The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland

Jarlath Killeen

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Titles include: Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS Editors, Authors, Readers Dennis Denisoff SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950 Laura E. Franey VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE Lawrence Frank VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle Jarlath Killeen THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland Stephanie Kuduk Weiner REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874 Diana Maltz BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900

David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Ana Parejo Vadillo WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM Passengers of Modernity

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The Faiths of Oscar Wilde Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland Jarlath Killeen University of Keele

© Jarlath Killeen 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4894–6 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4894–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killeen, Jarlath, 1976– The faiths of Oscar Wilde : Catholicism, folklore and Ireland / Jarlath Killeen. p. cm. — (Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–4894–1 (cloth) 1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900—Religion. 2. Christianity and literature— Ireland—History—19th century. 3. Literature and folklore—Ireland— History—19th century. 4. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900—Homes and haunts— Ireland. 6. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900—Knowledge—Folklore. 7. Catholics—Ireland—Intellectual life. 8. Christianity in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR5827.R4K55 2005 828′.809—dc22 2005047241 10 14

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

I dedicate this book to Mary: Níl aon ní, aon ní, a stór.

It is sad. One half of the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me. Oscar Wilde

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1. Child and Man: the Development of a Catholic Mind

25

2. Faith and Reason: the Bible, the Catholic Church and Wilde’s Scandalous Writings

44

3. Body and Soul: Nature, the Host and Folklore in The Picture of Dorian Gray

79

4. Religion and Politics: Wilde’s Social Philosophy

109

5. Art and Life: the Politics of Ritualism in The Importance of Being Earnest

138

6. Realism and Romance: Between Protestantism and Catholicism in Wilde’s Final Writings

162

Conclusion

186

Notes

190

Bibliography

210

Index

222

vii

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Preface and Acknowledgements The question of Oscar Wilde’s relationship with religion first occurred to me as an undergraduate. In a class called (rather ambitiously) ‘The Anglo-Irish Non-Realist Tradition’ a heated argument broke out when I suggested that ‘The Canterville Ghost’ was a rather didactic Catholic meditation. What surprised me at the time was the great resistance to this idea. I had not then realised the investment many of my peers had in Wilde as, precisely, an areligious, if not anti-religious thinker. The argument persuaded me that the issue was worth investigating in more detail and, when I applied to write a doctoral dissertation, ‘Oscar Wilde and Religion’ was the obvious choice. That dissertation turned out to focus only on Wilde’s fairy tales, and argued that only by placing these tales in an Irish Catholic context could they be fully understood. The next and obvious question was whether this also applied to Wilde’s major works. After all, a theory about Wilde which neglected The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ and The Importance of Being Earnest was clearly of only relative interest and importance. The answer to this question is in the book you now hold. I focus only on a selection of Wilde’s major works in the hope that this may act as the basis for further study of other material within the oeuvre. I offer a methodology which does not try to push aside other versions of Wilde that have been put forward since his death, but which tries to engage critically and fruitfully with these versions in a non-reductive fashion. I have learned a great deal from previous scholarship and only hope to suggest that analysing the Irish Catholic influence on Oscar Wilde can add to, rather than take from, the enduring appeal and complexity of his writings. We often try to remake our literary idols in our own image, and if the twentieth century saw Wilde as a rebel against all authority, including religious systems of thought and even God, perhaps the twenty-first century can acknowledge that this reading ignores the theological and religious sophistication of the man and his work. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1999–2001. In funding my doctoral research, the council enabled me to lay the basis for the present study. My doctoral supervisor Professor Declan Kiberd gave wise counsel and guidance not only throughout the duration of my initial research, but in the years that followed. He read the entire manuscript ix

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through its many stages, saving me from some vulgar errors and challenging me to push my analysis further. I have been enriched by his wide knowledge of the field and his never-dampened passion for Wilde. His personal friendship and scholarly encouragement are both integral parts of the book in your hands. My family have been a constant source of support to me since I left home to attend university, and my biggest regret is that my mother did not live to see the product of my strange obsessions, which she inspired in ways she never knew. Professor Joe Bristow, the general editor of the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, worked his way through my initially unwieldy and prolix manuscript with patience and encouragement, and ensured that the uninitiated reader did not get lost in the over-enthusiasm of my prose. Paula Kennedy, the commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan, took me through the publishing process with patience. Professor Owen Dudley-Edwards gave much time and encouragement to this work, and has saved me from many historical howlers. I can only hope that it lives up to his expectations. Dr Jerusha McCormack kindly allowed me to read an unpublished paper on ‘Wilde the Pervert: Catholicism as Subversion’. Her advice to me about the project was important in bringing it to completion. Professor Ronald Schuchard of Atlanta University provided me with some useful information concerning Wilde’s post-prison religious activities. Colin Rooney’s warnings and scepticism were the source of many of the qualifications which pepper the text. Darryl Jones and Margaret Robson provided intellectual, moral and psychological support at crucial stages in the evolution of the book, and without them I would have abandoned it at many different stages. Gerardine McBride, Eimear McBride, William Glynnski, Moynagh Sullivan, Ron Callan, Ellie Herrington, James Murphy, Diana Perez-Garcia, Máirín Nic Dhiarmida, Jeremy Harman, Ann Dooley, David Wilson, Jean Talman, David Kilroy, Ann Fogarty, Noreen Doody, Siobhan Holland and Mary King were all important in different ways, while the students in my seminar on Oscar Wilde in University College Dublin had to endure long and, no doubt, rambling speeches which had a vague relation to this book. My thanks to the staff in the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, London, and the libraries of Trinity College, Dublin, University College Dublin and the University of Toronto. My brother-in-law John Lawlor guided me through the technical aspects of word processing, and eventually took it over completely. The chaplains of Trinity College, Dublin – Richard Sheehy, Aidan Larkin and Paul Murphy – have contributed to this book without knowing it. For many years now they

Preface and Acknowledgements xi

have helped me to clarify my understanding of Catholicism and its engagement with the world. All quotations from Oscar Wilde’s letters are taken from The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Forth Estate, 2000), reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Ltd. A word as to the editions of Wilde’s works that were used. I have relied for the most part on Robert Ross’s edited version of Wilde’s Collected Works, helpfully republished by Routledge in 1993. However, where more authoritative editions were available I have used them. Under the general editorship of Ian Small, Oxford University Press is producing what will eventually be the authoritative texts. Only one volume, containing Wilde’s poems, has been available to me while writing this study. I have also used Donald L. Lawler’s edited edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, published by Norton, the edition of Salome edited by Peter Raby for the Oxford Drama Library and the New Mermaids edition of The Importance of Being Earnest, edited by Russell Jackson.

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Introduction

This book argues that the writings of Oscar Wilde can fruitfully be analysed as expressive of an Irish Catholic heritage. This is an important, if perhaps controversial, claim, and it may initially seem puzzling to many readers. Even today, the fact that Wilde was Irish comes as something of a shock to his readers, and, except for those scholars who have made Wilde a subject of study, that he was interested in Catholicism is virtually unknown. Both Terry Eagleton and Jerusha McCormack have indicated their frustration that the students they teach assume that Wilde was English,1 and they have been among the many critics who have sought in recent years to make Wilde’s nationality a central feature of their analyses of his work. McCormack has gone on to argue that Wilde’s Catholic interests are also crucial to understanding him,2 a claim that has been supported by other critics such as Ellis Hanson and Ronald Schuchard.3 That there is a link between these two elements – nationality and religion – has not, however, been fully explored, and yet, I believe, this link can explain much about Wilde and his writings. In this introductory chapter, I will first set out the Irish context into which Wilde was born, and then detail Wilde’s structural engagement with Catholicism. In the final section of the Introduction, I will explain why nationality and religion belong together in any analysis of Wilde. Much of this information will already be familiar to any reader with a knowledge of Irish cultural history, but, given that Wilde’s intellectual and spiritual orientation towards Irish Catholicism has been marginalised in most critical studies of Wilde, it makes sense to explain how and why an Irish writer, coming from a Protestant family, became so strongly attracted to Catholicism, and how, for reasons largely deriving from his parents’ careers, he became immersed in Irish Catholic thought from a young age. 1

2

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

I Both of Wilde’s parents came from a class in Ireland that termed itself the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, an expression that came into use in the 1790s.4 This was a class largely descended from English Anglicans who moved to Ireland after the Reformation, and who, because of their ethnic and religious allegiances to the English colonial power, were placed in a position of authority relative to the Irish Catholic majority. This ethnically English, Protestant minority held all major political and social power in Ireland. Until 1800 they had achieved this through monopoly of the parliament in Dublin, but, with the Act of Union of 1801, this parliament had been abolished and Irish MPs had to sit in the Westminster parliament in London. Although initially opposed to the Act of Union, because it moved political power from Dublin to London and thus diminished their power somewhat, after Catholic Emancipation was granted in 1829, most Protestants in Ireland came out strongly in favour of the Union. Emancipation gave Catholics the right to sit in parliament, and Irish Protestants realised that, should a parliament be re-established in Dublin it would be packed with Catholic MPs, who could go on to pass legislation stripping them of land and local administrative power. For this reason, most Protestants felt it was safer to support the continuation of the Union, as Catholics constituted a small minority in a British as opposed to an Irish parliament. Although by the 1840s most Irish Protestants were Unionist in political orientation, and believed that Protestant interests in Ireland would be best protected in this British dimension, there were some significant Protestant dissidents from this opinion. Some Irish Protestants believed deeply in Irish legislative independence and campaigned for greater legislative autonomy within the empire. This group would form the Home Rule Party under Isaac Butt in 1870. Other Protestants went as far as arguing and campaigning for complete separation from England and the establishment of an Irish Republic, and joined militant nationalist organisations like the Young Irelanders, who believed that Ireland’s colonial situation demanded a military rather than a political solution. Still others, such as the poet W. B. Yeats, developed versions of cultural nationalism which emphasised the historical, mythological and spiritual heritage of Ireland as distinctive from (and superior to) that of England. While it is possible to distinguish between these three strands of Protestant nationalist opinion in the late nineteenth century, it is fair to claim that membership of the institutions which sustained these opinions tended to overlap. These Protestant nationalists believed that, as the

Introduction

3

most educated and intellectually astute class in Ireland, they should be the natural cultural and political leaders of the country, and felt that such leadership would be the best way of maintaining Protestant hegemony in an Ireland where Catholics became more and more politically proactive.5 It is within this minority Protestant tradition that Wilde’s parents should be located. Although growing up in an ultra-Protestant Unionist family, in what her son would later call ‘an atmosphere of alien English thought’,6 Jane Francesca Elgee abandoned her family’s politics for a nationalist tradition which called for the complete political and cultural separation of Ireland and England.7 Born circa 1822 in Dublin, her family were ‘Protestant and Conservative, and there was no social intercourse between them and the Catholics and Nationalists’.8 Her paternal grandfather had been Rector of Wexford and Archdeacon of Leighlin. His son (her uncle) followed him to the diocese of Wexford. Jane Francesca’s maternal grandfather had been Rector of Kildare, and she was related by marriage to Charles Robert Maturin, profoundly anti-Catholic author of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and curate of St Peter’s in Aungier Street. Indeed, the anti-Catholicism of Jane Elgee’s family can be gauged through a reading of this novel, which characterises Catholicism as a blood-crazed cult of masochism and torture. In one of the novel’s many memorable moments, a Jesuit Superior tells his young charge that, in the hopes of convincing God to make the boy a priest, he spent the night ‘macerating myself at the foot of the altar for you, my child, – the scourge is red with my blood’.9 Wilde would later acknowledge this ultra-Protestant heritage in taking part of his post-prison pseudonym ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ from the anti-hero of his great-uncle’s novel, though combining it with St Sebastian, who was an iconic figure to many Roman Catholics. Both sides of his mother’s family were extremely well-connected members of the Protestant establishment, and antagonistic to any stirrings of nationalist opinion. Given this intellectual heritage, they were shocked when she dramatically converted to militaristic Irish nationalism at some point in the 1840s. The Young Ireland Movement had emerged as a major political force in 1842, led mainly by Protestants like the inspiring figure of Thomas Davis. The movement argued that Ireland would only become a prosperous country once the connection with England was completely severed, and claimed that England had only managed to maintain this connection by fostering sectarian division between the religious groups on the island. For this reason, the Young Irelanders pursued a programme of cultural unity which would emphasise the common cultural inheritance

4

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

of all the religious traditions, and which they believed would bring these traditions together. It established a newspaper, The Nation, to promote these ideas, and published political poems and articles which articulated the movement’s ideals. Many of its main figures, such as John Mitchel, believed that only a military offensive would bring an end to the political connection between the two islands.10 Wilde’s mother became a key figure in this movement in the 1840s. At least two versions of how she became involved with the Young Irelanders were propagated. Oscar Wilde told an audience, at a lecture in San Francisco in 1882, that his mother had no knowledge of the Young Irelanders at all until she witnessed the impressive funeral of Thomas Davis in 1845. Determined to know why so many were mourning this man, she ‘bought and read his poems and knew for the first time the meaning of the word country’.11 His mother gave a more mundane version of her political beginnings. She told a reporter that she became interested in Irish nationalism after reading The Spirit of the Nation, a collection of Young Ireland poems published in 1843.12 The passion and politics of this collection inspired her to become involved, and she began writing radical articles and poetry for the movement under the pen name ‘Speranza’ (‘Hope’). During this period the Famine was raging in Ireland (c. 1845–50), and Speranza’s verse became more extremist as the suffering in Ireland became more severe. One famous poem of 1847, which demonstrates the extent of Speranza’s nationalism, is ‘The Brothers’, which commemorates John and Henry Sheares who had been hanged for their role in an Irish rebellion of 1798. In the poem Speranza envisions the nationalist dead of the past demanding that the present generation fight for Ireland as they did: Oh! they preach to us, those still and pallid features – Those pale lips yet implore us, from their graves, To strive for our birthright as God’s creatures, Or die, if we can but live as slaves.13 In ‘The Enigma’, published in 1848, she openly called for the spilling of as much English blood as possible: What! are there no MEN in your Fatherland, To confront the Tyrant’s stormy glare, With a scorn as deep as the wrongs ye bear, With defiance as fierce as the oaths they sware, With vengeance as wild as the cries of despair, That rise from your suffering Fatherland?14

Introduction

5

This militaristic tradition was continued in the same year when Speranza contributed two inflammatory articles to The Nation, ‘The Hour of Destiny’ and, more famously, ‘Jacta Alea Est’ (‘The Die is Cast’), which called for ‘a hundred thousand muskets’ to be arraigned against English forces.15 That the English forces might conceivably include her own family seemed not to dissuade her, and understandably tensions between them remained palpable. In the first extant letter of Oscar Wilde’s this tension is evident: Wilde enjoins his mother to write to her sister – his ‘Aunt Warren’ – on green paper!16 Emily Warren had married an English army officer, Captain Samuel Warren, and undoubtedly failed to appreciate her sister’s desire to overrun the English army through war and bloodshed. After a raid on the offices of The Nation by the police force, ‘Jacta Alea Est’ was found, and the editor, Charles Gavin Duffy, was charged with treason. His subsequent trial made Speranza an even greater nationalist figure as she attempted to defend Duffy by insisting on her own authorship of the treasonous article. During the trial she twice stood up in the gallery and attempted to announce that she was the one who had committed treason, but was prevented from doing so by police officers,17 an attempt which was soon embellished in an article in Irish Society in 1892, which claimed she had proclaimed, ‘I am the culprit, if culprit there be.’18 While the level of her involvement in the nationalist cause became muted after the failure of the Young Ireland Revolution (1846), her poetry reveals the extent of her disillusionment with her Protestant background. Shocked by the magnitude of the Famine of the 1840s, she blamed the Protestant Ascendancy as part of an English garrison. Writing in the midst of the Famine, she employed the Evangelical rhetoric she inherited from her clergymen-relations to castigate those very relations for their impotence in the face of the catastrophe. Speranza’s deconstructive use of her Protestant heritage, however, reveals her continued dependence on it, as well as abhorrence of it: despite antipathy to Protestant Ireland in a general sense, it was not a place she felt able to abandon intellectually (as well as morally). Oscar Wilde’s father, William Wilde, also came from a conservative background. He was born in Co. Roscommon in 1815 to a resolutely Protestant family – his brothers Ralph and John both became clergymen.19 Military or political nationalism did not appeal to him. However, as well as the political nationalism of the Young Ireland Movement, in order to locate themselves in an Ireland dominated by this Catholic majority many nineteenth-century Protestants sought to express their nationalism by transcending the island’s sectarian divisions through an

6

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emphasis on a Celtic or pre-Christian Irish past. Folkloric research, archaeology and antiquarianism all emphasised the pagan heritage of Ireland, a heritage which all sections of Irish society, regardless of denominational division, could share. This form of nationalism was particularly dominant in institutions like the Royal Irish Academy which was dedicated to the collection and analysis of Irish antiquities. William Wilde became interested in this cultural nationalism that was fermenting among some members of his class. As well as becoming a doctor, specialising in aural surgery, he devoted much time and effort to this cultural research, becoming a member of a large range of institutions such as the Celtic Society and the Royal Irish Academy. He had, after all, grown up surrounded by Catholic peasants from whom he had heard many traditional Irish stories. In 1837 he left Ireland to travel through the Middle East where he became interested in collecting antiquities, about which journey he wrote The Narrative of a Voyage to Maderia, Teneriffe and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean (1840). On returning to Ireland he began to explore the antiquities of the Irish landscape and combined this with the collection of Irish folklore and superstitions. Although, like most of his class, Sir William had a deep-seated distrust and dislike of Catholicism as a theological system, his experience of the ordinary Catholic peasantry as a child had created in him a wish to forge intellectual and cultural connections with them. William Wilde argued that Catholicism had merely a superficial hold on the peasantry, and that at a deep psychological level they were still pagans, the best evidence of which was their folklore and their superstitious customs. This attitude can clearly be seen in Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), where he argues that most traditional Irish customs have their roots in a pre-Christian rather than a Catholic world-view. In the superstitions he describes Sir William finds ‘the vestiges of Pagan rites’, rather than Catholic ritual, and he takes pleasure in describing the failed attempts by Catholic priests to obliterate this vestigial paganism. The priests knew, for example, that the ancient Irish worshipped the sun and celebrated this great Druidic feast in May. The Catholic missionaries tried to move this celebration to the Eve of St John the Baptist’s feast in June, but ‘bonfires are still lighted in some places in Ireland on the last evening in April and in others on the 1st of May’.20 Wilde’s father had an extraordinarily close bond with ordinary Irish Catholics in the west of Ireland. In exchange for medical advice he would extract from them the traditional folkloric tales by which he was fascinated. Lady Wilde wrote of her husband:

Introduction

7

By the peasantry he was peculiarly loved and trusted, for he had brought back joy and hope to many households. How gratefully they remembered his professional skill, always so generously given; and how, in the remote country districts, he would often cross moor and mountain at the summons of some poor sufferer, who believed with simple faith that the Docteur mór (the great doctor as they called him) would certainly restore the blessed light of heaven to blind-struck eyes. In return, they were even glad to aid him in his search for antiquities, and to him came many objects of the peasant class for his inspection and opinion . . . 21 In 1857 his archaeological and folkloric activities led him to organise a visit for the British Association to the Aran Islands, which lie off the west coast of Ireland, for an examination of its prehistoric fort Dún Aengus. Moreover, although his medical practice was in Dublin, Sir William purchased holiday homes in the west, Illanroe Cottage in Connemara and Moytura House in Co. Mayo, and would retreat to these places as much as possible. A queer mixture of medical prowess and folkloric faith transmitted itself into Sir William’s more theoretically rigorous studies. For example, he had been appointed medical adviser for the 1841 census, and promoted to commissioner for those of 1851, 1861 and 1871, for which work he was knighted in 1864. While providing a wealth of statistical evidence in these censuses, Sir William would routinely mingle folkloric and legendary material with the most banal scientific facts. The entries in the 1851 census, for example, chart Irish history from the earliest times right up to the nineteenth century. The submission for AD 763 includes the ‘information’ that Three showers were shed in the land of Muireadaigh, in Inis Owen, viz., a shower of bright silver, a shower of wheat, and a shower of honey. A great snow for almost three months. A great dearth of food [áscolt mór, et fames]. Great drought beyond measure. Rith fola [dysentry] in all Ireland. The sun darkened at the third hour of the day.22 Folkloric exploration was one way for the Protestant Ascendancy to relocate themselves in Irish consciousness, but Sir William took his own investigations much further than simply a validation of the Irish past as a worthy object of study. In his writings he upheld a variety of antiquarian discourses that had been under attack for about eighty years

8

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

because of their dubious scientific value. He used these discourses to write his famous Irish Popular Superstitions, and their influence can also be felt in his studies of The Beauties of the Boyne (1849) and Lough Corrib (1867). When Lady Wilde attempted to arrange the copious notes her husband had left behind him (after his death in 1876) into two collections, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1888) and Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland: Contributions to Irish Lore (1890), Sir William’s routine mingling of the scientific and the folkloric became clear. While popular, both volumes were criticised by the intelligentsia for the contamination of empiricism by romanticism. Douglas Hyde wrote that, although the volumes were ‘a wonderful and copious record of folk-lore customs’, they were seriously flawed as ‘we do not know what is Lady Wilde’s and what is not’.23 Angela Bourke has explained the late nineteenth century in Ireland as a period where the baby of folkloric knowledge was thrown out with the bathwater in an attempt to direct the project of modernity towards a distinctly non-modern Irish landscape. Bourke points out that, in trying to transform Ireland from a traditional peasant society into one more open to industrialisation and economic modernisation, the political, religious and scientific establishment attempted to destroy longestablished forms of knowledge such as folkloric medicine, botany and ‘superstition’, and in doing so abandoned much that was good and positive about such traditions.24 Although a well-respected scientist, Wilde’s father ironically turns up in the folkloric vanguard. As he often brought Oscar Wilde with him on his archaeological, anthropological and folkloric expeditions west,25 a deep sympathy, not only for the people but also for the forms of wisdom available to them, would have been accessible to Wilde from the start of his life. Oscar Wilde grew up, then, in a home which was not only in Ireland, but was dedicated to the cultural and political independence of the country. He had been called ‘Oscar Fingal O’fflahertie Wills Wilde’ because of his parents’ interest in this Irish cultural nationalist heritage. ‘Oscar’ was the name of the grandson of Fionn MacCumhaill, the leader of a mythological group of Irish warriors, the Fianna, to which many Irish nationalist organisations like the Young Irelanders looked for inspiration. ‘Fingal’ was the name James MacPherson had used for Fionn in his ‘translation’ of the Ossian cycle in 1762. This poetic cycle described the exploits and adventures of the Fianna. The O’fflaterties were a leading native family of the west of Ireland who had provided many of the chieftains of the mythological past, and had been described enthusiastically by Sir William in his book on the Boyne valley.

Introduction

9

Moreover, as a young boy, Wilde met leading members of the Irish intellectual and political world dedicated, as were his parents, to promoting Irish cultural nationalism. These figures included not only other members of the Young Irelanders and the Royal Irish Academy but also Isaac Butt, the leader of the Home Rule Party. Both Speranza and Sir William were supportive of the Home Rule Movement, and Oscar Wilde would himself become a strong proponent of the man who would lead that movement during the 1880s and early 1890s, Charles Stewart Parnell. In the dedication of her collected Poems (1862), Speranza asserts that she taught her sons to ‘speak plain the word COUNTRY’,26 and this nationalism remained with Wilde throughout his life. Educated at both the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and Trinity College, Dublin, Wilde remained in Ireland until 1874 when he won a classical demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. A study which emphasises this Irish inheritance would, thus, seem reasonable. In the history of criticism devoted to Wilde, however, up to the 1990s the Irish cultural milieu in which he grew up was, if anything, de-emphasised, or read simply as biographical ‘background’ rather than of crucial importance to an analysis of his writings. It was argued that, after leaving Ireland to attend Oxford, Wilde effectively left Ireland and Irish materials behind. A good example of this kind of criticism is Alan Warner’s Guide to Anglo-Irish Literature which bluntly states that ‘[Wilde’s] plays have no Irish dimension’, a view echoed in Maurice Harmon and Roger McHugh’s survey of Anglo-Irish Literature which argues that Wilde ‘properly belongs to English theatrical history’.27 Compared with the cultural work of his parents, who take Ireland as their subject in their key works, Ireland simply does not appear overtly in Wilde’s major writings. Even in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), the most comprehensive and broadly conceived collection of Irish literature from the beginnings of writing in Ireland to the contemporary period, Wilde is included somewhat grudgingly by the general editor Seamus Deane, who is also one of the most important cultural critics in Irish Studies. Deane argues that Wilde made too many compromises with English literary convention to be considered a truly Irish figure: ‘the subversive, even radical critique of society that is implicit in what he has to say, finds no release within the linguistic conventions which he mocked but by which he remained imprisoned’.28 Deane, however, does not have the final word on Wilde in this anthology. In another section Declan Kiberd argues that The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) should be read as an implicit examination of the

10

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

colonial relationship between England and Ireland as configured through the town/country antinomy which Wilde’s text unravelled. For Kiberd, Wilde ‘challenged, by his personal behaviour as well as by artistic skill, the prevailing stereotypes of the Irish in Britain’.29 Developing this in his more recent readings of Wilde’s work, Kiberd has argued that through such writings we can trace how dialectical colonial identities become implicated in one another: Wilde’s work exposes how historically contingent Irish and English identity are to the cultural, economic and political relations between the two islands. Kiberd sees Wilde as aesthetically committed to exposing this contingency because of Wilde’s political commitment to an Irish Republican agenda, so that, in performing this critique, Wilde should be seen as continuing the nationalist work of his parents in a more subtle manner, undermining the imperial system, in which Ireland was kept subordinate, from within: ‘if Sir William did his research among the duns of Aran, his famous son studied a rather different set of prehistoric ruins, the English upper classes’.30 Before such an agenda could be achieved in political terms, artists had to demonstrate that the discourse which held Ireland in a colonially subservient position was hollow from the start. Kiberd claims that Wilde took on the cherished gender divisions of the Victorian English family in order to disrupt the power relations that operated in the imperial system. Wilde understood that the domestic divisions which constructed the Victorian male as an active, assertive and rational force and the Victorian woman as the passive, spiritual and emotional subordinate were also applied to justify imperialism, with the imperial centre seen as masculine and the colonised margins as feminine. In order to undermine this construction, ‘Wilde always liked to create manly women and womanly men’, a strategy which also implied that all such dualisms, including those of centre and periphery, were fictions.31 In this way, Kiberd can read Wilde as an important precursor to the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890s which had W. B. Yeats at its centre. Wilde was a good friend of Yeats, and also of George Bernard Shaw, and in a letter to Shaw he indicated that he saw himself as contributing to what he termed a ‘Celtic School’.32 This formulation was later applied to the poetry of Yeats and his imitators. Kiberd’s work was complemented by Davis Coakley’s biography Oscar Wilde: the Importance of Being Irish (1994), which traced in detail Wilde’s early life in Ireland, the influence of his parents and the political and artistic circle they operated in, and the impact these early experiences had on Wilde’s later writings. Coakley argued persuasively that ‘Wilde’s formative years in Ireland left a significant imprint on his writing’.33

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Although Coakley drew out these continuing influences in an unsystematic and often impressionistic fashion, he provided much-needed empirical evidence to demonstrate the importance of Ireland to Wilde’s life and work. In 1998, Owen Dudley Edwards adopted a similar style, though with more analytically telling results, drawing attention to a series of relationships between Wilde’s work and nineteenth-century Irish history, including his admiration of Charles Stewart Parnell the leader of Irish constitutional nationalism, the importance of his Evangelical family background, and the impact of his education in Portora Royal School, Enniskillen and Trinity College, Dublin, which served as laboratories in which Wilde’s intellectual life was developed. Edwards argues that the influence of Ireland on Wilde is elusive, and that ‘our desert is so barren of information on his Irish life’ so that we need to develop a new hermeneutic to probe behind the manifest content of Wilde’s writings to excavate the Irish elements.34 This theoretical and empirical foundation has been built on in subsequent scholarship which appeared in the 1990s. Richard Pine addresses Wilde’s place in an Irish canon, showing how his work fits in with fellow Irish Protestant cultural and political nationalists. Pine argues that Wilde demonstrates the complexities of life for a middle-class Irish Protestant of the nineteenth century, caught between the poles of England and Ireland, nationalism and loyalism, aristocrat and peasant, and claims that even Wilde’s sexual life should be seen as an articulation of this ‘middle way’. To Pine, Wilde’s Protestant Irishness marginalised him in both nineteenth-century Ireland and England, and this marginalisation attracted him to other forms of minority culture, including the homosexual subculture of Victorian London: Wilde stood irreconcilably outside both worlds, the English society which, by virtue of his difference, he was to shock, subvert, and despise for the rest of his life, and the Irish world which became more of a state of mind than a home.35 This ‘difference’ translated into all areas of his life, including his sexual and literary life; Wilde’s nationality can then be seen as an interpretive key unlocking all aspects of his work. Pine’s basic proposition – that Irishness disrupts the received wisdom of authoritative Victorianism – finds echoes in the work of Jerusha McCormack who argues that since Protestant Irish identity is a fluid and antinomian condition it can help explain the protean and indefinable qualities of Wilde’s own life and work. Because Wilde was ‘born into

12

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

a class known as the Anglo-Irish, at once a pillar of a rotting imperial regime in Dublin and more Irish than the Irish themselves . . . Wilde became adept at living on both sides of the hyphen’.36 She demonstrates this through a series of acute readings of Wilde’s writings, illustrating how their incorporation of Irish material, such as folklore and contemporary history, destabilises the English milieu in which he operated: his work is the literary equivalent of ‘guerrilla’ warfare, which, she believes, can only be interpreted ‘from the margins of society, from the perspective of the poor, the colonised, the disreputable and dispossessed’.37 Terry Eagleton’s play, Saint Oscar (1989), was a more creative contribution to this debate. Eagleton’s Wilde is a wildly contradictory figure, who periodically reveals his Irish identity, but who is quite prepared to adopt an ‘English’ persona as it suits. In response to his mother’s insistent talk about Irish nationalism, Eagleton has Wilde say I always speak up for Ireland, whenever the God-forsaken English scoff at it. Anyway, we were never Irish, mother: we’re Protestant gentlefolk with a house in Merrion Square and four others in Bray. What do we have in common with a clodhopper from Kinsale?38 Even in such contradictions as simultaneously asserting and denying his national identity, however, Eagleton’s Wilde is a very Irish Wilde: elsewhere Eagelton has argued that such contradiction is crucial to understanding the use of language in a colonial context. Eagleton claims that, denied access to normative discourses by the colonial power, writers in colonised countries are forced to use language in a variety of non-normative ways. Thus, in order to challenge the dominant language of realism in nineteenth-century England, writers like Wilde became experts in anti-mimeticism demonstrating that, for the Irish, ‘language . . . compensates for a history in which you are more determined than determining, more object than agent’.39 By exploring Wilde’s Irish roots, these critics have demonstrated the importance of George Bernard Shaw’s claim that ‘it must not be forgotten that though by culture Wilde was a citizen of all civilised capitals, he was at root a very Irish Irishman, and as such, a foreigner everywhere but in Ireland’.40 It is important to note, however, that the Irish Wilde produced by these recent studies has been, primarily, a Protestant Wilde. Not only were Wilde’s parents Protestants, but the kinds of nationalist projects they were involved in were also predominantly the work of Irish Protestants. As I have noted, the folkloric projects engaged in by

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13

Sir William and Jane Wilde were attempts by Protestant nationalists to understand better the culture of the majority of the Irish population, who were poor and Catholic. The educational institutions Wilde attended were also bastions of Protestant interest in Ireland. In emphasising Wilde’s Irish inheritance, these critics have seen Wilde primarily as a member of a small group of the Protestant ruling class in Ireland who decided to become nationalists, a minority within a minority, who held on to much of the social and religious prejudices of the class from which they emerged. Even where critics have indicated a Catholic dimension to Wilde’s Irishness, as Owen Dudley Edwards does in his suggestive analysis of The Sphinx (1894),41 there is no real attempt to explain the exact relationship of this interest to Wilde’s Protestant provenance. This Protestant milieu makes the second part of my argument, that Wilde was a Catholic writer, somewhat puzzling, and it is to this puzzle I now turn.

II Oscar Wilde did display a clear interest in Catholicism from a young age. Despite her Protestantism, Speranza was attracted by the Catholic Church. In an article in 1850, she argued that the Catholic Church deserved considerable praise because of its cultural achievements: Indeed, the sole patron of the Arts is the Catholic Church and considering the scant and insufficient means supplied by the faithful and impoverished people, it is marvellous to what an amount we are indebted to it for all that is best in architectural, pictorial or sculptured art throughout the country. Catholicism alone has comprehended the truth that Art is one of the noblest languages of religion.42 Moreover, she had her two sons schooled in Catholic theology and also baptised, in an unregistered ceremony, by a Roman Catholic convert from the Quakers, Fr Prideaux Fox, in a church in Glencree, Co. Wicklow, when they were between four and six.43 This act surely impressed upon Oscar Wilde the possibilities of private and imaginative nonconformity. By having him baptised a second time, Speranza was suggesting that Protestantism was ultimately an insufficient mythology through which to interpret reality. Speranza’s husband was not so enthusiastic about such romantic extravagances, though, when Fr Fox told him about the second baptisms, he allegedly said that he didn’t care ‘what the boys are, as long as they

14

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

become as good as their mother’.44 That he did care became evident soon afterwards. When Wilde became friends with Jesuits based in St Francis Xavier’s Church in Upper Gardiner Street, on Dublin’s North side, Sir William became irritated, and allegedly encouraged his transfer to Oxford so as to quell his Roman fever. Sir William was, however, clearly mistaken in his belief that Oxford would distract his son from the Roman Catholic Church as Oxford had been the centre of a revival of crypto-Catholicism since the 1830s. Catholicism in England had been in decline since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Protestantism became the state religion. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, a number of movements emerged in England which, directly and indirectly, revived Catholic fortunes. The Oxford Movement began as an attempt to reform the Anglican Church from within by a number of men directly connected with Oxford University, including John Keble (Professor of Poetry), Edward Pusey (Regius Professor of Hebrew) and John Henry Newman (Vicar of St Mary’s). Worried about the creeping influence of the secular world, and the British government in particular, on the internal governance of the Church, these men issued a series of ninety Tracts for the Times, between 1833 and 1844, which argued that since the Anglican Church was directly descended from Jesus’ apostles it was the only real purveyor of sacred truth in the world, and therefore could not be interfered with by outside forces. The tracts attempted to demonstrate the connections between the early Catholic Church and the Anglican faith of the nineteenth century. Such attempts caused a great deal of controversy. Many detractors argued that the Tractarians were in fact ‘Papists’ in disguise, and were part of a Catholic conspiracy to undermine the Protestantism of the Anglican Church. Such criticisms were reinforced when Newman publicly converted to Catholicism in 1845, shortly after his final tract which claimed that the Thirty-Nine Articles, which distinguished the Anglican Church from the Roman Catholic Church, were, in fact, compatible with traditional Catholic doctrine. His conversion served as an inspiration for others, and by 1864 nearly one thousand ministers, theological leaders and Anglican Church members had followed him to Rome. In that year Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua was published. It explained the reasoning behind his departure from Anglicanism and the process whereby he became convinced of the truth of Catholicism. Newman was made a Roman Catholic cardinal in 1879.45 Although the Oxford Movement was characterised by an attraction to the austerity and severity of the lives of the early saints, its interest in

Introduction

15

Catholic doctrine and liturgy inspired others within the Anglican Church, who would be termed Ritualists, to embrace such ‘Roman’ practices and doctrines as confession, altar candles, eucharistic vestments and belief in the Real Presence. Such Ritualists were distinctive in the vestments they wore during religious services, their use of incense in religious services and the doctrinal language they adopted. Again, Oxford was a key centre for the practice of Ritualism, with Edward King, Professor of Pastoral Theology, of major importance to the promotion and organisation of the movement which was attacked for its affinity with Catholicism as much as the Oxford Movement was.46 The Oxford Movement, and later the Ritualists, provided countercultural models for male relationships in an England dominated by the muscular Christianity of the Low Church Evangelicals. In opposition to a masculinity focused on hetero-normative ideals of reproduction, ‘toughness of fibre’ and intense rationality, Tractarianism and Ritualism offered, as James Eli Adams has argued, ‘a model of an elite brotherhood that defined itself through the possession of arcane (and presumably unorthodox) wisdom or values’.47 This model of intense fraternity made these movements particularly attractive to men who found themselves, for a variety of reasons, marginalised by the dominant culture of the time. It was into this atmosphere of intense religious debate that Wilde was sent to purge Catholicism from his imagination, and, unsurprisingly, it seems to have only fuelled his interest. He became close friends with David Hunter-Blair and William Welmsford Ward, and the three of them had prolonged religious discussions, with Blair serving as an advocate for Catholicism, and Ward for Protestantism.48 Blair dramatically ‘went over’ to the Catholic Church in 1875 during a visit to Rome, came back a Catholic evangelical, and persuaded some other undergraduates in Oxford to follow him. By this time Wilde was openly flirting with a public conversion – since he had been baptised into the Church, theologically Wilde was a Catholic already. He plagued his Protestant friends – in particular Ronald Sutherland-Gower – with talk of Catholicism, and had pictures of Newman and the Pope in his rooms.49 However, he cited financial problems with such a conversion, claiming that should he convert his father would cut him off. In 1877, Blair almost convinced Wilde to make a public declaration of his Catholic interests. During the summer Wilde travelled to Greece with his former tutor from Trinity College, Professor Mahaffy, and subsequently visited Rome, where Blair had arranged a meeting with Pope Pius IX. Back in England, in April 1878, Wilde made a significant

16

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

visit to the well-known Reverend Sebastian Bowden in the Brompton Oratory in London to discuss the possibilities of ‘coming out’ as a Catholic. Wilde does not seem to have ‘gone over’ however, particularly as financial pressure was being placed on him at this stage. Wilde’s half-brother Henry Wilson had died in 1877, and had included in his will a clause disinheriting Wilde should he convert. Wilde’s immediate response to this was caustic: He was, poor fellow, bigotedly intolerant of the Catholics, and seeing me ‘on the brink’ struck me out of his will . . . Fancy a man going before ‘God and the Eternal Silences’ with his wretched Protestant prejudices and bigotry still clinging to him.50 Wilde’s post-Oxford life also involved Catholic interests. At various times, he moved in the same artistic and literary circles as a number of artists and writers who eventually converted to Catholicism, including John Gray (converted 1890), Lionel Johnson (converted 1891), Marc-André Raffalovitch (converted 1896) and Aubrey Beardsley (1898). Most important, he became involved in a relationship with Robert Ross, an intense Canadian Catholic. Ross later claimed to have been the first homosexual lover of Wilde, and their friendship lasted until Wilde’s death with Ross becoming his literary executor. In fact, we owe the shape of some of Wilde’s writings – including The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889), De Profundis (1905) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) – to Ross’s influence, and, as Wilde’s letters demonstrate, Ross operated as a sounding board against which Wilde tested his Catholic interests. This friendship may be read as a continuation of that with Blair while at Oxford. Ross was clearly a constant advocate of Catholicism for Wilde, and he was particularly anxious that Wilde receive the final sacraments before he died. Wilde did, indeed, receive the sacraments just before he died in Paris in November 1900, having spent his post-prison years wandering Europe, and receiving blessings from the Pope at least seven times. In the hours before Wilde’s death, Ross sent for Fr Cuthbert Dunne, a Passionist priest from Dublin, and he administered the sacraments to an incoherent Wilde who may or may not have signalled his desire for them.51 The ‘Catholic Wilde’ has not been examined to the same extent as the ‘Irish Wilde’, perhaps because of the intellectual dominance of Richard Ellmann’s informative, though flawed, biography.52 Although Ellmann crucially and clearly established the extent to which Wilde engaged with the structures of the Catholic Church, he believed that

Introduction

17

such engagement was merely an aspect of Wilde’s aesthetic extravagance rather than evidence of any spiritual attachment. Ellmann unambiguously maintains throughout the biography that Wilde’s interest in the Church was aesthetic rather than spiritual, and that even this aesthetic interest had largely deserted him by the time he came to write his most important texts. Ellmann argues from the very start of his study that Wilde’s interest in the Church was due to ‘a delight in the forms of Catholicism, rather than its content’.53 It is, however, thanks to Ellmann that we have a clear picture of Wilde’s involvement with the ecclesiastical establishment. It is Ron Schuchard who has done most to challenge Ellmann’s reading, arguing that Wilde’s Catholic interest occupied him throughout his writing life and, as his ‘dark angel’, this interest saturates his texts with a ‘fear of damnation that underlies an excess of sensual pleasure’,54 reworking James Joyce’s argument that at the ‘very base’ of Wilde’s work ‘is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin’.55 However, this reading nonetheless supports Ellmann’s insistence that Catholicism is basically incompatible with Wilde’s sexual and intellectual interests and operates as a counterfoil to these interests. In proposing this reading such critics unwittingly support those conservative Catholic readers who have long viewed Wilde’s life as an unfortunate distraction from his ‘true’ goal which was acceptance into the Catholic Church.56 Sir Shane Leslie, for example, argued that Catholicism was banished from Wilde’s mind during his sexually active years and that ‘it was not until Oscar agonised in prison that Catholicism was revived in his mind. No one who reads his De Profundis can deny his penitence.’57 Of course, what he is penitent for, in this reading, is his sexual activity. This paradigm understands him as the prodigal son of Rome, the self-exiled child of Catholicism who finally made it home on his deathbed, and who is belatedly welcomed, although his previous behaviour is obviously disapproved of, and there is a difficulty in accepting most of his literary work within any Catholic ethos. More recent scholarship has complicated this reading of Catholicism somewhat. Ellis Hanson has interestingly demonstrated the pervasive engagement with Catholicism that can be traced throughout Wilde’s oeuvre positing that, pace Ellmann, Wilde’s engagement with it was not ‘simply’ aesthetic but was doctrinal also, and, pace Schuchard and others, that Catholicism does not in any simple way operate as a counterposition to his sexuality. Hanson argues that

18

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

Like other decadents, Wilde found in Roman Catholicism a florid and profound discourse of sin that gave shape and moral significance to transgression. For Wilde, however, the Catholic Church was itself a troubling and exquisite vision . . . He was tempted by the beauty of the Church . . . [and] by the power of its poetry to transform his consciousness . . . 58 Hanson points to a Catholic milieu in which Wilde worked, a milieu very important in aesthetic and personal terms to Wilde. The extent to which Catholicism and deviant sexuality were linked in the 1890s is clear from Hanson’s study, and writers important to Wilde, such as Walter Pater, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Arthur Symons and John Gray, are, he believes, best seen as part of a general Catholic aesthetic.59 There has been, then, much excellent research done on both Wilde’s Irishness and his Catholicism. However, the key point is that these two aspects of Wilde’s work have been kept apart. Those who have looked at the Irish Wilde have emphasised what was largely a Protestant cultural inheritance; those who have looked at Wilde’s Catholicism have emphasised either an English or a French Catholic angle. For example, in a recent study of the relations between ‘same-sex desire’ and religion in Victorian England, Frederick S. Roden asserts that ‘despite his Irishness, Wilde’s Catholicism was that of the male, homosocial Oxford Movement – not the cultural Roman Catholicism of his ethnic heritage’.60 Likewise, David Alderson contends that ‘the Catholicism which appealed to [Wilde] appears to have been a distinctly English version’.61 In the present study, I argue, on the contrary, that it is a specifically (though not exclusively) Irish Catholicism which pervades Wilde’s writings, and it will be the burden of the rest of this book to show why this approach to his career clarifies previously neglected aspects of his aesthetics and politics.

