In Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, Cecil Graham insists, "I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip." When asked what the difference is between the two, Cecil replies, "Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality." 1 Wilde would most likely have agreed that media publicity often accompanies--indeed, amplifies--the tedium of morality as a defining property of scandal. The scandal I want to consider, perhaps the most sensational scandal in Britain during World War I, suitably began with an announcement for a play by Wilde that appeared in the Sunday Times newspaper in February 1918:
OSCAR WILDE'S SALOME
MAUD ALLAN in private performances by
J. T. GREIN's INDEPENDENT THEATRE,
April next.
Terms of membership from Miss Valetta, 9, Duke Street.
This unassuming notice accompanies other advertisements that evoke Britain's charged cultural atmosphere as it entered its fourth year of war. In the paper's "Social and Personal" section, several personal detectives advertise their services for managing the contemporary misfortunes of "Blackmail, Divorce, Libel or anonymous letters" and for assisting "if you require relief from an embarrassing entanglement, or any delicate matter." The paper also boasts an array of treatments for such modern conditions as shell shock and war neurosis, with cures ranging from hypnotic suggestion to "Hindu Treatment." In the entertainment notices Madame Taussaud advertises a wax exhibition of "Celebrities of the PAST and PRESENT and HEROES of the WAR." The advertisement for Wilde's play, printed just above Madame Taussaud's announcement, would become the first document in a remarkable legal event which the press ultimately deemed "an unprecedented orgy of scandal and disorder." 2 Indeed, as the scandal over Salomé unfolded, it encompassed the peculiar realms invoked by the other advertisements: detected secrets, blackmail and libel, "delicate situations," the nervous disorders of war, hypnotic suggestion, the mysteries of the East, and celebrity exhibitions.
In addition to tedious morality and media publicity, a scandal also requires colorful public personalities, a condition satisfied by the above names. In 1918 the name "Oscar Wilde" was synonymous with infamy; Salomé, written in 1891, was his only drama to be banned from public performance in England, and its 1894 English publication with Aubrey Beardsley's naughty illustrations kindled a minor literary scandal of its own. 3 Maud Allan was a dancer who had become one of London's most famous and eroticized performers a decade earlier with her scantily-clad and sexually suggestive modern dance, "The Vision of Salome" ( 1). Meanwhile, her "intimate yet undefinable" relationship with Margot Asquith, who was rumoured to be a "sapphist," had provoked society gossip. 4 J. T. Grein, the play's producer and the owner of the Independent Theatre, was a businessman and dramatic critic of the Sunday Times. Active in the production of modern and often controversial drama, Grein was the first to bring Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw to the London stage. In 1918, Wilde, Salomé, Allan, and Grein were all widely recognized, ideologically charged proper names, ripe for scandalous deployment.
Within less than a week of Grein's advertisement, the front page of a small right wing radical newspaper called The Vigilante displayed the following cryptic paragraph:
The Cult of the Clitoris
To be a member of Maud Allan's performances in Oscar Wilde's Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9, Duke Street. . . . If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of these members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several thousand of the first 47,000. 5
The "Cult of the Clitoris" paragraph then launched the sort of enticing narrative that a scandal requires and also made its publisher, Noel Pemberton-Billing, a public sensation. In a few weeks, Allan, the play's star, and Grein, its producer, began legal proceedings against Billing on a charge of obscene and criminal libel. 6
An independent member of Parliament, Billing led the Vigilante Society, whose mission was to promote "purity" in public life. The Society was particularly dedicated to rooting out that "'mysterious influence'"--the invisible German presence spreading moral degeneracy in England itself--"which was responsible," Billing claimed, "for all the British failures in the war" (SLV, 3). The "47,000" mentioned in the "Cult of the Clitoris" paragraph alluded to a previous article by Billing that reported the discovery of a book belonging to "a certain German Prince." This book allegedly compiled reports from "German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading debauchery of such a lasciviousness as only German minds could conceive and only German bodies execute" (VR, 451). The book's "stupefying contents" provided instruction on "the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia" and included more than a thousand pages "filled with the names mentioned by German agents in their reports. These are names of forty-seven thousand English men and women" (VR, 451-2). Billing's article detailed the methods this "black book of sin" devised for "contaminating" the whole English population through the "carefully cultivated introduction of practices which hint at the extermination of the race" (VR, 452). Homosexuality, it seems, was the enemy's secret genocidal weapon. Most threatening to the nation at war was the successful queer invasion of "high politics." Billing warned, "Wives of men in supreme position were entangled. In Lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of State were betrayed. The sexual peculiarities of members of the Peerage were used as a leverage to open fruitful fields for espionage" (ibid.). This book even provided a "glossary" that listed "expressions supposed to be used among themselves by the soul-sick victims of this nauseating disease so skilfully [sic] spread by Potsdam" (ibid.). Under the subheading "The Fall of Rome," Billing closed his article with a call for action that exorbitantly merged national, imperial, moral, sexual, and gender panic:
all the horrors of shells and gas and pestilence introduced by the Germans in their open warfare would have but a fraction of the effect in exterminating the manhood of Britain as the plan by which they have already destroyed the first forty-seven thousand. . . . [I]t is a terrible thought to contemplate that the British Empire should fall as fell the great Empire of Rome, and the victor now, as then, should be the Hun. [VR, 453]
Thus, "the forty-seven thousand" belonged to a cult of sexual depravity susceptible to the influence, corruption, and exploitation by German agents. Since "The Cult of the Clitoris" paragraph implicated Salomé and Maud Allan in the 47,000, associating her with sexual deviance and national sedition, Allan charged Billing with the libel of insinuating that she, her performances, and her audience, were "obscene and indecent," "lewd[,] unchaste and immoral," and "addicted to obscene and unnatural practices" (VR, 472). That is, Allan accused Billing of implying that she was a lesbian, and that her performance in Wilde's play would promote sexual perversions among its vulnerable wartime audience, thereby opening "fruitful fields for espionage."
After the initial proceedings at Bow Street Police Court, Billing was committed to trial at the Old Bailey. Six days of sensational court drama then captured the attention of the media, and moreover, captured the popular imagination of a nation panicked, paranoid, and exhausted by the war. Co-opting the courtroom as a space of hystericized spectacle, slinging accusations and fomenting anxiety about the plot of the 47,000, Billing was ultimately acquitted by a jury of his peers and cheered as a hero by a mob of spectators, while press editorials scolded him for exploiting the national atmosphere of war hysteria with his outrageous allegations. Billing claimed the last word by compiling a Verbatim Report of the court proceedings for private subscription.
Wilde's trial and imprisonment in 1895 brought male homosexuality to the headlines, but the Billing trial signals the first time the discussion of female homosexuality obsessed the British popular press. 7 Allan then may be read as a public icon of homosexual danger homologous to Wilde, and her failed libel suit against Billing uncannily echoes Wilde's own libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry that eventually led to his downfall. However, beyond mentioning the trial and Billing's outrageous accusations, social histories of homosexuality have provided little analysis of the relation between the trial, the cultural history of lesbianism, and the gender and sexual dynamics within the cultural history of Great War Britain. 8
In the two books that deal exclusively with the trial, the question of female sexuality is precluded either by discussions of Wilde or political conspiracies. The title of Philip Hoare's recent book on the trial, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand , indicates the study's primary focus of analysis: for Hoare, the "cult" of Wilde and aestheticism were on trial, imagined by Billing as the ultimate threat to the British nation at war. Hoare construes Billing's attack on Wilde's play as a protest against the decadent indulgences that were considered symptomatic of the moral degeneracy and lassitude that put the British nation at risk of defeat by the Germans. 9 In Salome's Last Veil , war historian Michael Kettle convincingly argues that Billing's trial was implicated in a political conspiracy of disgruntled British war generals who were trying to block alleged secret peace talks with the Germans and plotting to overthrow Lloyd George's coalition government.
While the trial did powerfully evoke the ghost of Wilde's condemned sexuality and artistic practices and was deeply enmeshed in the political exigencies of its historical moment, it also crucially introduced the specter of female (homo)sexuality as a locus of national anxiety. Indeed, it was the very conjunction of particular political, literary, and sexual histories that provided the conditions of possibility for such an intriguing utterance as "The Cult of the Clitoris" to come to represent concerns over national security. Unprintable in news reports, the libelous phrase was the open secret of the trial and the phrase upon which Allan's prosecution and Billing's defense hinged. 10 Combining a seductive appeal to sexual fantasy with a whiff of farce, the phrase presented a hermeneutical enigma that recruited the suggestion of female homosexuality into the service of national wartime paranoia. Only recently have critics begun to consider the lesbian significance of the trial. Such work, however, has not had the benefit of the full trial documents and has been primarily interested in the trial's deployment of sexology. 11 In focusing on the lesbian accusation in the trial, I want to consider how a wartime crisis of reading and representation conred national and social anxieties through the operation of lesbian fantasy. The paranoid fantasies that Billing circulated encompassed and exceeded the concerns of Wilde's 1895 trial so that a decadent memory was recalled in order to portend a modern, more frightening manifestation; familiar moral panics were updated with international conspiracy and lesbian terror. Because the suggestion of lesbianism aroused a cultural frisson but lesbianism itself lacked a legal definition, it provided a salient re of sexual fantasy through which the nation could simultaneously condense and disperse its unrepresentable anxieties about national health and security.
