Great movie poster. Not so great movie. As in cinematic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this recent movie insists on emphasizing heterosexual romance. The Sybil Vane plot certainly introduces that theme into the novel, but Wilde focuses much more attention on homosocial and homoerotic relationships.

This attention is rarely explicit, in part because of the social taboo against homosexuality, which was of course illegal at the time. Wilde himself was convicted of the “crime” and sentenced to years of hard labor for it. The poem “Two Loves,” written by Wilde’s lover, Alfred Douglas, refers to homosexual passion as the “love that dare not speak its name.” This poem was used as evidence against Wilde in his criminal trial. See the full text of the poem here.

Where do you find evidence of homosexual passion in the novel? Find some very short quotations and analyze them to prove that this form of love is present in the novel, even if it remains unnamed. What kind of language does Wilde rely on to connote the love that dare not speak its name?