Homosexual Panic and Necropolitics in The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘A Painful Case

This article provides a comparison between James Joyce and Oscar Wilde’s characters in matters of homosexual panic and gender inequality, bringing the analysis to the grounds of necropolitics. Coined by Achille Mbembe, the term ‘necropolitics’ refers to how certain lives are deemed expendable within neoliberal systems. This article argues that in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the legal and social oppression of queer people and gender minorities rendered queer people and women vulnerable to the slow death of social annihilation. The criminalization of homosexuality went hand in hand with homosexual panic, a manipulative and necropolitical mechanism which drove queer people to construct and maintain heteronormative appearances. Oscar Wilde’s trials triggered homosexual panic that resulted in tightening social control and isolative measures, largely targeting homosexual and bisexual men. Basil Hallward’s murder and the suicides of Dorian Gray’s lovers in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and James Duffy’s isolation in Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’ are manifestations of the effects of the homosexual panic that forces Joyce and Wilde’s queer characters to live in a ‘living dead’ status unless they comply with an oppressive system. This social control and puritanism also affected women, limiting the roles they could occupy in society, the workplace, and the home. Therefore, this article also analyses the suicides of Emily Sinico and Sibyl Vane, demonstrating how gendered necropolitics impacted their deaths beyond mere tragic love stories.