Wilde, Shaw, and Somerville and Ross: Irish Revivalists, Irish Britons, or both?

Abstract

This article contends that Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and Somerville and Ross should be considered part of the Irish Literary Revival. These writers all shared important artistic and philosophical aims with the acknowledged members of the Revival, and were, in fact, socially and professionally connected to some of them. Wilde, Shaw, and Somerville and Ross are usually “disqualified” from the movement, because, as Anglo-Irish Protestants writing mainly for English audiences, their work occasionally betrays what fervent nationalist critics regard as “the pathology of literary Unionism”. Wilde, Shaw, and Somerville were all Home Rulers, and even the unionist Ross was critical of narrow-gauge unionism, so these critics are clearly responding, not to the actual, subtle political beliefs of these writers but to the conscious – and even unconscious – “Britishness” evident in their work. Excluding these writers from studies of the Revival for their perceived Britishness is illogical, since the entire Revival was underwritten by (and, some would argue, undermined by) the cultural Britishness of its mainly Anglo-Irish Anglican participants.

Keywords::

• Irish Literary Revival
• Britishness
• Irish Protestant identities
• France and Ireland
• canonicity
• Atlantic Archipelago

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council, as well as the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Notes

^1.Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, 178. Wilson Foster is referring to Somerville and Ross in this quote. For other relatively recent studies of the Revival that either ignore Wilde, Shaw, and Somerville and Ross or treat them as peripheral, see Shovelin'sJourney Westward (2011), Felton'sA Journey into Ireland's Literary Revival (2007), Vance'sIrish Literature since 1800 (2002), Chaudhry's Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print (2001), and Watson'sIrish Identity and the Irish Literary Revival (1994).

^2.Deane, Heroic Styles, 10.

^3.Stevens, The Irish Scene in Somerville & Ross, 191.

^4. As Homi Bhabha explains in his landmark study The Location of Culture (1994), the cultural mixing and interplay that inevitably occur between the colonisers and the residents of a colony results in the creation of a “liminal space, in-between the designations of identity”. In this space, we find “cultural hybridity” which “erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5, 5, 83).

^5. I am, of course, using the terms “Catholic”, “Protestant”, “Anglican”, and “Presbyterian” to signal cultural affiliations, not to imply doctrinaire religious belief among all members of these communities.

^6. See Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature; Friel, Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 51, 81, 93.

^7. Since the publication of J.G.A. Pocock's influential essay “British History: A Plea for a New Subject” in 1975, scholars have increasingly used the term “Atlantic Archipelago” in an effort “to avoid the political and ethnic connotations of ‘the British Isles’” (Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, 6. See also Pocock, “British History,” 606–7).

^8.Gardiner, The Cultural Roots of British Devolution, 15, emphasis in original.

^9. Ibid., 14.

^10.Longley, The Living Stream, 194.

^11.Bowen, People, Places, Things, 62–3; Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, 85–6.

^12. For the most concise articulation of this, see Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.”

^13.Beckett, “Recent Irish Poetry,” 70.

^14. As quoted in O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, 23.

^15.Mercier, “Victorian Evangelicalism and the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival,” 59–101; Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 31, 44, 182, 275, 296, 299, 537, 552; Sisson, Pearse's Patriots, 16, 52, 69, 104, 116, 134–6.

^16. Sisson, Pearse's Patriots, 104.

^17.Coxhead, Lady Gregory, 10.

^18.Hume, “Empire Day in Ireland,” 152.

^19. Mercier, “Victorian Evangelicalism and the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival,” 75–6, 83, 92; W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family, 176–7, 431–6; Whelan, “Protestantism in Beckett's Ireland.”

^20.Simpson, Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin, 172. For quotes from others accusing O'Casey of sectarianism, see Christopher Murray, Seán O'Casey, 288–9, 331.

^21. Isobel Murray, Introduction, Complete Poetry, ix.

^22.Wilde, Complete Poetry, 26, 29, 19.

^23. Ibid., 29.

^24.Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories, 17.

^25.Wilde, The Plays of Oscar Wilde, 266, 369.

^26. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories, 63.

^27. Ibid., 195.

^28.Yeats, Interviews and Recollections, vol. 2, 295.