III There are some key points to make about this Irish Catholicism, most importantly that it was not monolithic: there were at least two versions of Irish Catholicism prevalent in the nineteenth century. The first form of Catholicism was a version of folk-Catholicism, predominant in rural areas of the country, such as the west coast and the south. This was a form of Catholicism with strong connections to pre-Christian traditions, and which blended belief in fairies, magical healing, holy wells, popular prophecies and divination with more ‘orthodox’ Catholicism

Introduction

19

such as Transubstantiation, Marianism and the sacraments. Although Irish Protestants often claimed that the popular religion of the common people had little or nothing to do with Catholicism, most ordinary Catholics in Ireland had, in fact, cross-fertilised orthodox Catholicism with pre-Christian traditions to produce a highly creative syncretic form of popular Catholicism.62 It was precisely this syncretism which was at risk of being wiped out in the second half of the nineteenth century when, in the words of Emmet Larkin, a ‘devotional revolution’ took place. The second form of Irish Catholicism operating in this period, the insitutional Catholic Church, pressured by its Continental superiors, set itself the task of purging all ‘pagan’ or folk-Catholic elements from the religion of the people.63 Although Larkin argues that this was a highly successful mission, it took at least a century to effect. Importantly, William Wilde’s books tell us that the Catholicism that he and his children encountered in the west of Ireland was precisely this threatened version of the folk-Catholic, a version Sir William believed should be preserved: These matters of popular belief and folks’-lore, these rites and legends, and superstitions, were after all, the poetry of the people, the bond that knit the peasants to the soil, and cheered and solaced many a cottier’s fireside.64 Wilde was, this book will argue, attracted to both orthodox and heterodox Irish Catholicism. Moreover, while, as I have pointed out, his father insisted that the religion of the peasantry was in fact Celtic rather than Catholic, my book will demonstrate that Wilde recognised the syncretic aspect of this religion, and he saw in the Catholicism of the Oxford Movement and Ritualism some of the elements of the popular religion that he encountered in the west of Ireland as a child. Wilde’s writings demonstrate his attraction towards both forms of Catholicism in operation, and they thrive on the dynamic tension between them. It is important to understand how my approach to Wilde’s Irish Catholic heritage fits in with current interpretations of Wilde. Until the theoretical revolution in English studies in the 1980s it was traditional to dismiss Wilde and his work as indicative of the pathology of his sexuality. In other words, deviant sexuality was considered the explanation for the strangeness of much of Wilde’s writings. For those with no sympathy for him, his sexuality provided the excuse to treat his texts as trivial and his influence on literature as a sickness. However, even critics who were well disposed to Wilde tended to consider him as

20

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

a representative figure for a sexual minority, and read his writings as occluded attempts to treat of this marginalised position. Both kinds of critics produced a tragic Wilde, although from profoundly different angles: for sexually conservative reactionaries Wilde had brought the tragedy on himself; for others Wilde was a social victim, ultimately powerless against the forces of a conformist society.65 In the years since the theoretical revolution, a new generation of critics has reassessed Wilde’s influence, but, although they have made some startlingly brilliant readings of his life and work, these analyses have remained largely within the paradigm of Wilde the Victorian subversive, though it has become traditional to welcome his critique of traditional culture. In the analysis of one of his most influential critics, Jonathan Dollimore, Wilde becomes emblematic of what has been called a ‘transgressive aesthetic’, cancelling out or inverting any belief in any fundamental morality or ontology.66 Taking his cue from Jacques Derrida’s daring interpretation of Western philosophy as dominated by a ‘metaphysics of presence’,67 Dollimore in particular has seen Wilde as offering one potential means to deconstruct this oppressive legacy. Dollimore argues that Wilde recognises the binaries along which Western culture works, binaries such as speech/writing, presence/absence, male/female, self/other, and seeks to undo the logic in which the powerful are always legitimated: ‘Wilde’s experience of deviant desire . . . leads him not to escape the repressive ordering of society, but to a reinscription within it, and an inversion of the binaries upon which that ordering depends.’68 In privileging binary divisions Western culture has politically, socially and sexually marginalised those who represent alternative ways of living. Desiring to undo the inherent oppressiveness of this construction, Dollimore argues that Wilde configured a philosophical tactic to invert the binary and raised the previously ‘dead’ term to dominance. The ferocity behind the public and official reaction to Wilde both in his writing life and his trial for ‘gross indecency’ can be explained by the fact that Wilde represented a major threat to the ideologies underpinning Victorian orthodoxy. This theory suggests that, in attempting to dismiss his work as trivial and inconsequential, the critical establishment became an apologist for official culture and refused to confront the challenge Wilde offered to the critical assumptions under which it was working. However, while this approach to Wilde is very useful, it has so far failed to come to terms with Wilde’s clear attraction for such an apparently ‘orthodox’ category as religion.69 When critics have engaged with Wilde’s religious interests they have more often than not dismissed the

Introduction

21

seriousness of his engagement with it.70 It was Frank Harris who warned, ‘no one will understand Oscar Wilde, who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born . . . ’,71 and despite Harris’s general unreliability, even critics as sensitive as Ellis Hanson can dismiss out-of-hand any notion that Wilde was ‘sincere’ in his religious life. In the most recent survey of Wilde criticism, Ian Small has argued that there is a fundamental problem in the production of such alternative readings of Wilde’s life and work: Today it is easy to find critics writing of Wilde the Irish nationalist, Wilde the homosexual, Wilde the craftsman, as well as Wilde the plagiarist. Rarely is there a sense that these different interpretations are not easily compatible with each other: or, rather, an acknowledgement of the simple truth that Wilde cannot be all of these things at the same time.72 Small particularly objects to readings of the ‘Irish Wilde’, proposing that it is the political stance of these critics, rather than any actual creative relationship Wilde had to Ireland, that governs the interpretations offered.73 In order to incorporate Ireland, Wilde’s writings have, he posits, been reduced to an amorphous allegorical thematic, in which the Irish dimension ‘seems rather gratuitously tacked on’.74 However, what most critics have been trying to suggest is that Wilde’s work demonstrates clear thematic links with much other Irish writing and thinking from the end of the nineteenth century, and, noting Wilde’s own interest in Irish history and culture from his childhood, believe that it may be fruitful to explore how these links and influences play out interpretively. The present study attempts to reintegrate the critical paradigms Small denigrates and suggests that they propound such contested readings because, despite the importance of their readings, they offer inadequate interpretations of two sites crucial in any analysis of Wilde’s aesthetic: Catholicism and Ireland. Wilde’s soaring imagination was grounded in his complex material experience of Ireland, yet remained ultimately attached to an even greater Reality through the versions of Catholicism he encountered. Wilde utilised forms that could best express this complicated positioning: children’s literature, the Gothic, the detective story, the fairy tale, the aphorism and a symbolist theatre. Form itself is an important indicator of his ideological leanings. Wilde came from a family and a culture poised between folklore and literature, piety and profanity, periphery and centre, Ireland and England, Catholicism and

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The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

Protestantism, God and man. His family was a cultural nexus, and while growing up he was exposed to multiple discourses and a complex cultural history that would shape his own particular response to the symbolic environments in which he later found himself.

IV A cardinal point that arises from my discussion is that the social and historical milieu in which Wilde encountered Catholicism and Protestantism, in both Ireland and England, cannot easily be isolated from the mythology of either the institutional or metaphysical sphere. Religion functions, not simply as conscious values and rituals committed to memory, demarcated out from the diurnal round. Rather, religion is an intrinsic part of the very consciousness of the human, pervasive even among those who have consciously rejected it. In this way, Catholicism and Protestantism can be seen both consciously and unconsciously to infiltrate everything Wilde wrote. As Louis Althusser has argued, ideological control is most powerful, not in overt actions demanded by such structures of control, but rather in the more banal manifestations of unconscious allegiance to a system.75 Ideology is ubiquitous; so is the religious imagination. The argument here is not that Wilde was deprived of agency and merely replicated a series of systems within his writings. It is precisely that while systems can be absorbed to such a degree that we become unaware of them, the act of faith and the struggle with faith can render such unconsciousness open to some limited degree of control. Consequently, an argument like that posed by Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small in their narrative of Wilde the ‘professional writer’, that Wilde was more attuned to exploiting market opportunities than articulating ideological positions, is weakened because Wilde’s writings can be seen as sites of a struggle between conscious and unconscious forces.76 My methodology is geared towards recovering this Irish Catholic valence in Wilde’s works, and is strongly influenced by the work of new historicist criticism which reveals the deep imbrication of text and context. Whereas the work of Stephen Greenblatt demonstrated, for example, how Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) not only reflected contemporary debates about the existence of purgatory but also actually contributed to that debate,77 the project of my book is to recover the religious and theological histories of each work it examines, to restore these writings to the historical imagination, both cultural and individual, which first produced them.

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Both Wilde and his work are sites of ideological power-struggles between the languages of what David Lloyd has termed the ‘modern’ and the ‘non-modern’. Lloyd is a post-colonial theorist of Irish culture who posits that literary analysis should be an archaeology in search of the discourse of the ‘non-modern’, languages which are neither modern nor traditional, developed nor backward, but that occupy a space that is uncapturable by any such conceptual couples. The non-modern is the name for such a set of spaces that emerge out of kilter with modernity but none the less in a dynamic relationship to it.78 Lloyd identifies Irish culture as one such space where a creative dynamic between the hegemonic and the subversive takes place; I suggest that Catholicism, against which modernity defined itself but which itself refused such designation, often operated as another such space, and that through an active engagement with this space and language Wilde explored potential spiritual trajectories which remain fascinating and highly suggestive in interpreting his writing. This book is chronologically oriented, beginning with an analysis of one of Wilde’s most accomplished early poems, ‘Requiescat’, and ending with his last major poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). However, within this general chronological structure, we will follow the echoes and revisions of themes that appear throughout Wilde’s writing life. Moreover, each chapter will have important implications for the readings posited in other parts of the book. Thus, while Chapter 1 is mostly concerned with explaining why Wilde came to engage so fully with Catholicism, through an examination of his literary reaction to the death of his sister Isola, it will expand to incorporate further delineations of this reaction in his major poem The Sphinx (1894) and the short story ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’ (1891). This chapter will demonstrate the scandalous nature of Catholicism in both Ireland and England in the Victorian period. This theme will be continued in Chapter 2 where Wilde’s engagement with the Higher Criticism of the Bible will be demonstrated, first, in the English context of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and then in the Irish context of Salome (1894).79 Chapter 3 offers a close reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray, picking up on Wilde’s background in folklore, and linking this interest to the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation as illustrated through the changing substance of the portrait. Chapter 4 delineates an exploration of Wilde’s politics, in a focused analysis of ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’

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The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

(1891), and argues that it is through his sacramental vision of Christ’s body as socially transformative that his anarchism and socialism is refracted. If ritual and sacrament are important to Wilde’s political essay, then they are not usually noticed in The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed 1895, first published 1899). In placing this play in the context of the Ritualist movement, in Chapter 5, I hope to demonstrate the critical link between Wildean writings that are usually seen as having little or no relation to each other. Finally, in a reading of his last works, De Profundis (first published in abridged form in 1905) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Chapter 6 will argue that, far from demonstrating a radically different direction for Wilde, these are continuations of the images and themes which occupied him since his first writings. Drawing on a wide variety of Wilde’s writings, I hope to avoid the criticism Ian Small has levelled at some studies, when he claimed that they ignore any sections of the Wilde canon incompatible with their original thesis. In relating a range of both canonical and marginal work, I want to present a relatively comprehensive analysis of Wilde’s oeuvre, and set on solid close readings interpretations which emphasise both Catholicism and Ireland as fundamental poles of Wilde’s aesthetic and critical life. Having shown why the connections between Catholicism and Ireland matter in Wilde’s career, it should be easier for the reader to recognise how they reappear in works that do not, because of space restrictions, receive extended focus here. It is simply impossible, given space constraints, to address each and every one of his numerous writings, and I hope that the present study is suggestive for the interpretations of these unexamined writings.

1 Child and Man: the Development of a Catholic Mind

This chapter attempts to establish why it was that Wilde was attracted to Catholicism rather than Protestantism from an early age, and also sets out to demonstrate that it was a folk-Catholic, rather than either a Continental or English Catholic, imagination which pervaded Wilde’s creative experiments. To do this, I will look closely at one of the crucial moments of Wilde’s childhood, the death of his sister Isola in 1867. This event was of such a traumatic nature that Wilde was forced to find a coherent means of interpreting it. Through a reading of ‘Requiescat’, the poem in which Wilde commemorates Isola’s death, I will show why it was that Wilde saw folk-Catholicism as the best means of interrogating reality. The rest of the chapter traces the reverberations of this interpretation in two different pieces, The Sphinx (1894) and ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’ (1891), as the themes examined in ‘Requiescat’ resonate loudly in these two works.

I The crucial, tormenting, event in Wilde’s youth was the death of his sister. Isola Wilde was born in April 1857. The youngest of the Wilde family, she also became the centre of the household. Vyvyan Holland, Wilde’s own son, remembered his father talking vividly about Isola, and remarks that she had been ‘the pivot around which the family affections of the Wilde family moved’.1 Wilde told his friend Robert Harborough Sherard that Isola had been like ‘a golden ray of sunshine dancing about our home’.2 In 1867, when Wilde was 11 and Isola 9, she became extremely ill and, after a partial recovery, was sent to stay with an aunt in Edgeworthstown, County Longford. Unfortunately, her fever returned and she died. While this death was devastating for the whole 25

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family, it appears to have affected her brother Oscar the deepest. The doctor who attended Isola recalled Wilde’s ‘lonely and inconsolable grief seeking vent in long and frequent visits to his sister’s grave . . . and in touching, boyish poetic effusions’.3 The centrality of Isola’s death to Wilde’s youth is accepted by the major biographers. Richard Ellmann suggests that ‘the melancholy which he always afterwards insisted underlay his jaunty behaviour may have been first awakened by this early death’.4 In an interesting psychoanalytic biography of Wilde, Melissa Knox has put forward a theory about why this death affected Wilde to such an extent. This theory has generated much controversy, and, while it is certainly suggestive, I feel she stretches credibility at times. Knox argues that, since Sir William and Speranza were ‘too preoccupied to give their children enough care and affection’,5 Wilde and his sister had to provide for each other the love their parents could not. This love ‘would have quickly ripened into the pregenital type of intimacy found in these situations’.6 Knox further claims that when the Wilde family were engulfed in a scandal in 1864, this sibling eroticism would have heightened. Mary Travers had been a patient of Sir William Wilde since 1854, and they developed a close friendship which may have involved a sexual element. By 1862 the friendship had become strained, and Sir William encouraged Travers to emigrate to Australia, even giving her £40 for the journey. She never made this journey, however, and aggrieved by the breach in October 1863 Travers wrote a pamphlet which described one ‘Dr Quilp’ (a barely disguised Sir William) raping a patient. She distributed about a thousand of these pamphlets around Dublin in an attempt to destroy Sir William’s reputation. Speranza wrote to Mary Travers’s father complaining and suggesting that his daughter was inventing the entire affair. Mary Travers then successfully sued for libel, though the jury only granted damages of a farthing. The case caused a scandal in Dublin, and appears to have damaged the reputation of both Sir William and Speranza.7 Such a scandal, which placed a strain on the Wilde family, would, argues Knox, have drawn Wilde and his sister even closer, and what Knox calls ‘erotic play’ would have intensified between them.8 Isola’s sudden death effectively stalled Wilde’s sexual development, and Knox claims that practically all of Wilde’s subsequent sexual relationships, but especially that with Lord Alfred Douglas, were recapitulations of his initial love for, and sexual relations with, his sister:

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there is of course nothing out of the ordinary in a four-year-old girl seducing her six-year-old brother; younger children are, we can assume, less inhibited, and erotic play among children of the same family is anything but abnormal.9 Most of Knox’s audacious argument depends upon a reading of a crucial poem, ‘Requiescat’, which Wilde wrote in 1874, some seven years after the death of Isola: Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so, Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone, She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life’s buried here, Heap earth upon it.10 The return of Wilde to the occasion of his sister’s death after seven years is indicative of its lasting impact and his desperation to come to some kind of effective literary and psychological explanation of the event. However, I believe that Knox misreads this poem as an expression of Wilde’s sexual ‘development’, and that, since her argument about the erotic relationship between Wilde and his sister largely depends on a reading of this poem, her hypothetical sexual biography is undermined. What may be witnessed in ‘Requiescat’ is not so much a sexual as a religious struggle. According to Clifford Geertz, humans turn to

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religious systems and symbols to provide some degree of interpretability in the face of chaos at the limits of their capability of moral endurance. Suffering is ‘a radical challenge to the proposition that life is comprehensible’.11 In my view, the death of Isola, coupled with the trauma of the Mary Travers affair, forced Wilde into a search for a web of meaning in which his experiences could be satisfactorily interpreted. As Geertz observes, the response of religion to existential pain is the ‘formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience’.12 ‘Requiescat’ is eloquent testimony to Geertz’s theories, and demonstrates a struggle in Wilde between two different religious responses to death. The final stanza’s plea that ‘Peace, Peace . . . ’ (line 17) descend, suggests the speaker’s desire to banish the dead girl from his imagination. His very life is bound up in the fate of his plea for peace, intimating that either he or his sister will be silenced. However, the poem also witnesses a profound desire for the dead girl, a desire to be near her and to hear her. She clearly represents something deeply disturbing for the speaker, productive of deep ambivalence. While in the first stanza the speaker recognised that ‘she can hear’ (line 3) and ‘she is near’ (line 1), the last stanzas are rhetorical attempts to drive away the spectre of the dead girl by insisting on her literal and spiritual death, piling ‘coffin-board, heavy stone’ (line 13) on her breast to stifle her movements, and insisting ‘she cannot hear’ (line 17). The lyre and sonnet represent a Pre-Raphaelite encounter with powerful ghostly women. The poetry and paintings of D. G. Rossetti, the major figure in the pre-Raphaelite Movement, were characterised by their depiction of what Nina Auerbach has termed ‘sinister’ and phantasmatic female figures,13 often holding lyres in their hands. Associating Isola with such figures suggests that in her refusal to fade from his mind she came to represent the return of the female repressed to her brother. If Isola cannot hear the lure of the Pre-Raphaelite form, then Wilde will escape being haunted by her. The efficacy of this exorcism is undermined by the final lines’ substitution of the speaker for his sister in the grave. There are two languages running through the poem: the first is a language of folkloric spirituality which believes that the dead can awaken; the second that of sceptical modernity, where the dead girl is ‘fallen to dust’ (line 8) and her hair has ‘tarnished with rust’ (line 6). The contamination of hair by rust is suggestive of the power of modern technology to usurp the language of tradition, but also a warning that even machinery is susceptible to the corroding power of Nature. The

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speaker’s modern scepticism is defeated, or at least overpowered, not only by the strength of the dead girl, who can hear, but also by the speaker’s final realisation that he must die himself before his sister will cease to disturb him. Wilde kept an envelope containing ‘My Isola’s hair’ with him throughout his life, and this envelope serves as an ‘intertext’ for this poem. In this I mean that, in introducing Isola’s hair in ‘Requiescat’, Wilde is clearly referring to the presence of this hair inside his personal envelope. This intertextuality is confirmed by the parallel use of Latin in ‘Requiescat’ and on the envelope: the poem has a Latin title, and the envelope contains quotations from Jerome’s Bible. The envelope and the poem clearly belong together. Far from tarnishing into rust, as the poem claims, Isola’s hair was maintained until Wilde died. The envelope quotes Mark 5: 39, ‘She is not dead, but sleepeth’. Isola, silent in the poem, speaks clearly on the envelope: ‘Resurgum’, which means ‘I will rise again’. The poem’s final sublimation of the speaker and the sister – ‘all my life’s buried here’ (line 19) – is perpetuated by the envelope which contains illustrations of an ‘I’ (for Isola) and an ‘O’ (for Oscar) intertwined. A comparison of poem and envelope demonstrates that ‘Requiescat’ is a site of struggle and conflict for Wilde some seven years after the death of his sister, a struggle not only to reconcile himself to her loss but also to reconcile two cultural forces, one which sees empirical scepticism as the way forward – she is dead, the second which continues to warn and hope – she will rise again. Thus, the poem represents two only partially compatible responses to the death of Isola: first, acceptance of her death and insistence that she is at peace; second, agony at her death and insistence that she remains alive. The clashing of registers is impossible to reconcile because it reflects a conflict in the mind of the speaker. As such, the registers require a fusion that can only take place when a conversion of the mind to a language of paradox has occurred. This conflict can be understood if we turn to Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends. She relates there a story of a young girl who died of a fever ‘while away on a visit to some friends’. Instead of bringing her home, her father decided to bury her in the nearest churchyard, an act he was later to regret. In Ireland, the dead cannot rest in peace until carried back to their ancestral burial ground: A few nights after his return home, he was awakened by a mournful wail at the window, and a voice cried, ‘I am alone; I am alone; I am alone!’ Then the poor father knew well what it meant, and he prayed in the name of God that the spirit of his dead child might rest in

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peace until the morning. And when the day broke he arose and set off to the strange burial ground, and there he drew the coffin from the earth, and had it carried all the way back from Cork to Mayo; and after he had laid the dead in the old graveyard beside his people and his kindred, the spirit of the child had rest.14 Wilde’s speaker is in a situation similar to that of the father in this text. Isola was buried, not in her father’s home in Roscommon, but in Edgeworthstown where she died. In the poem the speaker attempts to deny the continued unrest of the dead child, caused presumably by her inappropriate burial, through a sceptical insistence that she is already at peace, but this insistence is undermined by the power of her presence. The poem does suggest one possible resolution to this unrest. Wilde appended the word ‘Avignon’ to the poem in its published version. Avignon contains a number of Catholic shrines, and Wilde probably did visit these while travelling to Rome in 1875, and if so it would tie this poem to the Catholic interests which dominated his life in this period. David Hunter-Blair had converted in the April of 1875, and encouraged Wilde to travel to Rome in the summer in the hopes that seeing the Holy City would coax him into a public conversion. Wilde did not head straight to Rome, however, and, in the company of his ultra-Protestant former Trinity tutor, Professor Mahaffy, took in a number of Italian cities and Catholic shrines, including Avignon. That Catholicism was on his mind during this whole trip is clear from a number of sonnets he wrote while journeying. ‘San Miniato’ describes Wilde’s visit to Fra Angelico’s home as a pilgrimage up ‘the mountainside,/Up to this holy house of God’; another, ‘Rome Unvisited’, expresses a desire to meet the Pope, ‘the only God-appointed King’. The final ‘Avignon’ places ‘Requiescat’ as another response to Wilde’s journey to Rome. That Isola is not literally ‘near’ him (line 1) is indicated by the putative place of writing: what she haunts is a landscape of his mind. While her brother is en route to Rome, Isola desires to be taken home. Home Rule is perhaps, so to speak, Rome Rule. Ironically, Wilde ran out of money before he reached Rome, and in this poem the west of Ireland has to act as a spiritual substitute. This fact, however, confirms my claim that, unlike his father, Wilde saw a creative relationship between the folkloric religion of the Irish west and the institutional Church headed by the Pope. Rome and the west of Ireland are spiritually congruent in ‘Requiescat’. The language of folk belief interpenetrates the language of the more orthodox Catholicism of the Jerome Bible. If the scepticism of the scientist tells Wilde that

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‘She that was young and fair/[is] Fallen to dust’ (lines 7–8), then the faith of the folklorist insists she is demanding to be exhumed and reinterred in Mayo. ‘Avignon’ places Catholicism as the mediating force through which this demand is refracted. Catholicism, after all, was the religion of a people whose belief in the unrest of the dead motivates this vision of the resurgent fever victim, refusing to be forgotten. As Sir William wrote, ‘decomposition may indeed afford the physiologist proof positive that the vital spark has fled, but that avails little with a people who believe that he is “with the fairies”’.15 The poem links Isola very closely to the processes of Nature itself, and the natural rituals of Irish folk life. Isola ‘grew’ as ‘sweetly’ as the daises (line 12). While it is now snowing, time is drawing near for Spring tide. With ‘Requiescat’ providing the heading of the poem, and ‘Avignon’ closing it, Catholicism provides the interpretative framework in which the poem should be read. Catholicism thus emerges as a discourse through which death can be successfully mediated. This may be because, at the time when Wilde was devastated by his sister’s death, he was well aware of the different discourses surrounding the dead in Ireland, one linked with placid resignation, an acceptance of death as God’s majestic decree not to be questioned, and another with a cultural celebration of the loved one living on through cultural practices. Stoic resignation was important to the Portora Royal School which Wilde attended. Portora was one of the Royal Schools of Ulster whose origin dated back to the Plantation; it was inextricably linked to the English presence in Ireland. It was also distinctively Protestant in imaginative terms. In its focus on the written word, especially its attention to the Greek text of the New Testament, Wilde would have observed the Evangelical and Protestant heritage of his parents in its most dynamic literary guise. In 1865 a speech by the Reverend Samuel Greer, Rector of Enniskillen, praised the Protestant ethos of Portora and noted with satisfaction that ‘the reading and study of God’s Word has been by no means neglected’ there.16 The exclusiveness of Portora reinforced the class snobbery undoubtedly implicated in Wilde’s home on Merrion Square, a far cry from the cottages he visited with his father in the west of Ireland. While Wilde was in the Protestant bastion of Portora in 1864 awaiting a Junior School prize-giving celebration a tragedy occurred. On the day preceding the celebration two fellow students drowned in the school lake. This tragedy was practically repeated in 1866 when Frederick Steele, the son of Portora’s headmaster, drowned in a boating accident. It is likely that these deaths would have been the first that Wilde encountered, and the reaction to them would have impacted on his

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assessment of the funereal implications of his sister’s demise just two years later. The response of the school to the first set of deaths was a cancellation of the prize-giving ceremonies; the second death caused a profound and melancholy despondency to descend on the school and indeed over the region. The Impartial Reporter of the time wrote that ‘never has such a settled gloom been cast over our town’.17 Both tragedies were accepted as the judgement of God. One parent submitted the belief that ‘the same Almighty Power who commands the winds and the waves, could . . . say, and for his own wise purposes, “Thus far shalt thou go and no further”’.18 The death of Isola the following year brought a similar feeling of despondency to the Wilde household. Wilde learned of the folk-Catholic reaction to death from his own experiences in the west of Ireland and his mother’s writings. It must have been remarkable to him to observe that the section of her book dealing with rituals of death is titled ‘The Wake Orgies’. Instead of stoic resignation, the peasantry reacted to death with joyful and erotic abandonment. Speranza admits that the more bizarre customs associated with the wake cannot be written about because of their ‘revolting and monstrous nature’, which the priests had been trying to stamp out.19 A modern collector of folklore agrees with this, claiming that ‘it is difficult to obtain precise details about the wake games because of their apparent obscenity’.20 One game involved a mock-marriage where, in the same room where the corpse was displayed, a young couple would get into bed and (in euphemistic terms) a ‘match’ was made.21 Another game, mentioned by Speranza, ‘Drawing the Ship Out of the Mud’, involved a young girl making ‘obscene’ gestures to the gathered menfolk.22 These folk-customs proved surprisingly resilient, and the ‘peasants cling to them with a mysterious reverence . . . [and] accept them as mysteries, ancient usuages of their forefathers, to be sacredly observed, or the vengeance of the dead would fall upon them’.23 The vengeance of the dead is precisely that which is falling on the speaker of Wilde’s poem: having buried Isola in Edgeworthstown graveyard without the attendant wake orgies which celebrate life and ensure that peace is maintained, it is little wonder that the speaker should be so haunted by the vision of his dead sister, for ‘she is not dead, only sleeping’. Even the speaker’s desire to have earth heaped upon him may have its source in folk-Catholic belief. Speranza tells us that one of the three powerful divinations is by clay, which ‘lies level on the earth, and has the mystery of the dead’.24 The despair that engulfed Wilde at this time, and the obvious differences that lay behind the encounter with death in Irish Protestant and Catholic imaginations, may have been the

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catalyst that allowed his relationship with Catholicism to intensify to a point where it would continue to absorb him for the rest of his life. The important thing about folk-Catholicism was that it allowed Wilde to face death in a more positive framework while it also enabled him to retain his parental intellectual inheritance. His mother and father, while Protestant, had introduced him to the Catholic version of the cosmos, not only through his second baptism – where he was schooled in Catholic theology – but also through his encounters with the Irish peasantry in the west. The sexual ‘obscenity’ of the wake games also demonstrates that folkCatholicism was an incredibly sexual force when compared with the asceticism of the Protestant response to death. The sexually scandalous nature of folk-Catholicism could explain why in ‘Requiescat’ Wilde appropriates the metre of English poet Thomas Hood’s much-reprinted poem, the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ (1844), which deals with the death of a young prostitute, an intertext which Melissa Knox has read as proof that an incestuous relationship between Wilde and his sister existed.25 However, it seems more likely that, in figuring Isola as a folk-Catholic return of the repressed, Wilde taps into the wake traditions in which illicit sexuality was envisioned as an appropriate response to the scandal of death, a sexuality that was creative in the face of the death’s nihilism. Moreover, traditionally, the Catholic Church was often seen in highly sexualised terms as the Whore of Babylon of Revelations 17: 5.26 The imagery of the poem is appropriate to this sexualisation of the Catholic Church: Isola is like a Gothic vampire waiting for the new season to come so that she can spring from her underground coffin to bring her demands. The Catholic Church had always been gendered female, but after the Reformation this gendering became attached to a discourse of the Church as Eve and Whore.27 In the poem, Isola is an innocent lily-white virgin (‘white as snow’ line 9) , but she is also an attractive woman, implying a completely unconscious seductiveness: ‘She hardly knew/She was a woman, so/Sweetly she grew’ (lines 10–12). Likewise, the Church is seen as a kind of seductress in anti-Catholic polemic, but she is also the conversely pure virgin: the Church is Virgin and Whore, on the one hand pure and sinful, lily-like and decadent; on the other hand, the Church as fallen, seductive and yet virginal and pure woman. The Catholicism which emerges from this poem, then, is a strange conflation of folk and orthodox practice; it is seductive, paradoxical,

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coded, secret, masked, folkloric. It is expressed in an ambiguous language (almost a private language), requiring historicisation for clearer interpretation. Moreover, Catholicism is enigmatic for Wilde in that it represents for him an anti-mimetic style evocative of the irrational and the paradoxical, the opposite of Protestant investment in the rational. He spoke of the superstitions of the people of Mayo as ‘the colour element of thought and imagination. They are the opponents of common sense. Common sense is the enemy of romance’,28 a sentiment echoing that of his mother who believed that ‘the very tendency to superstition, so marked in Irish nature, arises from an instinctive dislike to the narrow limitations of common sense’.29 ‘Requiescat’ demonstrates convincingly that Wilde had fully absorbed the strain of Catholicism found in the post-Famine west of Ireland. I will now turn to his experience of Oxford Catholicism and suggest its relationship with the folk-Catholicism of the west of Ireland.

II The series of traumatic events that ‘Requiescat’ sees resolved in a Catholic consciousness is behind Wilde’s absorption in Catholic culture. When he was effectively deported into the ironically Catholic atmosphere of Oxford, a different style of Catholicism was revealed to him in the discourse of Cardinal Newman, and the English Catholic Church Newman inhabited, though it was quickly transformed by Wilde into an analogous language of code and seduction. This Church possessed something of the fervour with which the Irish peasantry carried out their rituals, as can be evidenced, for example, in Newman’s sermon ‘The Second Spring’ (1852), which additionally appealed to the same imagery of fertility and nature that Wilde encountered in Mayo. In this sermon, Newman speaks of English Catholicism through the metaphor of the cycles of Nature: ‘The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of the night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched.’30 English Catholicism also employed the same discourse of the hidden and the marginalised as folk-Catholicism in Mayo. Wilde spoke of English Catholicism in distinctly sexual terms (though this time homoerotically), worrying about the ‘seductive’ effect Newman had on him. Wilde wrote to William Ward telling how he ‘longed’ for an interview with Newman about the possibility of conversion, speculating: ‘I could hardly resist Newman I am afraid.’31 In his imagination English Catholicism was configured as a ‘Church which simply enthrals me by its fascination’.32

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The enigmatic sexuality, the paradoxical fascination of Catholicism emerges most powerfully in Wilde’s neglected poem The Sphinx. This poem was undoubtedly begun during Wilde’s Oxford days when he was first experiencing this new version of the Catholic Church, and revised and revisited constantly until it was finally published in June 1894. Owen Dudley Edwards has rightly suggested that the poem represents Wilde’s continuing and conflicted relationship with Catholicism throughout those years.33 In Greek myth the Sphinx was gendered female, and by appropriating her Wilde employs the kind of anti-Catholic iconoclasm he encountered in his Protestant days. A more grotesque version of the Whore of Babylon than the Sphinx can hardly be imagined and represents a challenge to Wilde to transform an antiCatholic weapon into a subtle icon of possibility. Importantly, Wilde may have been influenced in his interest in Egyptology by suggestions by many that Ireland was an icon of the Sphinx also. ‘The Sphinx’ was an epitaph used to describe Ireland by Aubrey de Vere, a friend of both Sir William and Speranza, and, like Wilde himself, a convert Catholic. In his ‘Ode: Against False Freedom’ (1867), he claims that Ireland has been given a mission by God, to be the symbol of holy suffering to the world: But nought, O Ireland, like to thee Hath been! A Sphinx-like mystery At the world’s feet thou sit’st death-pale; And blood-stains tinge thy sable veil.34 De Vere was not the only writer to make connections between Ireland and the ancient cultures of the Middle East. Wilde’s Sphinx sitting at his Oxonian feet is a personification of the ur-cultural template that Speranza envisioned at the beginning of all civilisation and which she felt was best preserved in Ireland and in Catholicism. In the introduction to her Ancient Legends Speranza argues that it is the distinctive mythological foundation of a culture that is most important in shaping its future, and that the Irish are the most ‘mythopoetic’ race left in Europe.35 In her book on Ancient Cures, Speranza wrote that ‘the Irish . . . have retained more of the ancient superstitions than any other European peoples’.36 Wilde’s Sphinx is likewise a complex amalgamation of cultural treasures, from Egypt, Greece, Macedonia, the Roman Empire, ancient Israel and Christianity, representing precisely the kind of mythopoetic quality

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Speranza praises. By amalgamating Greece and Rome in this way Wilde effectively dissolves the supposed clash between Catholicism and Hellenism which many critics, particularly Richard Ellmann, have seen as structurally important to Wilde’s early life. Ellmann insists that although Wilde struggled between an allegiance to Greek paganism and Roman Catholicism, ultimately he ‘found better lines in pagan than Christian imaginings’.37 However, Wilde himself would later make clear that there was no such opposition between Hellas and Rome in his mind, claiming that the Greek Chorus survived in the servitor at Mass.38 Both Ireland and Catholicism were considered by many in Wilde’s family circle to have absorbed the myths and treasures of the ancient world and the glories of Christianity. Sir William Wilde had made extensive study of the Mediterranean and Middle East in his early life, recounted in The Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean (1840). This voyage took in most of the ancient world, which became in Sir William’s mind a site of a World ur-culture. His studies of the antiquities of Egypt and Greece led to his interest in those of Ireland, and Sir William made a series of comparisons between the three landscapes and those who populated them. He argued that the songs of the bards of Ireland were similar to the epics of Homer as both travelled ‘from mouth to mouth, by those great faculties of men, speech and memory’.39 Sir William believed that the megalithic tombs of the Boyne valley were the Irish necropolis comparable to the pyramids of Egypt, calling the site of these tombs ‘a great pyramid’.40 Speranza subscribed to the theory that Celtic beliefs and customs were directly derived from the culture of the first civilisations, cradled in the Middle East in Persia and Egypt, moving to Ireland via Greece. Wilde himself commented to W. B. Yeats that the Irish were ‘the greatest talkers since the Greeks’.41 Donald Lawler points out that in the poem, ‘hermaphroditic, the sphinx symbolises a pagan ideal of uniting a primitive animism with animal worship, an early representation of mystery religion, and a forerunner of the great mystery religion, Christianity, bridging the historic evolution of mind and soul’.42 This is no crude choosing between two metaphysics, but accepting the strong and ontological connections between them. Like the Israelites, the Irish have, in Lady Wilde’s mythology, emerged from Egypt: in her son’s poem they can now return there like the Christ child, for absorption in a cultural oasis full of obscure and enriching colour. Wilde’s Sphinx invades a Victorian enclave – the university study – and transforms it into a space for cultural transmission, an occult centre and nexus of the centuries.