Cultural analyses of World War I tend to agree that when the war violently imposed a radically different structure of national and psychical experience, it demanded new forms to represent this altered condition. 12 This challenge to modes of representation was aggravated by an epistemological destabilization. As the editors of Women's Fiction and the Great War contend, "No one knew what was going on throughout the Great War. Censorship, propaganda, and the sheer scale and complexity of the event made it impossible to grasp what was happening at any particular moment." 13 The rise of the daily press had stimulated the public appetite for information, but state intervention into reportage during the war amounted to what Phillip Knightley calls a "sordid conspiracy to keep the truth from the people." 14 Under these circumstances, the British public became disillusioned with the press and increasingly skeptical about the integrity of the printed word. 15 This wartime epistemological blackout was accompanied and exacerbated by a panic over spies "passing" in England and communicating in espionage codes, which raised the anxious hermeneutic question: how does one read or decipher identities--particularly dangerous and subversive ones--during a time of unprecedented uncertainty?
Jacqueline Rose argues in a more conceptual register that in war "something about knowledge or the possibility of acquired and definitive certainty is at stake." 16 In Why War? she proposes that, "The familiar destructiveness of war represents not, as is commonly supposed, finality but uncertainty, a hovering on the edge of what, like death, can never be totally known." 17 Billing's plot appropriated the emerging notion of lesbianism as an imaginative form through which to re this epistemological and hermeneutic dilemma that was engendered by World War I. The very suggestibility of lesbianism, with its wide range of connotations and possible manifestations but without a singular consolidated popular image, rendered it a particularly powerful vehicle for ring the wartime problematic of uncertainty, illegibility, and (mis)representation. Not only are sexual secrets considered commensurate with national ones, but the wartime dilemma of unknowability and uncertainty finds an analogy in the highly suggestive but ultimately unknowable notion of female homosexuality. In other words, if male homosexuality functioned as a re of the "open secret" in the nineteenth century, as Eve Sedgwick has suggested, then in the early-twentieth century, lesbianism operated as a re of heightened suggestion and potential-but-always-foreclosed knowledge that enticed only to frustrate the possibility of disclosure or interpretation. What cannot be known or comprehended about the "reality" of the war is translated into a fantasy of the epistemologically elusive category of female homosexuality.
Why lesbianism? Just how unknown or unknowable was it? Certainly, female homosexuality at this time admitted multiple genealogies. Literary (and largely French) representations include the vampiric and decadent "femmes damnées" of Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Balzac; the sapphic revivals of Natalie Barney, Renée Vivien, Michael Field, and Pierre Louÿs; and the indiscriminate courtesan or sexual rake of Zola's Nana and Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin. Medical discourse taxonomized the female sexual invert, while sexual politics aligned lesbianism with the self-exhibiting turn-of-the-century "public woman," a term first applied to prostitutes soliciting on streetcorners and actresses performing on stage that also came to include suffragists protesting in the street and "the New Women" emerging in the public sphere. 18 Such res of female independence and homosociality, which were linked with anxieties about female homosexuality, became more pronounced during the gender disruption of World War I. In spite of this legacy (notably, a largely literary French one), explicitly scandalous female homosexuality has been considered by many sexual historians as having been essentially "unthinkable" to the British popular imagination emerging from Victoria's reign. 19 In 1918 it is the very inconceivability of scandalous female homosexuality, at its precise historical point of shading into possibility, that constitutes it as the perfect re for staging the sexualized "Other scene" of wartime. Billing's plot of homosexual invasion and its specific appeal to the emerging cultural recognition of female homosexuality provided a means of representing, through a parodic sexual fantasy, the unrepresentable catastrophe of history. "The Cult of the Clitoris" scandal demonstrates that it is the very connotative suggestibility of lesbianism and its arousal of the imagination that makes Billing's plot so powerfully seductive.
If the narrative leading up to the trial reads like a sensation novel, then the scenes in the courtroom unfold as a dramatic performance that rivals Salomé's own histrionics of fatal desire. Billing admittedly planted the libel in the Vigilante to attract legal reaction and media attention, and his introduction to the Verbatim Report encourages us to inherit the case as a spectacle whose imaginative appeal exceeds its value as a legal document. He notes that the official Verbatim Report does not provide
those keys to individual and public temper which in the familiar press reports are usually supplied by parenthetical adjectives and nouns, and therefore that such helps to the imagination as "(sarcastically)," "(warmly)," "(great sensation)," and so forth, must be supplied by the reader's own discretion. [VR, ix]
Beyond demonstrating Billing's scandal-mongering, this appeal reminds us that we should read the trial not just within a legal or discursive framework, but also according to the operations of imaginative fantasy and interpretative possibility. As Billing writes with sweeping hyperbole, the trial "caused the liveliest stirring of the public mind in all parts of every continent where the English language is understood" (VR, iii). Accordingly, he actively "stirred" the public imagination by acting as his own legal representative with theatrical flare (he had four years' experience as an actor), expanding his conspiracy plot to include every member of the court--he accused the presiding judge and the counsel for the prosecution of being among the 47,000--and calling a remarkable cast of witnesses, including Wilde's former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
As a theatrical spectacle, the trial takes Salomé as its source and inspiration.   Billing and his witnesses testify that Salomé's "climax" in kissing/biting the lips of Iokanaan's severed head enacts Wilde's own sexual orgasm of writing--to represent the scene in language is to live the scene. This sexual climax is then transferred to Allan--to represent the scene on the stage is to live the scene, and in turn Allan's performance sexually influences the audience--to witness the scene as spectator is to live the scene. Affective and physical experience is mimetically relayed from one body to another through a simple circuit of representation, performance, and spectatorship. This ease of associative relay and substitution allowed the suggestion of lesbianism in the trial to carry a range of seemingly unrelated wartime anxieties.
Billing's insinuation that Allan's performance is marked by a latent lesbianism trades upon the suggestion that Wilde's own homosexuality seeps into both his title character and the actress performing her.  Furthermore, if in Billing's reading Salomé's violent passion for and power over Iokanaan reverses conventional heterosexual dynamics of desire by constructing the male body as a feminized object, then she resides somewhere in the undefined territory of masculine female desire, a paradox that easily slips into the shadowy realm of lesbian passion. 20 And in Billing's chain of associations, if Wilde's betrayal of heterosexual norms is equivalent to a betrayal of state security, then Allan's performance implicates her in a queer German plot that simultaneously betrays nation and heterosexuality: "Wives of men in supreme position were entangled. In Lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of State were betrayed" (VR, 452). Any violation of the sacred marriage bond may violate the sacred secrets of state, and what better re for representing such a double agent than the fantasy of "Lesbian ecstasy"?
Billing's deployment of Salomé also engages with the play's status as a symbolist drama. While definitions of literary symbolism vary widely, Charles Chadwick cites Stéphane Mallarmé's characterization of symbolism as the art of "evoking an object little by little so as to reveal a mood or, conversely, the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an 'état d'âme,'" a mood, Mallarmé insists, that "should be extracted 'par une série de déchiffrements'--'by a series of decipherings.'" 21 The object is hinted at, suggested, gradually revealed. Chadwick considers a companion aspect of symbolism, in which "concrete images are used as symbols, not of particular thoughts and feelings," but of an ideal world. 22 As Arthur Symons rhetorically asks in The Symbolist Movement in Literature , "What is symbolism if not an establishing of the links which hold the world together, the affirmation of an eternal, minute, intricate, almost invisible life, which runs through the whole universe?" 23
Critics have identified Salomé as symbolist in its use of suggestive, mystical, and highly aestheticized language whose incantatory musicality crosses boundaries of dream and reality, reference and evasion, representation and affect. However, given the wartime concern over secret agents and codes, any implied mysteries hidden in ambiguous language were suspect. As we will see, the idealized symbolist notion of "links which hold the world together" finds a parodic manifestation as political paranoia in Billing's conspiracy theory that connected the Salomé production with the "intricate, almost invisible life" of secret agents and international espionage. In other words, Billinganchored the possibility of symbolic suggestion to history, politics, and morality by reifying the "links" that held together Wilde's world of art and Britain's situation in wartime. 24
In this process of reification, the suggestion of lesbianism functions remarkably like a symbol in the "symbolist" sense. It operates as a re for revealing a state of mood and/or as a material substitute for the intangible, floating, "minute, intricate, almost invisible" life pervading the British cultural atmosphere of 1918. Indeed, Billing might have turned the ultimate symbolist phrase, since "The Cult of the Clitoris" purported to harbor an explicit referential content while simultaneously refusing stable referentiality in favor of infinite suggestion. It effectively symbolized a complex of affective relations among war, sexuality, gender, art, and politics that otherwise resist articulation, achieving this effect through a "series of decipherings," hints, and suggestions. In a Freudian sense, the phrase is a condensation that "represents several associative chains at whose point of intersection it is located," while in a Foucaultian sense, it also signals a cultural dispersion with its suggestion that deviant female sexuality is distributed throughout discursive formations and infuses all aspects of political life. 25
The scandal of "The Cult of the Clitoris" relied upon the scandalous--and seditious--connotations of Wilde's name that had been established through his own trials and imprisonment. As Ed Cohen, Regenia Gagnier, and others have demonstrated, these trials identified Wilde's artistic production, aestheticism, and self-fashioning with his sexual "gross indecency."  Perhaps precisely because Wilde was such an icon of social danger, his presence was recalled and redeployed in the years between his trial and the Billing trial. Most notably, between the spring of 1913 and the autumn of 1914, there were legalbattles involving Wilde's biographer, Arthur Ransome, his former lover, Alfred Douglas,and his literary executor, Robert Ross. 27 With the specter of Wilde conjured up particularly close to wartime, his performative invocation and abjection functioned to consolidate national identity and "vigor." We could read Billing's trial as just another addition to this history of early-twentieth-century deployments of Wilde's ghost; however, as I have proposed, in this trial the threat of Wilde was supplemented and perhaps exceeded by the threat of lesbian sexual espionage. While Wilde's infamy certainly underwrote Billing's homosexual plot, "The Cult of the Clitoris" introduced dangerous female homosexuality as a new perversion to be discussed, scandalized, and rallied against.
