The greening of Oscar Wilde: situating Ireland in the Wilde wars

Abstract

The importance of Ireland to an understanding of Oscar Wilde has been the subject of contentious discussion in recent years. For one group of critics Wilde has been considered “a militant Irish republican”, an Irish “terrorist by another name”, whose literary practices resembled those of “guerrilla warfare”, an ardent Home Ruler and Parnellite, and committed Irish nationalist whose work is suffused with references to Ireland and the Irish Question, very influenced by his Irish background and political views, possibly shaped by a genuine interest in and awareness of Irish folklore and the Irish oral tradition, and deeply engaged with issues of Irish identity and culture. For an opposing set of critics Wilde should at best be considered a “reluctant” Irish patriot, who referenced his Irish “identity” only when it suited him commercially, was more interested in exploiting intellectual fashions and fads than making genuine political points, was a shallow thinker in most areas of life and certainly didn’t use his writing to pursue Irish nationalist issues, was probably more of a British imperialist than an Irish nationalist, knew precious little about Irish folklore or Irish oral traditions, and his works contain few if any references to Irish issues or themes. The differences between these two interpretive communities certainly seem quite large, and these differences have been emphasised in a disputatious manner which has shed more heat than light on the messy matter of Wilde’s national identity. In this article I want to begin to clear up some of the misunderstandings I think have crept into this critical dispute and suggest fruitful ways in which opposing critics can come together in if not harmony then perhaps a less acrimonious, more productive way.

Keywords:

• Oscar Wilde
• allegory
• plausibility
• analogy
• postcolonial

Notes

1. Mahon, “MacNeice in Ireland,” 113.

2. The critical construction of an “Irish Wilde” took place mostly during the 1980s and 1990s in a number of significant interventions. I will be referring to several of these interventions directly in the article, but for a good sense of the development of academic interest in an “Irish Wilde”, see Walshe, Oscar’s Shadow, 69–121; Sammells, Wilde Style, 7–22.

3. Kiberd, “London Exiles,” 373.

4. McCormack, “Wilde Irishman,” 85; McCormack, “Wilde’s Fiction(s),” 99.

5. Wright, “Party Political Animal,” 13–15.

6. Wright, Oscar’s Books, 17–30.

7. Pine, Thief of Reason, 175ff.; Kinsella, “‘We must return to the voice.’” Kinsella, though, carefully clarifies that “Wilde’s orality is of a literate kind, and while its roots may be traced to Ireland, the material on which it draws can often be found in his education and subsequent reading” (11).

8. Mahaffey, States of Desire.

9. Killeen, Faiths of Oscar Wilde; Killeen, Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde.

10. Clayworth, “Revising a Recalcitrant Patriot”; Markey, “Wilde the Irishman,” 443.

11. Ní Flathúin, “Irish Oscar Wilde,” 339.

12. Guy, “‘Soul of Man Under Socialism’”; Guy, “Oscar Wilde and Socialism.”

13. “Wilde was a writer who did not have an abundance of either intellectual resources or material” (Guy and Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession, 281).

14. Frankel, ‘“Ave Imperatrix,’” 117–38.

15. Markey, Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales.

16. Haslam, “Hermeneutic Hazards.”

17. I am purposely misappropriating a now famous term of Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? I should also make clear here that the positions outlined above are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In other words, there is no reason why a critic could not simultaneously maintain that Wilde was an ardent Irish nationalist and also a shallow thinker with no interest in folklore. One interesting feature of the “Irish Wilde” debate, however, has been the extent to which the “nationalising” and “internationalising” arguments have indeed been polarised in discussion.

18. For more appreciative treatments, see the mutual acknowledgements of Killeen and Markey in their respective studies of the fairy tales, and their respectful appreciation of each other’s work: Killeen, Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 6, and Markey, Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, 6–7; see also Killeen’s recent use of Markey’s arguments in “Wilde, the Fairy Tales,” 192–3.

19. Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, 19.

20. For the debate about Yeats’s status as an “Irish writer”, see Foster, Irish Story, 84–7, 95–112. For Corkery’s influence, see Brown, Ireland, 63–7; Saul, Daniel Corkery; Foster, “Who Are the Irish?” See also Kiberd, Irish Writer and the World, 7.

