Lavender Green Dilly-Dilly, Part 2: Early 20th Century Gay Signals -- Garbo

A couple of weeks ago, I put up Part 1 of this three-part series, which took a close look at an old mystery by S. S. Van Dine called The Henson Murder Case. The version I was enjoying was in an anthology of early 20th century mysteries, and there were annotations. One of these side notes explained that the passage below contained a reference to a once-scandalous roman à clef, which is a fancy French way of saying a novel so closely based on real people that everyone knows who they are.

"I'm attending a levee which Mr. Markham is holding over a corpse and I want something rather spiffy. Is it warm enough for a silk suit?. . .And a lavender tie, by all means."

"I trust you won't also wear your green carnation," grumbled Markham. 

"Tut! Tut!' Vance chided him. "You've been reading Mr. Hichens. Such heresy in a district attorney! Anyway, you know I never wear boutonnieres. The decoration has fallen into disrepute. The only remaining devotees of the practice are roués and saxophone players..."

Was a green carnation really "code" for gay men at the very end of the 19th century? In my lifetime, I've heard many versions of LGBT+ coding and never really observed anyone do any of it. Lesbian and gay people I knew in the late 1970s would not have wanted a marker of any kind; they feared losing jobs, housing, or contact with their families. And trouble with the law, of course. But whether this cultural "fact" was real or bogus, I wanted to read The Green Carnation for myself.

I'm so fortunate to live in Maine, where so many libraries -- city, college, small-town, and private are connected in a statewide system. So even though this third printing of The Green Carnation is dated 1894, I could check it out and bring it home. The last time the date due slip was stamped was 1955, but with the added bar code it's possible that other people have borrowed this volume sometime in the last sixty-eight years. People in Maine do not replace or throw away things if they are still usable, and how glad I am about that. 

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Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reginald Hastings are the central characters in the Robert Hichens novel The Green Carnation. Oscar Wilde's stand-in has been given a feminine name, while Reggie's moniker is modeled on Lord Alfred Douglas, known to all as Bosie.

The Green Carnation, though meant as a send-up of the Aesthetic Movement, can be warm and funny. But as I was thumbing through the lightly-browned old pages, I got to some dialogue which made my heart sink for a bit. Somebody was saying to Reggie "Some day, perhaps you will throw away the green carnation."

In older fiction about LGBT+ people, love affairs often end (or never begin) because someone "in the life" doesn't think it's right to subject the person they love to the pain and danger of discrimination and ostracism. Jane Rule's sad-but-good 1970 novel This Is Not for You is a typical example. Happily, I discovered that the person speaking in the scene from The Green Carnation was not Esmé, but the woman to whom Lord Reggie was once engaged. 

And of course, this being a satirical novel, it doesn't really matter who makes that suggestion to Bosie, as he's certainly not going to toss away that boutonniere any time soon: 

 

Oh! It will be out of fashion soon, he answered, as he got delicately into the carriage.
 

The Green Carnation ends with the two lovers, free now that Lord Reggie's engagement has been broken, going off together to the railroad station.

"So you have been refused, Reggie!" said Esmé as they drove towards the station. "How original you are!  I should have never suspected you of that. But you were always wonderful -- wonderful, and very complete. When did you decide to be refused? Only last night. You managed it exquisitely. I think that I am glad. I do not want you to alter and the refining influence of a really good woman is as corrosive as an acid."

 

Lest we have any doubt on whom the novel's characters are based, we have this bit of discourse as Lord Reggie and Lady Locke discuss authors, including Mrs. Humphrey Ward, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens:

Reggie says, "Oscar Wilde was utterly mistaken when he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. After Dorian's act of cruelty [telling a girlfriend he never cared for her] the picture ought to have grown more sweet, more saintly, more angelic in expression."

"I have never read that book," says Lady Locke, and Reggie replies "Then you have gained a great deal. Poor Oscar. He is so terribly truthful. He reminds me of George Washington."

The novel is so jolly, catty, and funny, but alas, the reality behind the lives of Wilde and Bosie was much more grim. We won't get too sordid next time, but in Part 3 of this series, we'll touch on the notoriety of The Green Carnation, as well as on the lives of both its author Hichens and his peer S. S. Van Dine.  See you in two weeks.