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Egypt, Ireland, Catholicism and sexuality were all connected in Wilde’s intellectual development. Catholicism and Hellenism are iconographically linked, and the Sphinx has absorbed both Isis and ‘the Jewish maid’, the Virgin Mary (183). Although Edourd Roditi argues that in the poem ‘the props of Ptolemaic Egypt have acquired a macabre meaning as symbols of bestial passions which Christianity and traditional morals repressed in Wilde’s own age’,43 he is forgetting that Catholicism was most likely to be found accused of promoting bestial fashions itself. The grotesque length and rhyming of The Sphinx reflects the grotesqueness of the Sphinx herself, the ‘abba’ scheme of internal rhyme indicating the intensity of interiority notable in Catholicism, where a kind of eternal self-referentiality is all that is required for legitimation. Universality and interiority are perfectly balanced within the poem and the Church; the effect is as monstrous as it is attractive, as overwhelming as it is frightening. The poem is an imaginative response to the monumentality of the Sphinx: its form and structure is immense and exacting, utilising the full range of possible poetic devices – assonance, alliteration, parallelism, internal rhyme. The poem’s obsessive use of rhyme is unacceptably overwrought only if we forget that to Wilde ‘Rhyme, the basis of modern poetry, is entirely an Irish invention.’44 Like de Vere’s Ireland, sitting at the world’s feet as a cultural mystery none can penetrate, Wilde’s Sphinx can have a series of questions put to her she will refuse to answer, retaining her secrets in the face of the most persistent interrogations. De Vere’s theology of suffering included the justification for Ireland’s colonial position on the grounds that it would bring a cathartic distress that would perfect Ireland. Wilde’s instinct was always to attempt to reverse the colonisation process, and, as the Sphinx, Ireland engages in a vast cultural colonisation, acting as a cultural nexus, a seductive and absorbing cultural synthesis, which has travelled from the Nile, through the Charon, right up the Liffey, absorbing and transforming every culture it encountered. Wilde himself becomes an enigmatic cultural sponge too. Much as Catholicism and the Sphinx pillage the best elements from pagan religions and re-energise them in a new guise, so Wilde takes the best components of the English heritage and makes them his own. If the English could come to Ireland and destroy its culture, then an Irishman could go to Oxford and transform English tradition. The strangeness of an Irish Catholic in Oxford is figured in Wilde’s poem in the incongruity of the Oriental icon sitting in a politely furnished student’s room. Wilde revelled in this strangeness and decorated his room in Oxford with pictures of the Pope and Newman, and,

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paradoxically refers to it in The Sphinx as a monk-like ‘cell’ (194), both gestures drawing attention to a tension internal to Catholicism between extravagance (the kind of aesthetic extravagance found in Ritualism) and austerity (the austerity of a monastery). Oscar Wilde’s rooms at Oxford may have been the most extravagantly decorated monastic cells imaginable. It is vital to remember, however, that, even after Emancipation was granted in 1829, Catholics remained exotic creatures in England. When the Marquess of Ripon converted to Catholicism in 1874, The Times noted that ‘to become a Roman Catholic and to remain a thorough Englishman are – it cannot be denied – almost incompatible conditions’.45 While such exoticism was a mode of being for Wilde, this subversion required secrecy. Complete disclosure about his Catholic leanings would have been a betrayal of the complex silence of the Sphinx who has many questions posed to her but whose answer is an iconographic enigmatic stare. This subversive secrecy stands at the centre of the poem. Wilde was, of course, familiar with secret societies as rural Ireland was rife with them. Irish secret societies, such as the Ribbonmen, were dedicated to creating a more equal agrarian system, although they promoted this equality through acts of violence and intimidation on the landlords. Freemasonry, with which Wilde associated while at Oxford, was merely another version of these societies he encountered in Mayo. Rural ‘secret societies’ of the west and the Freemasons are linked in that ‘Masonic lodges, initiation rites . . . preserved, in a reduced form, the festal calendar and festal culture which lasted until the new mechanical techniques and ways of work broke up the ancient concept of the world’.46 Moreover, the Irish peasantry in general, in attempting to keep the ‘Devotional Revolution’ priests away from folk ceremonies, had become experts in the art of the secret. The language of secrecy, Sphinx-like behaviour, was the language of Catholics in both Ireland and Britain: folk-Catholics hiding from the soldiers of the Devotional Revolution in the west of Ireland; English Catholics dissembling to maintain positions in English society. Wilde’s father, observing the secret societies in Mayo, had noted that such societies are composed of those labouring under the smart of a real or supposed grievance . . . obliged, for crimes of his own, to be ‘on the run’, and seek shelter in a different country . . . to assume certain nicknames . . . to have certain signs and passwords . . . a freemasonry – a craft and a mystery . . . 47

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Wilde, in his religious, artistic and sexual life, elaborated upon such Gnostic ambiguity. ‘Coming out’, whether as a ‘gay man’ or as a Catholic, would have been ultimately false to the modes of imaginative thought he admired, reliant on a Gnostic or Bardic mentality. Thus the rhetoric of silence which pervades the Sphinx’s refusal to answer any questions is ultimately revealing, as it implies the multiplying of possibilities rather than their limiting. Disclosure is not part of the plan, merely a piling up of suggestiveness. This subversive silence explains the fascination with secrecy which pervades Wilde’s life from his second baptism to his incarnation as ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ after prison, a name which combined both Wilde’s ultra-Protestant past (Melmoth being the anti-hero of his great-uncle Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer) and his Catholic future. St Sebastian was not only the subject of homo-erotic worship, owing to the traditional artistic depiction of his death as a moment when the male nude reached ecstatic perfection, but also a great figure of conversion, having spent his years in prison converting his fellow prisoners and the prison guards to Christianity. Wilde’s final pseudonym thus becomes a code which allows us to interpret the secrecy involved in a poem like The Sphinx. The turn towards the crucifix at the end of the poem (194) is overdetermined by the intensity of the attraction of the Sphinx. The crucifix is an iconic body wrought with both suffering and sexuality, and as such is not so much the opposite of the Sphinx as its correlative. This confirms the ‘Christianising’ of the Sphinx in much the same way as the erotic and masochistic components of Irish folk-Catholicism had been baptised by many renegade priests on the run from Tridentine Catholicism. After all, even if officially the Irish Catholic Church opposed the erotic and carnivalesque practices in Irish wakes and other folk practices, as S. J. Connolly has pointed out, numerous priests actually participated in these traditions and refused to condemn them.48 The speaker’s repeated cries of ‘Away’ and ‘Get hence!’ (193, 194) are thus rendered ironic. The embracing of the crucifix at the end is an incorporation of the idealised male body into the ‘feminine’ sexuality of the Sphinx. Moreover the struggle between the crucifix and the Sphinx is an internal struggle in Catholicism anyway: the crucifix became a profoundly Catholic symbol after the Reformation as Protestants argued that its prominent display in churches was merely another aspect of Catholic idolatry. This link between secrets, sexuality and Catholicism is also clear from ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’.49 Just as Wilde’s great poem is structured

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around a desperate attraction to the hidden secrets of the Sphinx, here the story recounts the love an ultra-Protestant man has for a mysterious woman. Lord Murchison’s faith in Protestantism is, initially, unshakeable: he ‘believed in the Pentateuch as firmly as he believed in the House of Peers’ (124). While the Protestant Church was attacked from two sides in the nineteenth century – scepticism and Higher Criticism from within, the lures of the reconstituting and resurgent Catholic Church from without – Lord Murchison resists the first while falling for the second. The woman he loves, Lady Alroy, looks like a ‘clairvoyante’ and has a look of ‘the mystery of psychology’ in her face (125). When Murchinson tells Lady Alroy that he had seen her in Bond Street, she pleads for him not to ‘talk so loud; you may be overheard’ (206). The actions of Lady Alroy from this point onwards, and the influence of her psychological profile on her physiognomy, convince the Lord that there is indeed a mystery to be probed. The question about the Sphinx, the Catholic Church and Lady Alroy is whether or not they have anything to reveal. If the Protestant mind could conjure up all sorts of secret abominations taking place within the Church’s walls, then penetration could confirm or repudiate such a pornographic projection. Lord Murchinson is determined to effect this very penetration. Like a woman who enters a confessional, Lady Alroy keeps a closet of her own in which she sits for a time alone. The dangers of this would have been evident to any reader of the anti-confessional polemics of the nineteenth century, where the implication that women needed a Protestant escort at all times to prevent sexual and cultural dishonour was propagated. Lord Murchison sometimes thought ‘she was in the power of some man’ (128) – perhaps those devious Catholic confessors – but could never find any proof that other men were involved in her duplicity. Of course, more than simply a stereotype of an individual Catholic woman, Lady Alroy is the personification of the Scarlet Woman who wishes to seduce the Protestant gentleman into the clutches of Rome. Her ‘strangely picturesque’ style (124), her secrecy in pose and sensibility, suggests a vast and subtle conspiracy to seduce the Protestant Lord. The language used about Catholicism in the nineteenth century was, after all, extreme. There was incessant talk of sexual secrets behind convent doors, of debauched sexual practices behind the confessional cloth, of strange and diabolical behaviour perpetuated by men locked all alone in their monasteries. For example, the Catholic monastery of Elm Hill in Norwich was beset by scandals in the late nineteenth century. In 1864 a love letter from one Brother Augustine to a young

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apprentice in the priory’s chapel was leaked and published in the Norfolk News. The following year one Brother Stanislaus rebelled against the leadership of the monastery and ran away with a boy from another religious institution. Stanislaus went on to become a popular anti-Catholic speaker at Protestant rallies, speaking suggestively of improper goings on in Elm Hill.50 These scandals fuelled the fear of Catholicism in England, although a great deal of this fear was provoked by the fact that the English state was Protestant by definition, and had for two and a half centuries decreed such a person as an English Roman Catholic an impossibility. This language was reinforced through such penal legislation as the ‘Act against Jesuits and seminary priests’ (1585), which made it treason for any Englishman ordained a Catholic priest abroad after 1559 to come into or remain in England and a felony for anyone to shelter or assist such a priest. Such acts inevitably drove the Catholic community to elaborate rituals of secrecy, in which Lady Alroy’s fear of being overheard by others would be well understood. Repression of Catholicism and national denial of the Catholic community ensured that Catholicism became a largely underground religion, a psychological perversion of the rational mind as well as an alternative social movement with an internal set of rules and behaviours. Reactions to this secrecy were also extreme. In his Essay on Ritualism (1874) Prime Minister Gladstone complained that the elaborate accoutrements of Catholicism were methods by which others would be drawn into the web of the Lady of Lies. Wilde was a keen supporter of Gladstone, who had publicly dedicated himself to trying to solve the question of Ireland in an equitable fashion. Wilde had, moreover, sent him a copy of The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888, and would most probably have been aware of Gladstone’s discomfort with Anglo-Catholicism. After the declaration of Infallibility (1870), and believing that there was a widespread Catholic conspiracy to convert the rest of England through seduction rather than argument, Gladstone published his The Vatican Decrees and Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1875). Catholicism, he argued, was an elaborate hoax with a vacuum at its centre into which the Protestant nation was in danger of being sucked. Lord Murchison seems unable to ward off this danger and is so enamoured of Lady Alroy that he even proposes to her. The Scarlet Lady has entranced him with her suggestion of secrecy rather than any debauched reality. Lord Murchison cannot conceive of reasons why Lady Alroy could behave so strangely, yet it is obvious from the text that this is the only reason he loves her. Ironically, Cardinal Newman repudiated ‘showy works’ and ‘theatrical’ behaviour, desiring that

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Catholic rites ‘be founded on deep inward conviction’, believing elaborate ritual was a supplemental amusement for the non-serious Catholic.51 Lord Murchison, however, knows there must be more to them than that, as did the English public who continued to suspect Newman of dissembling even after his confessional writings. The Oxford Movement had, according to its detractors, a public and a ‘secret’ history, and this underground self was one associated with the extremes of perverse sexuality.52 In 1865 Punch caricatured Catholic priests as proto-drag-queens in ‘Parsons in Petticoats’. This suggests a danger that when Lord Murchison finally got Lady Alroy back to a marriage bed he might find something shocking beneath her elaborate robes. William Wilberforce had, after all, dreamed that Newman had conversed with him from behind a secretive veil; this iconography is reproduced here.53 The image of the Catholic Church as both socially transgressive and ambiguous in terms of gender and sexuality was one constantly rehearsed in Victorian England. David Hilliard has pointed out that the charge of ‘effeminacy’ was ‘frequently used by Protestant controversialists to smear the Anglo-Catholic party as a whole’,54 and Ruth Vanita has argued that ‘Roman Catholicism was stigmatised as “un-English” on the grounds that it was idolatrous and encouraged the “perversions” of celibacy, same-sex community, and “effeminate” ritualism’.55 The language and the aggression with which Catholicism was spoken about in Victorian society meant that, even after Emancipation had been granted in 1829, Catholics were still driven to forms of secrecy to practise their faith. The underground confidentiality in which Catholics practised signified for the Protestant a terrifying sexual secret. While Lady Alroy insists that she does nothing while in her mysteriously rented rooms, Murchison retains his suspicion that there was something going on here he has just failed to grasp: ‘He took out the morocco case, opened it, and looked at the photograph. “I wonder,” he said at last’ (132). Given the conditions in England, in which Protestants rarely spoke of Catholics except in extreme and often highly sexually charged terms, it is unsurprising that Lord Murchinson’s relationship with Lady Alroy should take on the aura of an obsession. In The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), G. K. Chesterton, an English writer who converted to Catholicism in 1922, tried to explain the attraction of the Church to non-Catholics. He claimed that, when constantly present, the Church begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair. The man has exactly the same sense of having committed or

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compromised himself; of having been in a sense entrapped, even if he is glad to be entrapped.56 This kind of obsession helps to explain Murchison’s behaviour after Lady Alroy’s death: he ‘shut [him]self up and saw no one. I had loved her so much, I had loved her so madly’ (130). Lady Alroy’s stance, empty or not, has proved so alluring that it causes a psychological breakdown in the Protestant who has manfully resisted the lure of honest doubt only to be routed by the effeminate and feminising Catholic Church. The point is not so much whether there is any secret here or not – we simply do not know – but that so long as the Protestant state continues to see Catholicism in an exotic light, whether in Ireland, the Continent or its own subjects, the greater will the attraction and desire for Catholicism be. The secret of the Sphinx may be a chimera, but the Protestant State will continue to produce it, and require it, in its pursuit of the enigmatic Catholic. This chapter has attempted to provide an account of Wilde’s spiritual formation from his childhood to his days in Oxford, and register the competing poles towards which he gravitated. In his attraction to Catholicism he found a language which codified experience in both orthodox and subversive modes, a language he later required when experimenting artistically and sexually. This language connects Wilde’s sexuality to the varieties of ‘perversion’ thought integral to Catholicism by both intellectual and public opinion in Victorian England. While living and working in England, Wilde maintained the folk-Catholicism he absorbed as a child in Ireland, and this retention allowed him to recognise elements of English Catholicism which utilised a similar discourse of secrecy and subversion. In the next chapter I will continue to trace Wilde’s engagement with the socially and sexually subversive nature of Catholicism in both England and Ireland in the late nineteenth century.

2 Faith and Reason: the Bible, the Catholic Church and Wilde’s Scandalous Writings

In the previous chapter I discussed how the Catholic Church was construed, by both the English public and the intelligentsia, as a sexually scandalous institution within Victorian England. I also demonstrated that the folk-Catholic beliefs of the Irish peasantry of the west were considered theologically and (at times) sexually transgressive by the institutional Catholic Church in that country. The scandalous nature of the Catholicism Wilde encountered in both Ireland and Oxford formed part of the attraction he felt for this ‘outlawed’ religion. Of course, some of Wilde’s own writings were considered scandalous themselves, and in this chapter we will turn to two of these works: The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and Salome, and consider how religious issues can contribute to an interpretation of both. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. was considered scandalous enough to be used as an instrument to attack Wilde at his famous libel trial against the Marquess of Queensberry. There, Queensberry’s defence counsel Edward Carson accused Wilde of having written a story ‘to show that Shakespeare’s sonnets were suggestive of unnatural vice’.1 In more recent years Carson’s reading of Mr. W. H. has been given a more sophisticated formulation. Kevin Kopelson has argued that the story should be seen as speaking ‘the truth of deviant sexuality’.2 Isobel Murray agrees and claims that ‘at a time when homosexuality was considered one of the vilest human aberrations, severely punishable by law, to suggest that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to a boy actor whose personality dominated him, was courting disaster’.3 Lawrence Danson posits that the story dances between ‘heart and soul . . . [and] penis and anus’.4 Salome too has been seen as a particularly scandalous piece of writing. The play was, after all, banned by the Lord Chamberlain, allegedly for its depiction of biblical characters which was illegal at the time. As I will detail later in this 44

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chapter, Wilde’s play has more recently been seen as a radically, and thus scandalously, misogynistic work, deeply implicated in a Victorian tradition of visioning women as either angels-in-the-house or demonic sexually charged and castrating viragos. While not disputing these important interpretations of Mr. W. H. and Salome, in this chapter I want to suggest that both pieces can fruitfully be read as a contribution to a major issue for Victorian England: the question of the authority of the Bible and the best way to interpret it. In arguing for the centrality of biblical hermeneutics for the interpretation of these two works I hope to show a Wilde fully engaged with the questions important to Victorians, questions which may not seem as important to us now as issues of sexuality. Interrogating Wilde’s contribution to the debate over the Bible in Victorian England will also, I feel, demonstrate how he drew his own version of hermeneutics from his experiences of Catholicism in the west of Ireland. In this way, this chapter continues the work of the previous one, in asserting a profoundly Irish and Catholic provenance for Wildean aesthetics. First, I will outline how and why biblical hermeneutics became such a pressing issue for the Victorians. In Thomas Aquinas’s classic theological work, Summa Theologiae (1266), he argued that God could and should be understood by humankind through two methods: faith and reason. Aquinas believed that since God was a rational deity, Christianity had to be a rational religion. God’s rationality was clear to anyone who reflected on the structure of the universe. In creating the universe, God had instituted that it run in an orderly fashion, an order that can be discerned, for example, in the rational division of the year into seasons, in the interdependent functioning of the organs of the human body, and in the ability of the human mind to think through logic. Reflection on the intrinsic orderliness of the universe would, claimed Aquinas, rationally lead anyone to the conclusion that some being of immense power and rationality must have so ordered it, as order does not emerge accidentally in Nature. From Order, true reflection would lead to the idea of an Orderer. However, Aquinas warned that reason alone could not lead anyone to accept the specifics of the Christian religion, especially the doctrine of the Incarnation, whereby God became man, and such beliefs as the virgin birth of Jesus, miracles and the Resurrection. Reason alone could not lead anyone to belief in these matters, which God had revealed to humankind through the Scriptures (the Bible). Assenting to these matters required ‘faith’, the ability to accept these articles as true even though they could not be demonstrated as beyond doubt:

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Now the intellect assents to a thing in two ways. First, through being moved to assent by its very object, which is known either by itself . . . or through something else already known . . . Secondly, the intellect assents to something, not through being sufficiently moved to this assent by its proper object, but through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side rather than to the other.5 Aquinas was clear that faith and reason, when considered in this way, would never contradict each other but would instead be complementary processes of the mind leading to the Triune God. This unity of faith and reason was broken, however, in post-Reformation Europe.6 In an attempt to undermine Catholicism, Protestant theologians, especially in England, argued that reason itself demonstrated the absurdity of the Catholic position on a number of crucial issues. In A Rational Account of the Grounds of the Protestant Religion (1665), one of the most important theological works of seventeenth-century English history, Edward Stillingfleet argued that ‘the judgement of Sense’ and the ‘rational evidence of Christian Doctrine’ together demonstrated the irrationality of Catholicism.7 Catholicism, he contended, rested on ‘implicit faith’, superstition and idolatry. Indeed, Catholicism had diverged so far from common sense and reason that the only way the Church maintained control over its flock was through the doctrine of papal infallibility which effectively forced people into belief.8 Likewise, the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists argued that the use of reason was humanity’s distinctive quality, and the obvious criterion in cases of doctrinal controversy. The individual conscience was to be governed by reason: ‘revelation’ was also to be judged by this criterion and only accepted if found to be compatible with it.9 According to William Chillingworth’s influential The Religion of Protestants (1638), reason had been ‘written by God in the hearts of all men’ who were thus capable of ‘deducing, according to the never failing rules of Logick, consequent deductions from them’.10 The result of these deductions, claimed Chillingworth, would be the complete rejection of Catholicism. Moreover, because the Catholic Church knew that the application of reason would completely undermine the basis of Catholicism, it had prevented its congregations from actively thinking and had ordered them to believe implicitly what the Church instructed them to. Such intellectual authoritarianism was not only an affront to the mind but was an assault on liberty, and demonstrated, as the Marquess of Halifax put it in 1687, that ‘The Church of Rome doth not only

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dislike the allowing Liberty, but by its Principles cannot do it.’11 The propaganda behind this anti-Catholic campaign of the seventeenth century was so successful that the link between Protestantism and reason and Catholicism and superstition (or ‘implicit faith’) came to be seen as natural. Raymond Tumbleson points out that in the seventeenth century ‘Anglican attacks on Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation assume for themselves a central subject position of rationality from which they construct the Catholic other as irrational’, and this construction became normative in the centuries after the Reformation.12 One of the main planks of the intellectual dichotomy between Protestant reason and Catholic faith was the study of the Bible. Protestant theologians supported the translation of the Bible from Latin to the vernacular. They argued that when the individual Christian was free to read the Scriptures and interpret them rationally, all would see that the traditional Catholic doctrines were incompatible with a rational reading of the Bible. The Protestant churches claimed that the clear division between Catholic practice and scriptural teaching lay behind the refusal of the Catholic Church to provide such a translation. Positing a sola scriptura faith was one means of consigning Catholicism to the intellectual margins. Of course, reading Scripture in this way, as a direct commentary on contemporary issues, required a belief in what was termed ‘plenary inspiration’ whereby the Bible’s statements on every subject are considered inspired and thus completely true. The Scripture-based approach of Protestantism led to the increase in widespread and scientific examination of the books of the Bible, and as this study became increasingly intense and focused its results ironically undermined the churches who had initially supported it. Beginning in Germany, the ‘Higher Criticism’ of the Bible began to suggest that the whole question of divine inspiration would have to be re-addressed. Although Protestant belief in plenary inspiration had remained intact in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s as knowledge of contemporary German scholarship was partial, this scholarship slowly infiltrated the country.13 Charles Hennell’s Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), Francis Newman’s The Hebrew Monarchy (1847) and W. R. Greg’s The Creed of Christendom (1851), all questioned the date and authorship of both testaments, problematised arguments for inspiration and miracles, and applied a rigorous rationalism to the interpretation of Scripture. Thomas Arnold in his Essay on the Right Interpretation and Understanding of Scripture (1831) and Two Sermons on the Interpretation of Prophecy (1839) historicised the Bible and criticised passages that he considered impossible to reconcile with received versions of history. In 1840,

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit was published posthumously. It claimed that reading the Bible as inspired Scripture effectively muted its power and that it would be more fruitfully studied as just another piece of literature.14 The Higher Criticism caused intense debate in the Protestant world, and divided England along intellectual lines. As the results of the Higher Criticism were disseminated through the Established Church, chaos and theological controversy followed, and, perhaps most disturbingly, the ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’ began. This ‘quest’ was the result of scientific criticism being applied to the Gospels. Once such focus was turned to the Gospel stories, a whole range of hermeneutical problems arose. Not only were the contradictions between Gospel accounts emphasised in this period, but scholars began to question whether a rational person could accept, on trust, the accounts of the miraculous the Evangelists placed at the centre of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835–36) repudiated the supernaturalism of orthodoxy and insisted that the life of Jesus be understood as a mythic superstructure built by the early Church on the basic historical framework, and was published in George Eliot’s English translation in 1845. In 1862 Ernest Renan was suspended from his chair in the Collège de France for denying the doctrine of the Incarnation. He subsequently wrote the bestseller Vie de Jésus which presented a man not unsimilar to a nineteenth-century French liberal. In 1865 Ecce Homo appeared in England, a secular interpretation of the Gospels.15 In one sense, what had happened was the most logical result of the faith-and-reason dichotomy. If Catholicism was to be rejected for its ‘irrational’ faith in Transubstantiation, the intercession of the saints, and Infallibility, then that which was ‘irrational’ in the Protestant tradition had also to be jettisoned. Traumatically, this turned out to be such crucial doctrines as the inspiration of the Scriptures and the divinity of Jesus. The emergence of the Higher Criticism was complemented by the conflict between ‘Genesis and geology’ whereby findings in the natural sciences demonstrated that the age of rocks stretched far back beyond traditional biblical chronology.16 The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) added biological as well as geological evidence to the growing dissatisfaction with a literal reading of the book of Genesis. The traditional methods of reading the Bible were eroded, and this opened the way for the attacks of militant Freethought. G. W. Foote and others contributed to the Freethinker, reworking the master narratives of the Bible and composing a ‘Comic Bible’, punning on its words and making profane jokes.17

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There was, of course, a traditionalist backlash. Foote was imprisoned for blasphemy and, in the academic world, scholars were threatened with disciplinary action if they did not curb their newly discovered hermeneutic scepticism. In 1857 Samuel Davidson was obliged to resign from his post as professor at the Congregationalist Lancashire Independent College due to his denial of the plenary inspiration of the Bible. He had rejected Mosaic authorship, and discarded any notion that the category of inspiration removed the Bible from critical judgements about its factual accuracy. In 1860 the infamous Essays and Reviews was published. It contained Benjamin Jowett’s essay ‘The Interpretation of Scripture’, encouraging the reading of Scripture ‘like any other book’. In 1862 J. W. Colenso, bishop of Natal, was tried and narrowly escaped conviction for heresy because of his claim that the Pentateuch was historically inaccurate, while in 1881 the Scottish Free Church scholar William Robertson Smith was deprived of professorship at the Free Church college in Aberdeen for his work with the Higher Criticism. While the vast majority of those who practised Higher Criticism were believers who did not doubt the importance of the Bible for Christians, the general public perceived the debate as a clash between religion on the one hand and intellectual criticism on the other. Those who sought to defend the Bible towards the end of the century often appealed to the ‘facts of archaeology’ to ‘prove the Bible’ and disprove the critics. However, in deploying archaeology as a weapon in their own cause, biblical conservatives had conceded the methodological battle, and only succeeded in further historicising and humanising the Bible itself.18 What happened was the triumph of empiricism and an overconcern with material facts. And a fact, once established, had to be accepted as true; being blinkered to the factual truth was not acceptable in the atmosphere of rational honesty fostered in Victorian England. To the rising middle-class professionals, who accepted a fact when they saw one, the clergy were debasing themselves by calling heresy what was established fact. If geology was proven, then all should accept it. If not, this should be demonstrated scientifically. Calling off the investigation by declaring it heretical was simply dishonest.19 All this may seem very far from the question which this present study addresses, the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Irish Catholic faith. Wilde is not usually considered as either interested in, or contributing to, the debate over these issues in Victorian England. However, Wilde was well aware of the disputes about the historical Jesus. He had probably first read about the ‘quest’ for the ‘Historical Jesus’ in an essay by the Rev. Patrick Fairbairn, DD, Principal and Professor of Divinity,

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Free Church, Glasgow, whose lecture on ‘The Christ of Scripture and the Christ of Modern Theorists’, was contained in a collection of lectures delivered to the Dublin YMCA in 1864, a collection which also included Sir William Wilde’s ‘Ireland – Past and Present: The Land and The People’. Importantly, some scholars have pointed out that Wilde was clearly interested in the questions about the status of Jesus. Steven D. Arata has argued that Wilde had absorbed the literature of the ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’ and that, as a result of such absorption, in works such as De Profundis, he produced a ‘wholly secular Jesus’.20 Guy Willoughby has written a book-length examination of Christ in Wilde’s work and claims that ‘Christ is the archetype’ for Wilde’s aesthetic of transformation through suffering: Under different species of plot, genre, and setting, each fable confirms that individual realisation depends, ultimately, on a full and unabashed knowledge of the intrinsic pain and reversal of human existence . . . 21 However, the nineteenth-century debates about the ontological status of Jesus were deeply bound-up in the overarching questions raised by the Higher Criticism, and the questions about Jesus and the Bible need to be considered together. In this chapter I argue that two of Wilde’s most scandalous works, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and Salome, should be understood within the context of the hermeneutic crises that nineteenthcentury biblical studies inflicted on the Victorian world, and that Wilde’s response to these issues was predominantly Catholic. Both these works set out to reorient questions of hermeneutics towards a folk-Catholic consideration of the power of personality and the power of story to overcome the rational rut that was dissipating the power of the Church in England.

I The Portrait of Mr. W. H. concerns the attempts by a group of characters to unlock the centuries-old secret of the identity of ‘Mr. W. H.’, the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The story opens as an unnamed narrator listens to Erskine tell the story of his friend Cyril Graham’s quest to convince him that W. H. was in fact one Willie Hughes, a boy actor of Shakespeare’s performing troop. Erskine refused to accept this theory without empirical proof, although Graham was convinced of the comprehensiveness of the hypothesis. A portrait purporting to be of

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Willie Hughes turns up, and Erskine congratulates Graham, only to find out that Graham had the portrait forged. They argue and Graham commits suicide. After hearing this story, the narrator becomes convinced that Graham’s theory is correct, and he launches a campaign to demonstrate the power of the theory. After two months he writes a long letter to Erskine explaining his reasons for supporting Graham’s belief, but, having written it, loses his own faith in the theory. Erskine is, however, convinced of the existence of Willie Hughes by the letter, and insists that the conjecture is accurate. He soon after dies of consumption, having written a letter urging the narrator to rededicate himself to Willie Hughes. The story ends with the narrator pondering the truth of the ‘Willie Hughes’ theory of the sonnets. The story itself exists in a textually ambiguous condition. There are two extant versions. The first is a short story first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a very well-established Conservative periodical, in 1889; the second is a much longer version of the same story, discovered after Wilde’s death, and which resembles an art-historical essay rather than a straight-forward story.22 The relationship between the two versions is contested and conflicted, and the variant versions of the story are problematic for editors attempting to produce a textually reliable version of the story. Ironically, the textual ambiguity surrounding Wilde’s narrative befits the subject of the story. Shakespeare’s sonnets were themselves the centre of an elaborate debate about textual authority in the late nineteenth century, a debate largely conducted through the pages of the magazine in which Wilde chose to publish his text. Blackwood’s had published a series of articles debating whether Shakespeare was a forger and literary counterfeiter, and arguing that Dante was the ‘rival poet’ mentioned in the sonnets.23 This textual ambiguity was, in part, produced by a more general cultural anxiety centred on the nature of Shakespeare’s commitment to homophile desire. The explicit nature of the passion expressed for the mysterious young man addressed in many of the sonnets had given rise to attempts to either censor or explain away much of the writing. Thomas Bowdler had crudely eliminated any ‘questionable’ matter from Shakespeare’s plays to render them harmless for a ‘family’ edition (1818), but other commentators had striven to translate the passion of the sonnets into a language acceptable to the middle-class readers who were being told that Shakespeare represented English high culture at its very best. The implicit, and at times explicit, nature of the sonnets had caused a problem for Shakespearean enthusiasts in the nineteenth century, as

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models of sexual behaviour became increasingly narrowed to a normative version of heterosexual love. If cultural authority rested on Shakespeare, in the sonnets this very authority seemed to be articulating the language of sexual deviants, so that Henry Hallam’s memorable statement that he wished that they had never been written can be easily understood.24 Shakespeare’s English interpreters went to great lengths to deny or sublimate the sexually scandalous nature of the sonnets, and had explained their homoerotic nature as the result of Elizabethan conventions or simply reduced them to the discourse of the public school. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. makes clear this link between sexual/textual ambiguity and authority: the greater the interpretive insight of the characters, the more central the passionate relationship between Shakespeare and Willie Hughes becomes to, not only the sonnets, but Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre. This was the reason behind The World’s vituperative criticism of the story after its first publication. The entire subject was, it argued, ‘a very unpleasant one, and it is dilated upon in the article in a peculiarly offensive manner’.25 Wilde is not, of course, making Shakespeare a homosexual, and thus anticipating the ‘discovery’ of the homosexual personality by the sexologists,26 although critics such as Lawrence Danson have made it clear that he is seeking ways to endorse same-sex relations in a coded fashion that would escape the censor’s eye. Danson argues that the language of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. is elusive when referring to the relations between its male characters: Do Wilde’s verbal gestures . . . point to heart and soul, or to penis and anus? Not that these are exclusive choices, except in linguistic situations like the one I have just created. But . . . Wilde very deliberately creates just such a situation, and adds this further twist: his language demands a choice, but it also makes such a choice seem inadequate or wrong.27 Joseph Bristow has pointed out, however, that Danson has failed to fully historicise the language of same-sex passion in terms of the nineteenth century, and that a ‘fully homosexual undercurrent’ is impossible to read into Wilde’s writings in general because such an understanding of sexuality was only available to writers towards the end of the 1890s.28 Contextualising the story demonstrates that it directly eschews the most culturally accepted version of homo-social passion in Victorian England, the language of muscular Protestantism as found on the rugby pitches of Eton.29 Wilde instead utilises a more

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marginalised language of male love associated in the public mind with both sexual and religious deviance, a language which implicated contemporary textual debates in ancient sexual ethics. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. emphasises that the male friendships it endorses are modelled after the ‘Platonic conception of love as nothing if not spiritual’ (325). The love between men it celebrates is primarily spiritual and only marginally sexual, and, as Linda Dowling has pointed out, ‘the conventions of Greek paiderastia as mediated through the Oxford Greats school . . . visibly shapes’ the story.30 All patterns of homo-social relations in the text are incorporated into the framework established by Plato’s Symposium. Its 1492 translation by Marsilio Ficino ‘began to exercise a strange influence over men and to colour their words and thoughts, and manner of living’ (324). It caused Renaissance men to ‘elevate friendship to the high dignity of the antique ideal, to make it a vital factor in the new culture, and a mode of self-conscious intellectual development’ (324). The ideal was embodied also in Montaigne’s essay on ‘Friendship’, translated into English by John Florio. Shakespeare distilled the pleasures of such male friendship which transcends ‘gross bodily appetite’ (325), into his sonnets, which express the most spiritual form of love. Wilde was well aware that a movement at Oxford had developed a cult of male friendship along the lines laid down in Plato’s Symposium, and which also implicated such male sexual codes in contemporary debates about textual hermeneutics. The Oxford Platonists were concerned, not only about same-sex ideals, but also about the nature of religious faith and the relationship between text and sex, text and spirituality. This cult of Platonic love was prominent in Oxford throughout the nineteenth century, including the period of Wilde’s attendance. The Platonic cult inspired what Timothy d’Arch Smith would later call ‘Uranian’ or ‘heavenly’ poetry which believed itself above the merely physical attractions of both hetero-’normality’ and sodomy, and praised the virtues of innocent asexual spiritual relations between men, relations that were intellectually and artistically fertile.31 It was the most ‘human’ of all love, as it raised the creature above his bestial sexual instincts.32 It acted as a legitimating discourse of male love that moved intercourse from the penis to the brain, from the bedroom to the library. It also activated the impulses of a number of Oxonians to reconsider the Catholic ideal of chaste priests living together in harmony bonded by the law of moral love. If we accept Linda Dowling’s contextualisation of the story in Oxonian Platonism, then we can reintegrate the sexual ‘resistance’

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posited by gay-affirmative critics with a religious reading, as same-sex Oxonian Platonism brings The Portrait of Mr. W. H. into the realm of religious debate where male love was primarily judged by a repressive Victorian society as an effeminising and Catholic influence degenerating a manly imperialist ideology. Oxford Platonism was linked to both Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholic renewal, and The Portrait of Mr. W. H. constitutes an active engagement with these categories of male relationships. Their supposedly ‘effeminising’ version of male relations, and their interest in Catholic ideals, led to the Oxford Platonists being viewed with suspicion by those with cultural power in Victorian England. However, in the eyes of some contemporaries, Oxford Platonism was seen as an antidote to the hermeneutic crisis England was suffering due to the emergence of the Higher Critical attack on the plenary inspiration of the Bible. If there was one book allowed principal position next to the Family Shakespeare of Thomas Bowdler, then it was the Family Bible, which was ironically a book as sexually scandalous as any of Shakespeare’s plays. The Bible was also a book sacred to the Oxford Platonists. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible were the cultural monuments upon which ‘Englishness’ stood. The King James Bible was analogous to Shakespeare as its translators had worked contemporaneously with the Bard; together they had produced a hegemonic idiom sanctified by their mutual association and the beauty of their language.33 If Shakespeare’s authority had been rendered ambivalent because of the possible sexual deviancy coded into his sonnets, then, as we have seen, the Bible had also come under serious threat in the nineteenth century. The attack on both the Bible and Shakespeare had a devastating psychological effect on English life and public values. However, the Oxford Platonists had found a means to reconstitute the textual authority of Holy Scripture. They were inspired by Professor Benjamin Jowett who linked the Bible to Platonic spirituality. Jowett was both an Anglican preacher and a classical scholar, and was convinced that English faith was in danger because the honest Englishman could not accept the truth of a Bible undermined by the Higher Criticism. For him, Broad Church convictions and Greek metaphysics coalesced: he arranged the Oxford curriculum so that Plato dominated and served as a Christian surrogate, a means of appropriating the old ideas in a new secular age. His lectures on the Republic sought to examine the ‘great uninspired writings’, but only as a means of moving toward a more secure belief in truth itself. Jowett stressed the Platonic claim that there

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was a realm of truth, Reality, that existed beyond the Heraclitean flux of perception. His translations of Plato sought to naturalise this claim by couching it in terms of the recognisable accents of Christian theology, through parallelism and language synthesis. He allowed the two discourses to cross-fertilise one another, to demonstrate their complete compatibility. His summation of the argument of the Symposium contained a multitude of Christian examples, and was copied by Wilde into his Oxford Commonplace Book: As the Christian might speak of hungering and thirsting after righteousness; or of the divine loves under the figure of human (cp. Eph. v.32: ‘This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church’); as the medieval saint might speak of the ‘fruitio Dei’; as Dante saw all things contained in his love for Beatrice, so Plato would have us absorb all other loves and desires in the love of knowledge.34 Jowett appeared to have bridged Platonism and Christianity and make them dependent upon one another, so that the truth of one would confirm the viability of the other. His disciples endorsed his arguments and structured their cult around such fertile intellectual cross-pollination. This interfusion of Platonic and Christian love, the Symposium and the Bible, explains those phrases in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. where it is clear that Wilde has gone beyond the confines of ancient Platonic theory and moved into the reconfiguration of Platonism within Christianity. In Wilde’s story, the relationship between Shakespeare and Willie Hughes is described in the language of Jowett. The nature of their love is compared to ‘dreams of the incarnation of the Idea in a beautiful and living form, and of a real spiritual conception with a travail and a bringing to birth’ (324). The narrator suggests that ‘the real world was the world of ideas and that these took visible form and became incarnate’ in this relationship (325). However, if the relationship between Shakespeare and Willie Hughes represents the Platonic Bible of the Oxford Platonists and Jowett, a spiritual Bible, then, in the story, even this version is not safe from the cynical attacks of the Higher Critics. Rather than believe in the ‘Willie Hughes theory’, the story’s characters find themselves succumbing to the hermeneutics of suspicion that would subject every word in the Bible to a devastating empirical scepticism. The majority of the Higher Criticism was imported from Germany and carried with it a pedantic loyalty to the tangible and empirical, a point Wilde’s text covertly makes when it refers to the