The very phrase "The Cult of the Clitoris" combines the shock of anatomical reference with the suggestive danger of female sexual and political independence. With limited female suffrage imminent, the phrase traded upon doubts and fears about recent successes in feminism, the gathering of women in political movements and public labor, and the constitution of the female citizen. The phrase actually grafted the aesthetic decadence of "the cult of Wilde" onto the concern that women's citizenship would free them from their traditional role of bearing and raising citizens for the empire. 28 Notably, the primary re of "The Cult of the Clitoris" was Maud Allan, the most unlikely and most suitable re for effecting this shift from Wilde's aesthetic and sexual threat in the 1890s to women's political-sexual threat in the late war years.
Unlike Wilde's legendary infamy, Allan's public recognition, like her dancing that made her briefly but thoroughly famous, was a fleeting gesture that momentarily entranced audiences, but left little trace of its performance. By 1918 her career was in fact declining, but the trial evoked the cultural memory of her eroticism, aestheticism, mass cultural appeal, and high society affiliations. A North American, Allan studied music in Berlin, then began a dancing career in Europe and Russia; when she performed before King Edward while he was on holiday in Europe, he encouraged her to bring her talent to England (SD, 152). Subsequently, clever marketing tactics rendered her dance "The Vision of Salome" a succès de scandale at London's Palace Theatre in 1908, catapulting her to fame, breaking box office records, and gaining her a position in London society. Reviewers repeatedly deployed the metaphor of hypnosis to convey her mysterious power to seduce, but not offend, her audience with her erotic and orientalizing dance. Those scandalized by Allan associated her with Wilde's degeneracy, but this hint of perversion only spiced up the gossip about her social affiliations. With her fame, she secured the patronage and friendship of Prime Minister Asquith and forged a particular intimacy with his wife, Margot, a relationship which "caused talk if not open speculation in social, diplomatic, and political circles," and which would be exploited by Billing in the trial, given rumors of Margot Asquith's unconventionality and lesbian-coded female coterie (SD, 176). Inevitably, Allan could not sustain her hypnotic spell over her audience, particularly once a campaign of demystification was instigated by the very media that had once promulgated her fascination. 29 A past fad by 1918, she was most likely attempting to revive her fame by taking her first dramatic speaking role in Wilde's Salomé; however, the very attributes which had once enticed the Edwardian public had been re-inscribed as national dangers by this time.
Certainly, Allan's artistic and erotic notoriety offended the wartime conservatism in art and morality. Her popularization of what one reviewer called the "sensuous, decadent, macabre" and her training in Germany coded her as suspicious to a country that blamed French-inflected decadence for the national decay that led to war, and was intolerant of any hint of German Kultur. 30 If her erotic dance had flirted with an association with Wilde's play--and his infamy--a decade earlier, Allan now took the risk, during a reactionary political climate, of foregoing any difference between her Salomé and Wilde's. Without a king's sanction to hide behind, her affiliations with the Asquiths did not help her reputation. Forced to resign as prime minister in December 1916, Asquith had proved a failure under the exigencies of war, and his continued association with artistic circles had only contributed to doubts about his ability to lead an aggressive, patriotic campaign.
By 1918, the exoticism, sexual danger, artistic innovation, and political liaisons upon which Allan had built her earlier fame were attached to a new female archetype: the sexually and politically dangerous spy-seductress. Just months before Billing initiated his campaign against Salomé, Mata Hari was executed in Paris for espionage. Born Margeretha Geertruida Zelle, Mata Hari left her notoriously abusive husband in 1904, changed her identity, embarked on a dancing career even more risqué and orientalizing than Allan's, and undertook an unapologetic life as a courtesan, taking lovers of the highest military rank, including German officials. 31 When war was declared, all that Mata Hari represented came under suspicion: her eroticism, exoticism, refusal of domestic femininity, and sexual promiscuity violated the wartime mood of sacrifice, restraint, and conservatism. Accustomed to inventing and reinventing her identity, Mata Hari mixed her stories and acquaintances one too many times and was eventually arrested. Although little hard evidence was gathered against her, she was swiftly condemned as a spy, and her legend as the female secret service agent par excellence fed the propaganda machine. Her Eastern identification and sexual repertoire invited an easy conflation of moral laxity with national deception and foreign difference, and her role as mistress to men in power elaborated the femme-fatale stereotype into a re whose sexual power not only destroyed men and threatened marriage, but also imperiled national security. 32 Such fantasies engendered in Mata Hari were directly transferable to Allan at a time when spy-paranoia was escalating.
The Billing trial was situated in and significantly contributed to a volatile period of home front anxieties, manifest in anti-alien sentiment that included both mob violence and official reaction against anything and anyone remotely German. 33 The first months of 1918 witnessed England exhausted and pessimistic about the outcome of the war. The aggressive German offensive in March shook the nation as the stalemate of trench warfare shifted into a campaign of action, including air raids on England. Historians Trevor Wilson and John Terraine concur that as tensions between military leaders and the government increased, the public, denied clear explanations, displaced its anxiety onto a renewed campaign against enemy aliens. 34 Billing's conspiracy of the "47,000" further resonated with war propaganda that explicitly aligned homosexuality with German degeneracy, and the paranoid fantasy of "the enemy within" conflated spy fever with homophobia. Alfred Douglas promulgated this association in his 1915 sonnet, "All's Well with England," which concludes:
Out there in Flanders all the trampled ground
Is red with English blood . . .
. . .  The next year Douglas published The Rossiad, which concludes with an appeal to England:
O England, in thine hour of need . . .
Raise up the best, hack down the worst,
Tear from thy heart the thing accurst.
Two foes thou hast, one there one here,
One far, one intimately near,
Two filthy fogs blot out thy light:
The German, and the Sodomite. [ibid.]
Douglas's conjoining of the "The foe without, the foe within" brings the war "intimately near" by identifying the foreign enemy with the deviant sexuality lurking within the British people. 36 This association of homosexuality, high society, national betrayal, andsocial decay had a long-standing history, but it was Billing's trial that brought such sentiments into public debate at a particularly vulnerable cultural moment and condensed them into the single cryptic phrase, "The Cult of the Clitoris." As the point of transference for such a range of allusions and connotations, and as the key utterance in the libel charge, the question of "The Cult of the Clitoris"--what it meant, to whom it referred, and who could interpret it--was a primary obsession in the trial.
The "Cult of the Clitoris" paragraph produces its distinct scandalous effects by staging an irresistible seductive scene of reading that initiates an elaborate sexual fantasy. The detective-reader must sort out the allusions and decode the meaning: Who or what is this cult? Who or what are the 47,000? And perhaps the most puzzling question for many early-twentieth-century readers: What, exactly, is a clitoris? The paragraph compels the reader into a sexy game of reading and allusion--but one that, like a coded war message or a spy-thriller novel, has (for Billing at least) a distinct secret to be deciphered and exposed. The phrase inflames the imagination and provokes interpretation, thus allowing Billing to intervene in the courtroom and unveil the underlying plot. The libel achieves its impact by forcing a convergence of deviant activities that amplifies the panic over national vulnerability while enlisting the most undefined realm of danger, "The Cult of the Clitoris," as the rhetorical gathering point for all other anxieties. As we have seen, in Billing's formulation, the spectacle of Salomé occasions a relay of meanings and perversions, from author to actress to audience. Similarly, the phrase, "The Cult of the Clitoris," conjoins the allusions and associations of immorality, national betrayal, homosexuality, and aestheticism. The salience of the phrase rests upon the suggestive invocation of female homosexuality, whose lack of a recognizable popular symbolization renders it most appealing for symbolic appropriation. It is precisely the language of the female body--the female nonreproductive but desiring body--that simultaneously demands and refuses interpretative attention, inciting scandal through its very resistance to representation. Unprintable in the newspapers, the obscene absence of the phrase "Cult of the Clitoris" vexes interpretation. Its lesbian meaning, the prosecution will argue, is obscenely obvious, but a cross fire of courtroom attempts to decipher the phrase culminates in Billing literally retracting the belabored lesbian signified from the range of interpretive possibilities.
In the police proceedings, the counsel for the prosecution, Sir Travers Humphreys, who had also represented Wilde in his trials, introduces the libel with a web of circumlocution. He deems it "an attack of a sort which I hesitate to characterize in language . . . unworthy of any man to have made upon any woman" (VR, 4). Guiding attention to the newspaper, he continues, "I find words which I must read, although I see there are some ladies in Court. I must read them aloud: 'The Cult of the Clitoris.'. . . it is my submission the words themselves are the filthiest words it would be possible to imagine" (ibid.). And yet, he immediately asserts,
What they mean no one can doubt; no one can doubt who reads the words as they are. . . . [T]he coupling of the name of anyone with that cross heading in leaded type . . . can only mean one thing, and that is that the lady whose name is coupled with it, either in her private or in her professional life, approves of that which is sometimes described in perhaps less--I do not know whether it is less objectionable--but less gross language as lesbianism, and a more horrible libel of any woman . . . is impossible to find. [VR, 5-6]
Humphreys claims that the unimaginable title and its association with Allan's name in the paragraph are obvious in their "meaning" and implication, thereby bypassing any interpretive process. According to Humphreys, the "coupling" of a woman's name and a clitoral cult "can only mean one thing," when in fact, the relationship between Allan's name and the title--this "coupling"--hangs suspended in possibility. Humphreys plugs up this epistemological gap with repeated assertions of the transparent meaning of the "coupling." His conspicuous discomfort over uttering the title in the presence of women further codes the phrase as obviously criminally unutterable while maintaining the assumption of female sexual innocence.
