The second and more complex grammatical reading of the title “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” eschews the genitive possessivity of the apostrophe – i.e. the crime being possessed by Savile – in favor of the grammar that sees Savile himself becoming the crime and/or being possessed by it. In other words, instead of viewing this eponymous crime as being something effectuated by Savile, this interpretation has Savile the man assume the role of the crime itself. This conceptualization does, in the end, arrive at many of the same conclusions vis-à-vis Wilde’s moralities. That is to say, it unearths profound flaws not just in Savile as an individual, but also in the greater society he inhabits. Savile is not just some vicissitude gallivanting around
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Who, if not Savile, is responsible? As the story itself would have it, Savile perceives the blame to encompass not only himself, but also London (and therefore, the society indwelled within it) as an organism of moral constitution. As fate puppeteers its esoteric purposes, no variable or aspect that took part in fostering such a man as Savile is free from its incriminations. It is those variegated influencers – molders of Arthur Saviles the world over – which have imbued this Lord with such a forceful sense of duty. In that sense, then, Savile’s emphasis on his self-professed “duty” is also a collective evil, equally achieving the moral deindividuation that Philip K. Cohen describes. If the first interpretation of the title – that Savile is the possessor of some determinable crime – leads to the Wildean conclusion about the iniquitous effects of individuality’s destruction, then so does the second interpretation. If one considers Savile himself to be the eponymous crime, then some external force(s) must be responsible; and if those externalities represent the summation of a society that fosters and allows someone like Savile (with his omnipresent “duties”) to exist at all, then the very same Wildean morality of deinvidualizing Victorian ostentation is inescapable. So remarkably, both interpretations of the title’s grammar actually arrive at the same endpoint of Wilde’s
Who, if not Savile, is responsible? As the story itself would have it, Savile perceives the blame to encompass not only himself, but also London (and therefore, the society indwelled within it) as an organism of moral constitution. As fate puppeteers its esoteric purposes, no variable or aspect that took part in fostering such a man as Savile is free from its incriminations. It is those variegated influencers – molders of Arthur Saviles the world over – which have imbued this Lord with such a forceful sense of duty. In that sense, then, Savile’s emphasis on his self-professed “duty” is also a collective evil, equally achieving the moral deindividuation that Philip K. Cohen describes. If the first interpretation of the title – that Savile is the possessor of some determinable crime – leads to the Wildean conclusion about the iniquitous effects of individuality’s destruction, then so does the second interpretation. If one considers Savile himself to be the eponymous crime, then some external force(s) must be responsible; and if those externalities represent the summation of a society that fosters and allows someone like Savile (with his omnipresent “duties”) to exist at all, then the very same Wildean morality of deinvidualizing Victorian ostentation is inescapable. So remarkably, both interpretations of the title’s grammar actually arrive at the same endpoint of Wilde’s