21. Mahon, “MacNeice in Ireland,” 113.

22. There have been very interesting examinations of how many writers and thinkers managed to combine versions of nationalism with a concomitant commitment to an international outlook. See, for example, the study of Maria Edgeworth as a “rooted cosmopolitan” by Katy Brundan, “Cosmpolitan Complexities.”

23. Foster, Irish Story, 108.

24. For an astute analysis of the changes to Irish studies, see Morash, “Value of Irish Studies.”

25. For a good survey of the changing nature of Irish studies and the ways in which postcolonialism impacted on the discipline, see Cleary, “‘Misplaced Ideas’?”; Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 47–76.

26. Deane, Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5 vols. Though, of course, these volumes also generated their own controversies, especially in relation to their representation of women writers and the make-up of the editorial team.

27. See Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism.

28. See Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 51–63.

29. Deane, Strange Country, 89–94.

30. Possibly … see Rawson, “Killing the Poor: An Anglo-Irish Theme?,” in God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 191–215 passim.

31. Roach, “‘All the Dead Voices.’”

32. Jones, “Dracula Goes to London,” 19.

33. This is a matter of some controversy. For a very considered and careful response to a question like this, see Morin, Charles Robert Maturin, 129–53.

34. See, in particular, Brantlinger’s brilliant intervention, Rule of Darkness.

35. Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 55.

36. Jameson, “Third-World Literature.”

37. For the most scathing response, see Ahmad, In Theory, 95–122.

38. For a survey of the use of allegory in Irish Gothic studies, see Haslam, “Irish Gothic”; Morin and Gillespie, “De-Limiting the Irish Gothic,” 1–12.

39. Foster, Irish Story, 109. Foster’s scepticism about such prospecting is obvious here.

40. For a representative sample of such analysis, see Deane, “Landlord and Soil”; Moses, “Irish Vampire”; Stewart, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

41. Murphy, Irish Novelists, 3, 5.

42. See Haslam, “Irish Gothic”; Killeen, “Irish Gothic Revisited.”

43. Sammells, Wilde Style, 13; Barry, “Critical Notes,” 2–3; Lloyd, Anomalous States, 65–79; Gibbons, Transformations, 134–48. Lloyd explicitly acknowledges Jameson as an influence in his discussion of allegory. Anomalous States, 84, note 18.

44. Gibbons, Transformations, 21, 142–3.

45. Frye, Secular Scripture, 59. For Irish studies critics who have adopted Frye’s term, see Killeen, Emergence, 88–9; Morin, Charles Robert Maturin, 133.

46. Again, this reference to possible authorial intention is another highly contentious aspect of literary interpretation – the debates about the “intentional fallacy” have not gone away.

47. It is important for me to clarify here that while different kinds of postcolonial readings (ones not dependent on allegory or analogy) have also been controversial (because postcolonialism itself occupies a controversial position in the discipline of literary criticism), this article will only deal with the issue of allegory/analogy because it is the most pertinent in terms of Irish readings in Wilde studies.

48. Stoker, Dracula, 344.

49. See Stewart, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”; Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 136.

50. See Miller, Dracula, passim.

51. For the revisionist controversy, see Brady, Interpreting Irish History; Whelan, “Revisionist Debate in Ireland.”

52. A very notable exception is the work of Howe. See Ireland and Empire.

53. See Hughes, “Origins and Implications.”

54. For a good survey of the changes in treatment of Wilde’s Irishness, see Sammells, Wilde Style, 8–16.

55. McHugh and Harmon, Short History, 145. See also Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition, 79.

56. Deane, Celtic Revivals, 81.

57. See Howes, Colonial Crossings, 6–23.

58. Pepper, Oscar Wilde.

59. See the speculative but provocative essay by McCormack, “Wilde and Parnell.”

60. Coakley, Oscar Wilde, 110–12.

61. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 18–19. Most scholars have been content to trust Ellmann’s judgement on the matter. Others have not been so convinced. See Walshe, Oscar’s Shadow, 21, 74; Markey, “Wilde the Irishman,” 448–50. In her treatment of the issue, Markey suggests that Davis Coakley, Declan Kiberd, Thomas Wright and I did not personally read or evaluate Fox’s original article, or assess Fox’s credibility, and depended far too uncritically on Ellmann’s view.

