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Victorian StudiesArticle 7 · Vol. 1, Issue 4, June 2026 · pp. 71–79

‘The Great White Caterpillar’: Oscar Wilde and the Objectification of the Male Body during the Eighteen Nineties

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s life was a challenge to the Victorian ways of manhood – a challenge with all a man’s body, mind and soul against the Victorian projection of a monolithic ideal manhood. Being a celebrity dramatist, a fashion-icon, a living genius in the body of a dandy, Oscar Wilde’s life questioned the superficiality of the myths of masculine propriety and male ethos by playing with and performing bodily subversions in the Late Victorian context. This article intends to read how Wilde’s contemporaries – his acquaintances, critics and the popular culture of caricature – constructed Wilde, the man, as a visual-icon, around the binary of beauty/bestiality, in terms of his body. In turn, the paper establishes that body stands as a dynamic and problematic site where physicality, sexuality and genitality coexist in their multiple organisations of coherence and discontinuities. The body acquires meaning through fashion and the choice of fashion is in turn a reflection of the body’s preferred codes of performances within the socio-cultural permissibility of its existence. Thus, in deconstructing the heteronormative norm, Wilde’s body was constructed and objectified variously by his onlookers. Wilde’s body adorns a flux of performative/bodily masculinity/femininity where definitive identity is a mad man’s dream.

Keywords:

bodyAestheticismDandyismcaricaturevisualobjectification

How to Cite

Dibasi Roy (2026). ‘The Great White Caterpillar’: Oscar Wilde and the Objectification of the Male Body during the Eighteen Nineties. Veritas: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1(4), 71–79.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21194857

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