Ultimately, his evasion of interpretation culminates in syntactical confusion and referential failure:
the meaning of that paragraph so far as I have read it is that there is some connection between [Mr. Grein's] proposed production of this play and that cult as it is called, which is the explanation of the paragraph, because that is what it is. Without it, the paragraph is meaningless, it means nothing at all. Under that heavily leaded type heading it means there is some connection with the nameless vice between women, and the performance at the Independent Theatre which is announced. [VR, 6]
The paragraph and its title achieve a singular meaning that cannot be named, a meaning which becomes lost in wandering referents (for example, "because that is what it is"? "Without it"? Which "it"?). Humphreys compensates for his obscure explanation by emphasizing the "heavily leaded type" of the graphic title (a typographical detail he repeats in this speech), and insisting on its indelible black-and-white obscenity. The lesbian meaning is somehow an effect of the graphic type, so that the ink of publicity stains the reputation of those it names as it does the fingers of its readers. As reference and interpretation fail, words become the things that inscribe them; the materiality of the printed letter stands in for the reference that the utterance itself obscures. Obvious but nameless lesbian meaning occurs as the point of conjunction among title, typeset, names of body parts, and names of actresses. 37 By referring to lesbianism as a "nameless" vice while lamenting the association of Allan's name with such a vice, Humphreys performs a move similar to the one that occurred in Wilde's trial, in which Wilde's namewas substituted for the terms "sodomy" or "acts of gross indecency." 38 In effect, Humphreyssuggests that such a coupling of Allan's proper name with the suggestive but referentially indeterminate title scandalizes Allan's name to a greater degree than if a more explicit accusation had been published. Her name supplies the point of determinate reference that the cryptic title refuses, a coupling which Humphreys both criticizes and exploits. 39
In his questioning of Allan, Humphreys again asserts the paragraph's criminal offense by evading its explanation. He refuses to repeat the paragraph's title, but asks Allan if she regards it as a libel. "I do," she affirms, and then Humphreys pauses to address the ruling magistrate:
Sir John, I should like to have your ruling upon this subject. I do not propose to ask the Witness what her understanding is of the libel. I will not ask any further questions unless there is some matter so obscure to an ordinary person--unless you desire it, Sir, I do not think I should ask any more than I have, that she regards that as a libel upon herself; but of course it is for you to say. [VR, 17-8]
Responding, "Certainly, I agree," the magistrate halts the explanation by admitting to "know" what Humphreys insists any "ordinary person" would know without naming (ibid.). The magistrate and Humphreys collude in an interpretive conspiracy of transparent meanings; as "gentlemen," they "hesitate to characterize in language" the "meaning" of Billing's attack, for to do so would violate gender chivalry, according to Humphreys's characterization of the libel as "unworthy of any man to have made upon any woman" (VR, 4). This unspoken agreement between magistrate and counsel suggests a male homosocial community of knowledge about female deviant desire, a desire whose utterance must be protected from its very object of reference.
The positions of knowing established at the Bow Street Police Court are reoriented in the criminal proceedings at the Old Bailey, tried before a jury. The counsel conres the jury (who are supposedly, unlike the learned magistrate, really "ordinary people") in a position of innocent ignorance, for in this case to position them as knowing what the coupling means would interpellate them within a community of prurient knowledge. In the above exchange between Humphreys and the magistrate, the two agree to share this knowledge in order to protect others' innocence and certainly to contain interpretation. Lawyer and judge conspire in a shared understanding that the Old Bailey proceedings then construct as extraordinary, exclusive knowledge.
Ellis Hume Williams, now leading the prosecution for the Crown in the Central Criminal Court, approaches the libel with the same theatrical caution as Humphreys: "Gentlemen, I am afraid once and for all, unpleasant as the task is--more particularly as I see that there are some women in the court--I must describe to you (if these ladies will stay) what the meaning of that phrase is" (VR, 57). Again, Williams makes his point about the danger of Billing's libel by suggesting that it threatens the sexual innocence of women. To counter Billing's suggestion that women know more and do more in the nation and in bed than popular culture will admit, the prosecution deliberately constructs the female spectators in the courtroom as most vulnerable in their ignorance. Williams trades upon and controverts Billing's suggestion that the spectacle of Salomé will immorally infect its spectators by now constructing the courtroom as a space that must be protected from the dangerous influence of Billing's words. Williams's parenthetical phrase "(if these ladies will stay)" reads as a rhetorical aside, and yet there is a sense in which he suggests that since the ladies will insist on staying in the courtroom then he must describe the meaning of the libel, thereby amplifying the threat of female homosexuality through the very act of interpretation. 40
Forced to explain the libel, Williams constructs the ability to read it accurately as dependent upon specific knowledge which he must, unfortunately, disclose:
You probably may have some idea, but unless you have some physiological knowledge you will not appreciate in its fullness what the gross obscenity of this phrase is. . . . [Y]ou cannot appreciate the gravity of the charge against this lady unless you appreciate what the real meaning is of this horrible phrase. [VR, 57-8]
He performatively attempts to short-circuit the paragraph's seductive potential with the intervention of scientific facts, didactically explaining that because clitoral pleasure is unnecessary to procreation, it is necessarily a lesbian vice. In Williams's interpretation, if "clitoris" operates as a metonym for lesbianism, then its utterance in conjunction with a woman's name clearly constitutes the worst accusation to make against any woman: that she indulges a sexual desire extraneous to any biological or social reproduction for the state. 41 In a Darwinian language of natural science, Williams undertakes what must be a first in British legal history: a graphic explanation of the situation and function of the clitoris, and its method of arousal in lesbian sexual practices. 42 With rhetoric that recalls nineteenth-century campaigns against masturbation, Williams denounces lesbian practices as "degrading, repulsive, contrary to nature, and consequently destructive of health--practices which, indulged in to any extent, sap and undermine the sanity and probity and self-respect . . . of those who indulge in them" (VR, 58). Ultimately, however, in order to stabilize the offensive meaning of the libel, he must have recourse to male homosexuality:
If this paragraph had been dealing with men instead of with women and had been headed "The cult of the penis," it would have required no explanation. "The cult of the clitoris" is worse; it means the deliberate perversion of all the natural instincts that nature has implanted in man and woman, to the practice of a filthy, enervating and degrading vice. . . . [reads paragraph aloud] What is the meaning of that? What is the meaning of the heading "The Cult of the Clitoris?" It can have no other reference than to the practice of this Lesbian vice; no other meaning is possible. [ibid.]
Much like Humphreys's argument in the police court, Williams finally just asserts the single possible reading that the title and paragraph make necessary, although here he provides a considerable lesson in anatomy and natural history. His simple declaration that "The Cult of the Clitoris" is worse than "The Cult of the Penis" is devoid of any argument as to why. In fact, the prosecution's strategy here rests upon a paradoxical tautology: an argument that asserts transparent moral obviousness must not be diluted or weakened by argumentation. 43 Within the problematic of interpretation, perhaps "The Cult of the Clitoris" is worse because it requires such lengthy explanation and interpretation. Since the location and "function" of the clitoris is so obscure and not known to the "ordinary" individual, the need for an uncomfortably explicit and protracted translation culminates in an atmosphere of enervated, exhausted shame. Certainly Williams's argument from analogy attests to the phrase's resistance to cultural legibility; supposedly anyone would know what "The Cult of the Penis" means, whereas Billing has manufactured a far more disturbing scene of perversion precisely because it refuses immediate cultural comprehension.
The speculation about "The Cult of the Penis" should also remind us that this scandal over traitorous female body parts occurred at a time when the British male body was being mutilated and dismembered on a scale never before experienced. Men at the front encountered the unprecedented ability of technological warfare to blow the male body into grotesque fragments; those injured bodies that did survive hand grenades, artillery fire, shelling, and surgical amputations testified to the inconceivable experience of modern war. As Joanna Bourke writes, "The horror of front-line dismemberment was beyond the imagination of many civilians in Britain. They were not, however, totally unaware of its impact on hundreds of thousands of men's bodies." 44 The returned injured soldier provided a corporeal metonym of the war's unimaginable violence against male bodies and masculinity itself. "In war," Bourke writes, "the injured man was not disabled but mutilated. He was the fit man, the potent man, rendered impotent. He was mutilated and mutilator in one." 45 Bourke's use of the loaded notion of male impotence alludes to castration as the classic trope of damaged masculinity. Trudi Tate suggests that "the distressing presence of war-injured men" effected a gender crisis by complicating the Freudian schema of gender difference in which the imaginary wholeness of phallic masculinity is constructed in opposition to women's castration. 46 "The Cult of the Clitoris" partakes of this wartime disruption of gender distinction constituted upon visible difference. The phrase dismembers and thus diminishes the female body, but it also invokes the danger of female sexual difference. It gestures to the genital "nothing" that constitutes female sexuality and, since the clitoris has been historically compared to the penis, it also signals the threat of a phallic woman. If masculinity was constructed against femininity's lack, then "The Cult of the Clitoris" confronts the vulnerable masculine body in wartime with a particularly menacing feminine sexual corporeality.
