Oscar Wilde

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to be natural is posing." (Sexual Dissidence, p.10) The distinction between the two uses of "natural" explains a good deal about why more conservative peers misunderstood Wilde. He favored nature when it was construed as an internal individualistic impulse (think Whitman), but not when it was considered as it was by most people: as society's norm. Similarly, when he suggests that beauty is the greatest good and in so doing diminishes the role of the soul, he does so not out of shallowness, but out of a half-facetious, half-earnest pursuit of that which is more genuine, less socially constructed (and therefore less hypocritical).
This search for uncorrupted nature led Wilde to a ferocious individualism, ironically attained by means that in the nineteenth century were considered criminal: sexual deviancy. Dollimore relates Wilde's homosexuality to the search for self-identity, suggesting that he creates a natural self only by casting down "a Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigor and repression that generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned." (p.3) Wilde brought about this internal upheaval, or recreation as Dollimore puts it, in many young disciples (significantly Gide, who is most vocal about reporting the chaos it threw into his life). This practice, somewhat of a game to Wilde, ...