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German Shakespearean scholar who ‘discovers’ that ‘Mr. W. H.’ refers only to ‘Mr. William Himself’, a delicious parody of such Cartesian scientism (307). In The Portrait of Mr. W. H. the grand lie of the forged portrait is an ironic comment on what passed for truth in Victorian England: empirically verifiable tangible fact. Erskine objects to Graham’s theory as he needed ‘some independent evidence about the existence of this young actor’, and he searches the registers of London’s churches, the Record Office, the Lord Chamberlain’s papers, ‘everything, in fact, that we thought might contain some allusion to Willie Hughes . . . [until his] actual existence . . . had been placed beyond the reach of doubt or cavil’ (309). Cyril Graham terms such an obsession with scientific positivism evidence of a ‘philistine tone of mind’ (309). He tells Erskine that ‘he himself required no proof of the kind, and that he thought his theory complete without it’ (310). He insists that the empirical fact that the portrait was a forgery ‘did not in the slightest degree invalidate the truth of the theory’ (311). What validates the theory for Graham is its spiritual completeness. Erskine tells us that the theory depended ‘for its acceptance not so much on demonstrable proof or formal evidence, but on a kind of spiritual and artistic sense’ (308), and refers to Graham’s ‘firm and flawless . . . faith in the whole thing’ (311). The narrator reminds Erskine at one point, that ‘whatever romance may have to say about the Willie Hughes theory, reason is dead against it’ (346). Rather than die, however, it is this ‘spiritual’ mode of the theory which affects the narrator: Willie Hughes ‘became to me a kind of spiritual presence’ (319), and ‘suddenly explained to me the story of my soul’s romance’ (344). Of course, the narrator too becomes obsessed with empiricism, ‘was always on the brink of absolute verification’, and ends up ‘put[ting] into the letter all my faith’ (345). Wilde’s novella is torn between these two approaches to language, sexuality, and reality: empiricism and faith. Two languages – scientific and religious – are being debated here. The philosophy of empirical analysis epitomised by the Higher Criticism represents a challenge to the theological language Graham is using. It rejects it as meaningless: unless Graham proves empirically that Willie Hughes existed, he has in effect said nothing. Without empirical test, Graham’s theory is nonsense. At stake is whether Willie Hughes can be spoken of, and, at a deeper sense, whether religious language can be used at all, a debate which has, for Erskine, profound implications about what can be accepted as truth in Victorian England. In his final letter Erskine insists to the narrator that ‘the truth was once revealed to you, and you

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rejected it. It comes to you now, stained with the blood of two lives – do not turn away from it’ (348). Erskine radically affirms that what the narrator calls a lie is actually the only truth. Both Cyril Graham and Erskine insist that, despite any evidence to the contrary, Willie Hughes existed. They rest their belief in Willie Hughes on the grounds that, verifiable or not, he provides the explanation of Shakespeare. He is the best clarification of the sonnets; he covers everything. The evidence against the theory counts, but it does not count decisively. What governs Graham (as is ably demonstrated by the narrator later) is his personal relationship with Willie Hughes, the extent to which Willie Hughes has a relationship with him. Willie Hughes is a ‘presence’ to Graham; he knows Willie Hughes and no mere accidents of history discount this personal relationship. While the scientist will modify his hypothesis in the face of conflicting evidence (Erskine will believe if there is a real portrait), the religious man will not allow anything to conflict with his faith. The statement ‘Willie Hughes exists’ is not falsifiable to him. Even arguments that seem to prove his nonexistence (the absence of his name from the first folio list of the actors of Shakespeare’s company) are accepted only for them to be turned to the believer’s advantage: it turns out that the absence ‘really corroborated the theory’ (308). For the narrator, however, statements about Willie Hughes (and by implication, God) fail the verificationist’s test of meaningfulness. They fail to have meaning because Willie Hughes cannot be the object of sense experience. To talk about Willie Hughes (and God) you have to postulate the truth of his existence first, and this a priori postulation is unacceptable to empiricists. What Graham asserts when he insists that Willie Hughes existed is that, despite any evidence to the contrary, this has to be accepted. If, by analogy, Wilde is addressing the issues dividing Cambridge Platonists and ‘honest doubt’ Protestants, the debate over the language of the Bible, then the debate over the existence of Willie Hughes has important echoes of another, connected, theological conundrum of the nineteenth century: ‘Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! His very name fascinated me’ (319). In the story, Willie Hughes is described as the personification of Platonic love which sees ‘the incarnation of the Idea in a beautiful and living form’ (324). Willie Hughes was the expression of the world of Ideas showing that ‘these ideas took visible form and became incarnate in man’ (325). The substitution of ‘Jesus Christ’ for ‘Willie Hughes’ helps to explain the language used about the enigmatic figure at the centre of the text. He is described as the ‘very incarnation

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of Shakespeare’s dreams’ (307). The story portrays Shakespeare as the man who said ‘I am that I am’ (320), a phrase that directly links him to God the Father who famously declared in Exodus 3: 14, ‘I Am Who Am.’ It becomes clear why Graham announces that ‘The only apostle who did not deserve proof was St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was the only apostle who got it’ (309–10), as it directly links belief in Willie Hughes with belief in Jesus Christ. The arguments about Willie Hughes’s existence, and the language the characters use in discussing him, make sense only in the context of the nineteenth-century ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’. Willie Hughes is more than just a man. The characters claim he is the embodiment of all of Shakespeare’s writings, just as Christians argue that Christ is the embodiment of the Bible as a whole. Similarly, like Christ, Willie Hughes is a ‘kind of spiritual presence, an ever-dominant personality’ (319). The Portrait of Mr. W. H. presents two views of Willie Hughes/ Jesus: one view sees him as powerfully alive to a small group of believers in faith, the other (as reconstructed by a rationalist modern historicalcritical method) views him as determined by the forces of empirical history. For readers oriented by faith, the ‘real Willie Hughes/Jesus’ is disclosed in the writings of the foremost disciple (Shakespeare and St John). For readers motivated by reason, the ‘real Willie Hughes/Jesus’ is to be found (if at all) through research and scholarship, and critically assessed against this scholarship. Wilde’s novella attacks the creeping hegemony of Protestant reason and science, a hegemony undermining the epistemology of the Bible.35 Faith is basic to the story, a faith which is foundational: facts do not lead to it, or reason, only revelation. Willie Hughes is not absent from this narrative; he is the most powerfully present of all the characters. Likewise, Christ’s absence from the tomb only indicates his greater power in the world. For the disciple of faith, the truth of the Gospels is eclipsed whenever one seeks to interpret it in terms of something else, such as when biblical narratives are interpreted in the light of history, or Jesus is interpreted in the light of psychology. For Cyril Graham the power of the sonnets is dissipated by Erskine’s failure to realise the overarching presence of Willie Hughes behind them. For the disciple of faith, one must ascribe primacy to the revelatory narratives when deciding on the truth. The textual Jesus interprets everything else; attempting to relate the narrative Christ to the ‘historical Jesus’ is bound to end indeterminately as there is no way to describe the referent apart from the text. In The Portrait of Mr. W. H. the narrator is ‘converted’ (307, a revealing word) to a belief in Willie Hughes after

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he is presented with proof that seems to him to account for the whole of the sonnets. After he has investigated the theory further the sonnets reveal to him ‘the story of my soul’. This is a religious account of fulfilment: an explanation of the world and the self that is truly satisfying. What happens to the narrator is that he lets the standards of his age gain hold of his imagination again: where, he finds himself asking, is a tangible Willie Hughes? Despite the fact that the narrator has just had his own identity deciphered, as well as the pattern of history (from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance to Victorian England), honest doubt and Darwinian scepticism overtake him. He can no longer understand how someone could sacrifice themselves for a belief despite his own devotion of weeks of study in an attempt to justify Cyril Graham’s theories. The faith-centred approach to the biblical Christ links Wilde, not only with the Oxford Platonists, but also with the Catholic Church. John Henry Newman also grappled with the Higher Critical attack on the Bible and concluded that the crisis of confidence England was undergoing was partly due to its dedication to ‘reasonable Christianity’. Newman agrees with the ‘honest doubter’ that ‘truth is the real object of our reason’, but insists that unfortunately ‘reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man . . . [has a] tendency . . . towards a simple unbelief’. There is no denying the ‘all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect’. Nor can the Bible as a book stand against this. It is not the obvious Word of God. The conflict between reason and religion is resolved only by the ‘Church’s infallibility, as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion of the world’.36 Faith in the Church brings a belief in the revelation of the Bible and brings reason back under the remit of God rather than man. Newman was very clear about the divisions between Protestantism and Catholicism on this point. Protestantism seemed to demand facts and nothing but facts; Catholicism necessitated faith: The religion of England is ‘the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible’ – the consequence is that to strike a blow at its inspiration, veracity or canonicity, is directly to aim at whatever there is of Christianity in this country. It is frightful to think where England would be, as regards Revelation, if it once got to disbelieve or to doubt the authority of Scripture . . . [but] there is nothing that binds the Catholic to belief in various portions of Genesis, etc, as popularly interpreted.37 Newman’s arguments postulate that man, as guided by reason, ought to be agnostic. All who think that men should be dogmatic about matters

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beyond the sphere of reason, who hold that reason is our sole guide, must find their way to agnosticism. Ultimately we are given a choice between belief and knowledge, or belief and doubt, belief as a synonym for ‘faith’. Religious belief after all is often resistant to contrary evidence and oblivious to negative consequences. Tertullian’s paradox is ‘Credo quia absurdum’ (I believe because it is absurd), while Aquinas argued that belief is superior to reason because it is to assent to a transcendent truth. The very impossibility of verification functions as a means of establishing a ‘community’ against the world, hinting at a counterfactual reality to which only believers have access. Likewise, the believers in Willie Hughes constitute a version of an arcane and exclusive group which demands total devotion to the memory of a mysterious and quasi-supernatural figure who continues to transform the contemporary world. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. incorporates and demolishes the language of empirical, reason-oriented science (the version of Protestantism articulated by the late nineteenth century), and insists instead on faith in the ‘un-provable’ Willie Hughes theory. The story thus resonates with the arguments of Wilde’s contemporaries in the First Vatican Council (1869–70) who posited faith as the cornerstone of theology. The Council argued that faith is a supernatural virtue by which we, with the aid and inspiration of the grace of God, believe that the things revealed by Him are true, not because the intrinsic truth of the revealed things has been perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.38 Propositions that are impenetrable to ‘reason’ are precisely those which faith can accept as mysteries revealed to the darkened mind by God. The Council believed that to grant too much power to reason was dangerous, and decreed that ‘if anyone shall say that the assent of Christian faith is not a free act, but necessarily produced by the arguments of human reason . . . let him be anathema’.39 The assent of faith is given, not because the intellect is clear, but in spite of it not being clear. While Protestantism (generally) highlights the rationality of God, and claims that his revelation through reason allows us, through scientific methodology, to reach the facts that save us, Catholicism highlights the impenetrability of God who can only be approached symbolically or stylistically to reach the truths that save us.

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For Wilde, the orthodox Catholic approach to the hermeneutics of faith and reason would have echoed what he knew of the Irish folkCatholicism of the west. Speranza had emphasised that the Irish were uniquely impenetrable to the kind of hermeneutic suspicion which characterised the Higher Criticism. She claimed that the Irish were ‘made for worshippers, poets, artists, musicians, orators; to move the world by passion, not logic’. The empirical evidence of Willie Hughes which Erskine demands would have made no sense to the Irish peasantry as, like Cyril Graham, ‘to believe frantically, trust implicitly, hope infinitely . . . these are the unchanging and ineradicable characteristics of Irish nature, of Celtic nature we may say’.40 In the faith of Cyril Graham in the intangible force of Willie Hughes, Wilde has combined orthodox and folk-Catholic belief in the primacy of faith over reason, a combination which unites the faith of Cardinal Newman to the superstition of the Mayo peasant. In both Cyril Graham and Catholicism can be found ‘an instinctive dislike [of] the narrow limitations of common sense’.41 Against the positivism of the English, a positivism of reason and fact, Speranza argued that the Irish had another weapon. The Higher Critics were intent on stripping bare the biblical narrative, dismantling its mythological accretions, taking apart any legendary material which had found its way into the Bible stories. In this way, the Higher Critics argued that historical truth could be obtained. They wanted to know exactly what had happened in first-century Palestine prior to the interpretations placed on these original events by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In direct contrast to this methodology, the Irish ‘lived entirely upon the traditions of their forefathers’, traditions which ‘blended’ pagan legends with ‘the new doctrines taught by Christianity; so that the popular belief became, in time, an amalgam of the pagan myths and the Christian legend’. Speranza’s point about this blending is not just that it occurred but that the Irish did not desire to separate myth from history: ‘these two elements remain indissolubly united to this day’.42 The Irish commitment to blending fact and fancy was a challenge to the colonial power which set about trying to impose a rational mentality on their colonised subjects. Sir William Wilde wrote that what he termed the ‘Protestatisation’ of Ireland was well under way by the mid-nineteenth century, and was unsure what could be done to prevent the destruction of peasant superstition and belief.43 In The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Oscar Wilde suggests one methodology of resistance: the deconstruction of rationality and reason by faith. He also explored another method. Wilde dedicated himself to continuing the

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blending of myth and history, the Bible and folklore, in his own work. While Renan and others were revealing the ‘original’ Scriptures to the light of history, Wilde piled legend and myth on top of basic fact. This hybridity can best be seen in his version of the Salome story, to which we now turn. Salome is a site where the cultural battles between text and tradition encoded in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. are continued.44 While the Higher Criticism and its opponents were busy fighting over the literal truth of the biblical text, Wilde’s obsession with Scripture (evident at least since his days in Portora where he won a prize for his New Testament Greek) led him not to some vapid theory of plenary inspiration, but to the mutations and ameliorations which the biblical narratives had undergone throughout a three-thousand-year tradition. Thus, while at first it may seem that The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and Salome are an unlikely pairing, the first being a story about the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the second a Symbolist play about a biblical episode, it is in their joint refusal to allow the Irish folk mind to capitulate before the rationalising of the Scriptures that links them.

II The origins of Wilde’s play lie in the Gospel accounts of Mark and Matthew. Matthew 14: 1–12 relates how Herod had John the Baptist imprisoned because John had been teaching that Herod’s recent marriage to his half-brother Philip’s wife Herodias was a breach of God’s law. He did not have John killed because he feared an uprising from John’s followers. Then, on Herod’s birthday, ‘the daughter of Herodias’ danced before him, ‘whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask. And she, being before instructed of her mother, said Give me here John Baptist’s head in a charger.’ This account, and that in Mark 6: 14–29, not only never names the daughter of Herodias, but also neglects to describe the dance performed for Herod. The name was supplied by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews (93 AD), and the story of Salome became central to Western art, being the subject of famous paintings by Albrecht Dürer (Salome bringing the head of St John the Baptist to her Mother Herodias, 1511), Peter Paul Rubens (The Head of John the Baptist Presented to Salome, 1604), and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, c. 1607), among others. The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of interest in Salome. She was the subject of some seventy drawings by Gustave Mareau, two of which, Salome Dancing and The Apparition (both 1876) were examined in exquisite and

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sensual detail by Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884). The passage describing Salome Dancing contains a series of startlingly erotic images: Amid the heavy odour of these perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of the basilica, Salome slowly glides forward on the points of her toes, her left arm stretched out in a commanding gesture, her right bent back and holding a great lotus-blossom beside her face . . . With a withdrawn, solemn, almost august expression on her face, she begins the lascivious dance . . . her breasts rise and fall, the nipples hardening at the touch of the whirling neck-laces; the strings of diamonds glitter against her moist flesh . . .45 Gustave Flaubert followed Moreau’s lead and his novella Herodias (1876) creates in great detail the historical context of Herod’s court in which the execution of John the Baptist took place.46 Wilde was heavily influenced by the treatment of Salome by these artists and writers. He was also influenced by the style of Maurice Maeterlinck.47 Wilde was asked to write an introduction to the English translation of Maeterlinck’s play La Princesse Maleine (1889) and, although he never produced this introduction, Peter Raby has pointed out that Maeterlinck’s ‘use of colour, sound, dance, visual description and visual effect offered Wilde a theatrical vocabulary more complete and more innovative than anything the London stage could demonstrate’.48 Wilde drew on all these sources in constructing Salome, combining, as Norbert Kohl has put it, ‘Maeterlinck’s symbolism with the rich imagery of the Song of Solomon, the exoticism of Flaubert, and the sensuality of Moreau as interpreted by Huysmans, and out of all these elements he created a fin-de-siècle femme fatale’.49 Critical study of Wilde’s play has concentrated on excavating his sources in the French traditions I have just touched on here, 50 and connecting these traditions together in their treatment of the ‘castrating woman’. Of the Salome produced by these nineteenth-century writers and artists, Françoise Meltzer has written that ‘she has lost all her political and historical meaning’ and has come to symbolise ‘the pure ideal of great beauty without scruples, without restraint, with cruel indifference’.51 Meltzer’s judgement echoes that of Bram Dijkstra, who argued that the emergence of the feminist movement towards the end of the nineteenth century produced a strong misogynistic reaction from many artists. The extraordinary attention focused on Salome attempted to demonstrate ‘the inherent perversity of women: their eternal circularity

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and their ability to destroy the male’s soul even while they remained nominally chaste in body’.52 The analysis of Wilde’s play has often been reduced to the question of whether his treatment of Salome is also misogynistic. Edmund Bergler famously linked the writing of Salome to Wilde’s sexuality, and claimed that ‘having proved to his own satisfaction that woman is cruel, Wilde’s homosexual role changes from that of an “experimenter” to that of a devotee’.53 Salome demonstrates, for Bergler, that Wilde not only rejected women sexually but also constructed an image of all women as dangerous. Kate Millett, in Sexual Politics, argued that a fear of sexualised women accounts for much of the power of the play,54 an argument revived by Victoria White who argues that to Wilde Salome’s ‘sexuality is automatically evil’ because it is a feminine sexuality.55 In one of the strongest analyses of Salome from this perspective, Charles Bernheimer posits: Wilde’s gaze, cultivated in the library like a decadent plant in the hothouse, exaggerates to the point of comic absurdity the characteristic traits of the femme fatale. She wants to kill men, specifically, to dismember them . . . She gets erotic pleasure from cannibalizing male corpses . . . She loves revenge and delights in perverse cruelty . . . Salome’s castrating desire is in effect a parodic collage of desire’s decadent articulations.56 Others, while maintaining that Salome represents the castrating woman, also point out that in exploring ‘perverse sexuality’ the play operates as a telling critique of patriarchy.57 While this critical tradition has been absolutely crucial to understanding the play,58 it has ignored other issues which would also shed light on what Wilde was trying to do. After all, when E. F. S. Pigott, the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, originally banned the play for production, he did so on the grounds that it had breached the legal prohibition against the presentation of biblical characters on the stage. He wrote to one colleague, Spencer Ponsonby, on 27 June 1893, complaining that Salome was ‘half Biblical, half pornographic’.59 Wilde’s transformation of the biblical material is crucial to us here. He refuses to allow biblical literalism to overtake his play. Ewa Kuryluk writes that ‘Wilde’s Salome belongs, not to an historical or quasi-historical tradition, but to a mythical one in which ethical and religious emphases make way for an aesthetic and symbolic orientation’.60 To the insistent Protestant question, ‘is it true?’ Wilde consistently answers, ‘it’s a myth’. Indeed, his play is the latest in a long history of apocryphal

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additions to the Gospel story, and operates quite eclectically within this tradition. When he was accused of confusing two historical Salomes Wilde counselled that this reaction was ‘the truth of a Professor at the Institute. I prefer the other truth, my own, which is that of the dream. Between the two truths, the falser is the truer’.61 This consideration brings us back to the status of truth in nineteenthcentury Ireland as outlined in the previous section of this chapter. It also allows me to reconsider Salome as a reflection on the Evangelical assault on Irish Catholicism both before and after the Famine, an assault in which the Bible was an important factor. Biblical literalism and its translation into Evangelical preaching come under extreme pressures here. If in the play Wilde confronts his audience with two fierce virgins – Salome and Iokanaan – he refuses to grant virginal status to his central source, the Bible. He had once proclaimed, after all, that the Bible was the cause of so much harm that he despaired of ever writing anything to equal it.62 Here I will argue that Salome needs to be rooted in the Ireland of the nineteenth century, and particularly the religious controversies that animated the debates between ‘Second Reformation’ Protestant Evangelicals and Catholics in poverty stricken regions during the Irish Famine. Drawing on the language of religious mysticism, especially that constructed by female saints of the Middle Ages, Wilde’s play critiques the muscular Protestant assault on Irish culture by Evangelical zealots, a mission that became associated with the ‘Souperism’ controversy of the 1840s. In the play, Salome should be seen as representative of a version of Catholicism as the ‘Whore of Babylon’, emanating from Protestant texts of this period. Her desire for the food and drink she sees imaged in Iokanaan is a rereading of the exchange of faith for food during the Famine. Wilde reformulates the image of Salome’s gaze, from the literal consumption of Iokanaan through his death to a more symbolic consumption of Christ through the rituals of the Catholic Church. This reading is not an attempt to reduce the play to an allegorical treatment of religious relations in nineteenth-century Ireland. Wilde’s emergence from an Evangelical, Famine-stricken environment is crucial to his construction of the play, and this organic relationship with his environment prevents this reading from being merely a crude allegory. Sexuality and spirituality were not isolated categories in the nineteenth century, nor in the Bible, and refocusing our attention on this spirituality may modify readings of the play as unambiguously misogynistic. The Song of Solomon is the linguistic and imaginative basis for Salome’s understanding of the meaning of love. By reason of its explicit sexuality,

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the Song of Solomon was a notoriously difficult text for biblical literalists. It expresses the speaker’s desire to be ravished, as she calls out ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’ and describes how his ‘lips . . . drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue’ (1: 2; 4: 11). The Catholic Church had always circumvented this sexuality by allegorising it as dealing with Christ’s love for the Church, or as an elaborate representation of the Virgin Mary. This circumvention and allegorisation led to Protestants seeing the Song as being peculiarly associated with the Catholic Church, and the representations of that Church as both Virgin and Whore. Salome’s final paean to love almost directly reproduces the language of the Song: If thou hadst seen me thou hadst loved me. I saw thee, and I loved thee. Oh, how I loved thee! I love thee yet, Iokanaan, I love only thee . . . I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire. What shall I do now, Iokanaan? Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was chaste, and thou didst fill my veins with fire . . . Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death. (91, lines 1040–51) Salome’s use of the Song links her with Catholic tradition, and especially to female saints of the medieval period, who used similar language to express a love for Christ that, while moving beyond the merely material, did not revoke materiality. St Catherine of Siena, for example, combined chastity with an erotic Christ-obsession. She rejected earthly bridegrooms because she was saving herself for Christ, and she assumed that she had entered into a spiritual marriage with him. This marriage of the soul was represented through very bodily metaphors. She insists in her letters that she married Christ, not with a ring of gold, but with the ring of his foreskin.63 As well as invoking Catholic tradition, Salome herself is clearly an elaborate metaphor for Catholicism.64 Her characterisation is dependent on depictions of the Roman Church in Victorian England which persistently refracted it through vampiric imagery. In one

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Evangelical sermon against the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’, William Bennet fulminated: I hasten on to another and a flagrant and most notorious sin; the cruelty, and intolerance, and persecuting spirit of the Babylonish woman: her scarlet robes are stained with blood. ‘She is drunken with the blood of saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.’ ‘In her was found all the blood of the prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.’65 Iokanaan’s denunciations of Salome as ‘the daughter of Babylon’, a symbol of ‘the wickedness of the earth’, who commits countless ‘abominations’ (80, lines 629–30), echo the attacks by Evangelicals like Bennet on the Catholic Church. Ironically, Iokanaan’s attacks are levelled at a woman who protects her virginity fiercely, and who worships the moon because ‘she has the beauty of a virgin . . . [who] has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men, like the other goddesses’ (68, lines 143–5). Like Iokanaan, Salome is chaste, though unlike him she is not afraid of the sensuality of the body. Iokanaan not only sounds like Bennet and other Evangelical preachers. It is probable that Wilde drew on his own family background in depicting him. Wilde made his distaste for Iokanaan, implicit in the play, explicit in his letters. In reference to the play’s publication in Paris and London, he claimed that Salome was now ‘dancing for the head of the English public’,66 a comment which connects the Baptist to the Philistines Wilde blamed for the play’s banning. While Lord Alfred Douglas argued that ‘though it is true that there is a reference to Christianity [in the play], there are no muscular Christians’,67 he may have been overlooking the rhetorical role of the prophet. Iokanaan’s raging against the flesh reminds us that Wilde was, after all, a Protestant Episcopalian in rebellion. He was the nephew of three Episcopalian priests, and the Evangelical tradition works its way out in his writing even as he attacks and rejects it. Wilde would have heard a great deal of talk of the ‘Whore of Babylon’ as he grew up when visiting his mother’s relatives, not least, of course, if he had ventured to read his great-uncle Charles Maturin’s Five Sermons on the Errors of Roman Catholicism (1824), which is heavy on hysterics and light on ecumenism.68 The Ireland Wilde grew up in was just emerging from the so-called ‘Second Reformation’, whereby Protestant Evangelicals attempted, with renewed zeal, to free the Irish populace from the evils of Romanism – by which path came poverty, laziness and rebellion – by

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bringing them biblical Christianity in the form of the vernacular Bible.69 There is no evidence that any of his extended family was very active in Evangelical circles, but there were few Protestant clerics who were not touched by the new spirit of proselytising through the Irish language. The ‘enthusiasm’ that swept through such families was usually combined with a profound conviction of man’s total depravity and the evils of the flesh, naturally to be associated with the evils of Catholicism. In 1840, for example, the Reverend Tresham Gregg, chaplain of St Mary’s chapel in the parish of St Nicholas’ Without, Dublin, insisted that ‘Popery is the religion of human nature . . . The temptation to Popery is as great as the temptation to sin.’70 If Catholicism represents so great an enticement, then it is well to remember that Wilde could resist anything but temptation. Moreover, in conceding its powerful allure the Reverend Gregg admits himself as attracted to Catholicism as any of his vulnerable parishioners. We find Gregg’s rhetoric echoed in Iokanaan’s attacks on Salome as the great creature of sin: ‘daughter of Babylon! Come not near the chosen of the Lord. Thy mother hath filled the earth with the wine of her iniquities, and the cry of her sinning hath come up even to the ears of God’ (72, lines 282–6). Wilde would have been exposed to such preaching in Trinity College also which was suffused with clerics involved in this Second Reformation campaign, most notoriously George Salmon. In the early part of the century another Evangelical, Joseph Singer, became Regis Professor of Divinity in Trinity and he used his position to spread Evangelical ideas. In 1828 he founded the Established Church Home Mission to proselytise among Irish Catholics, and he introduced millennial theology into the Trinity curriculum, most of which still clung to the institution when Wilde arrived there.71 Iokanaan, like the Evangelicals, talks about the mercy of God, but their own hatred of Salome/Catholicism suggests only an inability to forgive. Iokanaan’s speeches constantly set him in opposition to the Saviour he proclaims. In his fear of the approach of Salome he insists ‘Back, daughter of Sodom! Touch me not. Profane not the temple of the Lord God’ (73, lines 331–2). Here he practically recants Christ’s insistence that it is not the outside of the cup that needs preservation from moral pollution, but the inside (Matthew 15: 11–20). His call for the ‘people’ to ‘take stones and stone’ Salome (80, line 623), reverses Christ’s treatment of the Woman taken in adultery, and his injunction that only those without sin should cast the first stone (John 8: 3–7). Salome’s description of him as characterised by a whiteness so glaring that it is like the ‘snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea, and comes

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down into the valleys’ (72, lines 306–7), echoes Christ’s claim that the Pharisees were like ‘whited sepulchres’ who seemed clean on the outside but who were ‘within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness’ (Matthew 23: 27), an echo also picked up by Salome’s reference to Iokanaan’s eyes as like ‘black caverns where dragons dwell . . . like black caverns of Egypt in which the dragons make their layers’ (71, lines 259–61). The Pharisees’ pedantic obsession with hygiene was to a large degree cultural: their hallowed position within Judaism set them apart as a separate people, not only from the Romans but from their fellow Jews. The Evangelicals in nineteenth-century Ireland also thought of themselves as a race apart. In an address to the City Missions in Exeter Hall in December 1851 the Reverend Alexander Dallas spoke of the Irish peasantry as ‘miserable, grovelling, ignorant, superstitious creatures’, and pleaded with his congregation to learn to love them in the midst of their degradation. If their filth, and folly, and superstition, and passion repel your love you are not fit to go amongst them. You must be able to see the jewel of God in the midst of that dunghill, and condescend to be the scavenger to get it.72 If it is filth they desired, then Iokanaan has to contend with a cistern for most of the play, but, when given the opportunity to truly evangelise, he prefers to run back to his prison in the sewers rather than preach the good news to the eager. The Evangelicals believed that they had come to eradicate the danger of ‘Catholic paganism’, a Catholicism that believed in holy wells and patterns, which worshipped Mary and saw God in the bits and pieces of the everyday. Iokanaan likewise claims that Christ’s coming has sent these gods of superstition away: ‘The centaurs have hidden themselves in the rivers, and the sirens have left the rivers and are lying beneath the leaves in the forest’ (68, lines 147–9). However, ultimately, the message of Christ’s love is actually channelled through the pagan Salome in her majestic paean to Love at the end of the play. The ‘Second Reformation’ in Ireland intensified during the Famine (c. 1845–50) as the Evangelicals argued that potato blight was provided by God to punish the unrepentant Catholicism of the natives.73 The starvation of the Irish Catholics also helps to elucidate the elaborate associations made between Iokanaan and food by Salome, associations she evokes constantly. His hair is like ‘clusters of grapes, like the clusters

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of black grapes that hang from the vine-trees of Edom in the land of the Edomites’ (73, lines 321–2); his mouth is ‘like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory’ (73, lines 337–8). After he has been beheaded she hungrily kisses his lips, biting into his mouth ‘as one bites a ripe fruit’ (90, lines 1010–11). His voice ‘is wine to me’. Salome hungers and thirsts for his body, but when she finally receives it she is only left unsatisfied. Hunger and thirst were potent metaphors during the Second Reformation in Ireland: metaphors of conversion. Protestant leaders in early nineteenth-century Ireland usually claimed that any conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism came about through the power of the Word. Catholics contrarily claimed that conversion was usually the result of financial and physical distress.74 In what was called ‘Souperism’, Catholics argued that Protestant Churches offered material relief to Catholic peasants provided they renounce their religion first. Salome offers a lesson to both viewpoints. The ravenous attraction she feels for Iokanaan is unsatisfied even as she tears, vampire-like, into his decapitated head. Even then she remains ‘athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire’ (91, lines 1043–6). It is not the bread and wine offered by the Protestant Evangelical that will ultimately be of any use to the Catholics in need of material sublimation. Likewise, the Catholic victims of the Famine who converted to Protestantism in order to feed their bodies’ needs were, in the end, mistaken also. True conversion can only come through refocusing attention away from Evangelical Puritanism, towards the body-transforming flesh and blood of Christ. This at least is what Catherine of Siena believed. To eat for Catherine meant to become, so that in partaking of the Eucharist she became part of Christ.75 Salome too needs to shift from consuming Iokanaan to consuming the Saviour he is supposed to presage. Her pathetic cry of continued starvation – ‘What shall I do now’ (91, lines 1044–5) – has already been answered by the Christ of the Gospels in a conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4: 6–32, and alluded to in this play. First-century Samaritans were considered culturally unclean by official Judaism, and when the first Nazarene notes that ‘it is said that He (Christ) is now in Samaria’, a Jew responds by condemning Christ: ‘It is easy to see that this is not Messias, if He is in Samaria. It is not to the Samaritans that Messias shall come. The Samaritans are accursed’ (80, lines 606–9). The purity of the race – a key concern of the Irish Evangelicals – emerges here. What Salome requires is not the literal food of Iokanaan, but the water given by Christ to the

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woman at the well – ‘whosoever drinketh the water that I shall give him shall never thirst’. After their conversation, this great sinner became the means of converting the entire village in which she lived. If the Samaritan woman can be saved, so too can Salome. Of course, the real food Salome needs to feast upon, in contradistinction to the cannibalistic food of Iokanaan’s body, is associated with the Catholicism Iokanaan is so anxious to disassociate himself from. The shift from a cannibalistic need to eat Iokanaan and remain unsatisfied to a religious desire to consume the transubstantiated Body and Blood of Christ is crucial here. Christ is ‘the living bread come down from heaven’, and, in the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist where the material bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, vampiric images become sublimated into religious metaphors. Notably, after Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, the disciples bring him food, but he pointedly refuses to eat, claiming that, in his rich encounter with a marginal female figure, ‘I have had meat enough.’ Thus, Salome believes she wants material food, but what she really requires is the food of Christ’s mystical body. In the medieval period, ‘to eat God in the Eucharist was a kind of audacious deification, a becoming of the flesh that, in its agony, fed and saved the world’.76 Salome becomes a Christian by default owing to this as she ardently desires the very symbols and rituals that Christ offers through the Catholic Church, the rituals of Transubstantiation, though Iokanaan, Christ’s ‘great prophet’, would ironically refuse them to her. Eating Iokanaan does not convert Salome’s desires at all. She is still unsatisfied, because she has not yet tasted the real food and drink she requires. Likewise, the Irish Catholic Church is not a pagan culture requiring Evangelism and the Bible, but is already in possession of the instruments of salvation. The ‘famine’ Salome is suffering from is both literal and spiritual. Wilde transforms the spiritual politics seen in Ireland during the Great Hunger into a methodology whereby Catholic Ireland can be saved from Souperism and move to a higher plane of existence. Moreover, this transforms the language of Apocalypse in the play, a discourse very much in evidence during the Irish Famine. From the very start of the play an atmosphere of foreboding and impending doom hangs over the characters. The action takes place at a cataclysmic juncture in world history as the pagan world is on the brink of becoming Christian, an apocalypse that occurs in a colonial outpost where religious disputes are presided over by the moon.77 While the soldiers worry about the meaning of the moon the Page of Herodias sounds a warning note: ‘Something terrible may happen’ (70, lines 201–2).

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Iokanaan insists that the great tribulation is near at hand, and both he and Herod hear ‘in the palace the beating of the wings of the angel of death’ (72, lines 256–7; 76, lines 460–2), while Herod slipping on blood and Salome dancing in a pool of blood bring on the sudden reddening of the moon in confirmation of Iokanaan’s prophecy of catastrophe. Millenarianism like this was basic to the Evangelical tradition in Ireland, especially during the Famine which was read within an apocalyptic framework.78 About two-thirds of Protestants in the Established and Dissenting Churches in Great Britain practised some form of Evangelism which placed great emphasis on the prophetic traditions.79 One of the most important products of this millenarianism in Ireland was the Reverend Alexander R. C. Dallas’s three-volume Revelation Readings: An Aid in Searching the Apocalypse (1848), which emphasised the need to bring as many out of the bondage to Popery as possible before the nowimminent second coming, an attitude which goes some way towards explaining Iokanaan’s insane desire to wrest people away from both Herodias and her popish daughter. Irene Whelan points out that the language of the Evangelicals was vehemently and aggressively antiCatholic in orientation, a vehemence matched by Iokanaan’s hate for the ‘Whore of Babylon’: What the pre-millenialists sought was nothing less than the complete extirpation of Catholic influence from any part of public life in Britain and Ireland, and the eradication of Catholicism as the religion of the majority population in Ireland on grounds that it was the cause of political subversion as well as economic backwardness.80 Of course, millenarianism did not only serve Protestant Evangelicals who wished to preserve the status quo. It also offered many within the Young Ireland movement, to which Speranza belonged, a means of critiquing the establishment and suggesting that a new order was indeed needed in which the present elite would be wiped out in favour of the rising nationalists. Popular millenarianism incorporated the prophecies of the eighteenth-century English Benedictine Charles Walmesly (‘Pastorini’) and also the prophecies of St Columbkille, in print since the eighteenth century. Most millenarian beliefs were distributed through the ballad form, which may explain why Salome was characterised by Wilde as belonging to such a tradition: The Ballad is the true origin of the romantic Drama, and the true predecessors of Shakespeare are not the tragic writers of the Greek

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and Latin stage . . . but the ballad writers of the Border . . . The recurring phrases of Salome, that bind it together like a piece of music with recurring motifs, are, and were to me, the artistic equivalent of the refrains of old ballads.81 Wilde utilised the oral traditions underwriting the Bible itself, involving techniques such as parallelism (which would have preserved the structure of texts such as Genesis, Psalms and the Song of Solomon for generations) into his play, with a flexibility absent in the written word, the King James, and the millennial tracts of the Evangelicals. By utilising the ballad form Wilde can insinuate himself into the alternative millennial tradition and subvert his Evangelical roots. Irish ballads often had strong political focus in the trope of O’Connell as the Liberator, or in the aisling (dream-vision) claims that a Jacobite prince would free Ireland from bondage to Protestantism: The bondage of the Israelites our Saviour he did see, He then commanded Moses to go and set them free, And in the same we did remain suffering for our own Till God he sent O’Connell, for to free the Church of Rome.82 Salome, the pagan princess who worships the moon, is an allegorical Ireland, and her position in the Roman court is analogous to that of Ireland within the Empire. Speranza was prominent in the Young Ireland anti-colonial reconfiguration of the apocalypse, and her poetry uses the tropes of apocalyptic theory, absorbed during her own upbringing, for a narrative of nationalist resistance. Like the Evangelicals, she saw the Famine as the articulated word of God: By our prophets God is speaking, in Sinai’s awful thunders By pestilence and famine, in fearful signs and wonders.83 For Speranza, however, the signs of the times did not tell of the coming defeat of Irish Catholicism but the demise of Protestant hegemony: the Famine will be the last straw and will force people to rise up in anger and chant ‘RETRIBUTION, proud oppressors, for your centuries of wrong’.84 The decapitation of Iokanaan, the Protestant prophet of doom, may well be her son’s first strike against such oppression. It indicates the terrible blood-price that will be paid in such a cultural clash.