While a seemingly inexhaustible range of connotations emanate from Billing's paragraph, the law had to judge its legal meaning. Whereas Humphreys's speech for the prosecution at Bow Street suggested a vague "connection" or relationship of "approval" between Allan and "unnatural practices," the specific indictment for the Old Bailey trial claimed that the title and paragraph meant
thereby that the said Maud Allan was a lewd, unchaste and immoral woman and was about to give private performances of an obscene and indecent character so designed as to foster and encourage obscene and unnatural practices among women and that the said Maud Allan associated herself with persons addicted to obscene and unnatural practices. [VR, 472]
Billing's plea of justification then not only stated that this indictment was "true," but further denounced Salomé as "an open representation of degenerated sexual lust, sexual crime, and unnatural passions and an evil and mischievous travesty of a biblical story" that was written by "a moral pervert" and was particularly attractive to the German agents' list of the 47,000 (VR, 476). Notably, the prosecution--not the publisher of the paragraph--actually translated for the court what the libel meant; Billing merely claimed that this reading was true and justified, and added the emphasis on the underlying German invasion plot. However, because the indictment alludes to, but does not explicitly name lesbianism, it opens a conspicuous gap of interpretive possibilities, a gap which left considerable space for Billing to mount an attack on Allan while evading specific definitions.
When questioned about the meaning of the "Cult of the Clitoris," Dr. Serrell Cooke, an "expert" medical witness, explained that "Clitoris is a Greek word, it is a medical term altogether; it has nothing to do with ordinary language; nobody but a medical man, or people interested in that kind of thing would understand the term" (VR, 259). Semi-clarifying that "that kind of thing" refers to sexual perversion, Cooke concludes, "'The Cult of the Clitoris,' would have been very well understood by all the perverts all over the world. It would not have been understood by ordinary people" (VR, 260). With "clitoris" as a transnational signifier that unites "all the perverts all over the world," Cooke and the defense transforms the "cult" of the clitoris into a cult of readers who can interpret the phrase. In other contexts, Billing referred to the "initiated" as the only readers who could understand the title. 47 This sense of a seductive cult of reading, which recalls the construction of Wilde in his trial, converges with the sexological taxonomies that constituted the homosexual as an exclusive species of shared traits, including shared discourse (recall the glossary in the German Prince's black book). Furthermore, in the war context, the suggestion of secret sects or communities "all overthe world" sharing bonds of language, practices, and values that supersede those of national loyalty draws upon and exacerbates paranoid fantasies of spies with shared codes, secret languages, and hidden allegiances. This distrust of nontransparent language feeds into the wartime crisis of knowing and reading, and backs Billing's legal defense.
As we have seen, Allan's lawyers play a game of interpretation with the libel, alternately insisting on the obvious meaning of the paragraph, and then assuming an innocent ignorance of the audience whom they must educate into an appreciation of the libel's unimaginable horror. Billing's defense turns such constructions to his own advantage: how could Allan be innocent if she were able to recognize the phrase as an insult, as a lesbian allusion? In a tactic that relies upon the expert versus pervert opposition, Billing's cross-examination of Allan links knowledge and sexual immorality:
Billing: Did Mr. Grein explain to you where the libel was and exactly what it meant?
Allan: I do not think it is necessary for anyone to explain that paragraph to me . . .
Billing: You are well acquainted with the names that arise in connection with the [alleged libelous] matter?. . . [P]articularly with that one [i.e. the clitoris]?
Allan: Not particularly at all, Mr. Billing. 48
Through his questions, Billing ascertains that yes, friends of Allan saw the libel and understood its meaning, but no, neither she nor they are medical students. Billing then triumphantly crows, "Are you aware, Miss Allan, that out of twenty-four people who were shown that libel, including many professional men, only one of them, who happened to be a barrister, understood what it meant?" (VR, 85).
Admitting only two mutually exclusive realms of interpreters, educated professionals and degenerate perverts, Billing demands Allan identify herself in one group or the other. He then collapses the language of homosexual aestheticism with the language of the German enemy when he takes up Allan's autobiography and fixates on her study and milieu in Germany. Reading such passages as "[In Berlin] I came in touch with a broader spirit of what I had best call bohemian bon camaraderie," and "the German tongue was our Esperanto," Billing insinuates that Allan was part of an international "cult" whose adoption of German as its common language marked it as morally depraved danger to the British nation (qtd. in VR, 87).
Next, Billing reads passages from Salomé, insisting on their perverse sexual meaning. Allan denies such an interpretation, maintaining that Salomé is an innocent girl whose spirituality, not her sexuality, is aroused in her relationship with Iokanaan. Allan's refusal to read the play as remotely erotic belies her untenable position in facing lesbian accusations; she is more on trial than the defendant and must maintain her claim to chastity. 49 Ultimately, Allan's promotion of the play as spiritual and artistic is deployed against her. Billing insists that rather than proving her innocence, Allan's refusal to acknowledge the play's vice betrays her loyalty to the "cult" of readers who find beauty in perversity. Again, much like Wilde's trials, in which Wilde's modes of reading were considered symptomatic of his "gross indecency," Billing attempts to discredit Allan by constructing her as an "extraordinary" reader whose performance of a text by the "high priest" of an "outrageous cult" would appeal to the initiated.
While Allan claims that neither she nor Wilde is responsible for Billing's prurient readings, Billing re-appropriates the same strategy with the claim, "You quite understand that I am not responsible for what you read into the libel," which leads to an explicit comparison of the libel with the play:
Billing: Which do you think is the most likely to pervert public morals in this country, the witnessing of such a play or the reading of the paragraph complained of. [sic] Which do you think likely to do most harm to the young men and the young women?
Allan: The paragraph that you have had printed in your paper.
Billing: Will you tell me why?
Allan: Because you suggest things to them that they do not know anything about, and the curiosity of man is such that they will go and find out.
Billing: Are there any suggestions at all in this play?
Allan: Not that I know; if there are they are so veiled as not to be obvious.
Billing: You think that that [paragraph] title is unveiled?
Allan: I think that it is draped from the shoulder.
Billing: It was meant to be understood by those who could understand it, but was not meant to be understood by others?
Allan: That is what you say. [VR, 113-4]
Allan's apt metaphor of veiled language foregrounds the trial's contest over translation and interpretation, and implicitly evaluates the libel according to symbolist principles. For Allan, the artistic merit and legal defense of Salomé rests in its fully veiled language. Signs and symbols are caught up in such a thoroughgoing economy of shifting signification that no phrase holds a single obvious meaning and desire can never be categorized. Billing's libel, however, draped from the shoulder and only half-veiled, insinuates enough that the correspondences it forges intend to communicate vice and trap the vicious. According to Allan, Billing's intention that the reader of "The Cult of the Clitoris" paragraph should arrive at a particular sexual and political meaning renders Billing guilty of the very vice of immoral suggestion of which he is accusing Wilde. Allan's suitably elusive metaphor demonstrates the potential of rative language with the effect of exposing Billing's attempt to appropriate the symbolist impulse. Billing wants to fasten guilt and shame with knowledge and absolute interpretations, while Wilde's text and Allan's testimony staunchly refuse any such equation.
Veils and draperies here are also telling. Allan's metaphor suggests that Billing's "draping" anticipates a dramatic unveiling, exposing a final, naked body of lesbian meaning. The phrase "The Cult of the Clitoris" cites the perverse materiality of the body--Allan's body--with the intent of digging up Wilde's sentenced body to prove that its criminal corporeality subtends Salomé. As Robert Ross wrote in a private letter about the trial, "Kicking the corpse of Wilde has also been a pleasure to the English people even if they disapprove of Billing's methods." 50 Billing's methods include casting suspicion upon Allan and Grein's reading practices by aligning them with the perverted symbolist aestheticism that veils and thus signifies Wilde's condemned homosexual body. Constructing his defense by prosecuting modes of reading, Billing invokes a play of allusion and correspondences which ultimately relies upon and references Wilde's established perversion. Wilde's "corpus" thus functions as the legibly deviant body that anchors and underscores the illegibility of the lesbian accusation. 51
Dr. Serrell Cooke, who defined the interpretive communities capable of understanding the term clitoris, was Billing's most important expert witness. Although a specialist in tuberculosis, Cooke claimed to be an expert in matters of sexual psychology because he had studied Ricard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis . Supposedly, after he attended the hearings at Bow Street, he read Salomé, "consulted several well-known London doctors about the play," and prepared "a detailed medical synopsis of the play, explaining what it was really all about" (SLV, 149). Under Billing's questioning, Cooke offered an extraordinary sexual-linguistic diagnosis that (con)fused the symbolic weight of Wilde with the alleged plot of German queer invasion. He told the court that Grein's testimony exhibited a "rather extraordinary" use of language. "Things which were physical, material, he described as spiritual, poetic, beautiful," Cooke explained, noting that such language "is usually employed by homosexualists" (VR, 248, 249):
Billing: Is it customary for sex perverts to describe as beautiful and glorious all their perversions? . . . And is it customary for them to read into the distinctly physical acts of sex something spiritual?
