In 1891, Oscar Wilde published his essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” a work that proclaims the value of socialism and that defends the artist against a bourgeois public: Wilde thus takes a stance against consumer culture.1 He attacks consumer culture as embodied in popular periodical culture (and public opinion), which “makes use of journalists,” and even gives “absolute freedom to journalists, [while it] entirely limits the artist” (1969, 277). Yet less than a year later, his play Lady Windermere’s Fan, was a box office success at a major West End theater. Wilde thus turns to the genre most oriented to the mass audience, and most implicated in consumer industries like entertainment, decoration, and fashion. Also, of great significance to my point, the play was so obviously a vehicle for marketing expensive fashion that when the summer parody of the play was put up, the main character’s name was “Lady Winterstock.”2

Critics have therefore been somewhat unsure of, and even uncomfortable with, Wilde’s relationship to consumer culture. For example, even as Regenia Gagnier links Wilde with his contemporaries’ “critiques of industrial capitalism and mass society,” she chooses to qualify her claim: “The cornmodification of Wilde and his works, of the artist in general and bohemian artists in particular, in consumer society, complicates the pursuit of individuality and freedom of thought and expression” (2000, 27). Gagnier is in the end disappointed in Wilde. He is not the anti-consumerist she wishes he were. John Sloan is more on track when he points out that Wilde’s very defense of the artist’s autonomy is itself implicated in consumerism: “the appeal to the ‘man of taste,’ the connoisseur, in arranging and decorating one’s surroundings, was an advanced version of capitalist consumerism” (2003,135).

Building on the work of Sloan and others, I argue that Wilde cannot make-and refuses to even conceive of-art that is not commodified. His is a consumer modernism. We get a glimpse of Wilde s ideas on this consumer-based aesthetic when, in “The Decay of Lying,” he playfully reworks the relationship between Art and Life. There he describes the impact of Pre-Raphaelite paintings on large numbers of middle- and upper-class women consumers.

We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters [D.G. Rossetti and E. Burne-Jones], has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the strange, square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair…. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. (Wilde 1969, 307)

Rossetti’s paintings of Elizabeth Siddal were not just popular paintings that were reproduced over and over in prints. They created fashion styles and set trends in dress and interior design, those trends being reflected in popular Arts and Crafts wallpapers and popular “aesthetic dress” styles. And Wilde significantly links this fashion phenomenon to marketing within a mass culture-hence the reference to the “enterprising publisher.” For Wilde, to create a work of art necessarily entails the desire to impact a large audiencein other words to market, and in particular to market fashions.

Because he makes the desire to impact a mass audience so central, the elements of Wilde’s consumer aesthetic are superficial ornament and ephemeral public image-both of which he links to the theatrical. (seeing Wilde this way also makes sense of his move towards popular theater, a move that critics have tended to see as a financial necessity or as a move more subversive than participatory.) I further suggest that his concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism-thus we can call Wilde’s aesthetic a consumer-modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased (just as Wilde was erased from literary history by the early modernists). Ann Ardis (2002) devotes an entire chapter of her Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 to “Inventing literary traditions, ghosting Oscar Wilde and the Victorian fin de siècle. ” Ghosting Wilde was integral to inventing modernism. I argue-together with theorists like Ardis and Said-that there is no modernism without Wilde, and particularly without Wilde’s commitment to surface. Also, it is true that several high modernists used elements of consumer culture in their artistic creation-Joyce in Ulysses and Woolf in Mw. Dalloway, for example.3 The difference is that Wilde created art that was itself consumer culture.

These ideas come out more clearly when we place Wilde among the female aesthetes, the women who collaborated with him while he was writing about dress for the Pall Mall Gazette and editing the Woman’s World.4 As Schaffer and others point out, Wilde was developing his critical ideas at the same time that he was writing for a popular New Journalism press (the Gazette, for which he wrote 90 pieces) and editing a fashionable women’s magazine. He was editor of Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889.5 In a sense, Oscar Wilde editing the magazine counts as an extremely unusual event, as if we were to imagine Theodor Adorno editing Cosmopolitan, writing about Ralph Lauren(TM), and collaborating with Martha Stewart-in effect, producing mass culture rather than attempting its critique. Wilde was like an Adorno who could not do aesthetic philosophy in isolation from mass culture.