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The price of retribution is war and death; its inspiration is intense hunger and thirst. Wilde was ambivalent about such sacrifices. In America he referred to the Phoenix Park murders with obvious distaste – ‘When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her’ (an image which brings Salome to mind) – but he did add a caveat that ‘We forget how much England is to blame. She is reaping the fruit of seven centuries of injustice.’85 If Wilde is reflected at all in Herod, as many critics have suggested, his personal ambivalence towards violence may go some way towards explaining Herod’s intense reaction against Salome after he has allowed her to have Iokanaan decapitated. Its reality cannot but horrify him: ‘She is monstrous, thy daughter; I tell thee she is monstrous. In truth, what she has done is a great crime’ (91, lines 1052–3). The Irish inflection I am reading in the play was suggested by Wilde himself in his interviews after the play was banned when he reverted to Irishness as a bulwark against the philistinism of the English cultural establishment. In an interview with Le Gaulois in 1892, Wilde claimed: [O]f course, I do not deny that Englishmen possess certain practical qualities; but, as I am an artist, these qualities are not those which I can admire. Moreover, I am not at present an English man. I am an Irishman, which is by no means the same thing.86 Moreover, the Irishness of the play is confirmed by the emphasis on the presence of the moon throughout the play. The Page of Herodias sees the moon as an indication of the ominous portents of the things to come (‘like a woman rising from the tomb . . . looking for dead things’, 65, lines 3–4); Salome pictures it as a chaste maiden; Herod sees it as a ‘mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers’ (75, lines 409–10); Herodias insists that ‘the moon is like the moon, that is all’ (75, lines 416–17). The moon thus functions to characterise the various players in the drama. The references to the moon recall a moment in Speranza’s Ancient Cures when she notes that ‘the Druids believed that the moon exercised a powerful influence over the human frame, and produced a violent pulsation in the blood-vessels during the space of twenty-four hours’.87 The moon is a pagan, Irish symbol, whose influence, Speranza writes, was still felt in the Ireland of the nineteenth century: In some parts of Ireland the people, it is said, on first seeing the new moon, fall on their knees and address her in a loud voice, with the prayer: ‘O moon; leave us well as thou hast found us’.88

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If the moon is an Irish pagan symbol – though one that continued to be important in an Ireland suffused with Catholicism – and Salome herself suggests a religion caught up in the rituals of Catholicism, it is no surprise to find her Irishness confirmed with this link to the moon. The moon in the play is directly associated with Salome, functioning as an evocation of her even when she is physically absent. The moon is ‘like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are silver’ (65, lines 6–7). Irish identity also explains why Salome was originally to be dressed in green, in contrast to the yellow of all the other characters,89 and her indication to the Young Syrian that she will drop a ‘green flower’ to show her satisfaction with him (70, line 215). Like the Irish fairies she dances only when the moon is full. Lady Wilde recorded that the Irish read their fairies into a theological frame that covered the entire world. The fairies were fallen angels thrown out of heaven because of their overweening pride. They were not doomed to hell, however, but were to remain on earth until the final judgement at which time they would be allowed to re-enter heaven.90 The combination of fairy belief and Christian theology in the west of Ireland, which Speranza outlines, not only corrects views of the ‘unthinking’ paganism of the Irish, but, like Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils under a full moon, points to a time in Irish chronology when, with the gathering of the fairies, the veil between this world and the next will collapse as surely as the Veil of the Temple (which Herod attempts to press onto Salome) was torn at the time of Christ’s Crucifixion. At both, the dead arose and appeared to many people. Matthew 27: 52–3 claims that after the death of Christ ‘the graves were opened; and many of the bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared to many’; at the fairy dance it was habitual to see those in the locality who had passed on.91 Resurrection is precisely what Herod fears the most. On hearing that Christ has raised the daughter of Jairus he vehemently objects: ‘I forbid Him to do that. I suffer no man to raise the dead’ (80, lines 600–1). The resurrection of powerful women is central to the play. The daughter of Jairus (spoken about by the Second Nazarene) died at 12 years of age, suggesting her movement into adulthood and beginning of menstruation, at which point women were not permitted to eat at the household table. Christ’s first instruction to the family of the daughter of Jairus is that they prepare a meal for her, thus incorporating her back into communal rituals despite her menstrual state, and insisting on full rights for women (Mark 5: 38–43). Not only are we reminded of this when Salome dances in a pool of blood – which feminist critics have

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pointed out is an unambiguous reference to menstrual blood – but also Iokanaan’s fulminations against women include the claim that ‘by woman was sin brought into the world’ (72, lines 314–15), for which menstruation itself was thought to be punishment. St Catherine of Siena, on whom Salome is based, was also called back to the family table by Christ. While still young, Catherine withdrew from her family and deprived herself of both sleep and food, out of which she was called by Christ back to the family table. Importantly, Catherine was physically unable to resume eating and focused her attentions on the Eucharist. Instead of eating food, Catherine feasted on the Eucharist and had visions of drinking blood from Christ’s side to drown her thirst.92 The dead daughter of Jairus, functioning as a synecdoche of all ‘fallen’ women, and the interpellated figures of Catherine and the Samaritan woman at the well are recalled by Salome’s fairy-dance which brings all the dead to life again. The dance is also reminiscent of the claims of Irish nationalism, usually through the allegorised figure of a woman, that the dead were constant presences: the Irish dead, feminised by both colonial and national discourses that found their ultimate approbation in the writers’ circles of the literary revival. Immediately after Salome’s dance – the dance of Catholic Ireland and its ‘pagan’ fairies, the dance of outcast females throughout history, the dance of the feminised Irish nationalists – the head of Iokanaan (Evangelist, Puritan, misogynist) is demanded and received. There is a link between the oath demanded of Herod by Salome and the secret societies of agrarian Ireland which were heavily involved in propagating the kinds of violence and millennial imagery that saturate the play, societies where the moon held most sway. Secret societies like the Whiteboys or the Rockites demanded that their members took oaths, and helped to carry millennial messages of hope to Catholic counties, but also implicated their members in bloodshed and violence.93 When Salome forces Herod to swear to grant her anything she wishes Wilde is metaphorically linking his own involvement – if he is Herod – with the possible loss of life that such political commitment entails. The force and danger inherent in these discourses is realised and released and only negated by the implied possibility, at the end of the play, of a union of the moon and the Christ heralding an apocalypse when the Saviour leads his people (Catholic Ireland) away from a blood sacrifice and the literal destruction of the Protestant race to a love which is more mysterious than death and stronger than the grave. As many Young Ireland poems pointed to the Famine – the literal death of Ireland – as the path to the millennium when the imperial

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overlords would be punished, the radical figure of Christ outside the text, whose teachings are finally voiced not by Iokanaan but by Salome in her great monologue, suggests that the Apocalypse will bring a future in which Salome is vindicated. The suggestion that Salome is vindicated is contained in the stage directions after her speech of love: ‘A moonbeam falls on Salome, covering her with light.’ The light of the moon, the light of Catholic Ireland, the light of the fairies, falls on her and redeems her. Salome’s and the Irish Catholic Church’s desire for blood and bodies is here oriented towards a desire for the sacred materiality of the crucified Christ who died to save us from our sins. In Salome’s final speech of love she literally becomes a St Catherine whose erotic visions were mystical channels of devotion to the one true lover. Salome is also symbolically a Famine victim who has chosen to eat at the wrong table, but whose direction is being reset. This final movement also spectacularly refocuses blame for the entire bloody affair back on Iokanaan. It was, after all, his failure to bring Christ’s message in its totality to Salome that cut off all other avenues for her action. Instead of exercising the redemption of Christ, he became a condemning Pharisee; this is a continuing refrain of Wilde’s work in general. Protestantism has failed because it could not move beyond a narrow Hebraism, the old ways and dispensation, and into the Hellenism of Christ whereby the pagan gods are not dispelled but transfigured. In my discussion, I have placed Salome in both a biographical (Evangelical) and a national context and demonstrated that the writings of his parents remain basic for interpretations of the play. Speranza and Sir William provided Wilde with the imagery of his youth, and continued to be a repository upon which he drew in his writing life. Salome also confirms the association in Wilde of religious and sexual deviance, though it is also clear that it is through the language of Catholicism that he approached sexual politics. Taken together, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and Salome reinterpret the Gospel stories through the folk-Catholic version of story found in the west of Ireland. They represent what Angela Bourke has called a ‘vernacular cognitive system’ which could be found in Ireland, a system which wove fact and fiction together. Like the storytellers who wandered the Irish countryside, ‘by telling a story so seductive that no listener would wish to say aloud “That is a lie!”’ Wilde ‘subverts his own narrative’s claim to authority at the same time as he asserts it, holding out the possibility of access to a club of the adult initiated’.94 One threat to this system came from colonial authorities whose version of truth was

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wedded to empirical rather than lyrical Reality, to rationalism rather than to the illogic of folk tales. This rationalism was brought to its extreme in the Higher Critical attack on the Bible, and it is Wilde’s subversion of this attack that we have examined. However, another threat came in the form of the realist novel. Wilde took this threat seriously, and it is to his response – The Picture of Dorian Gray – that we now turn.

3 Body and Soul: Nature, the Host and Folklore in The Picture of Dorian Gray

I In the previous chapter I concentrated on demonstrating Oscar Wilde’s dedication to undermining what Speranza called the ‘common-sense’, literalist focus of English society. This focus manifested itself in the commitment to the plenary inspiration of the Bible by most Protestant churches, a commitment which involved reading every statement of the Bible on every subject as literally true. The depth of this commitment to literal reading caused the Protesting churches extreme epistemological difficulty when the Higher Criticism undermined sola scriptura religion. Empirically based religion was undermined by an empirically based methodology of reading. However, the issue of the English literal imagination is also of vital concern when examining Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, because the novel form itself was at the centre of debates about the application of empiricism in the nineteenth century. It is important to note that, while the novel was issued in two very different editions – the first in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, the second as a very revised single volume in 1891 – it is only with the second of these editions I will be concerned with here. I will detail below how interpreting Dorian Gray as an intervention in the debate about the relationship between the novel and reality in the nineteenth century can help in clearing up the rather confusing question of what exactly Wilde was trying to do in his literary experiment. As has been well documented, by the mid-nineteenth century, the novel had largely been rescued from the ambiguities surrounding its status in the eighteenth century, when novel writing was invariably associated with a lack of seriousness and an aversion to reality. Ian Watt 79

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has drawn attention to the strategies whereby eighteenth-century novelists attempted to distance their texts from ‘mere’ fiction by invoking various kinds of quasi-historical status for them.1 Maria Edgeworth famously prefaced her novel Belinda (1811) with the declaration that her book should be considered a ‘Moral Tale’ rather than a novel.2 This attempt to garner respectability continued into the Victorian period.3 One important factor which led to the novel form gaining such respectability was the movement whereby science became the paradigm within which many Victorian novelists worked, and the novelist became a type of social scientist rather than ‘simply’ a writer of fiction. Victorian ‘realists’ were instrumental in diffusing a new scientific model of the world, a model dominated by a rationalism that was fast becoming hegemonic. This rationalism had largely emerged during the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment. It is widely acknowledged that the emphasis on rationalism during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had placed Christianity under a great deal of intellectual pressure. Rationalism, especially at its most extreme, rejects even the possibility of miracles. A miracle occurs when something defies the laws of nature, such as a virgin giving birth, or a dead man rising to life. Rationalists like David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), argued that the laws of nature are fixed and a breach of them by definition impossible. Matthew Arnold, sage of the Victorians, echoed Hume when he insisted that ‘our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ, as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle; – and miracles do not happen’.4 Rationalists stripped Christianity of its supernatural ‘baggage’ and invested in the language of science.5 It is no surprise that the concept of novelistic realism came to play an important role in the centuries after the ideas of the Enlightenment had begun to filter to a wider population. David Lodge reminds us that ‘Realism is the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to description of similar experience in non-literary texts of the same culture’,6 the most powerful of which was Victorian science. In her reviews for the Westminster Review in the 1850s George Eliot made it clear that realism as a genre was organically related to the principles of Enlightenment philosophy. She castigated novelists who continued to write ‘fictionally’ rather than realistically. Eliot insisted that writers should look around them for the materials of literature rather than indulge themselves in the creation of fantastical worlds. Life, she argued, must be represented

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in novels as faithfully as possible, and argued that ‘realism’ was basic to writing novels: Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have some false ideas about evanescent fashions – about the manners and conversations of beaus and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one.7 Eliot believed that a commitment to realism necessitated that the novelist should go some way towards rejecting traditional religion, and should promote only what is verifiable of humanity. The Victorian realist tradition was an extraordinary attempt to both re-enact the Enlightenment project in terms of literary formalism, and an ethical attempt to rid the world of the supernatural traditions many believed were slowing down the intellectual progress of humanity. This Enlightenment project was energised by the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). The book sent shockwaves through the religious establishment as it argued that humans were not a special species at all, not specially created by God, but were closely related to such creatures as apes and monkeys. If this was true, then the soul was an unproven hypothesis. If there was little dividing the world of Homo sapiens from the planet of the apes, then humanity was a species of beast without soul, without God, without salvation. If a person has no soul, then a philosophy based on materialism was inescapable. Without a soul, humans are just collections of atoms and molecules which must obey the natural laws of material objects. Without a soul free will is seriously undermined as the body is reduced to obeying the laws of Nature. The implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory not only complemented the realist focus on social and natural causes for human behaviour, but also complemented the realist novel’s marginalisation of the supernatural. The ‘naturalism’ of the French novelist Émile Zola carried the literary realist experiment even further. Zola and the naturalists chose to intensify realism by using a vocabulary in his novels that approximated

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closely to that used by real people everyday, and also by writing with an often brutal honesty about the lower classes. Zola refused to gloss over the harsh realities of life for those marginalised by society, and was particularly devoted to explaining everything in his novels by natural and material, rather than supernatural, causes. In his Preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868), Zola proclaimed openly that ‘mon but a été un but scientifique avant tout’ (my aim was a scientific one above all), and describes himself as ‘un médecin’ (a doctor) rather than a writer.8 Of course, realism did not have a monopoly on the natural sciences: an important theme in Gothic novels has always been the impact of science on society, a theme that can be seen clearly in works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). However, the key difference between the realist and the Gothic novel is that realism not only examines science as an important issue but also is an attempt to imitate modes of scientific inquiry formally, modes which, as I have shown, have a methodological atheism at their heart. Given my thesis, that Wilde was an Irish Catholic writer, and thus broadly supportive of ‘supernatural’ modes of thought, it is important to examine his place in the Victorian novel tradition and his relation to such scientific realism. The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published on 20 June 1890, in the July edition of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. The publication received a great deal of very negative criticism, with the Scots Observer famously attacking its subject matter as dealing ‘with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera’.9 In response Wilde wrote a ‘Preface’ for Dorian Gray which was first published in the Fortnightly Review of 1 March 1891. The Preface warned Wilde’s critics that ‘Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming’ (3).10 Wilde then thoroughly revised the book for publication in novel form in April 1891. The plot concerns a portrait of a young man of extraordinary natural beauty, Dorian Gray. The painter of this portrait, Basil Hallward, became obsessed with Dorian after meeting him at a party, and took him as the inspiration for his art. In the final sitting for Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, who dazzles him with a glorious tribute to the beauty of youth and the degradation of old age. Having heard this, Dorian voices a wish that he could gladly give his soul in exchange for perpetual youth, and desires that he could remain young while the portrait took on all the ravages of time. This wish is magically granted, and for the rest of the novel Dorian remains, in outer appearance, exactly the same.

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However, under the influence of Lord Henry, and a mysterious book Lord Henry has him read, Dorian becomes cruel and heartless, first breaking the heart of his fiancée, Sibyl Vane, an action which precipitates her suicide, and then, in a fit of rage, killing Basil Hallward for painting the portrait in the first place. The portrait displays signs of all these sins and eventually Dorian, in a desperate attempt to destroy it, stabs it with a knife. However, in attacking the portrait he actually kills himself and when he is found the figure on the portrait has become young again, and Dorian’s own body appears old and hideously wrinkled. The largely unexplained alteration in Dorian’s portrait indicates that Wilde’s novel is outside the Victorian realist tradition. Indeed, in his many book reviews, Wilde was not enthusiastic about realism as a mode of writing as it made too great a distinction between reality and fantasy. He was uneasy with the work of realists like George Eliot because he did not believe that their commitment of being true to material life was adequate: This is the supreme advantage that fiction holds over fact: it can make things artistically probable, and by force of mere style, compel us to believe. The ordinary novelists, by keeping close to the ordinary incidents of commonplace life, seem to me to abdicate half their power. 11 For Wilde, the novelist was an inventor, a creator, who could invest magic with conviction, and persuade us of anything if only she was good enough. In a letter to the editor of the Daily Chronicle in 1890, Wilde insisted that Dorian Gray was directed ‘against the crude brutality of plain realism’12 governed by scientific naturalism. Most critics of the novel have agreed that Dorian Gray is not a straight realist novel, though it contains elements of such fiction. Rachael Bowlby has perceptively commented that ‘Dorian Gray does not in fact fall straightforwardly into any generic category’, and instead brings together ‘innumerable different forms and styles . . . alternating and overlapping in no particular order and with no . . . appearance of either a conventional linear narrative in the mode of realism, or a consistent symbolic line in the mode of allegory’.13 In two penetrating essays Kerry Powell traces Dorian Gray’s indebtedness to contemporary popular literature, including novels of mesmerism and what he calls ‘“magic” picture fiction’,14 novels which were outside mainstream realist traditions. As Isobel Murray argues, Wilde’s novel importantly combines at least ‘two fairly well known traditions, the “Gothick” one of, for example,

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Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”, and the “decadent” one of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, Huysmans’s À rebours and Pater’s Marius the Epicurian’.15 Both of these traditions lie outside canonical realism. By placing the novel in a non-realist tradition, these critics have laid the foundation for seeing Dorian Gray as part of an Irish canon. Scholars of nineteenth-century Irish literature have pointed out that, against the achievement of English and Continental novels, Ireland has relatively little to show. David Lloyd has commented that ‘accounts of the nineteenthcentury Irish novel are troubled by the need to explain its perceived inadequacy’.16 Compared to the accomplished writing of novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, Ireland produced nothing of comparative power until James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Terry Eagleton has pointed out that this lack can be explained by the dominance of realism as a genre in England. Since ‘classical realism depends upon the assumption that the world is story-shaped – that there is a well-formed narrative implicit in reality itself, which it is the task of such realism to represent’, the disruptive, colonial history of Ireland, and the impact of such catastrophes as the Famine on the ‘Irish mind’, deprived Ireland of such a rational narrative shape. Thus, ‘the Irish novel from Sterne to O’ Brien is typically recursive and diffuse, launching one arbitrary narrative only to abort it for some equally gratuitous tale’.17 Given this perspective, Wilde’s juxtaposing of a variety of literary genres in one short novel can be read as a typically Irish literary response to the vicissitudes of history, and thus a repudiation of colonial models of reality and realism. The generic positioning of Dorian Gray in an anti-realist tradition would also explain the overt Catholic elements of the novel. Since realism was, broadly speaking, antagonistic to religion, if Wilde’s novel supported a Catholic ethos, this would contribute to its anti-realist position. Indeed, there has been a welcome attention to the Catholic contexts and sources of the novel from a number of critics. For example, Jerusha Hull McCormack has established that the hero of the novel derives his name from Wilde’s friend and (probably) lover John Gray, a working-class poet, whom he met in the summer of 1889. It was during this summer too that Gray began moving towards the Catholic Church, a move completed in his conversion in March 1890. Gray’s sexual relationship with Wilde lasted through this period, conversion and perversion linked personally as well as culturally.18 Although critics such as Neil McKenna have argued that Gray was struggling between sin and sainthood in this period, between, that is,

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his sexuality and his religion, and that, given his sexual preferences, his conversion to Catholicism should be seen as ‘half-hearted’,19 it is more likely, given the Catholic reading of male friendships that pervaded Victorian culture, that Gray’s sexual and religious life were experientially linked. McCormack has pointed out that it was only ‘in retrospect’ that Gray saw his relationship with Wilde as a ‘course of sin’, and she argues persuasively that if the relationship was ‘sinful’ ‘it was necessary, therapeutic sin: clarifying for Gray the distinction . . . between his drive for self-betterment and the achievement of self-hood; between sexual attraction and spiritual quest’.20 As I have previously demonstrated, perverse sexuality was linked so closely to religious heresy in the Victorian mind that it is no surprise that many Catholics would see sexual ‘sin’ as the path towards sainthood. In juxtaposing his friend’s name with the pre-Hellenic race of the Dorians, Wilde brought together religious and sexual scandal, for, if John Gray courted controversy by converting to Catholicism, the Dorians were widely known as ‘a tribe of ancient Greece . . . famous for their custom of institutionalised paiderastia’.21 In naming his own hero ‘Dorian Gray’, Wilde can be read as indicating that the unnamed ‘sins’ that Dorian commits may also be bringing him closer to the Church rather than further away. The name ‘Dorian Gray’ thus suggests both religious and sexual dimensions to the hero of Wilde’s novel. Even more important for Wilde was the influence of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours which he read in 1884 while on honeymoon. This novel is a spiritual Bildungsroman, and charts the progress of its hero Des Esseintes from a childhood schooled by the Jesuits into a long period of oscillation between faith and doubt during which he is beset by both sexual and intellectual temptation. At the end of the novel, the hero is unable to express complete acceptance of the truths of Catholicism, despite an ardent wish that in doing so he could find peace of mind. The point about Des Esseintes’s sins is that, rather than merely alienating him from God they are what drive him towards Catholicism: it is by increasing his sexual sins that the hero feels himself more in need of the mercy of God. Sin and spirituality become one and the same thing, so much so that ‘in spite of everything, it was still only among the ecclesiastics that Des Esseintes could hope to enjoy relations in some degree of accordance with his tastes’.22 Wilde drew extensively on À rebours in writing his own novel. In Chapter X, Lord Henry Wotton supplies Dorian with a ‘yellow book . . . the strangest book that he had ever read’ (97). This book ‘fascinates’ Dorian and becomes central to his life. Indeed, the reader is told

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that ‘for years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book’, and that, so obsessed with it did he become, ‘the hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself’ (98). In a letter to E. W. Pratt in 1892, Wilde admitted that this book was ‘partly suggested by Huysmans’s À rebours’.23 The activities of Dorian Gray contain powerful echoes of both the sinful and the spiritual quest of Des Esseintes. This is most important in Chapter XI, where Dorian enthusiastically collects a vast array of fabulous artefacts such as perfumes and vestments, a direct reference to Des Esseintes’s own obsessive collections. The collections of Des Esseintes and Dorian contain vast amounts of Catholic items. Both Gray and Huysmans provided Wilde with a pattern whereby sexuality, sin and spirituality were linked in a movement towards the Catholic Church. Together, they suggested the possibility that the Bildungsroman, which was a largely secular genre, could be reconfigured and moulded into a spiritual parable. À rebours was, after all, Huysmans’s challenge to the materialist naturalism of Émile Zola’s work, in favour of a more compelling ‘supernatural’ interpretation of reality.24 Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) has also been identified as an important source for Dorian Gray. Pater was a leading Victorian aesthetician and, of course, had lectured Wilde when he was at Oxford, and Wilde remained in contact with him. He had sent him a copy of The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), to which Pater replied admiringly. Pater went on to review Dorian Gray.25 John Pick has described Dorian Gray as ‘largely a novelised form of the “Conclusion” to the Renaissance’ and claimed that ‘Lord Henry Wotton . . . represents the very voice – and indeed not infrequently the words of – the “Conclusion”’.26 Richard Ellmann documents the interrelationship between Lord Henry’s ‘new Hedonism’ and the philosophy of beauty found in the ‘Conclusion’: Pater had urged that we ‘be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy,’ and Lord Henry echoes him . . . when he says, ‘To realize one’s nature to perfection – that is what each of us is here for.’ Pater says we must not allow ‘theory or idea or system’ to oblige us to the ‘sacrifice of any part of this experience.’ Lord Henry goes further, ‘We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind . . . ’27

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However, as well as voicing a new Hellenism which is lifted by Lord Henry Wotton, Pater’s essays contain long meditations on Catholic art, dwelling in particular on the theology of Michelangelo’s and Leonardo’s greatest works, and also meditating on the founding of the Catholic Church. Like Wilde’s novel, which hesitates between two modes of thought, the scientific-realist and the Catholic-Gothic, Pater’s book goes back to the Renaissance as a moment of liminality between the Catholic Middle Ages and the ‘scientific’ Enlightenment. Although many read Pater’s intellectual commitments as driven by an almost atheistical modernism, his own flirtation with Catholicism demonstrates an ambivalence, a perpetual undecidability, which is brilliantly personified in his study of this historical period of transition.28 The influences of these Catholic factors on Wilde’s novel have been already traced by a number of critics, and I will not dwell on them here. However, it is important to point out that, even when tracing these Catholic influences, critics have tended to isolate them to one episode of the 1891 edition of the novel – Chapter XI. In this chapter Dorian experiences a number of fleeting interests and obsessions, such as perfumes, jewellery and ecclesiastical vestments. One of these interests is Catholicism, and the novel describes Dorian’s short-lived participation in a Catholic Mass in Chapter XI: It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion; and certainly, the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the ancient world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements . . . But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system . . . (103) This scene is read as modelled on Wilde’s own interest in Catholicism as a young man in Oxford, and an explanation of why Wilde did not publicly convert. Richard Ellmann claimed that ‘what [Wilde] would . . . say about Dorian Gray’ and his brief interest in Catholicism ‘was true of himself’ because such a conversion would have represented a betrayal of the intellect.29 That this judgement chimes with contemporary considerations of the Catholic Church, and religion more generally, as an intellectual stop-gap, explains the attractiveness of this explanation for critics. Catholicism, and religion itself, is that which Dorian

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(and by implication, Wilde) must evade if he is to reach his full aesthetic powers. It is curious, however, that the same conclusions are not drawn about Dorian’s equally fleeting interest in the theories of Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology. In Chapter XI, the same chapter in which Dorian briefly experiences an interest in the Catholic Church, he also ‘for a season . . . inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and pleasures of men to some pearly cell in the brain’ (103). Dorian here becomes fascinated briefly by the application of Darwin’s theories to a whole range of physiological qualities by a school of thought in Germany. Indeed, recognising the influence of nineteenthcentury science on the novel has been one of the most important critical ‘discoveries’ of the last decade, and Wilde’s personal interest in Darwinism has been a growing theme of much of Wilde criticism. In an interesting article, Terri Hassler argues that, by adopting the language of physiological determinism (the cutting edge of scientific research in the 1890s), Wilde offers a materialistic version of destiny, and rejects a supernatural one (such as one might find in the Catholic sources of the novel). She posits that the novel is a fictional treatment of the eminent Darwinist Thomas Huxley’s claim that ‘all life, thought and behaviour are reducible to the physical properties of life’. She contends that in Dorian Gray ‘Wilde creates the essence of the Huxleyan predetermined automaton’.30 John Wilson Foster argues that in its devotion to science Wilde’s novel is ‘a natural history of sensations’, and a reflection of Wilde’s wide reading in the natural sciences.31 The scientific basis of the novel has been brilliantly expanded on by Heather Seagrott. She notes the influence of the relatively new science of psychology on the text, and the extent to which contemporary psychologists tried to construct their science through models drawn from the natural sciences. Seagrott claims that Dorian Gray is ‘Wilde’s critique of overconfident scientific materialism and his attack on simple-minded oppositions between the fields of science and art’.32 The novel suggests that there are serious limitations on the power of science to explain the world, but demonstrates that these limitations can be overcome through the incorporation of art into the study of science. Science must take into account the findings of aesthetics if it is to be able to articulate a complete reading of the human psyche so that, ‘even as Wilde’s novel employs scientific discourse, it seeks to contain the various methods and imperatives of scientific discourse within its own aesthetic’.33 Seagrott, however, is uninterested in Wilde’s use of Catholicism in the

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novel. Importantly, Dorian’s abandonment of a biological approach to life (just as he abandoned a Catholic approach) has not encouraged these critics to suggest that Wilde too intellectually abandoned evolution as an inadequate mythology to account for human psychology. However, if Dorian Gray is really as anti-realist as I have argued, perhaps the materialist reading of the novel as an endorsement of science and Darwinism and a dismissal of religion has been too quick to find closure. As I have argued, it is realism as a genre which is dedicated to a scientific description of life, and Wilde’s novel clearly subverts such an approach. In the next section of this chapter I will demonstrate that Catholicism is not confined to one section of the novel, Chapter XI, and that, instead, it pervades the entire story. I will also show how Catholicism is used to illustrate the limitations of such discourses as scientific naturalism. Catholicism, I believe, overcomes materialist science in this novel. In the final section of the chapter I will argue that the Catholicism of the novel has important Irish aspects, aspects which were under serious threat from nineteenth-century colonial discourse. Colonialism used Irish folk-Catholicism as an example of how backward Ireland was, how lost in time the Irish people were. From a colonial point of view, depicting the Irish as a charmingly primitive people justified depriving them of the means of self-government. Wilde’s novel is an attempt to preserve Irish folk-Catholicism from being overwhelmed by such threats and used as an instrument in furthering the colonial mission.

II Scientific readings of the novel focus closely on Lord Henry Wotton. Hassler claims that he is Wilde’s ‘spokesperson for scientific materialism’.34 Seagrott agrees with this judgement stating that, although Dorian also becomes a scientist in the novel, ‘his initial role was as secondary investigator in a study initiated by Lord Harry’.35 I want to suggest a new source for this crucial character, and believe that Wilde had, in fact, a specifically Catholic source for him in another Henry, the Catholic convert Cardinal Henry Newman. One factor which links Lord Henry and Cardinal Newman is the importance which Wilde attached to both their voices. Lord Henry has a ‘fascinating’ voice, and in Chapter II, where he is expounding his ‘philosophy’, Dorian cannot help listening to him because ‘there was something in his low, languid voice that was absolutely fascinating’ (22). Newman too had a ‘fascinating’ and seductive voice. Wilde wanted and yet feared an interview with him because, after listening to his voice, ‘I could hardly resist [him] I am afraid.’36

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Like Lord Henry, Newman was also devoted to youth and beauty, and spoke extensively in natural metaphors about the corroding effects of Nature on male beauty. He was convinced that his own conversion to Catholicism, and the conversion of other prominent figures like Henry Manning, marked a new beginning, a new springtime for the English Catholic Church. This new springtime began, he believed, in 1850 when Pius IX announced the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy under Nicholas Wiseman. The English Catholic Church had been under the direct control of the Congregation of Propaganda in Rome since the seventeenth century, and the reconstitution of a national hierarchy certainly suggested a new energy to the Catholic Church. Whereas English Catholicism had, until this date, been in the words of E. R. Norman ‘discreet and carefully unobtrusive’,37 Newman believed the new church would be vigorous and challenging. It was as if the church had emerged from a long, dark and dead winter to new life in a glorious spring. On 13 July 1852, Newman preached a sermon, later published as The Second Spring, in which he compared the life of the English Catholic Church to the life of man.38 Man, he expounded, is not like the seasons. Man is born, he lives, and he dies: ‘Man rises to fall: he tends to dissolution from the moment he begins to be . . . he was young, he is old, he is never young again.’39 Youth is central to his thesis: it acts as the template of the material existence all would like to prolong. All eyes are turned to youth, tinged with envy and sadness: we look on the bloom of youth with interest, yet with pity; and the more sweet and graceful it is, with pity so much the more; for, whatever be its excellence and its glory, soon it begins to be deformed and dishonoured by the very force of its living on. It grows into exhaustion and collapses, till at length it crumbles into that dust out of which it was originally taken.40 Youth is the epitome of life and yet the beginning of the end. In the sermon, Newman argued that from a secular perspective there is no way to overcome the power of nature which will kill us all, and by implication no way for the Catholic Church to emerge from decrepitude to a new youth. The beautiful body is destined only to decay, and no science can avoid this: [The heart] puts forth its first leaves, and opens and rejoices in the spring-tide. Fair as may be the bodily form, fairer far, in its green

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foliage and bright blossoms, its natural virtue. It blooms in the young, like some rich flower, so delicate, so fragrant, and so dazzling. Generosity and lightness of heart and amiableness, the confiding spirit, the gentle temper . . . and yet, as night follows upon day, as decrepitude follows upon health, so surely are failure, and overthrow, and annihilation, the issue of this natural virtue, if time only be allowed to run its course . . . Let the bright soul go through the fire and water of the world’s temptations and seductions and corruptions and transformations . . . wait until youth has become age; and not more different is the miniature which we have of him as a boy, when every feature spoke of hope, put side by side with the large portrait painted to his honour, when he is old, when his limbs are shrunk, his eye dim, his brow furrowed, and his hair grey, than differs the moral grace of that boyhood from the forbidding and repulsive aspect of his soul, now that he has lived to the age of man. For moroseness, and misanthropy, and selfishness, is the ordinary winter of that spring.41 Regeneration is necessary for the body and the Church to be saved, but nature alone cannot provide this regeneration, only a miracle. Newman argued that England had recently witnessed such a miracle, transforming a dying and wrinkled body (of Old English Catholicism) into a young and powerful one, ‘a restoration in the moral world, such as that which yearly takes place in the physical’.42 The old Catholic Church ‘in its day became a corpse . . . [and] corrupt the air which once refreshed, and cumber the ground which once it beautified’,43 so that the Catholics were termed ‘a gens lucifuga, a people who shunned the light of day’.44 This has changed, however, because martyrdom has occurred. Because of the blood of the martyrs and the willingness to die for goodness, the natural order of things was dramatically reversed and sent into a miraculous turn: ‘For grace can where nature cannot. The world grows old, but the Church is ever young.’45 The one way out of degeneracy, as Newman suggests, is rebirth or revival through the grace of God. A close examination of Lord Henry Wotton’s ‘sermon’ on youth to Dorian Gray in Chapter II of Wilde’s novel, the sermon which effectively convinces Dorian to sell his soul for the sake of eternal youth, reveals how close his argument is to that put forward by Newman. Lord Henry insists that ‘youth is the one thing worth having’ (22), warning of the day ‘when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with

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its hideous fires’ (22–3). Echoing Newman, Lord Henry contrasts the days of man with the seasonal changes of nature: The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. (23) For both Newman and Lord Henry, in contrast to the revolution of the seasons is the linear development of man. Both men wish to find some way of preventing the corrosive power of nature from destroying that which is beautiful, the Catholic Church and Dorian Gray. This shared need to stall the processes of nature is central to the novel. A total fear of ageing and death motivates Lord Henry’s devotion to youth, and is also behind his desire for Dorian Gray who represents the pinnacle of youth. Late in the novel Lord Henry tells Dorian that ‘Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I am afraid of it’ (161). He admits that ‘to get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable’ (164). Lord Henry is scandalised by the body, by the fact that it will change and grow old, and yet obsessed with it. The natural male body is the centre of attraction, its beauty, its physicality. Lord Henry fantasises about Dorian Gray, the Victorian hunk. Pin-ups are desired for their bodies. However, these bodies can decay and grow old and are thus obstacles to desire also. Likewise, Dorian Gray functions as a body in conflict. Although Lord Henry has 17 pictures of Dorian floating around his house, over which we presume he can fawn and drool, he can never get enough of the Dorian that is more than a one-dimensional image. He wants to possess a body like Dorian’s (Dorian is a beefier version of the kind of hero Wilde usually employs in that he is compared to Adonis as well as to Narcissus), but is unprepared to do the ‘natural’ things in order to develop one. Thus, fear and desire of nature and the natural body structures the novel, just as it structures Newman’s sermon. Lord Henry and Newman want to divest the natural of the sting of death, and also maintain the natural as the centralisation of the erotic; they wish to stabilise the body in its prime of health and sexuality, but also to take full advantage of the natural world of process and sexuality. The male body is the centre of desire but also the central problem. Where Lord Henry Wotton rhapsodises the natural beauty of Dorian, John Henry Newman praises both the physical and moral beauty of the young: ‘fair as may be the bodily form, fairer far, in its green foliage and bright blossoms, is natural virtue’.46

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The difference between Henry Newman and Henry Wotton is, so to speak, that Wotton lacks the language of grace that Newman propounds as the only true path out of the natural process of death. While Newman insists that only self-sacrifice and grace can, in moulding the soul, save natural man, Lord Henry discounts such language as ‘medieval’ remnants of no importance in the harsh light of the nineteenth century. In Chapter II he dismisses the ‘maladies of medievalism’ (20), and towards the end of the novel, in Chapter XIX, dismisses Dorian’s pleas that the soul must be attended to: ‘What have you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up our belief in the soul’ (164). He tells Dorian that the problem with religion and other cultural phenomena is that they hold back Natural man: every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us . . . The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with . . . desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. (20) Catholic theology cannot function for Lord Henry so he dismisses it. Instead of Newman’s Catholic theology which insists that the actions of grace on the soul can reverse the natural process of ageing, Lord Henry suggests that a language of science can offer salvation. Lord Henry is the natural scientist at the centre of the novel. In Chapter IV he admits his belief that ‘the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at a scientific study of the passions’ (50). His devotion to scientific naturalism is all-embracing and leads him to reject the concept of the soul. He defines the kind of life operating in a completely materialistic universe: ‘Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams’ (165). According to Lord Henry, life has no free will, only biological imperatives. Existence does not consist of a body and a soul, but simply cells and fibres. Dreaming and hoping are merely aspects of physicality that humans mistake for something more important. Lord Henry’s entire language is suffused with a dedication to promoting what he defines as ‘natural impulses’ bequeathed to us by the evolutionary process. In one scene he explicitly acknowledges Nature as the source of his theories, which ‘belong to Nature, not to me. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval’ (63). Under Lord Henry’s influence, Dorian abandons supernatural explanations of the changes in the portrait and adopts thoroughly ‘natural’

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ones. If Darwinian theory is correct, Dorian argues in Chapter XI, surely natural process could explain the mutations appearing on the canvas: If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things. Nay, without thought or conscious desire might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love of strange affinity? (112) In a Darwinian fervour, Dorian traces every passion and thought he has to some nerve in his body or the brain: There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken away from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination. (137) Both Dorian and Lord Henry have rejected the supernatural theories Newman believes are the only way out of physical and moral decrepitude, and substituted a thoroughgoing scientific naturalism. The key point about the relation between Henry Wotton and Henry Newman is that they are in complete agreement on the importance of youth and beauty, that they both recognise that natural man will age and die and needs some methodology for regeneration. For Henry Newman, that regeneration will come through self-sacrifice and grace as demonstrated in the regeneration of Old English Catholicism in the wake of the reconstitution of the Catholic hierarchy. For Lord Henry such Catholic beliefs are mere ‘superstitions’ that belong in the past. He believes that regeneration of the body will come about only through embracing science and scientific naturalism. The problem for the critic is to discover which methodology the novel endorses. And here we need to be clear: it is Lord Henry Wotton’s theories which fall foul of the structure of the novel, and not Henry Newman’s. It is Lord Henry’s banishing of the soul which comes to be seen as a sick joke, while Henry Newman’s focus on the importance of the soul is vindicated. In Chapter II Lord Henry hypothesises the soul as a purely textual phenomenon, as the exercise of influence of one person over another: ‘To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry

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there’ (23). The irony is that his scientific dismissal of the soul takes place in a novel where the literal loss of soul by one character drives the plot forward. Lord Henry can talk flippantly about the soul, but the reader is fully aware that he has not lost it. He has his soul conveniently still with him. The irony is that Dorian, the only character who has truly managed to banish the soul as Lord Henry insists all should wants it back, and dies in the attempt to get it back. Having achieved eternal life and never-ending health, the dream of the science that Lord Henry pontificates about, for Dorian the soul should be superfluous. Unfortunately, the ‘medieval’ theories, as propounded by Henry Newman, about the (natural) unity of body and soul that Lord Henry tries to dismiss just won’t go away – where body and soul are split apart, neither element thrives. Catholic theology has commonly held the inseparability of the body and soul in relation to salvation, an inseparability which is the source of the doctrine that, on the day of judgement, the ‘resurrection of the body’ would occur. Both body and soul were necessary to salvation from a Catholic perspective. As Thomas Aquinas hypothesised, the human being was a ‘hylomorphic (form/matter) union of soul and body’.47 The medieval belief in the fundamental unity of the body and soul, which Newman echoes in his sermon, governs the novel’s interrogation of Lord Henry’s Darwinism, a discourse which effectively denied the existence of the soul completely. It is a materialism separated from a commitment to the spiritual realm of grace which leads to the horror of Dorian’s portrait. As Dorian points out in Chapter XIX in a debate with Lord Henry, ‘The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away’ (164). In separating Dorian’s body and soul so absolutely at the start of the novel, Dorian Gray is an experiment into what humans without a soul would do, into how human beings who conformed to Lord Henry’s ontology would behave. With Dorian’s soul transferred to the portrait by the end of Chapter II, the reader can conveniently watch what a body without a soul, the Darwinian body, would do.48 With his soul removed, Dorian’s body reverts to its animalistic origins. If Genesis 3: 19 tells us, ‘from dust you came and unto dust you will return’, Darwin insists that from slime you came and unto slime you will return. Importantly, Dorian’s origins are very dubious anyway. We learn in Chapter III that Dorian’s grandfather had his father killed when Dorian’s birth did not live up to the family’s class expectations. Dorian does not consider his family history to be of much concern to him, except to fear that his relatives had passed some ‘poisonous germs’ to him (111).