Cooke: Spiritual, poetic, beautiful, pure love; those are their expressions. . . . It is done because they cannot help themselves. I think it is part of their mental condition. 52
In addition to undermining Grein, Cooke's testimony also reflects back on Allan's cross-examination, as it diagnoses any symbolic mode of reading as "customary for sex perverts." 53 This perverse mode of interpretation can be appropriated or mimicked, regardless of the speaker's sexual activity. Much like the instructive glossary in the German black book, the patois can be learned and deployed. Under cross-examination, Cooke evades accusing Grein of homosexual acts (and thus evades libeling Grein) by making both an association and a distinction between modes of reading and sexual practices. When Cooke explains that he considers Grein's language "the language of a sodomist," "Because he describes the sadistic acts [in Salomé] . . . as something beautiful, spiritual, poetic," Williams cautions him, "Do you realise that to bring an accusation against a man of being a sodomist is the most terrible thing to be said against a man?" Cooke clarifies:
Cooke: I have not brought such accusation against any man. . . . It is a curious matter of psychology that a man should use such language in the description of this play.
Williams: Do not you think you left the Jury and the Court under the impression that you were intending to convey that the man who used the language of a sodomist used it because he was one?
Cooke: No, I did not intend to leave any such impression on the Jury.   This logic also assumes a foundational "ordinary language" of direct reference, in contradistinction to the symbolist mode where interpretations proliferate but are never resolved. Billing and Cooke's game of inverse signification easily aligns "speaking like a homosexualist" with both the propagandist portrayal of Germany as a morally inverted culture, and the general panic over the secret codes of foreign agents.
This construction of Wilde's inverted language is clinched when the "original" translator of his play, Lord Alfred Douglas, takes the stand as witness for the defense. He represents himself as straddling the space between ordinary and extraordinary reading, in the dual position of expert and ex-pervert. He insists that he was "entirely under Wilde's influence" during the writing of Salomé, but now recognizes him to be "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years" (VR, 291, 287). Claiming that, "I translated the play from the French, and I had many conversations with Wilde about it, and I have a very particular knowledge of what he meant by the play," he contends that Wilde
intended the play to be an exhibition of perverted sexual passion excited in a young girl. . . . [T]here is one passage which is sodomitic. . . . Wilde was a man who cloaked up those things in flowery language. He never used the word "sodomitic." He would express horror at such language. Anything like the "Cult of the Clitoris" would fill him with as much horror as it apparently does Mr. Hume Williams. . . . [Who] share[s] the horror of coarse and vulgar expressions, calling things by their right names.  Douglas's strategy, which privileges "right names," even casts suspicion upon Williams's earlier performance of his offense and disgust at the paragraph title.
With all symbolic modes of reading coded as perverted, Billing and Douglas morally denounce the play's metaphorics, particularly the dialogue's symbolic investment in the moon:
Billing: In your opinion has Oscar Wilde used the moon as a canvas on which to paint pictures which were almost too revolting to do in any other way?
Douglas: Yes to paint the situation of the play as it proceeded.
Judge: . . . Did he use the moon in this version as a canvas on which to paint indecent and abominable pictures?
Douglas: Yes, he did. Oh, yes.
Billing: Would he have considered that the most artistic way of doing it? . . . The most intellectual?
Douglas: To him all that sort of thing, whenever he was going to do anything particularly horrible, it was always disguised in the most flowery language, and always referred back to Art. That was his idea of Art. [VR, 292]
When asked about Salomé's desire for Iokanaan, Douglas translates and explicates Wilde's mode of perverse representation:
Billing: Did Wilde mean [Salomé's desire to touch Iokanaan's body] to be physical or spiritual?
Douglas: Physical. If anyone calls it spiritual it is a pure misuse of words and making the English language ridiculous.
Billing: Would you call that language the language of a sodomite?
Douglas: I think [Wilde] was referring to the language used by people who described it as spiritual. . . . [T]hose sort of people always refer to revolting things under pretty names. They try to disguise the horribleness of the action by giving it such names; they say beautiful, classic, and so on. They will not speak of it by the outspoken English name; they disguise it.
Billing: Have these people a common patois?
Douglas: Yes, they have a jargon. I have not had anything to do with them for twenty years. [VR, 294]
The lapse of twenty years and Douglas's conversion to Catholicism, conservatism, and homophobia distance him from "those sort of people" and secure his reliability, while positioning him as a privileged interpreter. "Translating" Wilde's perverse slippage between the physical and spiritual world, Douglas arrives at a hermeneutics of absolute inversion:
Billing: Did Wilde . . . ever give you an idea, when you were doing your translation, that it was anything other than a physical expression of unnatural practices? . . . [D]id he give you to understand that it was a poem dealing with the spiritual love of a young girl finding salvation in the spirit of the Prophet, or a young girl seeking lustfully the body of the Prophet?
Douglas: The point is that that is exactly how he would describe it. He probably did call it spiritual. That was part of the jargon.
Billing: Do you call it spiritual?
Douglas: No. Wilde would call it spiritual; he would say it was a study in the curious passions of the human soul. That was the sort of euphemism he would use. He never used plain coarse words at all. He was always revolted by coarseness of expression.
Judge: He would call spiritual what you call sadism?
Douglas: Yes. With those sort of people evil is their good; everything is topsy turvey; physical is spiritual; spiritual is physical, and so on; it is a perversion, an inversion, of everything. Wilde was a man who made evil his good all through his life. That was the gospel he preached. [VR, 294-5]
With Dr. Cooke's and Douglas's testimonies Billing composes a strategy of inverse translation for reading Wilde, Salomé, Grein, Allan, and "those sort of people." Douglas's repeated use of the terms "disguise" and "cloaking up" again res Wilde's language and reading as covering over the body upon which his sexual guilt is inscribed, and it tropes upon the enemy spy who lurks beneath the disguise of assimilation. Wilde's mode of reading for correspondences marks him as trading in a suspicious economy of counterfeit signifiers, an inverted code of meaning that must be decoded and exposed for its dangerous content.  Indeed, the ambiguity of the indictment enabled Billing, during the prosecution's concluding argument, to deny that he had ever actually claimed Allan was a lesbian. Throughout the six days of the trial, he allowed the prosecution to educate the audience on lesbians and their clitorises, thus heightening the scandalous effect. However his final disavowal of any lesbian intent renders him innocent of leveling an unforgivable libel against a woman, while maintaining a distinctly queer moral insinuation against Allan and Salomé. Having staged a seductive scene of reading that excites the most elaborate lesbian fantasies, Billing can then reassert his authority and officially refuse any lesbian reference. This disavowal, I would propose, actually consolidates and expands the lesbian threat; its banishment from referentiality only confirms its potential ubiquity. Without referential stability, it flourishes in the imagination. The innominate lesbian is the re of greatest threat precisely because she is "only" what is "read into" the phrase "The Cult of the Clitoris." The symbolist function of "The Cult of the Clitoris" I suggested earlier now requires reassessment to account for Billing's belated disavowal in court. The performative absenting of lesbian reference endows lesbianism with an even more powerful symbolic function through its very referential negation. That is, the erasure of lesbianism from the court record and "The Cult of the Clitoris" achieves a more profound symbolist effect. The symbolic mode is redoubled, so that the absence of lesbian reference acts as a re for revealing a (national) mood or "état d'âme" and becomes a dematerialized substitute for the intangible, floating, "minute, intricate, almost invisible" life of British anxieties in wartime.
The trial, Wilde's play, and Allan's performance then come to metaphorize, or translate, the crisis of the war into a scene of literary and sexual fantasy.  The press reports of Billing's acquittal also yoke together the disorder in the court and the high emotions of wartime. 54 The Daily Mail reports that when the "not Guilty" verdict was uttered
the gallery, packed with the public rose, shouting and 'hooraying.' . . . There has never been such an excited throng in the new Central Criminal Court, or one which gave vent to its feelings more vociferously. In vain did the judge try to give an order to suppress the demonstration. His lips were seen moving, but his words stood no chance of being heard. 55
The voice of the law is literally struck dumb by the force of the crowd, and as the court empties, "Outside a distant murmur of voices and a faint cheer; inside a last hysterical giggle as a woman went and a parting 'Hooray,' deep-toned, from a soldier in hospital blue"--a scene that conjoins feminized hysteria with national service (ibid.).
Newspaper editorials suggested that the trial functioned as a phantasmatic substitute for the war, and even identified it as a manifestation of mass hysteria. The Times wrote, "It is safe to say that no lawsuit of modern times has attracted such universal and painful interest as the deplorable libel action which terminated yesterday at the Central Criminal Court"; across England "the daily reports have been read and discussed with almost as deep anxiety as the news of the war itself." 56 The New Statesman lamented, "A great battle is raging; armies are bleeding and dying; Paris is at stake; and for a week the interest of the British public has been almost entirely centred upon a trial for criminal libel." 57 According to the Manchester Guardian, "Even in the preoccupations of war-time the Pemberton Billing trial is an arresting London event." The reporter specifically diagnosed the public response to the trial as "the most extraordinary expression we have had of war psychology and the feverish distortion of normal beliefs," and the New Age considered the trial a demonstration of the "mob-mind." 58 In a letter to the editor of the Times, a Labour M. P. insisted that Billing's paranoid conspiracy undermined the psychic health of the nation:
By far the most serious aspect of the case is the effect upon the great mass of our people, whose minds and thoughts at this moment are concerned with the fate of their loved ones at the front. . . . Reckless assertions . . . entirely unsupported by evidence, and defaming men and women alive and dead, may well have a disturbing effect upon a public opinion already racked with anxiety and tense with emotion. 59
Such a complaint attests to the cultural work performed by the trial. With
"loved ones" at the front engaged in a war that defied representation,
those at home witnessed a sexualized scene of strife upon which they
could displace anxiety and emotion, and the lesbian suggestion afforded a
particularly effective conduit for mediating this fantasy. Consequently,
even though a lesbian insinuation started the trial, as newspaper
commentators noted, "any issue was on trial at most times except the
one which was legally at stake."
