On "The Harlot's House" by Oscar Wilde

[etext of the poem]

I have already analysed poems based on the distinction between elements which are "there" in the reality of the text, and which are merely there to describe these elements, or to have something to compare "real" elements to. The first category of elements has been termed "view," the second "vision."

This kind of categorization can be especially useful in literary analyses as rhetorical figures like similes, metaphors, etc. can be regarded as tropes connecting one element from the layer of view and another from the layer of vision. In, for example, the simile "his hand was as dry as the Sahara," the hand, present in the reality built up by the text, is on the layer of the view, while Sahara, probably removed from this world, is on the layer of the vision. The most interesting thing, however, is a possible analysis of symbols: that there, the vision penetrates the view, and takes its place; in other words, the describer appears in lieu of the missing described. This kind of analysis is, naturally, not new; it shows close affinity with other interpretations of the symbol, with, for example, Roman Ingarden's remarks on this figure.

The above observations may also be extended to artistic periods suggesting that from Enlightenment to French Symbolism, a metanarrative-like tendency might be perceived according to which vision penetrates view in literary texts to a greater and greater degree until it finally takes over. Oscar Wilde's "The Harlot's House" is of special importance from this point of view, as it provides a miniature model of this process.

The poem contains quite a few overt similes, which start by comparing the dancers inside the harlot's house to automatons. Dancers and their shadows are (were) "like strange mechanical grotesques" or "like wire-pulled automatons" when "they took each other by the hand / And danced a stately saraband." But the distinction between the view of the dancers and the vision of the machines gets blurred when not a dancer, but "a clockwork puppet pressed / A phantom lover to her breast," and it was "a horrible marionette" that "came out and smoked its cigarette." In these passages, it can already be witnessed how vision appears more and more as view; how elements which so far have been relegated to outside acceptable reality appear alongside real elements.

But the process does not stop here. Let me reprint the whole stanza in which the last quote appears:

Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.

Not only has vision taken the place of view, but in the simile in the last line, the roles of view and vision get reversed: it is now a live thing that describes (as vision) the marionette (the view). The symbolism in which the real and the unreal gets unified has been surpassed: in this poem, the displaced reality is re-introduced as a mere describer, a vague point of reference far removed from the centre.