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In a purely materialistic universe, where the genetic inheritance from the previous generation may determine our behaviour in this, this disavowal of his family is a fatal mistake by him. Confronting his pure animalism in both familial and experimental form, Dorian allows Wilde to reveal Lord Henry’s materialist discourse as a dangerous rather than a healing force within society. It is vital to realise that Lord Henry’s science is not the solution to Victorian hypocrisy. It is ironic that, in Chapter XIX, he should bear the words of the Evangelical preacher (‘what doth it gain a man to win the world and lose his soul’, 164) to Dorian, as they are meant for himself. He is, in fact, the direct equivalent to the Evangelical, as he has been attempting to evangelise throughout the course of the text. Lord Henry’s ‘new hedonism’ is simply the reverse image of the asceticism preached by the street-Evangelical. His argument that ‘you must cure the senses by means of the soul, and the soul by means of the senses’ (22) is not as radical as it appears. He preaches Hedonism, but asceticism seeks to do the same. Feasting with panthers could be one way to fulfil Lord Henry’s dictates, but fasting would do just as well. What is asceticism but an attempt to discipline the soul through the senses? As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, ‘hedonism is the puritan’s outraged idea of enjoyment’.49 Lord Henry is, moreover, married to a woman named Victoria, by which Wilde indicates his close relation to, rather than subversion of, Victorian society. The stench of hypocrisy follows him as surely as it appears in the portrait. He never says a good thing but never does a bad one. In the very first chapter, after a typical comment by Lord Henry that ‘conscience and cowardice are really the same things’, Basil replies, ‘I don’t believe that, Harry, and I don’t believe you do either’ (10). Basil’s comment operates as a warning to the reader to interrogate Lord Henry’s activities and words very closely. He is not the alternative to Victorian asceticism but rather its equal. Lord Henry is no threat to Victorian society as he would never do anything to undermine it. His fear of death leads him to overdepend on it for survival. Significantly, despite his talk of railing against society, society never shuns him because he never does anything to disturb it. He depends on the rules to sound scandalous, but lives by them as staunchly as any society host. Lord Henry is Wilde’s means of indicting Victorianism, not as its critic but as its best representative: inert, exploitative, rhetorical, hypocritical, evangelical, soulless, dying. He is wrong about everything in the novel. This is brilliantly demonstrated in Chapter XIX when he and Dorian discuss Basil’s disappearance:

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‘What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?’ said the younger man . . . ‘I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn’t suit you . . . It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder . . . ’ (162) By the end of the novel he has completely misunderstood Dorian and misread what has happened. Most importantly, unlike Newman’s Catholic Church, he has not been saved by his scientific experiments any more than has Dorian. He tells Dorian, ‘I am only ten years older than you are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow’ (164). When compared with the successful regeneration of English Catholicism which Henry Newman outlined in his sermon, Lord Henry’s experiment is a disaster, leading to, not the fin de siècle, but the fin-du-globe as Lady Narborough puts it in Chapter XV (138). He has pointedly failed; English Catholicism has pointedly succeeded. When compared with John Henry Newman, Lord Henry Wotton and his theories fail miserably. However, it is important to note that Catholicism does not only operate in this paratextual fashion as the means of critiquing Lord Henry’s philosophy. Indeed, Catholic theology appears in the key image at the centre of the novel: the picture of Dorian Gray itself. Jerusha Hull McCormack has pointed out that the changing nature of Dorian’s portrait refers to another item whose changing material substance was at the centre of much public debates in nineteenth-century England: the Eucharist. McCormack posits that theological disputes as to whether one substance can, without obvious external change, assume the essential properties of a subject, would have alerted Wilde’s audience to the heretical nature of a book in which such an exchange of properties is proposed as the very action of its plot.50 The Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation claims that, at the moment of consecration, the materials of bread and wine change in substance to become the body and blood of Christ, although they retain the ‘accidental’ appearances such as taste and shape. This doctrine had been debated while the Oxford Movement was issuing its Tracts for the Times, and, as McCormack points out, had been a ‘key issue in the English Reformation and thus a key maker of sectarian difference’.51 The picture of Dorian Gray, which changes substantially without any clear external cause, is not simply a Gothic prop (although it is also that), but a perverse

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religious icon. After all, the language of the novel when describing the picture’s appropriation of Dorian’s soul is strikingly like that which surrounds discussion of the consecrated Host in Catholic theology. Indeed, the picture is the Host of Dorian’s soul, as well as a parasite that feeds off his future. Basil Hallward argues that Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. (10). Basil’s deliberations of accident and substance reveals that he thinks of the portrait in ways similar to Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of the consecrated Host. Dorian is merely the ‘accident’, but Basil’s soul (like Christ’s body and blood) is the substance of the painting. The portrait houses the secrets of love – Basil’s love for Dorian – in much the same way that the Host houses the secrets of Christ’s love for the world: ‘it will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven’. Echoes of the language of Transubstantiation continue throughout the novel. When Dorian takes the scientist Alan Campbell up to the schoolroom to destroy Basil’s body, in Chapter XIV, he notices that ‘loathsome red dew . . . gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood’ (134). The painting thus displays the iconography of blood, demonstrating its appropriation of Communion in both kinds (body and blood). Basil describes Dorian as a fascinating personality who would change the course of art and history: ‘his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style’ (10). This purposely evokes the language through which Wilde often wrote of Christ’s appearance in the world. The picture that holds Dorian’s soul is like a consecrated Host. The visual consummation of the picture is the equivalent to the consumption of Christ that occurs when partaking of the Eucharist. Ironically, Dorian behaves like a priest who decides to consume the transubstantiated Host alone and to refuse others access to the sacred body of Christ: he locks the picture away in the altar/schoolroom and declares that no one must ever look at it but himself. Whereas he cannot only consume the picture, but also, in the scene where he attends the Roman Catholic service, consume the correctly consecrated Host, he denies others the chance to do the same. The consecration of Dorian in the picture is a perverted liturgy: the picture is a carnivalesque figure

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which houses the soul but not the body. In direct opposition to the orthodox Catholic theology of the consecration, Dorian’s picture is all soul without an appropriate body theology: the only body theology that is provided is that given by Lord Henry who has dislocated the actualities of Nature into Darwinian worship. Only a reunion of body and soul in an orthodox (Catholic) interpretation of the Eucharist can restore balance to the cosmos. The problem with Dorian’s incessant search for spiritual satisfaction in his many collections, whether of ecclesiastical vestments or mystical writers (all of which, as McCormack points out, are ‘suspiciously Catholic’),52 is that he lacks the soul to complete their possibilities. What Dorian and the other male characters have managed to achieve is an ironically perverted version of Catholicism – ironic because Catholicism was considered a perverse theology by the Victorians anyway – by worshipping the wrong image. These men worship a man whose body and soul have been split apart, rather than the glorified body and soul of Christ in its resurrected and transubstantiated form. The body of Dorian is worshipped because it will never undergo the sufferings of the material life, while the body of Christ is worshipped precisely because crucifixion was undergone before resurrection. It is not alienation from suffering that deserves worship and adoration, but the triumph over suffering. Lord Henry and Dorian wish for the glorified body while they are afraid of the crucified body, but the novel demonstrates that the one is impossible without the other. The transubstantiated body of Christ in the Catholic Eucharist is the answer to the misdirected gaze of Lord Henry. The Eucharist is a remembrance of the great sacrifice whereby the body of Christ was subjected to abjection on the Cross, but it is also a reminder of the everlasting life of the new glorified body of Christ after the Resurrection, which gives new life to all freely. These connections and differences between the picture of Dorian Gray and the crucified and transubstantiated body of Christ are emphasised by the fact that both are framed and hung for the gaze of the world. What is required is a dramatic miracle to save both Dorian and the text from damnation, the kind of miracle the realist novel declares out of bounds. Dorian too must undergo a death for love, as he does when stabbing the portrait in horror at what it represents. At this moment he too is changed. At the very end of the novel, the portrait – which has been placed on the ground in the nursery for most of the text – rises and hangs again like a triumphant and glorified Christ ascending to the Father after the degenerate attempts to destroy the soul have been

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defeated: ‘when they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty’ (170).53 In this section of the chapter I have tried to demonstrate that natural science and Catholic theology do indeed struggle for mastery in the novel, but, unlike the critics I cited at the start of the chapter, I have argued that it is Catholic theology that ultimately overcomes the naturalism invoked by Lord Henry Wotton. Wilde’s novel thus vindicates Cardinal Henry Newman’s sermon on The Second Spring which insists that only a supernatural miracle powered by the grace of God can save the naturally decaying body of man, and undermines Lord Henry Wotton’s hymn to science. As I have argued in Chapter 1, Newman’s The Second Spring – which describes English Catholicism – would have resonated with Wilde’s memories of the folk-Catholicism he encountered in the west of Ireland. Irish folkCatholicism was suffused with the language of nature and the seasons. Sir William Wilde had noted the intimate relationship between the religion of the peasantry and the agricultural round, pointing out that ‘if ever there was a nation that clung to the soil, and earned patriotism by the love of the very ground they walk on, it is . . . the Irish’.54 Superstition after superstition, belief after belief, which both Sir William and Speranza recorded of the Irish peasantry were bound up in the agricultural year. However, there existed discourses which attempted to tap into the power of this native language of nature and appropriate it for colonial purposes. In the following section of this chapter I will demonstrate that the issue of ‘nature’ and the natural, which, as I have shown, is crucial to the novel, was also important in debates about Ireland in the colonial context. Lord Henry Wotton wished to contain the power of nature by science; England also wished to contain the power of those it configured as ‘closer to nature’, or primitive, those in the lands they had colonised, through a new instrument: the instrument of folklore. This containment strategy can be revealed through a close analysis of the first paragraphs of the novel which describe Basil Hallward’s garden. Having taken notice of how this garden attempts to domesticate the natural – both ‘wild’ nature and the Irish – I will then expand the discussion to take into account the rest of the novel. Wilde’s novel consistently undermines colonial containment strategies, and attempts to preserve for the natural language of folk-life a more powerful and transformative role in society.

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III A close analysis of the first paragraphs of Dorian Gray reveals the languages of colonial appropriation which run through the entire novel: The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japaneseeffect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourden note of a distant organ. (7) The first important point is that this garden is not representative of nature, but rather an attempt to control and domesticate it. The garden gives the impression of nature in the raw – with its unmown grass and aggressive bees – but this is illusory. It has been pointed out that the plants mentioned in the garden could never have bloomed at the same time naturally. The ‘natural’ effect in this garden is simply that, a mere effect, and Basil Hallward’s garden is much like those that were in fashion in the late Victorian period, heavily influenced by William Robinson’s The English Flower Garden (1883) and his The Wild Garden (something of an oxymoron) produced in 1870. The ‘Wild’ garden of Robinson is much like the Wilde garden produced on this first page. Robinson designed gardens for those who lived in the town but wished to create the look of the country. His magazine Gardening (begun in 1871) was intended for suburbanites who wanted to recreate the traditional image of the English country cottage

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while occupying a townhouse, wishing for a rural paradise without the inconvenience of actually living in the country. In Basil’s garden, ‘The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ’, even though it is situated in the metropolitan centre. Illusion is the key term here: these suburbanites would not like to live in the country. This is not Darwinian nature in the raw, but nature as an artefact or effect of culture. Lord Henry’s buttonholes are the fashionable equivalent of the Robinsonian garden, a relation made clear by Lord Henry later in the novel. When he asks a gardener for the name of the orchid he is wearing he is told that ‘it was a fine specimen of Robinsoniania, or something dreadful of that kind’ (149). The garden (and the buttonhole) is Paradise without the possibility of prohibition or banishment. Like Robinson’s gardens, Basil’s garden and Lord Henry’s buttonholes attempt to tame any natural chthonic outbursts, rebellions against the perfect English landscape with domestication at its heart. Lord Henry is terrified of being close to natural reality, a reality he associates with country living. In Chapter XIX, he tells Dorian that ‘anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to’ (160). Lord Henry’s language of urban ‘civilisation’ recalls William Robinson’s concept of horticultural colonisation. Robinson was fascinated with the idea of placing foreign plants in English soil, ‘in places where they will flourish without further care or cost’.55 His books are packed with illustrations which demonstrate the beauty of transplanting foreign plants to English soil: ‘Double Chinese paeonies in grass at Crowsley Park’, ‘Tiger lilies in the wild garden at Great Tew’ or ‘A beautiful accident – a colony of Myrrhis odorata’. Wilde echoes these ‘accidents’ by placing ‘Japanese effects’ and ‘Persian saddle-bags’ in Basil’s garden. They do not belong ‘naturally’ in the English garden but, as Robinson’s illustrations inform us, are part of a widespread colonial project to assimilate the ‘hardiest plants of other countries’ with the native ones. This scheme allows the English landscape to absorb the fertility represented by these foreign plants, and thus become a symbol of English superiority.56 The ‘Japanese’ effect is a momentary reminder that these juxtapositions suggest a darker history than the greenery of the English lawn would have us imagine. Assimilation attempts to make it seem as natural for these exotic plants to be in England as in their homeland: indeed the effect has to be momentary as too long a discernible difference

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could pose a significant threat to the stability of the garden. Laburnum, a drug designed to induce forgetfulness and sleep, usefully adds to the anaesthetising of rebellion. Robinson’s suggestions in The English Flower Garden follow these same lines of thought. Hallward’s and Robinson’s gardens flirt with the dangerous and the exotic, but dissolve into listlessness and anaesthesia. The ‘rich odour of roses’ does not serve to excite the inhabitants of the room, but acts as an equivalent to the opium that Lord Henry is ‘busy’ smoking: it serves to quieten and control. In this way, the English garden is comparable to the importation of opium, contributing to the maintenance of the status quo. The language of ‘civilisation’ used by Lord Henry also suggests the wider colonial mission of the English state and the ethnological equation of civilisation with England, the barbaric with the foreign. Those people who had been colonised by the English state had long been considered ‘closer to nature’ and less sophisticated, and this included the Irish. It was argued that the Irish were closer to Nature because they were innately primitive. For example, after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Irish were commonly spoken of as a lessevolved race than the English, or a race closer to ‘nature’ because seriously lacking in culture.57 This discourse can be seen in a famous letter written by the English novelist Charles Kingsley to his wife while he was in County Sligo: I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe . . . that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful.58 Wilde was well aware of this simianising language which permeated colonial discourse concerning Ireland, as he was often depicted in the popular press as ape-like himself. On 28 January 1882, during his American tour, Harper’s Weekly contained a cartoon of ‘the Aesthetic Monkey’, which showed a well-dressed chimp looking at a lily in caricature of Wilde’s own aesthetic philosophy. Similarly, the Washington Post contained a caricature of Wilde juxtaposed with ‘the Wild Man of Borneo’, and asked ‘how far from this to this?’59 Of course, this version of the Irish as more ‘natural’ than the English was an extremely aggressive form of colonial discourse. There was, however, a more benign language which also equated the Irish with nature, a language very much like that of William Robinson’s.

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This was a language very influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the ‘noble savage’. In A Discourse on Inequality (1755) Rousseau claimed that in the state of nature humans were uncorrupted and pure, and that sin and corruption began only with the beginnings of culture and society. Moreover, he also claimed that while most European cultures had grown out of such natural goodness, there still existed certain areas in the world where the noble savage still existed, and that much was to be learned from these noble savages. Some theorists in England alleged that Celtic countries like Ireland retained the qualities of the ‘noble savage’, and that England could learn much from Ireland because of this. Just as Robinson believed that intermingling English and ‘exotic’ plants would make for a more beautiful English garden, so, for example, Matthew Arnold, in his famous On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), advocated an infusion of natural, passionate Celtic blood to re-energise the English race.60 Robinson’s project is the horticultural equivalent of Matthew Arnold’s ethnic project: both have the dual benefit of not only adding to the beauty and attractiveness of the English middle classes and their homes but also deflect the desire of the natives for a garden of their own to plot. Because, while it is important to acknowledge that Matthew Arnold’s theories were more benign than those which saw the Irish race as simian, neither theory held out any possibility that the Irish would ever rule themselves. If for some the Irish were too un-evolved and bestial to be given any power, for Arnold the Irish were too opposed to what he called ‘the despotism of fact’ to be capable of effective rational government. Thus, the garden described in the first page of Dorian Gray contains much on the relationship between the Irish and the English in a very codified form. The English suburban garden was an elaborate codification of ideologies of subordination such as outlined in Matthew Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature, subordination of both the power of nature and the power of the colonies. Ironically, one way this colonial language could be kept up was through the use of folklore. The link between the language of colonial superiority and the discourse of folklore requires some explaining. In the 1760s James Macpherson, heavily influenced by theories of the ‘noble savage’, published a series of books containing the ‘translations’ of ancient Gaelic poetry concerning the warriors called ‘the Fianna’ (it later transpired that Macpherson had in fact forged these poems). They were hugely successful and made Celtic mythology and folklore extremely popular in England. However, they also made popular the notion that Ireland was a profoundly different place than England, a place that was in effect living in a different time. As increasing accounts of the customs

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and traditions of the Irish peasantry were sold in England, and increasing numbers of people began to collect folklore, Ireland came to seem increasingly caught in a time warp, stuck in the past. This perception also made it more difficult for the English public to accept the notion that the Irish could rule themselves: they were simply too caught up in the past to live in the present. This view of the Irish as living in the perpetual folkloric past is vital when examining Dorian Gray because the first paragraphs on Basil’s garden draw attention to certain aspects of folklore that have a direct bearing on the issue. David Upchurch has rightly pointed out that the ‘delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn’ is important in any interpretation of Dorian’s bargain as it returns us to Ireland and the folklore that Wilde grew up absorbing.61 Upchurch quotes from Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends to elucidate this reference: ‘[The sidhe’s] voices were heard in the mountain echo, and their forms seen in the purple and golden mountain mist; they whispered amidst the perfumed hawthorn branches . . . ’62 Wilde’s incorporation of the hawthorn, along with the wind blowing in the garden, suggests that the fairies are responsible for the eternal youth that Dorian experiences. Furthermore, the sidhe are as obsessed with youth as Lord Henry. They ‘look with envy on the beautiful young human children, and steal them when they can’.63 When Dorian makes his wish to remain forever young, the imagery of this paragraph suggests that the fairies have taken him away to ‘Tír-na-nÓg’ or the ‘Land of Perpetual Youth’, and have left a foundling in his place. Like the common view of the Irish in this period as living in a separate time zone to the rest of the world, Dorian is removed from present realities and placed in a land of no-time. It is partly this misuse of folklore which allowed the colonial occupation of Ireland to continue for so long. Wilde uses Dorian to expose what happens when a language of the ‘noble savage’ and folkloric time is directed at a people. Lord Henry Wotton looks on Dorian Gray as ‘pure’, like an ethnographer diagnosing the state of innocence, only to absorb him in vampiric desperation for rejuvenation. Lord Henry’s language is similar to that of Rousseau: he tells Dorian that society should not interfere in the development of mankind by inflicting its rules and regulations upon it (those medieval impositions that he and Rousseau objected to so much). Man, he argues, should be allowed to develop ‘naturally’. His seduction of Dorian is a desperate attempt to domesticate the energies of ‘natural’ races like the Irish, and so feed on these energies for his own needs. In Primitive Culture (1871) Edward Tylor argued that the study of primitive cultures

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such as Dorian represents would help explain how the institutions of man developed upwards, from a primitive to a more complex and sophisticated state. The result of such a present-centred modality was the outcrop of texts like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) which rendered the great societies whose myths it accumulates products of a past life rather than a future possibility. Likewise, Lord Henry proclaims himself a believer in evolution, but as a ‘civilised’ man he is sure he is at the top of the evolutionary scale. The myth of the Fall is here an appropriate one: Dorian is seen as a man before the Fall as clearly as any primitive race like the Celts and the Irish were. His abandonment of his soul in the garden, which represents the neutralisation of alternative ideologies in obeisance to the English way of life, is the inevitable outcome of the discourse of racial assimilation as propagated by Matthew Arnold. If Dorian is ‘natural man’ in danger of being absorbed by civilised man (Lord Henry), after he gives up his soul, Dorian himself becomes guilty of perpetuating the same colonial discourse as his master, Lord Henry. Dorian consumes Oriental ornaments and Oriental drugs as greedily as Lord Henry smokes his opium-laced cigarettes, but he does not draw upon them as the materials for a new philosophy or model of a new aesthetic. He simply consumes them, in a manner reminiscent of the ‘new imperial’ absorption of ‘virgin’ land for the raw materials of empire. The narrator explicitly tells us that Dorian refused to allow his obsession with Oriental artefacts to become the basis for a new philosophy or aesthetic: ‘he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night . . . ’ (103). Just as the Irish did not benefit much from the English consumption of Irish folklore, non-Western cultures don’t benefit from the kinds of consumption Dorian engages. He finds his instruments ‘either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with western civilisations’ (104). This is an ironic commentary on what obsessions like Dorian’s can do for the peoples who produce the goods he wants – cultural extinction. Rather than preserve or save these cultures, Dorian’s Orientalism assists in the process of extinction. Dorian’s consumption of the Oriental is Wilde’s method of referring to the colonising practices of England in Ireland. In the mid-nineteenth century, Oriental could easily mean Irish. Antiquarians believed firmly that there was a racial link between the Irish and the peoples of the Orient,64 and the link between the Irish and the Oriental can be seen

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even in some caricatures of Wilde which depicted him as Oriental. For example, one 1882 American lithograph ‘pictures Wilde as a grotesque, cartoon Chinaman with a pigtail and “Fu Manchu” moustache’.65 Assimilation leads to extinction. Basil Hallward is also implicated in this version of colonial assimilation, mainly through his carrying of a Gladstone bag (116).66 Like Matthew Arnold, Gladstone conceived of the United Kingdom as a multinational state composed of interdependent countries, but with England remaining the dominant player. He advocated ‘imperial unity’ but insisted that ‘the supreme statutory authority of the imperial parliament’ would remain ‘unimpaired’ by this arrangement.67 In other words, Gladstone maintained the belief in a model of colonial superiority where England would gain authority through a more cordial relationship with its colonies. That Basil is implicated in this is emphasised by his Ulster hat – as Ulster held the greatest concentration of those in Ireland who rejected Irish independence and supported the political union with England. These colonial models help explain Basil’s parasitic relationship with Dorian. To Basil, Dorian represents a means of reinvigorating his art. Just as Matthew Arnold argued that the benign union of Saxon and Celt would rejuvenate England, Basil believes that Dorian’s presence greatly improves his own art: ‘You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things that I have ever done. And why is it so? Because while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me . . . ’ (14). Absorbing Dorian, Basil can become the greatest painter in England. The colonial parasitic versions of racial assimilation offered by Basil, Lord Henry and Gladstone would have had little attraction for Wilde. He too wished for an imperial panorama but in which Ireland was to rule England. In a discussion of Home Rule Wilde told the poet Theodore Wratislaw, ‘My own idea is that Ireland should rule England.’68 Wilde often encouraged his listeners to engage with ‘exotic’ non-European art, and, during his editorship of Woman’s World, articles on Egyptian and Indian cultural commodities were numerous. In a lecture he gave during his American tour Wilde supported Asian anti-mimeticism, but argued that it needed to be conjoined with a Greek-like attention to the material world.

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Wilde’s writings insisted that Western art is actually dependent for its models on the non-Western ornaments which served as the raw material:69 When I was in San Francisco, I used to visit the Chinese theatres for their rich dresses, and the Chinese restaurants on account of the beautiful tea they made there. I saw rough Chinese navvies, who did work that the ordinary Californian rightly might be disgusted with and refuse to do, sitting there drinking their tea out of tiny porcelain cups, which might be mistaken for the petals of a white rose, and handling them with care, fully appreciating the influence of their beauty . . . If these men could use cups with that tenderness, your children will learn by the influence of beauty and example to act in like manner.70 Wilde argues that the Western (primarily British) child should learn the ways of the Orient in order to subvert the dominant ideologies of the homeland. His treatment of Dorian Gray, who represents the folklore of Ireland, suggests that Wilde desires a similar role for Irish anti-mimetic traditions. This chapter has argued that The Picture of Dorian Gray represents a challenge to the realist novel which grounded in Darwinian materialism, writing fantasy and miracle out of the everyday. In De Profundis, Wilde claimed that Catholicism attracted him partly because everyday it perpetuated a miracle at the moment of consecration, the very miracle that realism was determined to write out of the commonplace. Using the Eucharistic Host in battle with the discourses of evolution and colonialism, Wilde’s only novel becomes as transformed by the miraculous as the bread and wine at consecration, so that what we are left with is not merely a novel, but a myth. Through the fate of Dorian, Wilde demonstrates the dangers to Ireland when its anti-mimetic traditions were translated into a commodity rather than left as a living tradition. But, in creating a myth of his own, Wilde has also produced a counter-hegemonic language which exposes the commodification of folklore for what it is: a means of destroying still-living traditions. This strategy is inherently political, but Wilde was involved in more explicit political movements than this, and it is to this issue that we now turn.

4 Religion and Politics: Wilde’s Social Philosophy

In previous chapters I have traced Wilde’s anti-mimetic aesthetic and his investment in non-realist traditions. This investment was manifested in a refusal to allow the literal and empirical to overcome the imaginative and the lyrical in his writings. I have shown that Wilde derived much from his parents’ folkloric and literary work, and also from their political commitment to Irish nationalism. It seems important at this point to move to a delineation of the precise nature of Wilde’s own relationship to what we can broadly term ‘political theory’ and investigate what connection this relationship has with the Irish nationalist background I have established as crucial for understanding his literary work. The question of Oscar Wilde’s political commitments is a critical minefield as so many scholars of Wilde have disagreed about the exact nature of his knowledge of and his allegiance to the social and political movements that were everywhere in late nineteenth-century England. Much appears to hinge on one of Wilde’s more opaque statements to a journalist. In 1894, in an interview with Theatre, Wilde suggested his interest in two political ‘movements’: socialism and anarchism: We are all of us more or less Socialists now-a-days . . . Our system of government is largely socialistic. What is the House of Commons but a socialistic assembly? I think I am rather more than a Socialist . . . I am something of an Anarchist, I believe; but, of course, the dynamite policy is very absurd indeed.1 Wilde is not here declaiming his socialist leanings, but indicating that such leanings need to be read in a wider frame, that frame being anarchism. 109

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‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ was published in February 1891 in the Fortnightly Review.2 Much recent work reclaiming Wilde as a serious political thinker has turned to this text. The best studies of the text have concentrated on locating the sources behind Wilde’s argument, and critics such as Isobel Murray and J. D. Thomas have excavated passing references in the essay to a wide variety of both English and Continental traditions.3 Anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, communists like Friedrich Engels, socialists like Sidney Webb, William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, intellectuals like Matthew Arnold, Ernest Renan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, have been recognised as sources for Wilde’s argument. In a book-length study of Wilde, George Woodcock argued that a consistent political philosophy can be found running throughout all Wilde’s writings: Bearing in mind the close sympathy between Wilde and the anarchists, demonstrated . . . in his general attitude towards society . . . it is not surprising that his scanty political writings should have given so libertarian a picture of socialism.4 Declan Kiberd has largely agreed with Woodcock and claimed that ‘as a student of Proudhon, [Wilde] supported the contention that all property is theft’.5 However, a recent and important essay by Josephine M. Guy has been sceptical about the extent to which these significant figures in political philosophy are important for understanding the thrust of Wilde’s essay; she believes that their presence here is simply Wilde’s version of namedropping.6 The list of sources scholars have unearthed may indicate, not the intellectual depth of Wilde’s engagement with contemporary social and political opinion, but rather his way of surrounding his essay with celebrity value. She warns that ‘unlike textual data about a work’s composition . . . contextual information is constrained only by prior definitions of relevance’,7 and argues that concentration on sources has obscured the fact that in the article ‘Wilde invokes quite incompatible notions of social change without registering their contradictions.’8 This means that ‘The Soul of Man’ is ideologically incoherent, and certainly cannot amount to any real expression of Wilde’s ‘serious’ social opinions, evidence of which is his clear lack of interest in the essay subsequent to its publication, and his failure to revise it. The essay should be seen in its journalistic context, Guy claims, and read as a piece of provocative ‘entertainment’, exploiting themes of contemporary interest,

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without attempting to give any clear expression of Wilde’s theories of social justice.9 Wilde simply did not know a great deal about any of the political ideologies invoked in ‘The Soul of Man’ and used their names as a means of generating greater publicity. To illustrate her point, Guy demonstrates that Wilde’s use of the term ‘Individualism’ in ‘The Soul of Man’ is indebted to its debate in popular journals of the period. Wilde constantly uses ‘Individualism’ throughout the essay, but particularly towards the end where he writes that ‘anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature – it requires, in fact, that nature of a true Individualist – to sympathise with a friend’s success’ (332). Whereas Isobel Murray linked ‘Individualism’ with the theories of Ralph Emerson, Guy shows that ‘Individualism’ was a specific political ideology in the 1880s and 1890s, connected with figures such as Auberon Herbert, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Lord Elcho, Joseph Levy and Thomas McKay, and propagandised through The Liberty and Property Defence League. Many articles had been published in journals leading up to the writing of Wilde’s essay. Guy shows that some Individualist theories do show up explicitly in ‘The Soul of Man’, and points to Wilde’s endorsement of voluntary associations as a means for individuals to co-operate in making society workable: I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary association that man is fine. (279) The Individualists also believed in voluntary associations. However, Guy also shows that the Individualists were committed to protecting property rights, which is completely at odds with Wilde’s argument that private property must be abolished: ‘With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism’ (282). Wilde ignores the clear discrepancy between his argument about Individualism and that put forward by the Individualists themselves. Guy’s point in demonstrating the relationship between Wilde’s political essay and the Individualists is not to argue that Individualism is a better context to place Wilde in than socialism or anarchism, but rather that Wilde knew very little about any of these political movements, and that he was using their names as celebrity capital to gain publicity for himself.

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Guy’s charge of intellectual incoherence needs to be addressed. In the first section of this chapter I will describe some of the versions of socialism and anarchism that were discernible in nineteenth-century England, and demonstrate that intellectual or ideological coherence were not characteristic of these movements anyway, and that accusations that Wilde misuses these terms are therefore wide of the mark. The key question is why Wilde should have wished to associate himself with the politics of socialism and anarchism at all. I will argue that Irish revolutionary violence was often (mis)read by the English intelligentsia, and also by the English public, as a version of both socialism and anarchism, a reading emphasised in the writings of Matthew Arnold. The association between socialism, anarchism and Irish nationalism led, I believe, to Wilde’s interest in these terms. In other words, I accept Guy’s claim that Wilde did not know a great deal about the particular political aspirations of many of the groups which called themselves ‘socialist’ or ‘anarchist’ but he did understand thoroughly the Irish inflection these terms received in Victorian England. Major Irish political figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Home Rule Movement, and Irish organisations such as the Land League were often talked about as anarchic and even socialistic forces, and caricatured as such in the English press. Moreover, even as conservative an organisation as the Catholic Church was attacked as a dangerous force in English society, with Cardinal Manning’s support for the working classes denounced as ‘socialist’. It is knowledge of these Irish and Catholic links to anarchism and socialism that, I believe, made Oscar Wilde sympathetic to other figures and movements who were also called, or who called themselves, socialists or anarchists. The Irish association with these terms came first, and then Wilde’s sympathy with a very nebulous ‘anarchism’ and ‘socialism’. It is in the light of these complexities – the Home Rule Movement, the Land League and its attitude to property, Parnell and the organisational convolution of the Catholic Church – that Wilde’s position on private property in ‘The Soul of Man’ will be examined in the second section of this chapter.

I The first point to make is that neither socialism nor anarchism were coherent or cohesive political movements in this period. R. N. Berki has astutely warned that ‘names in political discourse show themselves notoriously unstable over time, and this is especially true of ideological concepts like socialism, communism, social democracy, and their ilk’.10

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This is especially true of socialism and anarchism in the late nineteenth century. For example, not only did many different groups call themselves socialists though they had widely diverging political goals, but the general public used the word ‘socialist’ as an adjective to describe people who would have denied any association with it. There was a fluidity to the use of political and ideological terms in this period that is seldom acknowledged today. Berki warns against historians and political scientists operating with a too-limited definition of socialism, pointing out: There is something like a ‘general meaning’ [of socialism] in the world at large, an unconfined discourse in which writers are participating, a sense of words up in the air, not to be connected with any single source or intellectual dwelling place. There seems to be a running dialectical parley between the hard core of statements occurring in black and white in the pages of books and pamphlets, and the softer substance surrounding it: one could not exist without the other.11 After all, people as diverse as John Ruskin and Karl Marx, William Morris and Cardinal Manning, Oscar Wilde and Maud Gonne associated themselves with socialist ideology. ‘Socialism’, I suggest, amounts to a type of Foucaultian discourse which can take in both people and documents apparently ideologically at odds with each other. John Goode has argued that ‘socialism in England at this period has no historical reality except as the subjective projection of its protagonists’.12 Understandings of socialism were confused because socialism itself was a confused and confusing theory put forward from a number of different perspectives. Socialism was a discourse wide enough to contain radically competing tendencies, which deconstructed each other but remain in a continuing dialectic. This is a point which needs to be made in more detail. It has often been assumed, for example, that socialism is an atheistic discourse, an assumption mainly based on Karl Marx’s explicit opposition to religion, and also the explicit atheism of the former Soviet Union. However, socialism was not atheistic in origin. In Friedrich Engels’s 1843 essay, ‘The Progress of Social Reform on the Continent’, he surveyed socialists in Europe and found that French communists, for example, were Christian, and appealed to the Bible and the early Christian communities for inspiration. German communists, led by Wilhelm Weitling, also appealed to Scripture and promoted as an axiom, ‘Christianity is

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Communism’. French apocalyptic movements of the early nineteenth century, involving thinkers as diverse as Claude Henri de Rouvroy, the Comte de Saint-Simon, François-Marie-Charles Fourier and Étienne Cabet, all focused on the belief that socialism meant the eruption of the kingdom of God into the secular age, an eruption which would end the inequalities and oppression in the world. A large and diverse range of socialist thinkers associated the ending of the capitalist system with the building of the city of God on earth: ‘Lamennais, Cabet, Buchez, Leroux, Enfantin, Bazard, Considérant, Barbes, Blanc, Vidal, and Pecqueur all embraced a religious socialism . . . All insisted that social progress must be tied to religion.’13 England had its own version of such religiously inspired socialism. The Christian Socialists were a powerful movement within the Church of England in the 1840s and 1850s. As working-class self-expression began to emerge from the mire of history, the churches also began to reassess their positions on ‘secular’ issues. Out of this, figures like F. D. Maurice, Cardinal Manning and Thomas Hughes rose to confront working-class misery. They rejected naked economic competition and the claim to cut-throat individualism upon which capitalism rested. The dominant characteristic of the Christian Socialists was a deep moralism: even though many within the movement held widely diverging opinions, Christian Socialists held in common a belief that church, state and society were failing to live up to the terms laid down by the Gospels. A group of them unified in 1848 when J. M. Ludlow, F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley issued a manifesto entitled ‘To the Working Men of England’, signing it ‘A Working Person’. They reached out to the ‘unsocial Christians and the unChristian socialists’. In advocating co-operation between classes for mutual advancement in the realisation of the kingdom of God as a present reality, they opposed the dominant social teaching of the churches which believed that social harmony should be maintained by a patient endurance of the present inequality and the alleviation of the worst of suffering by Christian charity. Christian Socialists wanted society organised on moral rather than economic grounds because of their belief in the spiritual, if not the social equality, of all in the eyes of God.14 John Ruskin, one of Wilde’s favourite lecturers while at Oxford, was also involved in the broad Christian Socialist movement, and this indicates that, while many who initiated the movement were part of what was termed ‘muscular Christianity’, this was not always the case. Between 1854 and 1858 Ruskin taught at a Working Men’s College founded by F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes in

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London. In his books Unto This Last (1860) and Time and Tide (1867), Ruskin argued that the principles underlying capitalism, such as competition and self-interest, were disguises for greed in English society. Between 1871 and 1878 Ruskin issued a monthly ‘journal’ Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. Where Christian Socialists like Kingsley and Hughes placed great emphasis on the developed male body as a mirror of the developed Christian male soul, Ruskin believed that, rather than play games, muscles could be used to improve the countryside. While at Oxford, Wilde became involved in one of Ruskin’s schemes to build a flower-bordered road in Ferry Hinksey in 1874. Such an interest in Christian Socialism may have been behind Wilde’s commitment to the figure of Jesus as the main figure in ‘The Soul of Man’: ‘And he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself’ (285). There simply did not exist any clear definitions which delineated socialists from all others. This applied even more widely when we take into account the general public understanding of these labels. Anarchism, too, was a diverse and multifarious ideology with some very strange bedfellows. Anarchism was not a coherent movement with a firm set of political and social principles behind it. The London of the 1880s and 1890s, where an anarchist collective first assembled, had a bewildering array of groups interacting, from Marxists, socialists, Irish republicans and trade unionists.15 David Miller argues that an opposition to the iniquity of the state was the only concept that united this broad spread of opinion, an opposition to the state as an act of violence against the integrity of free individuals.16 Indeed, as Haia Shpayer-Makov has pointed out, despite its small size the [anarchist] movement exhibited great diversity, harbouring different ideological tendencies, ethnic groups, and organisational frameworks. Its range included communist revolutionaries and libertarian individualists, continental refugees, middle-class faddists, rural communitarians, Christian pacifists, and industrial unionists.17 Thus, both socialism and anarchism were slippery terms in Victorian society and, as Josephine M. Guy has clearly established, readers cannot trust simply to Wilde’s own philosophical name-dropping to decide which strand of which movement he was most interested in. It is, indeed, most likely that, as Guy suggests, he knew very little about any of these movements in particular.

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Erin Williams Hyman has, however, argued that, contrary to Guy’s claim, Wilde was very familiar with, and committed to, one strand of anarchist opinion. She traces Wilde’s relationship with and knowledge of the French Symbolists and points out that French Symbolism was deeply implicated in the anarchist movement of the same period. Wilde’s French associates such as Félix Fénéon, Remy de Gourmont, Octave Mirbeau, Stuart Merrill, Adolphe Retté and Marcel Schwob were all part of both the Symbolist and the anarchist movements: The proliferation of bombings in Paris in the early 1890s, claimed by or attributed to anarchists, was widely supported by the literary and artistic avant-garde, who saw the anarchist bomb-thrower as the ultimate manifestation of the individual in revolt against a corrupt social order . . . But the fascination of the Symbolists for anarchist acts of terror went beyond a simple recognition of an analogy between ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘revolt for revolt’s sake’, or of a celebration of radical freedom and hyper-individualism. That is to say that figures like Jean Grave, the foremost voice of anarchism in France at the end of the century, elaborated an analysis of the institutions of power and state coercion, which radically critiqued the military, patriotism, marriage, bourgeois morality and private property.18 While Hyman’s theory of Wilde’s ideological involvement in the French Symbolist-anarchist drive is persuasive, there were, I believe, broadly Irish nationalist reasons why Wilde was attracted to the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘anarchism’, reasons which preceded his encounter with French Symbolism. After all, these political movements all tended to be conflated with Irish nationalist agitation in the Victorian mind. Shpayer-Makov points out: Not only did the Fenians, socialists, and anarchists share the same labels, but contemporaries confused their identities. In the 1880s little differentiation was made between socialism and anarchism, and the tags ‘communism’ and ‘anarchism’ were recurrently applied to Irish agitators . . . 19 Irish revolutionary activity in England was often considered paradigmatic of new broadly left-wing political movements like socialism and anarchism. Indeed, ‘“Anarchy” became synonymous with disorder, turmoil, mob rule, lawlessness, and breakdown of morals. The label

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“anarchy” was often applied to the Irish situation to indicate the state of disarray in the country, which called for constant British supervision.’20 The key figure in intellectualising this popular version of anarchy as a peculiarly Irish disease and anarchy as a political force was Matthew Arnold. The intellectual foundation for Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867) is a framing distinction between England-as-Culture, and nonEngland-as-Anarchy, a distinction exemplified for Arnold in Anglo-Irish relations: There are many things to be said on behalf of this exclusive attention of ours to liberty, and the relaxed habits of government which it has engendered. It is very easy to mistake or exaggerate the sort of anarchy from which we are in danger through them. We are not in danger from Fenianism, fierce and turbulent as it may show itself; for against this our conscience is free enough to let us act resolutely and put forth our overwhelming strength the moment there is any real need for it. In the first place, it was never any part of our creed that the great right and blessedness of an Irishman, or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to do as he likes; and we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if necessary, a nonEnglishman’s assertion of personal liberty. The British Constitution, its checks, and its prime virtues, are for Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love and kindness; but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us so to extend them. And then the difference between an Irish Fenian and an English rough is so immense, and the case, in dealing with the Fenian, so much more clear! He is so evidently desperate and dangerous, a man of conquered race, a Papist, with centuries of ill-usage to inflame him against us, with an alien religion established in his country by us at his expense, with no admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our business, no turn for our comfort! . . . Evidently, if we deal tenderly with a sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure philanthropy. But with the Hyde Park rioter, how different! He is our own flesh and blood; he is a Protestant . . . 21 The vitriol of this passage revolves around the danger to English superiority when the concept of liberty is extended so far as to allow all Englishmen to ‘do what they want’. Arnold’s implication is that, if today English society is uncertain as to what to do with English ‘roughs’ who riot in Hyde Park, tomorrow it will be uncertain as to what to do

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when foreigners rebel. The English could start treating an Irish Fenian like an Englishman possessed of all the rights of the English. To this, Arnold replies that both the English rough and the Irish Fenian are anarchists, as both operate under the same logic. Crucially however, the real menace lies in losing the distinction that is so germane to the English constitution, which depends on Englishmen not behaving like foreigners. Arnold believes that when an Englishman does have the temerity to act like an Irish Fenian, he should be treated as one. Arnold’s thinking provides important clues to Oscar Wilde’s handling of the term ‘anarchism’. Wilde consumed the writings of Matthew Arnold from his teens, and was familiar with his categorisation of Ireland as anarchical long before he became interested in the Symbolist movement in France. Arnold’s depiction of the ‘Celt’ as an anarchic force had been first expressed in ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ published in 1866. Here the Celt was described as ‘undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature’.22 Jerusha McCormack suggests that it is possible that, ‘in writing his article, Wilde himself was simply living up to his name – and to the stereotype of the Celt’.23 While growing up in Ireland, the circle around Wilde’s parents were deeply interested in Arnold’s depiction of the Celt and debated his characterisation widely. As Davis Coakley observes, Arnold’s book very quickly ‘became one of the canons of the aesthetic movement by contrasting an idealised beauty of Celtic life and art with the utilitarianism of the Victorian period’.24 On the contrary, of course, Wilde did not begin to meet with French Symbolists and anarchists until the 1880s. As I suggested with the ‘name-dropping’ of Godwin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Wilde may have been attracted to Symbolism precisely because he recognised in its terminology a language that had already been applied to Ireland. It is with the Arnoldian stereotyping of the Irish as paradigmatic of both the English sense of law and order and of anarchism itself that we should attempt to understand some of Wilde’s more radical activities. He paid bail for the revolutionary John Barlas, who was arrested in December 1891 after firing a pistol outside Westminster, claiming that ‘I am an anarchist. What I have done is to show my contempt for the House of Commons.’ Wilde wrote to Barlas and compared them in strongly Arnoldian terms: ‘We poets and dreamers are all brothers.’25 To Arnold, the Celts were ‘always ready to react against the despotism of fact’,26 as the Saxons were the hard-headed rationalists possessing ‘the skilful and resolute application of means to end which is needed to make progress in material civilisation and also to form powerful

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states’.27 Arnold argued that as Ireland was full of dreamers rather than actors it was ‘a nation poetically only, not politically’.28 Wilde’s phraseology in writing to Barlas indicates that he saw a connection between his own anarchism and that propounded by Barlas in that they were both ‘Celtic’. Wilde also signed a petition for the reprieve of the so-called ‘Chicago anarchists’, but did so only at the request of Shaw whom he believed a member of the ‘Celtic School’ of drama.29 In other words, Wilde’s active involvement in anarchist politics in these two cases is linked to his recognition of an Irish element in both of them. ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ is Wilde’s most extensive political argument, and I now turn to trace the Irish and Catholic elements of this essay.

