilde's critique of American gender politics reflects his larger and more fundamental criticism of American culture and values, and of men's roles within them. I am not suggesting that Wilde was a misogynist, but rather that his response to American culture was symptomatic of the late nineteenth-century crisis in masculinity. His disappointment at the failure of American men to take their place in society as arbiters of taste suggests the need for a nuanced reassessment of his transatlantic gender politics. My research overlaps with the work of Elaine Showalter, Laurel Brake, Margaret Stetz and Sally Ledger, whose research on the period has revealed a conservative gender bias operating even amid the period's progressive circles.Footnote ¹⁴ This analysis also develops Paul Giles's recent reading of British aestheticism as “threatened”Footnote ¹⁵ by American social organization and reform, both of which menaced to introduce “unwelcome ambiguities, particularly around the idea of masculinity.” Wilde's attention to the social disruption occasioned by the American male's refusal to shoulder the cultural responsibilities of his sex reflects a conservatism which puts into question the reliability of his investment in challenging traditional gender boundaries.

Wilde had every reason to be inimical to the American work ethic and the spirit of capitalism because it posed an overt challenge to the aesthetic movement's message that life is an art. The success of the powerful, productive and provincial American man contradicted his interpretation of British values and fin de siècle gender constructs. His reservations about the American man and his “vulgar test of production” were symptomatic of his critique of American culture as a whole.Footnote ¹⁶ Unlike more disparaging British visitors, he did not think that America lacked culture, but that American men failed to appreciate its importance and, as such, were abandoning their social responsibilities. As Rachel Bowlby notes, “Culture, as a space marked off from business or working concerns, was also associated with femininity” for American men.Footnote ¹⁷ For Wilde, masculinity was connected to gentlemanly notions of leisure and sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities. The aesthetic doctrine he promulgated in his American lectures thus amplified the country's already prominent debate over ideals of manly citizenship and new artistic developments.

For upper-middle-class Irish or English men, the class among which Wilde counted himself a member, taste and tastemaking was regarded as a privilege which endowed men with a cultural preeminence not usually shared with women. The right to arbitrate between what constituted Art and what did not amounted to the authority to determine the form and content of culture writ large. Eschewing the pleasures of Art was therefore tantamount to giving up one of the highest privileges of manhood. The cultural logic driving this assessment was that men had deeper affinities with antinaturalism, “Art” and the intellect than women, who were closer to “Nature” and materialism.Footnote ¹⁸ This position is echoed in the works of Baudelaire and other decadents. It reverberates throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray, where Lord Henry becomes the mouthpiece for the misogynistic view that “no woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex … They represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as we men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”Footnote ¹⁹ Sounding a similar note, the Scottish literary critic Robert Buchanan attacked the “fleshly school” of Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris for their failure to defend English literary traditions from women and “foreign influences,” a failure that amounted to surrendering their manhood.Footnote ²⁰ In this respect, then, Wilde's androcentric position does not place him “outside the pattern of masculine behaviour within his class,”Footnote ²¹ as some critics have claimed, but within a recognizable model of British nineteenth-century masculinity. The fact that middle- and upper-class American men appeared to Wilde to shun the refined lifestyle available to them represented the disavowal of a precious gender and class-based experience.

The American rejection of the Art–Nature gender binary is illustrated by the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. As Wilde keenly observed in “The Decay of Lying,” America's foundational myth was the tale of a man who was incapable of telling a lie – in other words, a man who had surrendered artifice and repented his attack on Nature. Wilde saw in Washington's tale an encapsulation of the values that underlay the utilitarian, aesthetically disinclined nation he had visited:

The American man might be a moral and manly citizen, but to Wilde's sense he was also a dullard intentionally starved of aesthetic sensations and overindulged in commerce and industry. Facts, he wrote, “are vulgarising mankind.”

Wilde was not the only observer of American culture to raise this objection. His transatlantic contemporary, Henry James, also criticized American masculinity. The opening chapters of The Ambassadors focus on the agonies of two business-oriented Americans in England where there is naught to do but – horrors! – enjoy. In the presence of such wickedness, they “felt shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure” and prowl the streets looking “guilty and furtive.”Footnote ²³ Rather than giving himself over to the pleasure of leisure, one man finds no other recourse than to fly into what James terms “the sacred rage” – a convulsive response to the sweetness and light so toxic to his sensibilities. This type of American male starkly contrasts James's American aesthetes, who profess that “the great thing is to live, you know – to feel, to be conscious of one's possibilities; not to pass through life mechanically and insensibly, like a letter through the post-office.”Footnote ²⁴ In The American Scene, James mourns the fact that the American businessman