62. Markey, “Wilde the Irishman,” 450.

63. Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, 118.

64. For Fox’s original articles, see “People I Have Met.” Doubts about the veracity of some of Fox’s other assertions in his series of articles for Donahoe’s Magazine should be nuanced. For example, Fox asserts he knew Charles Dickens when Fox’s parents lived in Exeter, and though this may seem unlikely it is supported by acquaintances of Fox who reference a note from Dickens as among the possessions left after his death. For the reference to the Dickens’ note, see O’Sullivan, “Author of ‘People I Have Met,’” 485; also, the obituary of Fox in the Boston Daily Globe, Sunday, April 2, 1905. For the residence of the Dickens family in Alphington in Essex from 1839, see Forster, Life, 185. I have consulted Michael Slater, probably the world’s foremost authority on Dickens, and asked him to assess Fox’s “memories” of Dickens. In his view, Fox is likely to be “romanticising” or misremembering certain events. Personal correspondence, November 14, 2014.

65. Oscar Wilde, letter to James Nicol Dunn, November–December 1888. Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters, 371.

66. Wilde’s political commitments are very contentious matters in Wilde studies, but for a good summary of what we know of his straightforward support for Home Rule see Wright, “Party Political Animal.” For a very clear articulation by Wilde of his Home Rule views, and his knowledge of the issues involved, see his interview with the St. Louis Globe Democrat in 1882. The interview is quoted in the article by Wright, 14–15.

67. Quoted in Wratislaw, Oscar Wilde, 13. Wratislaw makes it clear that Cyril, Wilde’s son, was also an ardent Home Ruler – at the age of seven or eight!

68. Glasgow Herald, March 22, 1888, 7. Quoted in Wright, “Party Political Animal,” 15.

69. Clayworth, “Revising a Recalcitrant Patriot”; see also her article, “Wilde the Irishman.” This mistake is a genuine one, and I am certainly not accusing Clayworth of being purposefully misleading (such an accusation would, in fact, be ridiculous). We all make interpretive mistakes and I am guilty of more than my fair share. For academic error, see Lerner, Error and the Academic Self.

70. Markey, “Wilde the Irishman,” 443. Most critics have used Wilde’s phrase correctly. See, for example, McCormack, “From Chinese Wisdom to Irish Wit,” 305; Wright, Oscar’s Books, 24.

71. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 22–3.

72. Haslam, “Hermeneutic Hazards,” 40–1; Bashford, “When Critics Disagree,” 617.

73. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 38–9; McCormack, “Wilde Irishman,” 86; Siegel, “Wilde’s Use,” 24–6; King, “Typing Dorian Gray,” 22; O’Connor, “Picture of Dorian Gray as Irish National Tale”; Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 326; Upchurch, Wilde’s Use of Irish Celtic Elements, 25–6; Edwards, “Impressions of an Irish Sphinx,” 59–60; Killeen, Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 61–78.

74. For a similar list, see Haslam, “Hermeneutic Hazards,” 38–42. For a good survey of Irish approaches to Wilde, see Doody, “Oscar Wilde,” 246–66.

75. Bashford, “When Critics Disagree,” 616; Sammells warns that “when approaching Wilde’s Irishness, we need to find ways of helping students read his work that do not involve the cracking of a code. Wilde is not an Irish writer underneath.” “The Irish Wilde,” 40; Small, Oscar Wilde, 54; Haslam, “Hermeneutic Hazards,” passim; see also Guy, “Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde,” 87, 92; Rose, “To Each His or Her Own Wilde.”

76. Haslam, “Hermeneutic Hazards,” 57, footnote 80.

77. Ibid., 42, 54, footnote 18.

78. Bashford, “When Critics Disagree,” 617.

79. See especially Haslam, “Hermeneutic Hazards,” passim; Markey, “Wilde the Irishman,” passim.

80. There have been, to date, three book-length surveys of the field. Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued; Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research; Knox, Oscar Wilde in the 1990s. See also the very valuable article by Bashford, “When Critics Disagree,” and the intervention by Guy and Small, Studying Oscar Wilde.