II As I have shown, Josephine M. Guy has argued that the politics of ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ should not be taken too seriously and should be seen within a journalistic context where articles would be written on a variety of topics very quickly with little or no scholarly research on the part of the writer. Placing Wilde’s essay in this context helps us account for its many intellectual shortcomings, and especially the weakness of its engagement with Individualism, socialism or anarchism, all of which were quite substantial political theories in the late Victorian period. However, I believe that Guy’s own dismissal of ‘The Soul of Man’ is problematic. Part of the difficulty lies in Guy’s own contextualisation of the article. While she urges locating the essay in the contemporary journal debate about Individualism and socialism, she fails to locate a far more important journalistic context and one which picks up on the Irish connotations of both anarchism and socialism as articulated by Matthew Arnold. Owen Dudley Edwards has pointed out that there can be only one reason why the attack on the English press is so vitriolic in the essay.30 In a central passage Wilde lashes out at the gall of journalists who have ‘nailed their ears to the keyhole’ (312), and complains that, while in France the sexual and marital difficulties suffered by public figures do not become fodder for the mob, in England the activities of the divorce courts are made available to all (312). He opines that ‘in the old days men had the rack. But now they have the Press’ (311). This is clearly a reference to the problems encountered by Charles Stewart Parnell whose career was destroyed just months before the publication of ‘The Soul of Man’, because of his adultery with Katherine O’ Shea, the wife of Captain O’ Shea, a member of his political party.

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As the proceedings of the O’ Shea divorce case were widely reported in the English press, the Liberal Party and its leader, William Gladstone, threatened to withdraw their support for Irish Home Rule unless Parnell was removed as leader of the party. In December of 1890 the Parnell Spilt occurred, dividing the Irish Parliamentary Party and effectively destroying both the career of Parnell and the possibility of a Home Rule settlement.31 ‘The Soul of Man’ appears to be Wilde’s reaction, written in sarcastic white heat, to the events of the day: the essay is a ‘furious denunciation of the British press and its destruction of Parnell’.32 Wilde was, of course, very politically attracted to Parnell, and drew attention to this many times. For example, on 5 March 1882 he insisted, during a lecture on ‘The English Renaissance’, in Milwaukee, that he was ‘strongly in sympathy’ with Parnell’s Home Rule Movement.33 Not only would Wilde have had sympathy with Parnell as a victim of a sexual scandal but also Parnell’s leadership in the cause of land redistribution as President of the Land League and leader of the Home Rule Party explains why property and its duties are central to the ideological bent of ‘The Soul of Man’ as a whole. The chief object of attack in ‘The Soul of Man’ is private property which it regards as a curse as well as a blessing. Wilde denounces a society ‘where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind’ because in such a society a man who is denied access to these privileges will ‘kill himself by overwork in order to secure property’ (284). What is often forgotten in discussions about this essay is that Wilde himself was a landowner. When his father died, he inherited estates in Bray and his mother became the owner of the Moytura House estate which had 16 tenants. Their failure to pay their rent was the main reason Speranza had no choice but to seek a pension from the British government. Far from being complacent about landowning, Wilde was impatient with the lack of rents as it placed him under financial difficulties, and he wanted to sell the land as quickly as possible to relieve the family of this burden. ‘Property is really a nuisance’ (278), he writes: it certainly was if we consider his own dealings with tenants’ rights and rents. Wilde’s role as landholder has been written out of traditional discussions about the influence of Ireland on his work, perhaps because it may seem difficult to reconcile landlordism with a commitment to the rights of the poor and the propertyless. However, it was quite possible to be a Protestant landlord and an Irish Nationalist: Charles Stewart Parnell managed to be both simultaneously. Parnell was both a good

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landlord and a key figure in ending the landlord system which had operated in Ireland since the English presence on the island began. Wilde-as-landlord complicates any simple opposition to landowning in ‘The Soul of Man’, although it does shed some light on the complaint that ‘property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore’ (288). What does not emerge in either Wilde or Parnell is an intense deprecation of all ownership, though this has often been taken as read. W. J. McCormack has asserted that ‘Wilde genuinely detested private property.’34 Like ‘The Soul of Man’, the debate over Home Rule as championed by Parnell was pervaded with the issue of property and the rights to it. While there would appear to be a great distance between the Wildean anti-property polemic and the position of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the actual logistics involved indicate that Parnell and Wilde are actually closer on this issue than a superficial reading would imply. In the first place, the basic argument for Home Rule contended that English autonomy over Irish affairs and English ownership of Irish property were impediments to the national development of both countries. Parnell argued that the division over property ownership was preventing the achievement of national perfection, especially in the imposition of English versions of history, progress and civilisation on the Irish. This notion of property impeding perfection is central to ‘The Soul of Man’ which has as its main aim the ‘perfectibility’ of human life through a shrugging off of the authority of outside forces. This point is made forcefully towards the end of the essay when Wilde writes that ‘the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all’ (322). In the second place, Parnell was convinced that the ownership of peasant land by Irish landlords was a deterrent to their taking their position as the leaders of the Irish movement. Parnell became involved in the Land Movement in Ireland for two reasons. It is certainly true that he had a great deal of sympathy for a peasantry he felt were being crushed by the landowners, but his own position as a landlord was vital to the construction of his political and agrarian vision. Socially conservative, he believed that the peasantry needed great leaders above anything else and that these leaders would arise out of the landowning class as they were the educated minority. This is of a piece with the ideology behind Wilde’s configuration of the artistic elite as the proper leaders of the masses. Wilde maintains that while he wishes to see the universal perfection of the people, it is a position they have to be led to by great men (like Parnell, one supposes). Wilde notes that, although in

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general the English public is ignorant of what is good for them, especially in artistic matters, in some areas they have been led out of ignorance through the charisma of leaders: as a certain advance has been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few individuals refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their standard. (310) The attack on authority driving the essay does not exclude the possibility of great moral authority which inspires, rather than compels, the masses to change. Wilde maintains simultaneously that ‘the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all’ (322) and that Public Opinion is an odious thing which needs disciplining by artistic prophets. Henry Irving is pointed out as one such prophet because, in refusing to bow before public pressure, he actually changed public taste (315–16). Wilde includes in his list of great men capable of leading the people those freed from the chains of earning a living through the ownership of enough property: At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain type of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realization. (289) Parnell was likewise convinced that public-spirited landlords, freed from the burden of being a colonial pain-in-the-neck, would be the best leaders of the Irish, shaping Public Opinion in their own image. His argument was that such figures were lacking in the Irish landscape because of the terrible burden not only of colonialism – whereby they were doubly alienated from the tenants – but also because their focus on property maintenance and holding had been so great as to distort their natural abilities: [The landlords] were given those lands originally free of charge on condition that they perform certain duties. They were given them

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under English rule in order that they might make the Irish people content – but it was not intended that they should oppress these tenants, that they should rack-rent them or that they should starve them . . . When the land of Ireland was given to those men for nothing it was given with corresponding duties, and they have failed in those duties.35 Parnell’s argument that the landlords have clearly neglected the moral duties given them by property is the source of Wilde’s coruscating sarcasm about the rhetoric of duty and privilege in his essay: ‘Individualism does not come to the man with any sickly cant about duty . . . or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice . . . It knows that people are good when they are left alone’ (312). It is at moments like these that readers must recognise that the essay is laced with irony – a point made by A. E. Dyson who warned that ‘if we remain at the literal level’ when reading ‘The Soul of Man’ ‘we [will mistake] genuine irony for flippancy’.36 Wilde knew, after all, that the cant about duty has always in Ireland been simply that – cant. Far from being obsessed with duty – as the essay ironically suggests – Irish landlords have always conveniently forgotten it. The danger of property in this context is that it leads to this kind of behaviour: property stolen from others through the colonial appropriation of land creates a situation in which the language of ownership, duty, privilege and responsibility becomes fraught and impossible. Paul Bew has argued that Parnell wanted tenants to purchase their land so as to end rent competition and allow the landlords and the tenants to realise that as Irish men they had a common objective of self-rule (the goal of any true anarchist). Parnell argued that With a suitable solution of the land question we should gladly welcome the continued presence of these gentlemen in Ireland. We should gladly see them taking their part for which they are fitted in the future social regeneration of this country, in the future direction of its affairs and in the future national life of Ireland.37 Parnell’s speeches indicate again and again his belief that once tenants owned their own land landlords’ interest and obsession with rent would be eliminated and they would be free to aid the transformation of the country. The search for national Home Rule is analogous to Wilde’s theory of individual self-development. In the late nineteenth century, nations were considered analogous to individuals,38 a point which, perhaps,

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should be included in the contextualisation of Wilde’s use of Individualism in ‘The Soul of Man’: advocating ‘Individualism’ went hand-in-hand with supporting Home Rule, allowing individual self-government rather than alien authority. Wilde writes that ‘all authority’ over another is ‘quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised’. Ironically, he praises the authority of despots who exercise it ‘violently, grossly and cruelly’ because this ‘produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it’ (294). It was England’s oppression which instigated Irish revolt. That Parnell, Wilde’s prophetic figure, his political Messiah, could be attacked for a sexual relationship motivated Wilde into a passionate counter-attack involving the issues which Parnell had been most public about. As the leader with a vision for the transformation of the country along what Wilde saw as anarchist lines was eliminated, Wilde launched a counter-offensive in the very organs of attack (the English press) used against his hero. Wilde’s desire for a movement from property ownership can be seen in this context as having far less radical application than left-wing writers on Wilde have imagined. In other words, Wilde is as left-wing as Parnell here. That Wilde saw Parnell as something of an anarchist is not surprising: so did the English press, and this journalistic context for anarchism is another that Josephine Guy has neglected. Caricatures in Punch often depicted Parnell as the fuse lighting the Irish anarchist flame, and his appeal to the ‘Fenian’ agitators in the year and a half after the start of the divorce case cemented this line.39 On a purely populist level the link between ‘Parnellism and Crime’ had been made long before a famous series of articles in The Times had implicated Parnell in the Phoenix Park Murders and the Special Commission on the issue had been convened. Wilde not only attended the sittings of this commission but also possessed the volumes which comprised its report. The line in ‘The Soul of Man’ claiming that ‘after all, even in prison, a man can be quite free’ (290) becomes clearer in the context of Parnell’s time in Kilmainham Gaol in 1881, where he was imprisoned for inciting violence. Parnell famously issued a ‘No-Rent Manifesto’ from his cell, and declared that ‘Captain Moonlight’ would replace him as an authority in Ireland. ‘Captain Moonlight’ was a codename for the most violent elements of Parnell’s followers, a figure of popular anarchism, who would burn hayricks, maim cattle and torch landlord houses, all to demonstrate his disdain for the property of the rich. Parnell and anarchism were wedded in the popular mind, but, while in prison, Parnell

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also used his time to resolve the property issue through negotiation with the English government. That ‘Captain Moonlight’ and Parnell should have been so publicly linked confirms the line of association between Parnell and anarchism that Wilde exploits here. Through figures like Parnell, criminality and prison appear in a more romantic light, and this lies behind the famous eulogy to criminality in ‘The Soul of Man’: After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace . . . A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law and be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. (290) Moreover, Wilde needed to absolve criminals because of his own background in Irish Nationalism. If specific acts of violence disturbed and repulsed him, he still needed to find a general theory that would allow for its persistence. John Henry Newman had argued that the Irish were justified in their breaking of English law to preserve tradition: the Irish people has never recognised, rather have since the time of Henry II protested against and rejected the sovereignty of England, and have seemingly admitted it only when too weak to resist; and therefore it is no sin to be what is commonly called a rebel.40 This theory, according to Declan Kiberd, is one which Wilde would have found very attractive.41 The category of criminal came to him in an ambivalent guise because his mother, as the author of ‘Jacta Alea Est’ was nothing if not a criminal in the eyes of the British. The Speaker of ‘The Soul of Man’ asserts that crime is tolerable in the present social arrangements precisely because the present social arrangements are so morally unacceptable and criminal in their own right: ‘it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg’ (291). Jesus, the figure in the end central to this essay, spent his last night in prison as a criminal. Furthermore, Wilde’s tentative acceptance of the necessity of violent protest in this essay (Wilde points out that if ‘it is often said that force is no argument . . . that, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove’, demonstrating that many important problems ‘have been solved entirely by means of physical force’, 311) is understandable given the levels of violent activity associated indirectly with Parnell. Parnell as nationalist, landlord, criminal and anarchist lies behind this essay. Crucially, he had also led, for a time, an organisation that

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appeared to many as a model anarchist syndicate. In 1881 Benjamin Tucker described the Irish National Land League – which had Parnell at its helm – as the nearest approach, on a large scale, to perfect Anarchistic organisation that the world has yet seen. An immense number of local groups, scattered over large sections of two continents separated by three thousand miles of ocean; each group autonomous, each free; each composed of varying numbers of individuals of all ages, sexes, races, equally autonomous and free; each inspired by a common, central, purpose; each supported entirely by voluntary contribution; each obeying its own judgements; each guided in the formation of its judgement and the choice of its conduct by the advice of a central council of picked men, having no power to enforce its orders except that inherent in the convincing logic of the reasons on which the orders are based; all coordinated and federated, with a minimum of machinery and without sacrifice of spontaneity, into a vast working unit, whose unparalleled power makes tyrants tremble and armies of no avail.42 The organisation of the Land League as described by Tucker matches the anarchist organisation of society described in ‘The Soul of Man’. It also sounds like another organisation to which Wilde was attracted, and to which we should now turn our attention: the Catholic Church. This link may sound far-fetched, particularly as the Catholic Church has been in the forefront of attacks upon anarchistic groups rather than an advocate of them. Besides, the social encyclicals issued by the popes since Leo XIII, whatever qualifications they may express, insist that obedience of the law and loyalty to the state are binding principles upon all Catholics. Moreover, the Church itself is a profoundly centralising force, and manifests a frighteningly bureaucratic and often dictatorial mindset when issues of theological disagreement arise. The doctrine of Papal Infallibility, promulgated by Pius IX in 1870, may be the ultimate centralising device, its overweening authority evident in Pius’s reply to some bishops who expressed concerns that the declaration would conflict with the conciliar model of much of Catholic tradition: ‘I am Tradition’. All this is true, but it is also true that Wilde was attracted to this authoritarian side of the Church. It is such Ultramontane Catholicism that found expression in some of Wilde’s fairy tales, and (as we will see when we look at De Profundis) Infallibility had its charms for him too.

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The Catholic Church as an alternative empire to the British model pervades Wilde’s early poetry (and is crucial in the construction of The Sphinx), and, far from revoking the idea of empire, Wilde was against the break-up of such a unifying force. His enthusiasm for a great empire was stated clearly in an interview with a reporter in America: I do not wish to see the empire dismembered, but only to see the Irish people free, and Ireland still a willing and integral part of the British Empire. To dismember a great empire in this age of vast armies and overweening ambition on the part of other nations, is to consign the peoples of the broken country to weak and insignificant places in the panorama of nations.43 This indicates the kind of empire he envisioned: one ruled by those who were marginal, the poor, the oppressed. What the place of Ireland in this empire was he also made clear: ‘my own idea is that Ireland should rule England’.44 This is a vision of an imperial topsy-turvy in which the last shall be first, relevant to Catholicism because it constituted an empire (a global one) without any secular authority, ruled from a prison (Pius was at this time trapped by secular forces in the Vatican), and identified with the least of the people, especially in Wilde’s native Ireland, where the Catholic Church was a bulwark against the authority of the English state. Likewise the Church satisfied Wilde’s lifelong attraction to majesty and kingship. This attraction is clear from the passage partly praising both princes and popes in ‘The Soul of Man’: ‘The Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes have been; the bad Popes have been. The bad Popes loved Beauty . . . To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much’ (323–4). This declaration of the majesty of the papacy at least partly conflicts with Wilde’s anarchistic leanings. The Pope after all was the prisoner of the Vatican and the Prince of the Church. Wilde shared Parnell’s vision which saw the landlords becoming completely Irish and leading the people to an anarchistic future, but here he adds a further and necessary move: conversion to Catholicism. The paragraph in ‘The Soul of Man’ concerning the power of popes (323) not only suggests that Wilde was profoundly attracted to even the Borgias but also lays down the conditions under which he could appeal to a Catholic tradition without balking: the Pope’s authority must be invested in force of personality rather than the power of compulsion, a position which only a prisoner could achieve. Wilde is attracted to the activities of the popes because they were the great patrons of the arts in the past – ‘it was a Pope who said of Cellini

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to a conclave of Cardinals that common laws and a common authority were not made for men such as he’ – however, they were often its great dictators – ‘it was a Pope who thrust Cellini into prison, and kept him there’ (322). The words about the value of imprisonment indicates why Wilde may have more hope for a Catholic Church in which the Pope is effectively a leader in prison, a prisoner of the Vatican. From the vantage point of the margins (like the prisons), a more liberating empire could be constructed. Wilde’s admiration for the imprisoned Pius is evident in a letter he wrote to Robert Ross, 21 April 1900, where he tells of being ‘outside the Caffe Nazionale [in Rome] . . . when the King drove past. I at once stood up, and made him a low bow, with hat doffed . . . It was only when the King had passed that I remembered I was Papista and Nerissimo!’45 The imprisoned leader had great moral and intellectual authority but no ability to enforce his arguments. The Pope may issue encyclicals but can compel no one to agree with them. The Pope must effectively compel people’s obedience through his behaviour: like Irving and Parnell he must lead the masses into perfection through the attractiveness of his personality. And, despite its profoundly centralising forces, in terms of its organisation the Catholic Church resembles an anarchistic collective. As Eamonn Hughes has pointed out, each parish effectively runs itself, while claiming access to the totality of the Church’s intellectual and moral teaching. Each parish is a centre in itself, linked by a network of organisations to other such local cells everywhere in the world.46 This means that the Church is precisely the kind of paradoxical congregation that could contain Wilde’s contradictory impulses towards anarchism and centralisation, the individual and the collective. After all, the Church operates hierarchically, but no more so than the political structure Wilde argues for here in which the artist leads the people to their own individual perfection. There is no priesthood of all believers in his scheme, but rather a priesthood of the elite in a Druidic-Catholic mediation that would bring the demos to enlightenment. Moreover, the image of the Catholic Church as explicitly dangerous to the centralising English state that had been in operation at least since the Glorious Revolution also likened it in the English mind to the forces of anarchy. Orthodox English political theory held that the Catholic Church operated as an anarchistic force in society. Thomas Hobbes’s theories are predicated on the idea that the position of the Church in the state has been domesticated and effectively removed from the public realm, and John Locke excluded Catholics from his Letter on Toleration (1689) because he considered that they were among the few

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religious groups left that had failed to interiorise the Church suitably. In the 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei, Leo XIII made it clear that there was always to be a conflict between the state and the Church because the function of the modern state was to appropriate all power to itself and deny power to all others. His arguments posed difficulties for any state wishing to accept the Church as merely one more social body to absorb. Disdain for the authority of the state was clear in an address give by Henry Manning on 10 January 1876, where he insisted that The Church, having a Divine liberty as the witness which God has constituted in the world to deliver His revelation . . . has within its sphere a sovereignty, and that sovereignty is one which is exempt from all control of human authority. No authority on earth can intervene to dictate to the Church what it has to teach, or within what limits it shall teach.47 The Church, Manning maintained, should be as free from civil censorship as Wilde maintains an artist should be. Wilde insists that what prevents the artist leading the public to a greater understanding of reality is the interference of the government: ‘the desire to exercise authority over the artists and over works of art’ (298). The artist, though, can only operate truthfully when free from such censorship. Wilde envisioned the perfected Individual at inner peace but causing consternation in the external world: his artist is completely free in his soul, but ‘is a disturbing and disintegrating force’ in society (298). This conception of the artist is directly related to Manning’s articulation of the Church: It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be.48 Importantly, Manning represents the English Catholic figure who best managed to bring together a broadly ‘socialist’ commitment to the rights of the working class and an Ultramontane Catholicism seen through his support for the declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870. Indeed, during the famous Dock Strike of 1887, one union, the

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Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen, wove an image of Manning into their banner. His support for the strikers was reason enough behind his depiction as a socialist and, indeed, an anarchist agitator in the English press. Ultimately the Catholic Church, in its organisation and in its theology, should be seen as just as paradoxical as Wilde, despite the attempts of many of its proponents to render it explicable logically. If Catholicism produces the likes of a Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI), it can also produce the Latin American liberation theologians. If it attracts the intensely rational Cardinal Newman, it can also produce the French mystical Symbolists. And in its social policy it tries to hold in tension the principles of subsidiarity (no organisation greater than necessary) with those of socialisation (complexity of social life requires governmental organisation).49 Likewise, the Land League, although hierarchically organised with a central president in Parnell (who could be dictatorial at times), was also run along the lines of syndicate anarchism. It is in the light of the complexities relating to the Home Rule Movement, the Land League and the Catholic Church that Wilde’s own position on private property in ‘The Soul of Man’ should be understood. These contexts (political, religious and journalistic) resolve the apparent contradictions of the polemic on property. If there is to be no such thing as private property, after all, then what are organisations such as the Land League and the Home Rule Party agitating about? The key point of the essay is that property is to serve man, not man to serve property. Hence, the problem lies in the amount of work-slavery that is undergone to facilitate the accumulation of property, as property is the status of citizenship. ‘The Soul of Man’ opposes industrial socialism precisely because it would continue this slavery rather than abolish it: ‘under [authoritarian socialism], or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any freedom at all’ (184). Under certain guises, socialism simply makes man the slave of his work rather than the slave of capitalism. This was also the focus of criticism of socialism from another source, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891). The encyclical insists that man is not a working animal, and that work is simply that which is undertaken to live. Work must be organised to facilitate the religious needs of the human which are primarily to develop his talents in the direction willed by God. Both ‘The Soul of Man’ and Rerum Novarum are profoundly in agreement with what the problem of socialism and capitalism is: both see mankind in terms of means rather than ends, both see mankind in the language of the economic ideologue. Wilde and Leo view humanity as

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important in and of itself, each individual being uniquely vital to the species as a whole. Society, they urge, should be organised around the perfection of humans, not the perpetuation of an economic model, no matter how just it might be: ‘it is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery’, Wilde warns, ‘but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish’ (184). Ironically, of course, Rerum Novarum, despite its own disdain for socialism, was read as a socialist, and even an anarchist, document by many. Richard Sonn points out: the involvement of legitimate priests with the anarchists of the early 1890s reflected the new liberalism of Rome and the doctrine of social Catholicism promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. In the papal encyclical . . . the pope denounced the exploitation of labour by capital, recognised the right of the workers to equitable treatment and even to a minimum wage, and recommended the reestablishment of guilds. The following year, the pope declared that the church was not opposed to any form of government thereby sanctioning clerical republicanism . . . A certain number of French priests now felt encouraged to take the cause of the working class . . . 50 Although the encyclical can hardly be called radical, and possessed a very flawed understanding of socialism, it committed the Catholic Church officially to a rejection of a central thesis of the prevailing capitalist ‘realism’ of the western world, namely that labour is a commodity to be bought at market prices determined by the law of supply and demand, rather than by the human needs of the worker.51 It challenged the assumption that the laws of economics were natural and the basis of morality and insisted on the higher law of justice as instituted by God, a challenge echoed in ‘The Soul of Man’. Relocating ‘The Soul of Man’ in an Irish Catholic context also enables us to understand its apparent dismissal of Jesus at the very end of the essay. Wilde insists that Jesus is ultimately not the means through which the social body can be changed. Jesus achieved his perfection through a liturgy of pain. In ‘The Soul of Man’ pain is designated an outmoded state of consciousness, a perverse liturgy that science and the laws of evolution have allowed us to surpass for a joyous ritual of delight. Instead of focusing on redemptive transformation through

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suffering, Wilde seems to advise us to transform life through an embracing of evolutionary laws and an acceptance of sensuous pleasure and joy, for ‘it must be remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain’ (330). If ‘the real Christ’ is the medieval Christ (331), the Christ on the Cross, then, the essay argues, Jesus does not present us with a pattern that will lead us to salvation. The ‘modern’ world has moved beyond Jesus of Nazareth and it is best that he be left behind. It is in this argument, however, that Wilde’s ironic pose plays its most significant part. After all, if England no longer needs the figure of Jesus because of his perfection through pain, as Wilde ironically insists, this very England has been recently crucifying another Christ figure on the cross of public opinion. The dismissal of Christ, apparently so central to the argument, is clearly, within the context of Parnell’s political crucifixion, a red herring, because it is precisely Parnell’s crucifixion at the hands of the English press that marks him out as a messianic leader, just as it is Pius’s crucifixion at the hands of the secular world that makes him redemptive. Christ is sarcastically dismissed as unnecessary for the now fully evolved ‘England’, but Wilde allows that ‘unevolved’ countries like Russia still need him: ‘in some places in the world, the message of Christ is still necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection except through pain’ (333). If this central point about the differences between modern England and ‘medieval’ Russia is placed in the context of the crucifixion of Parnell by English journalists then the ironic inflection in Wilde’s praise of England becomes evident. The essay amounts to a deflation of England’s belief in itself as the engine of progress and the centre of the ‘modern’ world, a belief that allows nations like Russia and Ireland to be completely marginalised in economic and cultural terms. The term ‘the modern’ comes, of course, from an intense overvaluation of the contemporary, and an arrogant version of historical process that sees the present as the culmination of linear development. It was this kind of ideology, stimulated by the very science and technology apparently feted in this essay, that allowed places like Russia and also Ireland to be delegated as distinctly non-modern. Post-Famine Ireland looked to Parnell (rather than England) to be its messiah, to raise it out of poverty and dependence. England, many believed, was content to simply watch the starving Irish die. It is in the essay’s apparent endorsement of England that the bitter irony becomes evident. One example of this is the famous suggestion that the English

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should stop being so altruistic because this charity does not solve the problems it sympathises with: ‘[Philanthropists] try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor’ (274). Read straight, this argument validates the liquidation of the poor to dissipate any qualms in the consciences of the rich. This resonates with Anthony Froude’s novel The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889), which Wilde had severely criticised in a review for proposing as a solution to the Irish problem the elimination of the Irish people themselves.52 The logic of ‘The Soul of Man’ appears the same, and the extermination of an entire class of people to ease the demands of charity and altruism reaches back to Swift’s polemically modest proposition that the Irish poor should allow their children to be eaten so as to solve the problem of starvation. Remembering Wilde’s experiences in the post-Famine west of Ireland can help to highlight the bitter irony running through the text. In the very first paragraph Wilde explains that although he disapproves of charity he can quite understand where it originates: ‘[People] find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this’ (274). The irony here comes from the fact that it was far from inevitable that people would be moved by poverty. In the place of sympathy and charity, what the Irish were offered during the Famine was a theology of political economy and the logic of scientific Malthusian evolution, which Wilde also appears to recommend to them. At one stage, for example, Wilde assures his readers that perfection is advancing and that we need not worry about the practicality of his scheme: ‘To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards individualism’ (327). What should concern us here is the glaring dissonance with Wilde’s previous intimation that humanity, far from experiencing perfection as the ‘laws of life’ carry on towards their utopian goal, is ground underfoot by them: ‘[Man] is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient’ (277). The point is that, in utilising such turns of phrase, Wilde is implicating the laws of science as far more problematic than many of his commentators would have us believe. The dissonance between starvation and the laws of progress were hardly unfamiliar to Wilde as he came from a country considered to be the very antithesis of progress and evolution,53 and knew what it was like to be considered as primitive. The appropriateness of his name to

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denote the ‘wildness’ of Irish culture was a gift to caricaturists who wished to attack Wilde’s aesthetic philosophising. A positive endorsement of Darwinian notions of evolution from some ape-like ancestor was hardly to be expected from a man originating in a culture which was often identified with the aboriginal apes of Punch, and who was himself often depicted as a typical if amusing Paddy, as I have clearly demonstrated in the previous chapter. One 1882 lithograph of a simian-jawed Paddy had him announcing, ‘Begorra and I believe I am Oscar Himself’, in a caricature entitled ‘National Aesthetics’. Darwinian theory had hardly served either Wilde’s country or his reputation very well, and to suggest that he uses it here in a completely straight manner is to ignore these national and personal difficulties. Such private history must surely come into play in an essay that links the English with the laws of progress and evolution, and the poor and starving with the medieval and the primitive. Critics who piously accept the arguments put forward in the essay at these points as unmistakably and literally Wilde’s own have failed to adequately contextualise. If read straight, the essay often sounds suspiciously like one found in Unionist organs like the Dublin University Magazine of 1851 which tapped into the theory of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution which saw history in terms of a constant movement beyond superstition and myth into the clear light of truth and progress: No agency of recent times has been so influential as steam . . . The intercommunication of ideas and of states, of mental and material wants, is now becoming so rapid and so well established, that, notwithstanding some serious impediments to present progress, every nation must advance, and all are tending towards the common goal of a higher civilisation.54 It requires some effort to remind ourselves that this was written in a country emerging from the worst European Famine of the nineteenth century; apparently, the one million dead are assisting in the rapid progress toward civilisation, and only the dreadful persistent existence of the rest of the peasantry is a ‘serious impediment’ to progress. This hymn to technology and the possibilities it offers is almost directly reproduced in ‘The Soul of Man’, which proclaims an astounding confidence that machines will save the world: At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is

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the future of machinery; and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself . . . machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. (298–9) This is despite Wilde’s knowledge that far from assisting humanity, machines have so far led only to its greater misery. The reference to the country gentleman happily sleeping in his comfortable bed while the trees are growing laces the entire passage with intense irony, for it was the country gentleman and his ‘cultivated leisure’ which most nationalists blamed for the misery of the poor during the Famine, an event the Dublin University Magazine sees as helping in the development of mankind. This is where phrases about man being crushed under inexorable laws begin to resonate more clearly, and a picture of a starving population condemned to death by the intricacies of poor law and political economy emerges from the specious confidence of the apparent argument of Wilde’s essay. Wilde came from a family whose most active political period was during the Famine, and his mother wrote impassioned attacks on ‘gentlemen of leisure’ and the English government, in an apocalyptic rage, as causing the deaths of thousands with their trust in economic and scientific determinism. ‘The Soul of Man’ is Wilde’s deeply ironic version of the millenarian visions common among Protestant Evangelicals. As his parents so eloquently pointed out, far from assisting Irish progress, the ‘intercommunication of ideas and states’, facilitated by the railways and the steamships, did not prevent the English government or its landowning garrison from allowing so many to starve to death. Technology became the means of denial – this can’t be happening, or if it is then there is nothing we can do about it – rather than the means of amelioration. As his mother wrote poems which compared the desolate peoples of rural Ireland with the Israelites holed up in an oppressive Egypt, lack of charity and a hardening of the hearts became a canonical narrative gesture in literature dealing with the Famine. If serious, the argument of ‘The Soul of Man’ would have Wilde advocating a policy of allowing the poor to starve while the laws of evolutionary individualism caught up with social problems. After all, the essay allows that ‘the evolution of man is slow’ (333), and therefore the mass extermination of the poor is a necessary (though a regretful) evil. Ultimately of course, the essay holds out the probability that there would not be anyone left to starve, but this is hardly a consolatory suggestion to those being

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crushed by evolutionary necessity right now, which only charity alone can assuage. The removal of such backward primitives as the Irish peasantry from the land, after all, was, in the language of the Blue Books, one more step towards the mechanisation of farming necessary to allow the laws of capitalism and production to be implemented.55 In the same way as many read English government efforts during the Famine as the best that could be done in appalling conditions, ‘The Soul of Man’ too seems driven by a genuinely benign desire to raise the poor out of their terrible state. The scheme proposed here offers platitudes in rhetorical extravagance, but little else; taken literally that is. Its ironic reversals suggest a transfiguration of the problem. The appeal to technology is also a rhetorical illusion. No doubt it is comforting to be told that we must let the scientists carry on with their work and that they will come up with a solution to poverty: anyone coming from a Famine-devastated landscape would detect the hollowness of this argument quicker than others. New agricultural systems were only more elaborate and ingenious schemes to rid the landscape of those appalling things known as cottiers and poor farmers. It is only in reading ‘The Soul of Man’ next to Irish economic decline that the apparent contradictions can be exposed as ironic commentary on colonial dependence. For example, one passage is devoted to the beauty of the modern house. Wilde considers that the laws of evolution dictate that the mob will eventually be enlightened enough to accept the aesthetic arguments of the artistic elite. Indeed he tells us that it is impossible to enter a modern house without ‘seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty. In fact, people’s houses are, as a rule, quite charming nowadays. People have been to a very great extent civilised’ (321). In its use of the term ‘civilised’ this passage brings us back to comparisons made during the Famine between the houses of the English and the mud cabins of the Irish, the appalling vista between the Big House and the shack. Wilde spent a great deal of his life preaching about ‘The House Beautiful’,56 surely in reaction to negative analyses of the homes of the Irish. If the English thought their houses superior to those of the Irish, then an Irishman would have to come over and transform the English home itself. Moreover, if the House Beautiful is the insignia of civilisation, and it is an Irishman who has been responsible for transforming the homes of the English middle classes into something ‘civilised’ (despite his origin in a barbaric country), surely the concepts of barbarity and civilisation need to be reassessed. If in the 1841 census 80 per cent of the Irish

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peasantry lived in one-room shacks, it would take an Irishman, who spent some time in his youth accompanying his father into these cabins, to conduct a pseudo-Evangelical civilising mission to the poorin-taste English. In such a convoluted knot, the distinctions between progress and degeneration, evolution and devolution, of the civilised and the barbaric begin to seem chimerical if not entirely illusory, a function of the rhetoric of the English Empire. This chapter has argued that Wilde’s political philosophy complements his anti-mimetic aesthetic, and demonstrated that his theoretical commitments to socialism and anarchism arose from his experience of Irish political nationalism and Irish and English Catholicism. Reading ‘The Soul of Man’ back into an Irish context has explained much of its more puzzling aspects – such as the apparently contradictory stance towards authority. What emerges from this reading is a recognition that Wilde operates through often esoteric and highly personal connections between figures and movements (such as Parnell and Leo XIII) which are very difficult to decipher at this present juncture. We will now turn to what has been recognised as not only Wilde’s best individual work, but also his most heavily coded: The Importance of Being Earnest. This play has rarely, if ever, been connected to Wilde’s religious impulses, but an excavation of its spiritual codes will reveal that such impulses are ever present even here.