60
The trial was clearly not about female homosexuality; however,
lesbianism's combination of unrepresentability and potent
suggestibility offered a sensationally effective and exquisitely
elusive means of ring Britain's political and epistemological
crises of modern history.
Maud Allan has been a research passion of mine for longer than I'd like to admit. At last I can extend my sincerest thanks and appreciation to a number of people whose suggestions have helped my research, thinking, and writing on this project: Michelle Elleray, Geoffrey Gilbert, Ellis Hanson, Molly Hite, Barbara Leckie, Antonia Losano, Biddy Martin, Natalie Melas, Petra Rau, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Pamela Thurschwell, and Percy Walton. I am particularly grateful to Gabrielle McIntire and Brian Greenspan, whose timely and generous interventions at a critical stage made all the difference.
1. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), 451.
2. "The Old Bailey Shocker," New Statesman, 8 June 1918, 183.
3. On the composition, banned production, illustration, and publication of Salomé, see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Middlesex: Penguin, 1989), 350-5.
4. Felix Cherniavsky, The Salome Dancer (Toronto: McClellend & Steward, 1991), 176; hereafter abbreviated SD.
5. The Vigilante, 16 February 1918, reprinted in Noel Pemberton Billing, ed. Verbatim Report of the Trial of Noel Pemberton Billing, M. P. On a charge of Criminal Libel Before Mr. Justice Darling at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey. With report of the preliminary proceedings at Bow Street Police Court, an Appendix of Documents referred to in the Case, Reference index, &c. (London: Vigilante Office, 1918), 455; hereafter abbreviated VR.
6. Billing did not actually write the paragraph; however, he did take responsibility for it. The novelist Marie Corelli had sent the Times advertisement of the play to the Vigilante office, with the suggestion that one might find in attendance the members of the 47,000. Captain Harold Spencer, working for Billing at the time, read Corelli's letter and devised the short paragraph just before the newspaper went to press. See Michael Kettle, Salome's Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century (London: Granada Publishing, 1977), 17-8; hereafter abbreviated SLV. Throughout my paper, I will refer to Billing as the author of the libel, as he took full responsibility for it, and had already planted the plot of the 47,000.
7. Wilde's trials actually followed several well publicized trials and scandals regarding male homosexuality that occurred in late-nineteenth-century Britain. See Jeffery Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), 13-21.
8. Weeks mentions the trial in Coming Out, 105-6, and H. Montgomery Hyde narrates the trial in The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1970), 171-6. More recently, Jennifer Travis, Lucy Bland, and Laura Doan have published work on the trial with a specific interest in the legal construction of lesbianism.
9. Hoare's reference to the social representation of the war as an imagined "disinfectant" that would clean up the decline of morals associated with social and artistic decadence reproduces Samuel Hynes's argument that "What the war did was to make the condition of England a social disease for which war was the cure." Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 13.
10. Lord Darling, the judge in the criminal case, directly requested that the press refrain from reporting the "disagreeable details" of the case and emphatically warned that "there is no protection for the publication of indecent matter in any newspaper. . . . [I]f it is indecent there is no protection simply by reason of the fact that it is a report of what is going on in the Court of law" (VR, 57-8). The Manchester Guardian even printed this warning from the judge, foregrounding, like many other newspapers, the unnamable obscenity of the case. See "Mr Pemberton Billing and Miss Maud Allan," Manchester Guardian, 30 May 1918. On the operations of the "open secret," see D. A. Miller's "Secret Subjects, Open Secrets," in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Eve Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet," in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Michel Foucault's "The Repressive Hypothesis," in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978).
11. See Jennifer Travis, "Clits in Court: Salomé, Sodomy, and the Lesbian 'Sadist,'" in Lesbian Erotics, ed. Karla Jay (New York: New York University Press, 1995) and Lucy Bland, "Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome, and the 'Cult of the Clitoris' Case" in Sexology in Culture, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). In Fashioning Sapphism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), Laura Doan also refers to the trial to frame her discussion of "the visibility of lesbianism in English legal discourse and in the public arena" . Notably, none of these analyses use the original trial documents. Their reliance upon Kettle's selective reproductions of passages from the case limits their readings and leads to inaccurate claims about the trial proceedings.
12. See both Samuel Hynes's A War Imagined and Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) on how the war impacted on the modern imagination. See also Jay Winter's Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) for a nuanced argument that dissents from the notion of the war as a "radical break" and insists on the continuities of tradition in the representation and memorializing of the war. Notably, even though Winter strongly protests the yoking of "modernism" (revolutionary aesthetic practices) and World War I, he calls upon a relatively caricatured notion of modernism as a radical break with the past that wholly disregards traditional forms of representation. My argument attempts to strike a dialogue between the war's simultaneous reliance and innovation upon established historical forms.
13. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, introduction to Women's Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1.
14. Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 109.
15. Knightley points out that censorship of the press was imposed at the outbreak of war, and when war correspondents were allowed at the front, they were strictly regulated so their reports would corroborate the propaganda effort. Appropriately, perhaps, Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Times and the Daily Mail, was also the director of propaganda in enemy countries (Knightley, 82). On the deliberate invention and circulation of lies, false war stories, rumors, and the concealment of actual events, see also Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928). See also Trudi Tate's "Propaganda Lies," in Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
16. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 21.
17. Ibid., 17.
18. On suffrage, the ideologies of the separate spheres, and the "public woman," see Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 200.
19. William Cohen argues that male homosexuality, the "unspeakable" crime and most covert of sexual practices during the late Victorian period, is the appropriate locus for an analysis of scandal, while female homosexuality is simply beyond imagination: "While the willful effort to deny female sexuality resulted in celebrated adultery, divorce, and illegitimacy cases, ironically it largely precluded lesbian scandals, which were less unspeakable than unthinkable." William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 6.
20. Indeed, most major critical engagements with Salomé in the last twenty years have been concerned with her sexual queerness. The most emphatic proponents of reading Salomé as a (gay) man trapped under transvestic veils are: Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and the European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Richard Dellamora, "Traversing the Feminine in Oscar Wilde's Salomé," in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thais Morgan (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1990); Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991); and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anarchy (New York: Routledge, 1992).
21. Charles Chadwick, Symbolism (London: Methuen, 1971), 1.
22. Ibid, 3.
23. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), 146.
24. Notably, although Salomé clearly pays homage to symbolist drama, the play also self-consciously ironizes the symbolist compulsion in the very moment of enacting it. Thus, Herodias staunchly, even comically, refuses to play the symbolist game of lunar similes with the rebuff, "The moon is like the moon. That is all." Herod likewise ultimately realizes that "It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees.  Salomé, in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington and Stanley Wientraub (New York: Penguin, 1981), 407, 419. In this sense, as much as the drama exploits the symbolist compulsion, it also foregrounds its maddening potential and keeps an ironic distance from the very paranoid associative chains of meaning that Billing forges in 1918.
25. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 42.
26. For analyses of Wilde's trial, see Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993); Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986); and Michael Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviancy, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
27. In the spring of 1913 Douglas charged Ransome with libel for his literary biography of Wilde, which referred to the expurgated sections of De Profundis and largely blamed Douglas, without naming him, for Wilde's suffering. See Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913). Douglas lost the case when the jury decided that the words complained of did constitute a libel, but were true. Notably, Justice Darling was the judge presiding over the case, the same judge who presided over Billing's case.
28. In fact, "The Cult of the Clitoris" not only gestures to the "cult" of Wilde (and the Dandy as the "cult of the self"), but also to the cult of Sappho practiced by the all-women salons of Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien or represented in Pierre Louÿs's Songs of Bilitis. The phrase suggestively overlaps the decadent Sappho-revival of Baudelaire, Louÿs, Vivien, Barney, and Swinburne with the political reaction to the successes of the feminist movement. On the sapphic revival in Paris, see Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) and Catherine Van Casselaer, Lot's Wife: Lesbian Paris, 1890-1914 (Liverpool: Janus Press, 1986).
29. While the journal Academy published an enthusiastic review of her debut in March 1908, less than two months later it published another review that questioned Allan's legitimacy and dismissed her fame as the effect of crass self-promotion. J. C. F., "Miss Maud Allan's Salome Dance," Academy, 21 March 1908, 598-9; Christopher St. John, "All We Like Sheep," Academy, 2 May 1908, 736.
30. "The New Dancer," Times Literary Supplement, 26 March 1908, 102. By 1918 German composers had been wiped off of British concert programs, and the war against Strauss was particularly violent. See Hynes, A War Imagined, 75.
31. Mata Hari fabricated an identity as a Javanese dancer, claiming to give authentic expression to Javanese and Indian sacred dances, which she performed in little or no clothes. Capitalizing on the same Salomania as Allan, Mata Hari performed her own "Dance of the Seven Veils," was constantly compared to Salome, and urged her agent to ask Strauss to produce a Salomé performance for her. Julie Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage (London: Collins and Brown, 1992), 17.
32. Mata Hari was immediately mythologized and her story exploited by war propagandists. An example of this is Henry de Halsalle's, The Life Story of Madame Zelle, The World's Most Beautiful Spy (London: Skeffington and Sons, 1917), a sensational, fictionalized account of Mata Hari's life as a German agent.