Wilde and James were not alone in their concern about the feminization of American culture. But Wilde was not conducting a masculinist crusade, and his was not a manly civilizing mission like that of other Victorians.Footnote ²⁶

Wilde sought to bring Americans a unisex idea of leisure and refined aesthetic taste. To this end, he advocated aestheticism as part of a refined life based on sensation and experience. Labour and strength were central to his creed of the beautiful. In his “Personal Impressions of America,” he asserted that “the line of strength and the line of beauty are one.”Footnote ²⁷ Rejecting imputations of degeneracy, in “Art and the Handicraftsman” he told Americans that they “must have strong, sane, healthy physique[s] among [their] men and women. Sickly or idle or melancholy people do not do much in art.”Footnote ²⁸ Manliness, he insisted, was not at odds with refinement; culture and leisure were the right of middle-class Americans.

But this was a hard sell for American men. Wilde detected that the “American eagle” was fearful that he had “come to cut his barbaric claws with the scissors of culture.”Footnote ²⁹ What Wilde conceived of as refinement, many perceived as domestication. The Nation spoke on behalf of “American eagles” when it advised Wilde to cease representing himself as “a missionary preaching art to the heathen in the wilderness, at the sacrifice of fortune, fame, and everything that the Philistine holds most dear.”Footnote ³⁰ In their eyes, the conspicuous leisure and dilettantish artistic inclinations of aesthetic men disqualified them for productive labour and put them at odds with the active, work-oriented masculinity of middle-class Americans. Wilde, for his part, actively sought to rebut this position. His lack of success in attracting middle-class American men to the aesthetic enterprise should not obscure his genuine attempts to appeal to them – attempts which, it needs to be said, have gone unnoticed in the critical literature. In “Art and the Handicraftsman,” which he wrote expressly for his American audience, he sought to break down the gendered “opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful.”Footnote ³¹ Now, instead of opposing woman's ornamental quality and man's utilitarianism, Wilde argued for a harmonized aesthetic. The beautiful and the useful should be one, and men and women should work jointly towards this end. Utility is allied with beauty, Wilde says, because it is “an expression of the use you put a thing to and the value placed on it.” Art's beauty “is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.”Footnote ³² Wilde's diction is telling: though elsewhere he explicitly mentions both genders, here he makes a distinct appeal to men, an emphasis developed throughout the lecture. “Do not think that the commercial spirit which is the basis of your life and cities here is opposed to art,” he tells his American audience, in a direct address to the men in it. Rather than condemning their commercial way of life, he invites them to include art in it, comparing them to the Renaissance merchants who built Italy's most beautiful cities:

In other words, if American businessmen wished to be remembered they should bear in mind that visitors to Florence did not flock to the city because of the Medici's great banks, but because of the great art their wealth enabled them to commission. No anticapitalist, Wilde repeatedly emphasized that commerce and the arts should work hand in hand. In response, an American correspondent facetiously noted that Wilde represented “English Poetry extending the right hand to American Commerce” in favour of what he punningly termed “Fair Trade.”Footnote ³⁴

Of course, Wilde's message fared far better among women since they were the ones who led the way in terms of the production and consumption of aesthetic goods.Footnote ³⁵ From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, middle-class American women had begun to extend their realm beyond the domestic sphere, augmenting their roles by becoming increasingly active consumers. The aesthetic woman represented conspicuous consumption at its best. She allied her activities with the Veblenesque idea that taste and social status might be purchased and displayed. For the cost of, say, an aesthetic, empire-waist dress, the aesthetic woman purchased an outward and visible sign of her inward cultivation. Able to move more freely than in conventional dress, her uncorseted form also signalled her physical ability to undertake useful labour in the name of her cause (if she chose to do so). Historical accounts show that in addition to artisanal work, aesthetic women were particularly active in developing networks for social improvement and urban beautification.

While some American men embraced what Mary Warner Blanchard calls Wilde's “daring new category of the masculine self,”Footnote ³⁶ most did not. But we should not take our enthusiasm for daring categories too far, nor make too much of Wilde's “homosexual proclivity”Footnote ³⁷ and its “coding.”Footnote ³⁸ For one thing, Wilde's aestheticism was not so limited: it offered both American women and American men the chance to enrich their lives culturally and artistically. For another, we cannot take as axiomatic that Wilde's effeminacy was universally recognized by Americans as code for something that dare not speak its name (in fact, many contemporary newspapers commented on his manliness and drinking prowess). To be sure, select segments of American society were attuned to Wilde's personal preferences but this was far from common knowledge. Though many Americans thought Wilde odd, they had ample reason for doing so – from his medieval outfits (ordered direct from a theatrical costumier) to his ineffectual lecturing style.

