‘Charmides’ and The Sphinx
‘Charmides’ and The Sphinx
Crashing into Objets d’Art
Sensualising the frozen spaces of art is best exemplified in the erotic entanglement with inert bodies in two narrative poems by Wilde, ‘Charmides’ (1881) and The Sphinx (1894). In these two poems Wilde anatomises impossible or transgressive desire and articulates a poetics of parrying and resistance. In ‘Charmides’ we follow Wilde’s experimenting with romance conventions through sexual encounters with a statue (agalmatophilia) and with a dead body (necrophilia). Wilde, the chapter suggests, engages here with the possibility of sensually violating the realm of beauty in its aesthetic perfection. These themes are updated in The Sphinx, a poem whose images emphasise Wilde’s ‘jewelled style’, fragmented eroticism, archaeological fantasy, and excess.
Keywords: Oscar Wilde, ‘Charmides’, The Sphinx, transgression, statue, necrophilia, gems, style, excess
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