SEX IN UTOPIA: THE EVOLUTIONARY HEDONISM OF GRANT ALLEN AND OSCAR WILDE

Abstract

In his provocative polemic“The New Hedonism,” Grant Allen mounts a passionate defense offin-de-siècleaestheticism by proposing a modern ethic – the titular “new hedonism,” which he borrows from Oscar Wilde's novelThe Picture of Dorian Gray(1890, rev. 1891) – that fully synthesizes aestheticism's insights with up-to-date scientific knowledge. At first glance, Allen seems an unexpected ally for Wilde, in part because few literary historians have explored the link between the two contemporaries. Many modern-day scholars of Allen's work (including Peter Morton, Bernard Lightman, William Greenslade, and Terence Rodgers) have tended to focus on his popular science writing, his elaborations on Herbert Spencer's evolutionary theories, and his controversial “New Woman” novelsThe Woman Who Did(1895) andThe Type-Writer Girl(1897). Those who do connect Allen and Wilde, such as Nick Freeman, often draw the relationship into focus through the two writers’ shared interest in libertarian socialism rather than their overlapping philosophical and aesthetic concerns (111–28). Yet, as we can begin to see in the epigraphs, the association that Allen made between evolutionary progress and the “beautifying of life” echoes one of the most significant claims of Wilde's earlier, dialogic essay, “The Critic as Artist.” “Aesthetics,” Wilde's speaker, Gilbert, enthuses, “like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change” (“The Critic as Artist” 204). Allen's survey of human evolutionary history reminds him, too, that our cultural and artistic achievements are all that lift us “above the beasts that perish” (382). For both writers, then, aestheticism's commitment to beauty, “self-development,” and the emancipated pursuit of pleasure entails potentially sweeping consequences for the future evolution of humankind. Allen's vocal support for Wilde – which Allen expressed privately in letters as well as publicly in his 1891 article “The Celt in English Art” – was not simply a convenient political alliance, but an integral part of Allen's complete program for sociocultural improvement.