The Trope Of Women In Symon's 'White Heliotrope'

Wilde is not the only writer who employs the trope of a woman’s sexual prowess being a negative. Arthur Symons, another Aesthetic poet, also uses this ethereal, vampire woman in his poem “White Heliotrope.” The effect of the woman in Symons poem is similar to the effect the women in Wilde’s. The speaker in “White Heliotrope” laments a past love that seems never to go away. She has a strong and undeniable influence over the male speaker. He writes that if his handkerchief ever smells of white heliotrope again, “this […] /will rise, a ghost of memory” (line 13-14). The woman continues to have an influence over him, even though she is far-gone. She has sucked all of his passion out; he is left with only her smell that elicits memories of her again …show more content…
In Wilde’s the male speaker walks away with no mentioned reminders of his lover or the harlots, where as this speaker does have a memento. This poem is also influenced by Victorian morality. In one stanza Symons writes, “the mirror that has sucked your face / […] / and there mysteriously keeps / forgotten memories of grace” (lines 5-8). Here the lover is no longer a pure, perfect figure. She was one graceful and perfect and now she is only an empty mirror image of herself, she has none of the same substance she once did. The opinion of an unchaste woman as graceless is characteristically Victorian. Wilde’s male speaker also places this kind of judgment on the harlots. They are intoxicatingly, immorally elegant; their total ignorance of social rules is enticing. As the speaker sees it, these women reject patriarchy and live freely, but the speaker can only see this as depraved because he has only been taught the strict confines of …show more content…
The poem represents the Aesthetic movement positively, specifically the independence women received from it. Women, as seen in the poem, could finally transcend their domestic roles and gain some economic freedom within the patriarchy. In this freedom, though, Wilde reveals an element of control left on the women. They are independent, but they had to gain this independence by being completely rejected from their culture – they have to become immoral visions of sexuality in order to counteract the image of domesticity to which they were supposed to adhere. They have not even totally gotten away from the male gaze. Their economic freedom rests on the wallets of hungry male customers; they cater to men like housewives, but they do so in a sexual way and not in a supportive way. The social pressure still present in the scene reveals a pessimistic view of society. No matter how far away the culture moves from a strict morality system, the remnants of it will always press on life. It seems by using the character of the speaker as the main voice in the poem Wilde makes a social comment greater than the confusion of transitioning from Victorianism to Aestheticism. To be free of society, to escape its power, one has to remove themselves from it – as the lover walks away, as the harlots have already walked