To Americans, the aesthetic movement's message was ostensibly demotic and democratic in tone. It suggested that taste and beauty were amenable to all. To the British, artistic pursuits were understood as a way of enhancing one's quality of life as well as class status. According to Linda Dowling “at the heart of the vision of aesthetic democracy inspiring Ruskin and Morris, one still evident in Wilde's musings on mankind and utopia, lies an ideal of aristocratic sensibility … as the hidden source of value in moral and aesthetic terms.”Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, Roger Stein notes that the aesthetic movement in America chiefly affected the leisured and middle classes, despite its meliorist and universalist claims.Footnote ⁴⁰

Early in his American tour, Wilde was animated by democratizing ideals. Inspired by the egalitarian ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris, he believed “art and life, value and fact, or the Good, True and Beautiful” need not be differentiated.Footnote ⁴¹ In New York and Boston, he easily penetrated the first circles, but in other parts of the country newspapers reported Wilde's audiences were “composed of persons in the middle ranks of life socially.”Footnote ⁴² He made inroads among the working classes too. After descending into a Colorado coal shaft in a bucket to meet the miners, Wilde was gratified to report that “the strong men” had been reduced to tears by “the secret of Botticelli.”Footnote ⁴³ Wilde was not averse to such social comedowns – literal or metaphorical. He told Whitman that the common man's simplicity and straightforwardness held great appeal for him. He was impressed by an encounter with a railroad worker in the East who quoted Pope and cogently analysed and discussed aestheticism with him. “Now in England, in men of his class, such a conversation would be simply impossible,”Footnote ⁴⁴ Wilde concluded, hinting at the great promise America held in his eyes.

Yet Wilde's aestheticism was not quite as egalitarian as these incidents suggest. His aesthetic credo was rapidly shifting away from the project of aesthetic democracy put forward by Ruskin and Morris.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although he remained indebted to their idea of “art for life's sake,” his philosophy inclined more and more towards a Paterian view of art for art's sake, with definite class associations. Wilde's 1882 lectures make clear that he was straddling both interpretations. By the time he returned to Britain and began lecturing and writing on America for a British public, he had accepted the credo of art for art's sake and its elitist implications.

During his years at Oxford, Wilde was influenced by Walter Pater, who grew warm towards him, lent him books and encouraged him to turn to prose. However, Pater's growing conservatism and reluctance to accept Wilde's lifestyle stunted the friendship. The publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray put a strain on the relationship, which never recovered because Pater disagreed with Wilde's hedonistic interpretation of aestheticism. As Denis Donoghue notes, Wilde was fundamentally different from Pater; he took what he needed from him, used him to develop his own thoughts, and moved on.Footnote ⁴⁶ Pater's influence was nevertheless a formative one. Coming at the start of Wilde's intellectual and artistic career, Pater's assessments coloured his valuation of America and particularly the American man.

In Wilde's essays on the United States, he applied what by then had become his own aesthetic standard, one that was nevertheless indebted to Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Crucial to his intellectual development, the book became a breviary of aestheticism for him. Its chief contention was the importance of aesthetic sensation to life. For Pater, the “aesthetic critic” should consider “all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind.”Footnote ⁴⁷ These influences must be analysed and digested. They are valuable because of their properties “of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.” Art enables one to experience these sensations and to become more sensitive to their nuances and variety. By this standard, the American man fails to appreciate life. Wilde modified Pater's emphasis on sensation by connecting the high value of aesthetic experience to a superior valuation of physical and sensuous experience. This suggests one of the reasons why Wilde was so appreciative of Whitman's poetry, which commingled these drives. He claimed that Whitman (along with Emerson) had “given the world more than anyone else.”Footnote ⁴⁸ To the Philadelphia Press, Whitman praised Wilde as “outspoken, and manly.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In his conclusion to The Renaissance, Pater rejected the material and the commercial, in favour of “impressions” and experience as ends in themselves.Footnote ⁵⁰ The objective of life is to venture beyond what we already know, he explained. “What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own.”Footnote ⁵¹ Wilde also found the American man lacking in this respect. In an 1887 article for the Court and Society Review, he claimed that one of the few things of interest to American men abroad was the national pastime of “matching”:

Rather than considering travel abroad an opportunity to test opinions and court new impressions, the unaesthetic American wants only to have his biases confirmed. Failing to understand the central role of art in life, the American man takes refuge in commercialism. When he is abroad, the American

Wilde patently allies himself with Pater's belief that success in life is the ability to be receptive to the “counted number of pulses” life gives one and to “maintain this ecstasy.”Footnote ⁵³ The philistine American man, however, needs to be consoled for having “wasted a day in a picture-gallery”; when in Europe, he looks at everything, sees nothing, and then goes home.Footnote ⁵⁴

The aesthetes' definition of success radically contradicts the American man's. For Pater and Wilde, life's interval is spent by some in “listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Passion is of supreme value because it yields a precious fruit: “a quickened, multiplied consciousness.” The highest wisdom is to be found in “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake … for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.” In his indifference towards art and culture, the American man has, by this estimation, shunned precisely the thing that makes life worth living.

In his essays on America, Wilde sounded the alarm for a crisis of masculinity: American men's voluntary exile from the country's cultural life was, he thought, symptomatic of their self-emasculation and their slow degeneration towards cultural irrelevance. Despite the tight reigns they held over the country's fiscal well-being, Wilde noticed a lifeless, bloodless quality to these dollar princes. The result, he detected, was an inversion of the relation between the sexes. New World women were not content to be domestic goddesses, but boldly extended their empire to public culture, a traditionally masculine realm. Far from welcoming women or fighting their incursion, many American men seemed only too happy to quit the field of culture altogether and to move into private, parochial pursuits instead. Yet the danger Wilde registers is not only that “American women are cosmopolitans, as ambitious and combative as men are supposed to be,”Footnote ⁵⁶ as Peter Conrad notes, but that American men are too docile, too complacent and too comfortable at home. This is an indication of the fact that the activities Europe puts at their disposal – largely cultural and social pursuits – are not of interest to them. The United States' larger spaces and developing industry hold more inherent appeal. This change denotes a sharp shift in sociocultural practices, not merely a reversal in gender roles. In Daisy Miller, a novel published a few years before Wilde's American tour, James made a cranky American boy the mouthpiece for this view. “My father's name is Ezra B. Miller,” he announced. “My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Though the reader is left to infer that Mr. Miller is deceased, the child soon supplies a detail which makes clear that Mr. Miller is only dead to the world of culture. “My father's in Schenectady. He's got a big business. My father's rich, you bet!” Like father, like son: little Randolph Miller “doesn't like Europe” and has no interest in the Grand-Tour-cum-European-husband-hunt the female Millers have undertaken. Wilde agreed with James's assessment. The American father, Wilde said, “passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.”Footnote ⁵⁸

What does the American man value? According to Wilde, technology, usefulness, and efficiency come high on his list. Indeed, “his wildest dreams of Utopia do not rise beyond elevated railways and electric bells.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Europe's gentle decay is not picturesque to him. He sees only the rust on Veronese balconies and the grass in Ravenna's streets; he wants nothing more than to fix up the whole of Europe.Footnote ⁶⁰ In short, “he is so utilitarian that he is absolutely unpractical.”Footnote ⁶¹ While British men are still at college, their American counterparts already practice professions, do business, and make money. “They have no time to study anything but the stock markets, no leisure to read anything but newspapers.” To the American man, the reliable indicators of civilization are steam engines, household hot-water apparatuses, and telephones – not art, leisure and culture.

Wilde himself marvelled at American technology, gushing to one reporter that the Chicago waterworks represented “the wonders of machinery”: “The rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.”Footnote ⁶² American machinery had realized his wish to see “the line of beauty and the line of strength” united. Still, machinery should be a means to progress, not an end in itself, he cautioned. The machine is no indicator of civilization; the use one puts it to is. Machinery per se should not become a test of civilization. Matthew Arnold prefigured Wilde in advancing the view that wealth must be used as a tool. To him, philistines were those who thought greatness dependent on riches – not on their use.Footnote ⁶³ Famously resistant to sweetness and light, the Arnoldian philistine is usually middle-class and prefers “the machinery of business, chapels, tea meetings and addresses.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Echoing this idea in his lecture on “Art and the Handicraftsman,” Wilde told his American audiences that he did not object to machinery if it was put to proper use:

The crux of Wilde's message to the American man is that by giving up his social role as an arbiter of taste and culture and opting to worship the machine, he is doing irreparable damage to the nation's social fabric. In this Wilde agrees with Culture and Anarchy: the worship of machinery signifies a deficit in “general intelligence.” According to Arnold, this means that “America, the chosen home of newspapers and politics,” falls short in “culture and totality.”Footnote ⁶⁶ British society could be subdivided into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace, but in America, Arnold concluded, “the Philistines stood for the great bulk of the nation.”Footnote ⁶⁷ What Wilde observed during his lecture tour was exactly what Arnold and Ernest Renan had warned of: the result of “popular instruction without any serious higher instruction” was Americans' “intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Wilde's criticism is primarily directed towards the middle-class philistine. The middle classes should enjoy art and leisure, while the lower classes and manual labourers must find joy in handiwork. For both, life should be infused with beauty. Wilde sums up the American man as “M. Renan's l'homme sensuel moyen, Mr. Arnold's middle-class Philistine.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Wilde fictionalized his impressions of the American man's intractable rationality and utilitarianism in “The Canterville Ghost” (1887), which he wrote the same year as his essays on Americans. The story turns on the exploits of the Otises, an American family who buy a house haunted by the ghost of sixteenth-century Sir Simon de Canterville. Wilde put the contrast between unrelenting American pragmatism and artistocratic English superstitions at the heart of the tale. When warned about the ghost before buying the house, Mr. Otis demurs,

“I fear that the ghost exists,” Lord Canterville replies, “though it may have resisted the overtures of your enterprising impresarios.” “The laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British aristocracy,” Mr. Otis retorts. This exchange reveals the chasm between transatlantic cultural attitudes by pitting popular against elite culture, middle-class American against aristocratic English attitudes, science versus belief, realism versus gothic conventions, and the natural versus the supernatural. Wilde makes this tension the hinge upon which the story turns, exploiting rather than resolving these differences. Faced with a terrifying sixteenth-century uxoricide that has left a permanent bloodstain “much admired by tourists,”Footnote ⁷¹ the no-nonsense American man doesn't falter. “Pinkerton's Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time.” Annoyed by the ghost's clanking chains? Rising Sun Lubricator comes to the rescue. Bothered by the ghost's illness? Doctor Dobell's Tincture does the trick. For every quaint English notion, there is a practical American solution – or so it seems. When ingenuity and commercial cures begin to fail, it is an American girl (who will grow up to be an aesthetic woman, as the story's conclusion reveals) who saves the day. Little Virginia Otis bravely enters Sir Simon de Canterville's ghostly world, prays for his sins and succeeds in exorcizing his curse. By penetrating the masculine, artistocratic English world her father and brother refuse to acknowledge, she achieves better results than they. For this, she is rewarded by a brilliant marriage and becomes Duchess of Cheshire. The ghost “made me see what Life is,”Footnote ⁷² Virginia simply explains. But her mother, Wilde implies, has played a part in the development of her aesthetic sympathies. In a surprising concluding twist, we learn that Mrs. Otis is an aesthete and that she has spent time in the London suburbs, where aestheticism was popularized and counted large numbers of adherents. Mr. Otis, for his part, remains bewildered:

Wilde was sympathetic to the plight of nineteenth-century women, but he did not believe that their progress needed to come at men's expense. Although he welcomed the advances in gender equality that he witnesses in America, he mourned the fact that the American man had stepped aside. “A prime responsibility of male tastemakers was to ensure that tastes continued to be determined by men – while women were to remain its leading enforcers,”Footnote ⁷⁴ Richard Dellamora notes, and it is clear to Wilde that American men were dodging their duty. As a result, American women began to take on new positions as arbiters of taste, connoisseurs and what Leonore Davidoff refers to as “custodians of the turnstile.”Footnote ⁷⁵

What Wilde witnessed in America was the boundaries of men's and women's separate spheres being redrawn and the women's world extended. Raised on upper-middle-class ideals that romanticized the British aristocratic and upper classes, Wilde believed that leisure and culture were a male privilege and, for some, a right. That the American man should shirk such a possibility was incomprehensible to him, since he stemmed from a milieu where all of society aspired to such leisure, but very few attained it. Wilde's anti-Americanism is founded on assumptions of cultural preeminence, which assume British values to be superior to American ones. His view of American gender relations indicates the gulf between British and American attitudes to culture, the arts and technology. For the American man, masculinity is inexorably connected to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through wealth. For Wilde, manhood is defined as the right to leisure and the pursuit of art for art's sake. The American man's cultural abdication therefore registers as a testament to the failure of his sex. For these reasons, Wilde paradoxically concludes, American men are the weaker sex.