81. Killeen, “Wilde’s Aphoristic Imagination,” 2. Although the joke seems to have been taken seriously! See the reference in Small, “Wilde’s Texts,” 376.

82. Knox, Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide. Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, reviewed the book in the Times Literary Supplement, January 13, 1995. This review was attacked by Susan Balée in her review of Knox’s biography in Victorian Studies 38, no. 2 (1995), 319–21. Merlin Holland posted a response to Balée in Victorian Studies 39, no. 4 (1996), 539–41, to which Balée responded in the same issue, 542–3.

83. For other instances of what I consider to be disproportionately critical interventions, see the tackle on McKenna’s Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, by Guy and Small in Studying Oscar Wilde, 25–9; the criticism of Regenia Gagnier by Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research, 73, where he contends that Gagnier has “recapitulate[d] (but with little acknowledgement)” his own work from the 1970s onwards; Horst Schroeder’s (otherwise invaluable) series of articles on Josephine M. Guy’s edition of Wilde’s “Criticism” in Vol. IV of the Oxford University Press edition of Wilde’s Complete Works, which he subjects to an extraordinary point-by-point eight-part critique, starting in The Wildean, no. 34 (January 2009), and finishing four years later in The Wildean, no. 43 (July 2013). In the January 2011 (The Wildean, no. 38) instalment of this saga, Schroeder insists that Guy’s edition is “textually not above reproach, is lacking in literary competence, and is insufficiently researched” (54). See also the unnecessarily intemperate tone adopted by both Knox and Small in their surveys; the accusations that other critics misrepresent, mislead and invent evidence that mar the otherwise stimulating articles by Haslam (“Kiberd’s and Pine’s Distortions,” my own “methodological shortcomings”), “Hermeneutic Hazards,” 50, and Markey (others make “dubious assumptions”, other “critics [are] anxious to argue for”, evidence has been “misconstrued”), “Wilde the Irishman,” 447–8.

84. Bashford, “When Critics Disagree,” 620.

85. An accusation Richard Haslam makes. See “Hermeneutic Hazards,” 50–1.

86. Levelled by Ian Small against the contributors to McCormack’s Wilde: The Irishman. See Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research, 59. He exempts Owen Dudley Edwards from this accusation.

87. Levelled by Anne Markey: “given the partiality of existing criticism, the time is now ripe for a more inclusive and disinterested assessment of Wilde’s fairy tales”; “more balanced evaluation”; “Wilde’s familiarity with Irish folklore … was considerably more limited than some critics have wanted to believe.” Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, 2, 13, 57 (my emphasis). Precisely why these critics wanted so much to believe in Wilde’s knowledge of Irish folklore is never specified.

88. This is generally referred to as the “revisionist controversy” in Irish history circles. For the ideological commitments of the revisionists, see Eagleton, “Revisionism Revisited,” 320.

89. Moreover, I would discourage attempts to turn genuine disagreements into disparagement. For example, in her mostly generous study of the sources of and influences on Wilde’s fairy tales Anne Markey rightly points out that “the recent configuration of Wilde as one of the most transgressive writers in a re-constituted canon of Irish literature in English has tended to downplay the ambivalences in his utterances about Ireland”, but unfortunately goes on to complain that while “dissenting voices have argued that Wilde only acknowledged his Irish identity when it suited him … that argument has largely been ignored without ever having been discredited” (Markey, Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, 196). I’m not sure critics should ever try to “discredit” each other’s arguments – problematise, complicate, certainly, but to “discredit” suggests that scholarship proceeds by one scholar refuting the arguments of a previous scholar in favour of their own. I also think that term is at odds with the general tenor of Markey’s study.

90. Leitch, Literary Criticism, 36–49.

91. See Marcus and Best, “Surface Reading.” Marcus and Best oppose criticism that takes “meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter” (1), and find Marxist and psychoanalytic literary criticism particularly problematic as they think that both are wedded to a search for “master codes”. Given their list of modes of criticism that appeal to the “surface” rather than the “depths” of a text (“Surface as materiality” (history of the book), “Surface as the location of patterns that exist within and across texts” (narratology, genre criticism), “Surface as literal meaning”), theirs is an approach to literature that is particularly in vogue now.