^29.Pine, Oscar Wilde, 60. Pine is quoting from “The Critic as Artist”, in which Wilde, through the character of Gilbert, twice disparages “the English mind”, once calling it “coarse and undeveloped” and later declaring that it is “always in a rage” (Wilde, Intentions, 197, 201).

^30. Pine, Oscar Wilde, 96.

^31. For an important study in this regard, see Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde.

^32. For more on Wilde's influence on Yeats, see Doody, “‘An Echo of Some One Else's Music’,” 175–88.

^33. Jerusha McCormack, “Wilde's Fiction(s),” 111, 116.

^34.The Works of Ossian was a popular cycle of poems which McPherson fraudulently claimed were based on ancient manuscripts he had found, which contained copies of poetry written by the actual “Ossian”, or Oisín.

^35.Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 17.

^36. Wilde, of course, went a step beyond the others when he not only threatened conversion to Catholicism during his time at Oxford but actually did so on his deathbed.

^37.Kiberd, “The London Exiles,” 373.

^38.Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 88–91; Shaw, John Bull's Other Island, 7.

^39. Shaw, Collected Letters, 1911–1925, 309.

^40. In the play, Shaw mistakenly places the village in Co. Galway (Shaw, Back to Methuselah, 195). While it is near the border between the two counties, it is in fact in Co. Clare, outside New Quay.

^41.Shaw, Selected Short Plays, 255.

^42.Shaw, Collected Letters, 1911–1925, 308.

^43. Ibid., 309.

^44. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 381; Fitz-Simon, The Abbey Theatre, 43.

^45.Fitz-Simon, The Abbey Theatre, 42.

^46. Ibid.

^47.Shaw, Man and Superman, 7–38.

^48. Shaw, John Bull's Other Island, 10. For Shaw's negative depictions of the English (versus his more positive portrayals of the Irish), see Clare, “Bernard Shaw's Irish Characters and the Rise of Reverse Snobbery,” 138–51.

^49.Moran, “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” 147–60.

^50. As quoted in Lewis, Edith Somerville, 223.

^51. Ibid., 227, 243.

^52. Trustworthy commentators such as Frank O'Connor have repeatedly vouched for the meticulous accuracy of their rendering of West Cork Hiberno-English (see O'Connor, Introduction, Classic Irish Short Stories, ix).

^53. Lewis, Edith Somerville, 209–10.

^54. For more on the influence of France on Somerville and Ross, see Stevens, The Irish Scene in Somerville & Ross, 127–58.

^55. As quoted in Lewis, Edith Somerville, 210.

^56. Bowen, People, Places, Things, 63.

^57.Somerville and Ross, In the Vine Country, 38, 108, 198.

^58. Ibid., 116–17.

^59. Ibid., 117.

^60. Ibid., 30, 53, 133.

^61. Ibid., 111, 112, 205, 208.

^62. Ibid., 158, 86, 86.

^63.Krielkamp, “The Novel of the Big House,” 70.

^64.Somerville and Ross, The Silver Fox, 2.

^65. Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, 178; Maume, Entry for “Edith Somerville and Martin Ross,” The Oxford Companion to Irish History, 520.

^66. Although Mount Music (1919) was published after Martin Ross's death, Somerville said in the book's preface that “This book was planned … [and] a few portions of it were written” with Ross, so that it was her “duty, as well as [her] pleasure” to put Ross's name on the title page. Likewise, the plot of The Big House of Inver (1925) was suggested to Somerville by a letter from Ross, detailing the history of a Big House family that she knew in Co. Galway. Thus, Ross was once again credited with co-writing the novel (Somerville and Ross, Mount Music, 7).

^67. See Synge, The Collected Letters of J.M. Synge, vol. 1, 117.

^68.Oakman, “Sitting on ‘The Outer Skin’,” 134.

^69. As quoted in Lewis, Somerville and Ross, 165, emphasis in original letter.

^70. Stevens, The Irish Scene in Somerville & Ross, 163–5, 193.

^71. Ibid., 191.

^72. As quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde, 85.

^73.Shaw, The Matter with Ireland, 123, 145. See also ibid., 204, 296.