Wilde the "Pervert": Oscar and Transnational (Roman Catholic) Religion

In late Victorian England, a "pervert" meant two things. One meaning designated a person who "turned" or converted from one sect of Christianity to another. In Wilde's time this referred specifically to converts from the established state Church of England to the transnational Roman Catholic Church. The other, newer meaning designated someone who turned from conventional heterosexual relations to a (as yet unnamed) homosexual orientation. In the context of the late Victorian empire, both were considered dangerous. The rising social and political influence of Roman Catholicism appeared threatening as a transnational Church invading a national one. For the Anglican Church of England, this crisis was played out what came to be known as the Oxford Movement, still influential during Wilde's time as a student there from 1874 to 1878. What is interesting in Wilde's life, as in his work, is the way he himself played with the dangerous transgressions inherent in being a "pervert." Sexually, he was converted to same-sex love while still a married man. In terms of religion, he remained fascinated with Catholicism, allegedly converting on his death-bed. But what is provocative is way that Wilde used one "perversion" to play into another: so that in such works as The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome, his version of a kind of anti-Catholic Catholicism becomes a site of sexual desire, and sexual desire expression for that kind of spirituality, which, as unrequited longing, can ultimately n find no object adequate to its imagination.