33. The First Sea Lord, Prince Louis Battenberg, whose father had been a German prince; Lord Haldane, whose German education and diplomatic ties made him a target of public hostility; and the vice-consul in Rotterdam, A. G. Holzapfel, who was British-born with an unfortunate appellation, were all forced to resign because of popular anti-alien sentiment. See John Terraine, The Impacts of War 1914 and 1918 (London: Hutchinson, 1970). See also David French, "Spy Fever in Britain, 1900-1915," The Historical Journal 21.2 : 355-70, for a discussion of the prewar and wartime history of popular sentiment and official legislation regarding "aliens" and spies.
34. Trevor Wilson speculates that the public, unable to dispense with its political and military leaders at this time, displaced its anxiety onto a renewed campaign against enemy aliens in Britain. Terraine concurs, diagnosing a vehement hatred and righteous indignation against the Germans as a desperate civilian attempt to combat the "flagging of the spirit as the war dragged on," and which found its most explosive expression in anti-alien activity. Terraine, Impacts of War, 177.
35. Qtd. in SLV, 15. The purse refers to money raised in support of Robert Ross while he was undergoing his legal battles with Douglas.
36. Qtd. in Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York: Arcarde, 1998), 22.  Propagandist works published during the war such as Henry de Halsalle's Degenerate Germany (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1917) and de Halsalle and C. Sheridan Jones's The German Woman and Her Master (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1916) expressly aligned sexual perversity in Germany with the country's moral degeneracy, citing in particular "the unspeakable Eulenburg affair," in which a group of "advisers and confidants of the Emperor" were exposed as indulging in le vice allemand (155-6).
37. Allan's position as an actress actually feeds into the lesbian suggestion. Havelock Ellis includes the theatre along with girls' schools, prisons, and "lunatic asylums" as the breeding ground for female homosexuality. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897; New Hampshire: Ayer Company, 1994), 83-4.
38. Cohen makes this point in "Typing Wilde," in Talk on the Wilde Side.
39. What might be the significance that lesbianism is "nameless" and not "unnamable," the common nominal refusal of sodomy? This is not the love that dare not speak its name, but a love that has no name or does not know what name to speak.
40. Here we encounter what Stuart Hall et al would characterize as a signification spiral; that is:
a way of signifying events which also intrinsically escalates their threat. . . . The signification spiral is a self-amplifying sequence within the area of signification: the activity or event with which the signification deals is escalated--made to seem more threatening--within the course of the signification itself.
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: MacMillan Press, 1978), 223.
41. Here is the full passage of Williams's instructive interpretation:
[Y]ou cannot appreciate the gravity of the charge against this lady unless you appreciate what the real meaning is of this horrible phrase. . . . [T]he fact is that this particular part of the female organization is open to treatment, let us say, other than by normal means which nature intended. And, hence, there has come into this wicked world undoubtedly a practice. . . .--recognised as a vice which is supposed to have originated in the Island of Lesbos where there were women and no men--a vice by which the clitoris can be excited (six words omitted) and ways other than those which nature intended. And there do exist in the world vicious practices where men are able to gratify their passions with men, and women with women--degrading, repulsive, contrary to nature, and consequently destructive of health--practices which, indulged in to any extent, sap and undermine the sanity and probity and self-respect . . . of those who indulge in them. [VR, 58]
The notion of the clitoris as extraneous will not only be elaborated by Freud, but has a history stretching back to the middle ages. On the discursive history of the clitoris, see Valerie Traub, "The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris," Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 2 : 81-113 and Thomas W. Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur" in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, ed. Romona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 90-131.
42. Notably, the Verbatim Report makes a point of omitting the "sixty-one words" in which "The learned counsel explained in a very clear manner the precise situation and function of the clitoris" and also "six words" in which he explains how the clitoris can be excited (57, 58). It seems worthwhile to note that Marie Stopes's Married Love was first published at the end of March 1918, reviews of which can be sometimes found alongside editorials about the Billing trial. An accessible and immmensely popular book for the lay public on sexuality, it proposed the ground-breaking argument that sexual knowledge, education, and instruction were all necessary for a healthy marriage. Stopes explicitly and simply explained the importance of the clitoris for female pleasure and argued vehemently for the benefits of female sexual satisfaction (beyond reproduction). The trial, then, is poised at, and contributesto, a revolutionary moment in the knowledge of female body parts and conrations of female sexuality.
43. My thanks to Ellis Hanson for calling my attention to this tautology.
44. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 34.
45. Ibid., 37-8.
46. Tate, Modernism, History, 97-9, 117-8.
47. Billing's defense at the police trial had been that his libel could not have posed a threat to public order, as only the "initiated" or medical experts would understand the meaning of the phrase. Either the understanding reader would already be corrupted, or would be a medical expert, and thus incorruptible (SLV, 20).
48. VR, 84-5. Jennifer Travis similarly points out how Billing tried to use Allan's knowledge of terms as "sadism" to prove her sexual immorality. See "Clits in Court."
49. One of Allan's repeated tactics for deflecting a sexual reading is an appeal to orientalism, so that Wilde's curious phrases, such as "gilded tigers," are shifted from the language of sexuality to the language of the East; it is the authenticity of Wilde's orientalizing play that accounts for its indecipherability and which an ignorant reader might misconstrue as sexual. Allan thus attempts to intervene another "expert" position, one of cultural and artistic knowledge, to cleanse the play of inherent sexual transgression and consign Billing's reading to prurient scandal-mongering.
50. Letter to Cecil Sprigge; qtd. in Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand, 137.
51. My thanks to Natalie Melas for pointing out this relationship.
52. VR, 249. Hoare briefly cites some of this exchange and claims,
The exchange between Billing and Cooke rehashed all the old shibboleths of the Wildean era; only now, prejudice masqueraded as pseudo-medical 'evidence.' It was the barely cloaked philistinism of an age whose cultural horizons were foreshortened by war and desperate blind patriotism. In 1918--nearly two decades into the twentieth century and the modern era--these words were a direct reversion to Victorian values and hypocrisy. [Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand, 145]
I am arguing that we cannot dismiss such exchanges, as blatantly outrageous as they appear now, as simply philistinism. The concern with modes of reading seems a crucial context for the trial's ability to connect issues of artistic practices, national security, sexual practices, and moral codes.
53.  For Wilde's speech, see H. Montgomery Hyde's The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), 256.
54. That the unimaginable experiences of war at the front found an analogue in Billing's trial is graphically suggested by the press's juxtaposition of photographs and reports of the trial alongside maps of the battles at the front. See for example, the Daily Mail, 1 June 1918, where a photo of witnesses "who have given remarkable evidence in the Billing trial" is positioned directly under a map of the front and the photo headline "Huns Gain in France and Flanders." The Times' report of the trial on 3 June, "Mr. Billing's Trial," frames a map of "Great Battles Between the Oise and the Marne," while the Manchester Guardian's report of the "Frantic Demonstrations" at Billing's acquittal borders a map of the front lines. The Daily Mail's photo of the crowd cheering Billing's acquittal appears directly beside a photo of "The War Council of Versailles," with a photo headline that links the two: "Billing Trial--After the Acquittal. Versailles Council."
55. "The Billing Trial," Daily Mail, 5 June 1918, 3.
56. "A Scandalous Trial," Times, 5 June 1918, 7.
57. "The Old Bailey Shocker," New Statesman, 8 June 1918, 183.
58. "Study in War Psychology," Manchester Guardian, 5 June 1918, 4; untitled editorial, New Age 23.7 (13 June 1918): 99.
59. J. H. Thomas, "Common Sense and the Billing Trial: To the Editor of the Times," Times, 5 June 1918, 7.
60. "A Scandalous Trial," Times, 5 June 1918, 7.


The fromSel parameter specifies the start of the selection. This ranges from 1 (before the first character) to the number of characters in the text + 1 (after the last character). A value of 1 for both fromSel and toSel selects the entire text.
The toSel parameter specifies the end of the selection. This ranges from 1 (before the first character) to the number of characters in the text + 1 (after the last character). A value of 1 for both fromSel and toSel selects the entire text.
import GUI in "%oot/lib/GUI"
var textField, lbl : int
procedure CheckInput (s : string)
for i : 1 .. length (s)
if (s (i) < 'a' or 'z' < s (i)) and s (i) not= ' ' then
GUI.SetSelection (textField, i, i + 1)
return
end if
end for
GUI.Quit
end CheckInput
textField := GUI.CreateTextField (100, 100, 200, "", CheckInput)
lbl := GUI.CreateLabelFull (100 + GUI.GetWidth (textField) div 2,
100 + GUI.GetHeight (textField),
"Only Allows Lower Case Letters", 0, 0,
GUI.CENTER + GUI.BOTTOM, 0)
loop
exit when GUI.ProcessEvent
end loop
GUI.SetLabel (lbl, "Program Finished!")
This means that you can only call the function by calling GUI.SetSelection, not by calling SetSelection.


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enum class AlbumInclusionStrategy
Describes object types to include when finding albums
keyword
- The com.adamratzman.spotify id of the strategy
(common, js, jvm)
ALBUM |
|
(common, js, jvm)
SINGLE |
|
(common, js, jvm)
APPEARS_ON |
|
(common, js, jvm)
COMPILATION |
(common, js, jvm)
keyword |
The com.adamratzman.spotify id of the strategy val keyword: String |
(common, js, jvm)
ALBUM |
|
(common, js, jvm)
APPEARS_ON |
|
(common, js, jvm)
COMPILATION |
|
(common, js, jvm)
SINGLE |