92. Ibid., 5. See also the very lively article by Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!” The article by Best and Marcus has generated considerable debate in lit crit circles. See Bartolovitch, “Humanities of Scale” and Straub, “Suspicious Reader Surprised”, for two good responses.

93. Leitch is quite dismissive of this term, which he calls a “bogeyman”. Literary Criticism, 44, note 6.

94. See Tracy, Analogical Imagination.

95. Kucich, “Unfinished Historicist Project,” 73.

96. Powell, “Mesmerizing of Dorian Gray”; Powell, “Tom, Dick and Dorian Gray.”

97. [Oscar Wilde], “Mr. Froude’s Blue Book,” 203.

98. Oscar Wilde, “Greek Women” (1876), f. 17 (unpublished MS in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA 3574), quoted in Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 58–9.

99. Haslam, “Hermeneutic Hazards,” 47, 44.

100. Ibid., 57, footnote 65.

101. Bashford, “When Critics Disagree,” 617; Rose, “To Each His or Her Own Wilde,” 26.

102. Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” 37.

103. For a good collection of views on this issue, see Iseminger, Intention and Interpretation.

104. Dutton, “Plausibility and Aesthetic Interpretation,” 329.

105. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 35, 38–9.

106. Bashford, “When Critics Disagree,” 617.

107. Wilde, Earnest, 18.

108. Wright, “Party Political Animal,” 14.

109. Wilde, Importance of Being Earnest, 17.

110. This issue was discussed with Thomas Wright in a series of emails in June 2014, and he pointed me towards the reference in the Pall Mall Gazette. Wilde was a friend of Cunninghame Grahame’s, and corresponded with him. See Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters, 1021.

111. As well as a number of other comparisons (such as with Cardinal Henry Newman).

112. Killeen, Faiths of Oscar Wilde, 105.

113. Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 47, 49.

114. Ibid., 156.

115. See the still useful study by Bendz, Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold.

116. Marez, “The Other Addict.”

117. See, for example, Blackford, “Childhood and Greek Love”; Vincus, “Adolescent Boy”; Marez, “Other Addict”; Platizky, “Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

118. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 7.

119. Although Haslam’s article is putatively about the “hazards” of “Hibernicizing” The Picture of Dorian Gray, it tends to become rather scattershot in attacking any interpretation of the novel and indeed any Wilde text, and Wilde himself, with which he disagrees. As my own article is about specifically Irish interpretations of Wilde and criticism of this approach, I cannot here address some of Haslam’s other points.

120. Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research, 145.

121. See Powell, “Mesmerizing of Dorian Gray”; Oates, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”; Hasseler, “Physiological Determinism Debate”; and Seagroatt, “Hard Science, Soft Psychology”, among many, many others.

122. Killeen, Faiths of Oscar Wilde, 107. In the book I manage to call Basil’s coat a hat, an instance of sloppy proof reading.

123. My main problem with Prof. Haslam’s response to my own work is not that he disagrees with it so vehemently but rather that his article is filled with dubious claims which depend on ignoring most of the studies he cites, and lifting certain sentences completely out of context. He appears to be very taken with my work, though, and has dedicated a substantial amount of time and space trying to undermine it. See “Irish Gothic: A Rhetorical Hermeneutics Approach”; “Irish Gothic,” 83–94; “The Editor’s Amputated Fingers.” Haslam is, though, a fine critic, and I have no hesitation in recommending his own “Irish readings” of Wilde: “Oscar Wilde and the Imagination of the Celt”; “Melmoth (OW)”; “Revisiting the ‘Irish Dimension.’”

124. Rose, “To Each His or Her Own Wilde,” 26.

125. Curtis Marez certainly does a much better job than I do in suggesting a possible line of enquiry for anyone who wanted to pursue this particular textual detail. See “The Other Addict,” 266.

126. Leitch, Literary Criticism, 48.

127. Culler, Literary in Theory, 167.