5 Art and Life: the Politics of Ritualism in The Importance of Being Earnest

Taking Wilde’s most famous play as its focus, this chapter argues that previous interpretations of The Importance of Being Earnest (while important) have ultimately failed to comprehend the extent of its radicalism, because they have not registered its relation to a ‘theatrical’ faction within the Anglican Church in the nineteenth century – the Ritualist movement. My analysis here is very different from that usually made about this play, and this difference is vital to grasp. The Ritualist movement originated in the Tractarian debates and the shift in High Church Anglicanism to a more coherent form of Anglo-Catholicism. Anglo-Catholic Ritualists surrounded themselves in controversy by reinstituting the liturgical offices of the Catholic Church, including using ecclesiastical vestments again. Canon Chasuble is the clearest signal in this play that Wilde is attempting to comment on the Ritualist movement, the chasuble being a Eucharistic vestment traditional to the Catholic Church. In the light of the idiosyncrasy of my argument, and also the rather convoluted nature of the plot of Earnest, it may help readers to be reminded of what exactly occurs in this drama based on mistaken identities and implausible coincidences. John Worthing, an orphan who was found abandoned in a handbag in Victoria Station as a baby, now lives a double life. Officially he lives in the country with his ward Cecily Cardew and her governess Miss Prism; he has, however, invented a fictitious brother ‘Ernest’ whose wicked activities provide Jack with an excuse to escape to a surreptitious life in London where he adopts his invented brother’s name as an alias. His friend, Algernon Moncreiff, sympathises with Jack’s double life because he has himself invented a fictitious friend called Bunbury who becomes seriously ill any time Algernon wishes to escape the demands of respectable life. While in 138

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London, Jack falls in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, Algernon’s cousin. Gwendolen has proclaimed she will only marry someone of the name Ernest, and for that reason is much taken with Jack. Her mother, Lady Bracknell, refuses to allow the marriage to take place, however, as she disapproves of Jack/Ernest’s orphan status. Returning to his country home, Jack finds that Algernon has already arrived there having assumed the identity of Jack’s fictitious brother Ernest. In the interval Algernon/Ernest has fallen in love with Jack’s ward Cecily who has long been enamoured of Jack’s mysterious brother and, indeed, has carried on a completely fictitious relationship with him through the pages of her diary. Gwendolen now arrives and, after a series of mix-ups through which the two young women discover that Jack and Algernon have only been affecting the name ‘Ernest’, Lady Bracknell turns up. She is pleased that her nephew Algernon proposes to marry Cecily, who has a considerable amount of money in the Funds, but Jack refuses to allow the marriage to take place until Lady Bracknell agrees to his own marriage to Gwendolen. Fortunately, it is discovered that Miss Prism is the absent-minded nurse who 28 years before had misplaced the baby of Lady Bracknell’s brother on the platform at Victoria Station, a baby whose name was Ernest John. This clears the way for the marriage of both couples! Early criticism of this play concentrated on the theatrical contexts in which it was first produced, and the divergences between the three- and four-act versions of the text.1 Much the best recent criticism has come from gay-affirmative critics who have focused on the political importance of the plot. Christopher Craft has argued that this plot, far from confirming heterosexual marriage and the patriarchal family, does something far more interesting with sexuality. He contends that, in the female characters’ desire to marry a man called Ernest, Wilde demonstrates ‘the sheer arbitrariness . . . [and] formalism’ of hegemonic heterosexuality. By revealing this arbitrariness, Earnest demonstrates that compulsory heterosexuality can only be achieved by excluding all other forms of desire possible: ‘Wilde’s farce thus discloses heterosexual closure as itself the function of . . . the formal exclusion of Bunbury, with whatever unspeakable pleasures “serious Bunburyism” entails’.2 ‘Bunbury’ thus comes to represent all forms of desire not reducible to the ‘normalising’ demands of heterosexuality. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written persuasively that the play undercuts the necessary marriage between the two pairs of lovers, and has a much greater investment in the sibling and avuncular relationships (brotherly love, avuncular compassion) encoded in the plot, especially in its focus

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on Lady Bracknell. Sedgwick notes that ‘because aunts and uncles . . . are adults whose intimate access to children needn’t depend on their own pairing or procreation, it’s very common, of course, for some of them to have the office of representing nonconforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children’.3 Sedgwick believes that ‘it follows that a family system understood to include an avuncular function might also have a less hypostatized view of what and therefore how a child can desire’.4 Wilde’s play thus becomes the site of a political and sexual battle between competing versions of sexuality in Victorian England: one version, heterosexual, limiting, constrictive, exclusive; the second version, ‘queer’, open, liberatory, inclusive. The shift from the marriage plot that is so central to Earnest is as crucial as Craft and Sedgwick have pointed out, but what neither have noticed is that challenges to the Victorian family had already arisen in the movement known as Ritualism, and it is the connection between Earnest and the Ritualist threat to the patriarchal family we will explore here, taking the secular criticism of Sedgwick and Craft in a religious direction. It has, as far as I can tell, never been emphasised that Canon Chasuble is an Anglo-Catholic priest. In the Ritualist controversy of the second half of the nineteenth century, Eucharistic vestments such as the chasuble were a key site upon which a cultural battle was fought, a battle emerging from the Oxford Movement. The iconography of costume was a vital indicator of where a priest stood in the debate between the Anglican Church and the ‘roman’ Ritualists within it. A veritable war was fought between Ritualists and their enemies, Low Church Protestants, whose aversion to religious vestments was quite explicable. In 1874 John Hubbard pointed out that ‘coloured Vestments . . . remind them of the Vestments used in the Roman Church’.5 When Anglo-Catholics became more open in their uses of such colourful vestments, they found themselves at the centre of a long series of legal battles. The opposition to the chasuble was due to its implication that by wearing it the priest laid claim to the mysterious powers attributed to Catholic priests at consecration.6 The use of the chasuble was the badge of a Ritualist, and Wilde’s employment of it here is hardly coincidental. Just as Craft and Sedgwick have noted the coded homosocial quality of Earnest, so Anti-Ritualists feared the subtextual implications of Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England. Anti-Ritualists regarded the Catholic as an obvious enemy, but hated the Anglo-Catholic as a traitor disguised as a friend. Dr Arnold of Rugby said that the first was a French soldier in his own uniform, the second was a French soldier

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in an English uniform. 7 In Ritualism, the Highway to Rome (1867), J. Cummings claimed that prodigious efforts are being made by the Ritualists to enlist converts, or rather I should say perverts. Young men and young women are captivated and charmed by beautiful music, by a gorgeous ceremonial, by rich and variegated dresses, which also, whether at the ball or at the opera, or in a Ritualist Church, are no doubt very attractive.8 Such an extravagance as Earnest, where the ultra-Protestant audience is invited to laugh at that which they consider most serious, should be viewed as another contribution to the propagation of religious as well as sexual perversion. This conversion–perversion paradigm religiously inflects the critical observation of the play in terms of a homosexual subplot outrageous to a strict Victorian conscience.9 Wilde at Oxford had debated with Dean Mills, a High Churchman, on the virtues of Tractarianism, and was familiar with the arguments on both sides. His decision to attend the Brompton Oratory when he considered a complete conversion to Catholicism in 1878 can hardly have been a casual one. The Brompton Oratory was driven by the guiding spirit of Father Frederic William Faber, who was known to be an enthusiastic Ritualist. Wilde had previously offered his opinion on the proper attire for missionaries in Africa, and this interest in vestments continued after his release from prison. In France he attended services at a church near his residence and befriended a priest there, noting, ‘He showed me all his vestments: tomorrow he really will be charming in his red’.10 Wilde would have encountered Ritualism while at Oxford, where one of the most important Ritualist priests, Edward King, was Chair of Pastoral Theology. His appointment was greeted with intense protest, and his later elevation to the bishopric of Lincoln caused a scandal. He was finally prosecuted for Ritualist practices, such as vestment wearing, the eastward position, altar candles and the mixed chalice, although he remained undaunted.11 Others were even better known for Ritualist controversy than Edward King. J. R. Bloxham was a Fellow of Magdalene College, and the curate of John Henry Newman at Littlemore from 1837 to 1840. Bloxham caused a great stir when he began to dress provocatively in both Littlemore and Magdalen, and he was described as ‘the father or grandfather of all ritualistics’.12 Importantly, in Earnest Jack’s apartments in Belgrave Square are occupied by a woman called Lady Bloxham (Act I, line 521). This coincidence of Canon Chasuble and Lady Bloxham

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appearing in the same play can hardly be overlooked even if it can be pointed out that Wilde was much more familiar with another Bloxham.13 Magdalen College became a centre of worship and activity for clerics who wished to follow in Bloxham’s footsteps and Oxford and Magdalen in particular found themselves the butt of many complaints from the national press, especially the Quarterly Review and the British Magazine. Canon Chasuble’s references to celibacy as the practice of the Primitive Church also indicate that he should be included in the Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic party. In Act II the Canon notes that ‘the precept as well as the practice of the Primitive Church was distinctly against matrimony’ (II, 191–3), and this lies behind his own failure to marry. The issue of celibacy caused outrage in many literary figures of the time, not least the novelist and intellectual Charles Kingsley whose peculiar mixture of Darwin and doctrine led him to consecrate sexual performance and the volcanic-like power of the phallic male as religiously purifying. The position of the Anglo-Catholic Church on celibacy was an affront to all his deeply held beliefs whereby the family was sanctified by the vibrant sexual relationship between husband and wife and the production of children.14 Wilde is undoubtedly undermining the conceptions of the muscular Christians, not least through the Anglo-Catholic figure of the Canon. He parodies English fears that the putative celibacy of many Ritualists was a mere disguise enabling a greater access to young and attractive women. The Canon’s sexual desires are here at odds with his ideal of celibacy, but they are not directed towards the fertile Cecily and Gwendolen, but to Miss Prism, whose abilities with children are put under some question by her substitution of Jack for a three-decker novel: On the morning of the day . . . that is forever branded on my memory, I prepared as usual to take the baby out in its perambulator. I had also with me a somewhat old, but capacious hand-bag in which I had intended to place the manuscript of a work of fiction that I had written during my few unoccupied hours. In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I can never forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the bassinette, and placed the baby in the hand-bag. (III, 352–62) Miss Prism, moreover, is not only infertile, but for a woman of her age retains a keen sexual imagination. While many see Miss Prism’s devotion to literature as in some way a sublimation of her sexual desires, such an argument is not convincing. Her interest in literature has not subsided

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since the loss of her precious manuscript. When the Canon asks her to marry him she tells him that she will ‘forward you, this evening, the three last volumes of my diary. In these you will be able to peruse a full account of the sentiments that I have entertained towards you for the last eighteen months’. Literature serves as the site for consummation: sexual fertility is not in question here, but rather its continuous deferral in the service of a gratifying titillation. The Canon announces that ‘the Primitive Church was in error on certain points. Corrupt readings seem to have crept into the text’.15 This entire episode is not a dissolution of the sexual objections that critics like Charles Kingsley would have enunciated towards the practice of celibacy, the high regard for Holy Virginity, and the revival of sisterhoods and monastic life; rather it is an open satire. The Canon has the gall to wait until old age to marry and his wife is far from childbearing age; their pleasures lie in insinuation and deferral of sexual pleasure and the sublimation of sex in the act of outrageous flirting through the borders of books – ‘Had I the good fortune to be a pupil of Miss Prism I would hang off her lips . . . ’ (II, 75–6). Of course, the fear was great in many circles that sexual titillation with women was the least problem the Anglo-Catholic male posed, and most suspected that there was something pathologically wrong with male Ritualists, though precisely what it was difficult to say. The Victorians lacked the psychological and sociological vocabulary the twentieth century provided to speak about the shifting range of masculinities available, so vague terms had to be applied. Charges that the men involved in the movement were not really men at all but ‘effeminate fanatics’ were frequent. The Ritualists were considered to foster effeminate or womanly temperaments rather than manliness. Bishop Wilberforce lamented the lack of ‘vigour, virility, and self-expressing vitality of the religious life in the young men’ involved in the movement.16 Not only was such an effeminate approach considered unmanly, it was also considered radically unEnglish. Certainly, all the male characters in this play fit very uneasily into what would be considered by the Victorians as ‘normal’ masculinity. Masculinity was very important to the Victorians, and was perceived by them as the embodiment of many principles upon which society was based. Muscular Christianity was an expansion of the Victorian imperial drive to produce ‘manly men’ who would propagate the principles of English Protestant Rationalism to the wider colonial world, and at home preserve the English Protestant constitution from the threat posed by both the emerging woman’s movement (as best represented by the term the ‘New Woman’) and the rise of Roman Catholicism

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within the state after the reconstitution of the Catholic hierarchy in the 1850s. The Importance of Being Earnest is important in these debates about the construction of masculinity as it emerges at the point where the male hetero- and homosexual are being produced by the language of the medical and legal establishments.17 Many commentators have seen a direct link between the play and attempts by certain writers to allow for some kind of genital contact between men in society against the wishes of the very society that produced them. The play can be read as an attempt by Wilde to privilege the forms of masculinity that were being marginalised by the manly Christianity of the Protestant imperialist middle classes. ‘Homosexual’ traits were first posited as useful in identifying Anglo-Catholic behaviour: it was not sexuality that was of chief importance, but religious orientation and all that entailed. Homosexual behaviour emerged from the conjunction of anti-Catholicism, imperial necessity and the medical and legal abilities to describe such phenomena with a degree of intellectual sophistication. David Hilliard has argued persuasively that ‘a homosexual sensibility expressed itself within Anglo-Catholicism’ from the beginning,18 but I believe that we need to be more specific than this. Anglo-Catholicism specified male behaviour that was generally different from that legitimated by the dominant social norms, including extremes of celibacy, a worship of the Virgin Mary, and an asceticism complemented by an excess of spectacle. This affront to the dominant notions of masculinity allowed certain ‘scandals’ involving sodomy to be highlighted by the press,19 although the same practices went on in the public school system without raising much attention. In other words, there was about as much sodomy practised by men on the rugby pitches of Eton and Oxford as there was in any Anglo-Catholic or Catholic monastery, but the Protestant manliness of the rugby players discouraged or disallowed any highlighting of this. Sodomy and effeminacy were then associated through the prism of Catholicism, laying the ground for the emergence of the homosexual ‘condition’ in the 1890s, galvanised by the Oscar Wilde trials.20 Earnest is directly implicated in these issues because it refuses to accept the traditional notions of masculinity central to Victorian society, a refusal that is typified by the absence of Lord Bracknell throughout the play. He is absent because of what Gwendolen believes his paradigmatic masculinity: Outside the family circle, papa, I am glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man

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begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? (II, 583–7) Lord Bracknell is the ideal man here because he is exactly the kind of man considered so outrageous in the world outside the play. Wilde’s Earnest legitimates the radical association of effeminate men, powerful women, Anglo-Catholic priests, cross-dressing Catholics, the young, the alternative family, gorgeous surroundings, conservative politics and spectacle as a challenge to hegemonic Victorianism. The problematics of masculinity explain why the question of male origin is placed under extreme pressure. Jack, after all, is not the product of any parents at all but is found self-generated in a handbag left in the London underground. Lady Bracknell amusingly comments: ‘I had no idea that there were any families or persons whose origins was a Terminus’ (III, 128–9). Jack’s existence in this textual trajectory undermines the Victorian emphasis on origins as the determinant of sexual identity.21 The Victorian period witnessed an outcrop of literature about pregnancy and childbirth. Birth was vital to the Victorians as they had read their Origin of Species very carefully. Darwin warned that only the fittest would survive evolution, and so only the fittest should be allowed to reproduce. Birth and reproduction had to be regulated very carefully to ensure that only robust children would be produced so as to enable the manly English nation to carry on; the aristocracy, weak women, effeminate men must never be allowed to reproduce their own kind as this would inevitably lead to a degeneration in the species.22 The problem with Jack from this point of view is that the policing of his birth has somehow failed. No one seems to know where he has come from because, as he admits, ‘I was found’ in a handbag (I, 548). Worse, he derives his name – Worthing – not from any venerable old family, but from the fact that the man who found him ‘happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket at the time’ (I, 552–3). The name ‘Worthing’, in other words, is ‘Worth-nothing’ when measured by typical Victorian standards of masculinity. By appearing in a handbag, Jack is now open to the possibilities of life whatever it may present to him: not knowing his parents means that no one can tell if he is of good, healthy Darwinian stock able to carry out the duties of the Empire, or if he is of the worst kind of weak Catholic. Being born in a railway station terminus terminates all possible social control. This joke about Jack’s birth suggests that looking to Nature for an answer as to what kind of person we are is a misguided and misplaced activity.

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It also warns of the dangers inherent in the modernising project. After all, travel by rail signalled the distribution of the products of modernity to the furthest reaches of England, and also concretised the concept of time as a straight line down which people travelled in ‘progress’.23 For Wilde, railway stations are aptly called termini as he wished to terminate the drive towards such narrative progress that configured history in such imperial, rational terms. For the Irish, who had just undergone a Famine, the idea of history as progress was ridiculous. Wilde opted for a model that terminated railway lines, derailing the depopulating project of modernity, and subverting novels like the classic Evangelical tome by Anne Howard, Mary Spencer: a Tale for the Times, which argued (directly in opposition to the claims of the Ritualists) that building railways, rather than adorning cathedrals, was the best way to spread the Gospel. If Nature and modernity are undermined, the name ‘Ernest’ also loses its authority. Ernest, after all, was not only a name, but a very loaded term in Victorian England. One was expected to be Earnest: enthusiastic, serious, practise what you preached, especially if you were a man. Here, far from being Earnest, Jack is really still Jack: a Jack-of-all-trades, a man of all names and a man of none. As the son of a muscular Protestant (his father turns out to have been a general in the army – though ironically ‘a man of peace, except in his domestic life’ (III, 460–1)!), Jack should by Darwinian principles be the embodiment of his father’s genes. Of course, he is the very opposite. He is far from militarily disciplined and prefers idleness to work, lounging around eating cucumber sandwiches rather than travelling abroad and saving the Empire from disintegration. Far from being energised by the demands of the Empire, Jack proclaims that he is in pursuit of pleasure: ‘what else should bring one anywhere?’ (I, 40–1). In contrast to society’s attempt to pin down its masculine subjects so that they can become the instruments of its hegemony, Wilde’s play refuses to grant such unproblematic identity status to these people. The principles of Victorian orthodoxy force its men to dichotomise: Jack or Ernest? In Wilde’s play he turns out to be ironically both. Thus Gwendolyn asks of Jack at the end of Act III: ‘But what own are you? What is your Christian name now that you have become someone else?’ (III, 431–2). This existential transformation is accomplished by Jack with far less pains than for another key Victorian figure, Dr Jekyll. While Jekyll must go through a painful physical metamorphosis to escape the confines of Victorian masculinity, Jack doesn’t suffer the least existential angst when he finds that his conceptions and indeed his conception has been

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altered before his very eyes. He takes his discovery of the ‘true’ nature of his identity very well: ‘[Jack] puts book very quietly down and speaks quite calmly’ (III, 469–70). He discovers that his name is ‘Ernest John’. In this transformation he is allowed to relinquish his schizoid existence and integrate Jack and Ernest in the one social body – precisely the kind of duplicity feared of Anglo-Catholic priests. As Sedgwick argues, in closing the play with a pun on the signifier of the Name of the Father Wilde overturns traditional male configurations.24 Given its Ritualist component, that the women should be the powerful figures in this play is hardly surprising. After all, Ritualism was considered by many ‘a female movement’. Octavius Ellis attacked it in 1868 because of its preponderance of women, claiming that the Ritualistic clergyman is led, or rather misled, by a few ladies, who have time and taste for ornamental work, for embroidering coloured stoles, chasubles, &c., and they allow themselves no rest until they have persuaded him to wear these things.25 The faction was understood to be an aspect of the ‘women’s movement’, and the combination of celibate priest and unaccompanied women was strong meat for many, a congregation of anti-patriarchal families that existed at the very heart of the nation. The likes of Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell wandering the countryside without Lord Bracknell knowing anything about it is precisely what the Low Church Evangelicals wished to avoid. Lady Bracknell insists that men must always be kept in the dark, however: [Gwendolen’s] unhappy father is, I am glad to say, under the impression that she is attending a more than usually lengthy lecture by the University Extension Scheme on the Influence of a permanent income on Thought. I do not propose to undeceive him. Indeed I have never undeceived him on any question. I would consider it wrong. (III, 76–82) Ritualist congregations were a challenge to the authority of fathers and husbands, of which there are precious few in the play. Ritualists claimed that the church was not the place to allow too much familial loyalty. This stance attracted strong criticism, with Reverend Scobell warning fathers, husbands and brothers to ‘beware lest these, the weaker vessels, be the means in the end – as Adam was driven out of Paradise – of driving you out of the Eden, the happy, the very happy

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Eden of an English Christian home’.26 The play has driven them out. Lady Bracknell informs us that poor Lord Bracknell is sent to bed whenever the dinner table numbers are at all out: ‘Fortunately he is accustomed to that’ (I, 331–2). What we find in this play then is a headlong confrontation with the challenge of the New Woman, and the trials of masculinity as the 1890s matured. Lady Bracknell may be more than just a strong woman, however. In an article in Punch called ‘Parsons in petticoats’ (10 June 1865), it was argued that clergymen of extreme High Church orientation ‘are very fond of dressing like ladies. They are much addicted to wearing vestments diversified with smart and gay colours, and variously trimmed and embroidered’.27 Priests-as-women is hardly a new theme, but excavating it here may shed light on the possibility that Lady Bracknell is some kind of drag queen.28 Sedgwick has pointed out that Lady Bracknell is a character ‘often played, of course, Charley’s Aunt-style, by a male actor in woman’s dress’.29 The emphasis on hyper-masculinity and the aggressive distinction between the sexes in Victorian England may have been, in part, a cause of the revival of Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism in England. Although it would be going too far to suggest that all Catholic priests are really cross-dressing men, Jung may be right in positing that if a society dichotomises the sexes to such an extreme as did the Victorians (with fashion historians suggesting that iconically they were almost of two different species)30 strategies by which both sexes could participate and engage in the structures of feeling and power will necessarily spring up to compensate for this intense dichotomy. If society develops a sexual division to a neurotic degree this may generate a religious tic in order to satisfy psychological needs. The ‘effeminising’ quality of Anglo-Catholicism may have been a powerful reason for its attraction to men unable to fulfil the muscular Protestant ideal so apostrophised in this period. Hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity and an insistence on the radical separation of the sexes may heighten the urge to transgender. I am not suggesting that we can analyse the entire Ritualist movement as a reaction to the repression of the feminine aspects of the personalities of the male players in society. But seeing the Ritualist movement as registering an objection to the extreme separation of the sexes can help us understand Lady Bracknell better: she is not a woman who has appropriated some of the power given to men in the society to which she declares allegiance, but a man who wishes to activate structures of feeling denied to him as a man, the need for spectacle, for music, for the beautiful, earthgroundedness, intuition.

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The issue here is not whether it is biologically correct to term these impulses ‘feminine’. If Lady Bracknell is a drag queen, then it may be because she figures as a kind of Anglo-Catholic priest whose function it is to legitimate the inversions that constitute the play’s narrative drive. As the main focus of power in the play, Lady Bracknell as the crossdressing Catholic priest may represent a possible reconciling trajectory for Victorian society: the clothing of the female is merely a means to channel the traditionally feminine aspects of the personality that are rendered illegitimate to men during this historical period. Integration of masculine and feminine characteristics is empowering. Lady Bracknell’s ‘masculine mind’ (clearly visible in the scene where she questions Jack about his social position) is united with her feminine sympathy in order to effect the complete transformation of society. ‘Anglo-Catholic’ may be the best way to describe Lady Bracknell as she unites the traditional masculine forms (Anglo) and traditional female forms (Catholic). A man who ‘wishes to be a woman’ (or a Catholic priest) may simply want to experience the more spiritual states of mind associated with women. This also suggests that the ‘angel of the house’ model for Victorian women must be considered, in part, a religious projection and desire of men and not simply a patriarchal tool of oppression, as which of course it may have been experienced by the women onto whom it was projected. Cross-dressing and Ritualism are ways for men in a hyper-masculine society to integrate the anima. The Ritualist desire is not simply to be defined then as the thrill of the trivial, but the need to reconstitute the self as a new religious persona. This is a good example of what Homi Bhabha has termed ‘sly mimicry’.31 Lady Bracknell and the Ritualists represent ‘mimic men’, by their subtle use of the language of the dominant power back against that power, thus facing them with the worrying threat of similarity. A cross-dressing man is an extreme example of the kind of mimicry used to subvert power structures. It becomes increasingly difficult for the hegemonic power to act against mimics as they have become so like them as to be almost indistinguishable. This mimicking quality of Lady Bracknell is the reason why she has been misread as the villain of the piece, and Jack and Algernon as the heroes. What the play demonstrates, however, is that Jack and Algernon must change their behaviour to become more like Lady Bracknell. The point about Lady Bracknell is that she is a type of fifth column, precisely the kind of traitor in the clothing of a friend that populated the Ritualist movement. In her there is a case of true subversion: she mouths all the right Victorian doctrines but constantly undermines

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them with her actions; she presents herself as the protector of society but fashions it after her own image.32 If there is a subversive power in the play it does not rest in Jack and Algernon’s rather pathetic dualities. She tells Algernon never to speak disrespectfully of Society: ‘Only people who can’t get into it do that’ (III, 188–9). Instead of speaking disrespectfully of it, she creates it in her own image. For example, she spends most of the play denouncing things French in favour of respectable German, but we soon learn that she is busy importing the saucy into the staid. Observing that Cecily’s hair and dress are distinctly unfashionable she comfortably tells her that ‘a thoroughly experienced French maid produces a really marvellous result in a very brief space of time’ (III, 168–70). The rituals of language (which represent the conservatism of Victorian society) are ritually contradicted by Lady Bracknell’s rituals of behaviour (which represent a different society inhabited by the subversive characters in the play). This kind of contradiction may have been one reason why Wilde was at times attracted to someone like Queen Victoria. The Queen staunchly opposed the emergent feminist movement in the starkest terms, and was most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety . . . ’33 The patent absurdity of a matriarch opposing women’s power is hilariously displayed by Wilde in the play. Lady Bracknell is after all a woman in an extremely powerful position. She decided she would marry her husband (and let nothing as banal as money stand in her way): ‘I do not approve of mercenary marriages’, she tells Cecily, noting, ‘When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind’ (III, 191–3). Moreover, she decides most else in her household, withholding information (such as Gwendolen’s flight to the countryside) from Lord Bracknell as she sees fit. Yet she rhetorically insists that Gwendolen could and should never choose for herself who she will marry – it should come as a surprise to her, whether pleasing or displeasing (I, 465–9). She holds the book of eligible men; she can control whether a side of Grovesnor Square is fashionable or not; she demands that Jack find himself at least one parent before the end of the courting season (I, 584–7). These things all indicate the kind of moral and social power she holds, yet she always insists that women are the social inferiors of the

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men in the text. Lady Bracknell says all the ‘right’ things – women should stay in and know their place – while doing all the ‘wrong’ ones. In this she both maintains position and appropriates power. Her ritual creates the kind of reality she wishes to live within. She says at one point, for example, that Jack’s sad beginnings in a handbag distress her greatly: ‘To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag . . . seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution’ (I, 569–74). Far from being an indication of her innate conservatism, however, this is simply a sop to respectability: she has already effected a revolution in the domestic sphere with as few fireworks as possible. Despite several interpretations that cast Lady Bracknell as the villain of the piece, something altogether more interesting is happening. The lovers must overcome Jack and Algernon’s pathetic double lives in order to get on with the plot. Lady Bracknell is not overcome but rather vindicated. She is not a Gorgon, but a goddess; not a monster, but a myth. She has conjured up a world out of the recalcitrant materials of fact that obeys her every whim. She can say in one speech that the one hundred and thirty thousand that Cecily has in the Funds make her a very attractive girl indeed, while in another lamenting that we live in an age of surfaces. When she pronounces that a ‘cloak-room at a railway-station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion . . . ’. (I, 575–7), she displays a knowledge of the workings of secrecy and scandal that Jack can only aspire to. You must say the right things while doing the wrong ones; you must perform a politics of the subversive while maintaining the mask of conservatism. It is no surprise that Lady Bracknell believes that Nature is that which we must overcome in life, a belief indicated by her otherwise absurd demand that Jack find himself a set of parents as quickly as possible. The universe governed by Darwinian theory indicates precisely the opposite: that Nature is what we must conform to at all costs, and this Nature included the strict biological and cultural division of the species into two. The existence of Lady Bracknell and the Ritualists is a challenge to that argument. Lady Bracknell is less concerned with the way things are as defined by scientists, as she is with the way things should be as defined by Lady Bracknell. This attitude is implicit in her comment on the side of Belgrave Square on which Jack’s house sits: ‘The unfashionable side. I thought there was something. However, that could easily be altered’. Jack wonders if Lady Bracknell means that the fashion or the side could be altered to which she ‘sternly replies: ‘Both, if necessary, I presume’ (I, 529–32).

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If Lady Bracknell can manipulate geography and fashion, then why cannot she also manipulate biology and physics? After all, her version of manliness involves a heightened motherliness. Although her concern for Gwendolen is stimulated by the need to keep society on side, there is no suggestion that there is not a deep bond between them – indeed, as Algernon warns us, Gwendolen is becoming exactly like her mother (I, 625–6). Lady Bracknell’s dedication to ‘health’ is genuinely parodic of the late Victorian obsession with healthiness of body as derived from Spencer’s theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’; the men in this play are surrounded by paradigms of sickness that they have dreamt up in order to accommodate their transgressive desires (I, 346–7). Lady Bracknell merely parrots society’s demands, and then marries a man who stays in bed – muscular Protestantism is marginalised as Lady Bracknell confidently assimilates the generically unhealthy into her household. Indeed, it is only the two ‘heroes’ who have to redefine themselves in line with the other characters, but it is not until they are recognised as ‘changed men’ by Cecily, Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell, and reality has begun to conform to their vision of it, that the process is complete. Algernon and Jack must learn how to use reality to their advantage rather than adapt themselves to the demands of reality by splitting their lives in two. It is vitally important that Jack learn to be Ernest and not earnest. His problem has been that he has tried to be both. Thus, I would contend that this play is about Jack and Algernon learning to act like everyone else in the play: in other words, Jack and Algernon must learn to stop leading double lives as schizoid muscular Christians and, instead, become Ritualists like the other characters. The two main characters are not subversive heroes. They are not trying to undermine the muscular Christian ideals that they are supposed to live up to, but only to avoid their duties. Jack feels his duties to Cecily and Miss Prism quite sharply. ‘Dear Uncle Jack is so very serious!’ Cecily tells us, ‘so serious that I think he cannot be quite well’ (II, 14–15). Algernon insists that ‘My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree’, but his duty has in fact forced him to create an alternative personality for himself. He does admit that ‘it is awfully hard work doing nothing’ (I, 690). The other characters in the play exist by working within Victorian conventions but continually exploiting them for their own purposes. Lane, for example, is the perfect servant, apparently polite and deferential, but all the time pulling the rug out from under his employer’s legs. He fabricates documents and stoically admits to it. He has plundered Algernon’s

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wine stock but doctored the books in a manner that he is completely comfortable with admitting. Algernon is clearly distressed and discomfited by this kind of behaviour because when he does something he wants to do, rather than something he feels it his duty to do, he pretends that Bunbury is sick. He tells us that he feels completely let down by his servant’s behaviour: ‘Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility’ (I, 33–5). Lane would never feel the need to stoop to such subterfuges as manufacturing a sick friend in order to do what ever he really wants to do. Gwendolen and Cecily depend on irreality as much as Algernon and Jack, but instead of deceiving the world through inventions and implausible contortions, they simply demand that the world live up to their expectations, which it invariably does. Jack gets it wrong on numerous occasions. When confronted with the fact that the two girls now know the ‘truth’ about both himself and Algernon, he is forced to come clean: ‘it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind’ (II, 767–70). The truth he is forced to admit is that he has not, and has never had, a brother, ‘not even of any kind’ (II, 778). However, this is what is untrue, as Algernon ‘really’ is his brother. While the men in this play are often caught short, the women are always poised and in control, moving from one contradictory position to another with ease as the universe strives to accommodate their version of existence. Cecily never allows reality to get the better of her and force her to accept things she doesn’t want to: if Algernon/Ernest won’t send her love letters she will write them herself; if nothing exciting ever happens she will fabricate an action-packed life in a soon-to-be-published diary; if she is not to be married she will invent an engagement; if no one buys her a ring she can produce one on demand. After meeting Algernon/ Ernest for the first time she tells him cheerfully, ‘we have been engaged for the last three months’ (II, 456–7). It is important to notice that reality here is in fact altered, and that it is Cecily’s version of the past that the characters learn to adhere to. Gwendolen’s diary is as sensational as Cicely’s, so sensational that she reads it on the train (II, 655–7), presumably because it contains as many fantastic incidents. Canon Chasuble’s sermon on the meaning of the manna in the desert is so useful that it can be produced on any occasion, even at a meeting designed to prevent discontent among the upper classes (II, 243–51). Discontent might be rife (the kind of discontent experienced by Algernon

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and Jack) because the upper classes are finding reality too stuffy for them. Oppressed by a society constructed around the strictest morality of conscience they are forced into the desperations of a double life: repressed sexuality is expressed through eating as it can be fulfilled no other way. Indeed, ‘Bunburying means to invent a fictitious character, who can serve as a pretext for escaping a frustrating social routine, regulated by a repressive convention’.34 Continued dedication to a situation productive of social schizophrenia is the reason someone like Algernon is all set to wait until Cecily is 35 until he can have his not-so-wicked way with her. Cecily is not prepared to make such compromises with a reality she disapproves of. She can barely wait five minutes, and has little intention of postponing her sexual fulfilment until she has grown older: ‘I am not punctual myself, I know, but I do like punctuality in others, and waiting even to be married is quite out of the question’ (III, 273–5). Algernon is willing to sublimate his desire into buttered muffins and cucumber sandwiches, but such sexual substitution holds no attraction for his fiancée. Likewise, Jack seems reconciled to the fact that Gwendolen can never marry him, and resigned to remaining a bachelor, focusing his sexual frustration on consumption. Cecily tells us that he has taken to eating ‘paté de foie sandwiches and 1889 champagne at twelve’ due to his invalid nature.35 Gwendolen, however, will marry often to satisfy her own sexual desires. She regrets that her mother will prevent her marriage to Jack but consoles him: ‘But although she may prevent us from becoming man and wife, and I may marry someone else, and marry often, nothing that she can possibly do can alter my eternal devotion to you’ (I, 706–9). Age and respectability do not prevent Miss Prism from actively pursuing a sexual relationship with the Canon, who is prepared to disregard the Primitive Church’s views on celibacy so that he can hang off Miss Prism’s educated lips. In their pursuit of respectability it is Algernon and Jack who, though going to the trouble of creating second existences for themselves, remain the frustrated and chaste heroes; those at the very centre of this society have designed strategies of contradiction and paradox to ensure all sensuous needs are met. Miss Prism and Dr Chasuble may put on a face of strict moralism, but their fictions (the three-volume novel and the sermon) are as absurd as visions of the cosmos as anything put forward by Jack or Algernon. The idea that Miss Prism is ‘sexually forlorn’36 is wide of the mark. The ‘stain on the lining’ of her handbag caused by the ‘explosion of a temperance beverage’ gives the lie to that (III, 393–4). She may appear the perfect embodiment of a humourless

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governess but she is the one with the past, a past that directly contradicts her present ethical posture. It is only after her past has been revealed that the Canon decides that ‘corrupt readings have crept into’ the Primitive Church, and expresses his desire to marry her. She is hilariously more interested in the return of the handbag (‘it has been a great inconvenience being without it all these years’, III, 399–400) than the sight of Jack, the child she so hideously misplaced. Thus Jack’s and Algernon’s double lives are inappropriate when considered in terms of the society of the play, but not, I suggest, in the terms of Victorian society, where such double lives were all too common (a good example being Wilde’s own). The key process in the play is the renunciation of the underground life in favour of a more integrated self, though this integration is far more subversive than the type of social schizophrenia practised by the two men. They must give up Bunburying and discipline their bodies to a new form of social logic. While Jack and Algernon bungle their way through the play, the female characters are comfortable and at ease with paradox and contradiction. Our heroes must learn to emulate their fiancées and learn quickly. For example, to take a random selection of incidents: Jack has no understanding of the ritual process of courting and has to be impatiently instructed by Gwendolen (‘I am afraid you have had very little experience in how to propose’ (I, 449–50)); Algernon cannot appropriate himself quickly enough to the complexities involved in Cecily’s diary writing; Algernon consistently gets his predictions wrong: his belief that ‘girls never marry the men they flirt with’ (I, 98–9) is directly contradicted by Gwendolen’s decision to marry to Jack; Jack completely mistakes Miss Prism and Cecily for conventionally ‘respectable’ creatures, a mistake that Lady Bracknell never falls into (‘Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?’ she asks the Canon, to whose reply that ‘she is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability’, she knowingly responds, ‘it is obviously the same person,’ III, 321–5). There is something peculiarly odd about Jack’s insistence that there is nothing in life worth pursuing like pleasure when he has to work very hard to keep up the alternative personalities he has constructed. This is radically pointed up when he appears on stage in black mourning the death of his brother who happens to be in the next room (II, 209). Algernon also has to evolve the personality of Bunbury which demands that he travel exhaustingly up and down the country and involve himself in elaborate plots because he cannot adjust to social life, or make social life adjust to him.

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Note the difference between Jack and Algernon, and Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen and even Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble. Their deceptions cause them no worry at all. Lady Bracknell routinely delights in lying to her husband, and does ‘not propose to undeceive him. Indeed I have never undeceived him on any question. I would consider it wrong’ (III, 80–2). Algernon’s opinion that in marriage ‘three is company and two is none’ is clearly wrong (I, 271). Likewise Gwendolen speaks quite comfortably in contradictions. She will wait for Jack all her life if he isn’t too long (III, 374); she loves him so much that she will remember him forever, though she will marry early and marry often; she never changes, ‘except in my affections’ (III, 436). When the two male characters do lie they are so uncomfortable that they create elaborate fictions that allow them to do so with impunity. Moreover, rather than lying, Jack discovers that he has in fact been speaking the truth all his life. Gwendolen, Cecily and Lady Bracknell lie and deceive all the time without worry or fear of contradiction, and that the two men must come around to their way of thinking is indicated by the general movement of the play. When Jack discovers that he has been telling the truth all his life, Gwendolen assures him that she can forgive him as she ‘feels sure he is about to change’ (III, 480). Cecily must constantly correct Algernon’s view of the world. He arrives attempting to convince her that he is not as bad as he has been depicted in Jack’s reports. Cecily is quite clear on the matter: If you are not, then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner. I hope that you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. (II, 122–5) What Cecily is trying to inform Algernon of here is that instead of exhausting himself with Bunburying he can be ‘bad’ and acceptable in society at the same time. Algernon can have everything he wishes by abandoning his double life and integrating the self into society through forming a club of subversion, a subversion expressed through an alternative liturgy. It is to this alternative liturgy we will now turn, because, after all, the Ritualist debate over the vestments also highlighted what many AngloCatholics had been arguing for so long: that the Eucharist was so important that special vestments for it were necessary. The Ritualist focus on the Eucharist, the most important ritual within Christianity, is important to us here, as I suggest that Wilde’s invocation of it through

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the blatant reference to the chasuble controversy is hardly accidental. Catholicism places most importance on this rite as its theology of Transubstantiation claims that the material symbols of bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, and that by partaking of the Communion the receiver symbolically undergoes the Passion and Resurrection of Christ him/herself. The emphasis on the Real Presence was an important and understandably controversial feature of AngloCatholic theology in the nineteenth century and reinforced critics who argued that Ritualism in the Anglican Church was a covert attempt to catholicise the country. Freemasonry also has an important ritual similar to the Mass: in the sublime degree of Master Mason the candidate undergoes the death and rising again of the Masonic hero, Hiram Abiff, rituals that Wilde would have experienced when he became a Mason for a period while at Oxford. If the reference to the chasuble of controversy is no accident, the fact that one character in the play undergoes a life, death and resurrection experience can hardly be overlooked. Although the death of Ernest from a severe chill in a Parisian hotel (II, 232) may seem a far remove from the theological Christ, what needs to be taken into account here is that the entire play is an attempt to re-enact the themes of the Anglo-Catholic controversy. The laughter distracts purposely from the serious orientation of the text. To underscore the point, Ernest is resurrected twice. The first time is in the form of Algernon (a false report). When this happens he refers to Jack as ‘Brother John’ as if they lived in a monastery together (II, 317). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is perfectly correct in arguing at length that the play is really about achieving some sort of sibling relationship between Algernon and Jack rather than indulging in the articulations of the marriage-plot. 37 These brothers resemble monastics dedicated to ‘passionate celibacy’ more than any Victorian family (III, 289). The brotherhood of Jack and Algernon is replicated by the quick establishment of a ‘sisterhood’ between Gwendolen and Cecily, and is plainly linked to Anglo-Catholic challenges to the traditional family. The second resurrection of Ernest is in the ‘new man’ of Jack. ‘Jack Christ’ is a familiar term for the remade Christian hero, and this is no exception. If the Mass is an elaborate metaphor open to hierophanies, and is as such capable of transforming not only bread and wine (the fine wine which is so much better in bachelor households!) but the human personality also, the multiple references to change and conversion in this play become explicable. In the mysteries of the Mass material

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substances are changed into divine ones, and humans may be similarly transformed in their psycho-spiritual natures. While Miss Prism’s suggestion that Ernest may have actually benefited from his sudden death (‘What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it’ (II, 223)) seems absurd (and is) his sudden reappearance actually confirms that this has happened. His first words to ‘Brother John’ are an announcement that ‘I am very sorry for all the trouble I have given you, and . . . I intend to lead a better life in the future’ (II, 318–19). Not only does the Canon think that Jack’s brother is ‘sincerely repentant’ but claims that he has been restored to him ‘by the mysterious dispensations of providence’.38 The play is essentially about convincing Jack and Algernon to give up their resistance to a pattern of dandiacal behaviour the others have already embraced. Dandies are open about their lives; Jack and Algernon are secret. The Dandy is the perfect vehicle of recusancy: he seems to be respectable though a bit outré and so can continue to exist while surreptitiously converting others to his way of life. If the emphasis on the Eucharist is important, the references to Baptism cannot be ignored. Both Jack and Algernon express a desire to be baptised by Canon Chasuble: ‘I would like to be christened myself, this afternoon, if you have nothing better to do’ (II, 266–7). Belief in baptismal regeneration was a mark of High Churchmanship shared by many Anglo-Catholics. The emphasis on Baptism in this text has often been overlooked, but I believe, in the light of the many other religious references I have uncovered, the baptismal issue needs to be examined closely. Declan Kiberd has argued that the second baptisms in Earnest are covert references to Wilde’s own second baptism into the Catholic Church as a boy on holidays in Glencree, Co. Wicklow.39 However, whether or not the desire of Jack for baptism is a type of Wilde’s own is questionable. There is an understandable desire by critics of Wilde to identify his writing in some uncomplicated way with his biography, but such attempts are often problematic, whether approaching from a gay-affirmative angle, or any other version of his life. Conversion is certainly up for grabs here but it is not immediately clear what exactly Earnest is suggesting about it. Conversion is nowadays considered to be overwhelmingly ‘personal’ (for which read politically unimportant). This interpretation has allowed Wilde’s ‘conversion’ to be read as a trivial event as it occurred to a young boy, and his subsequent flirtations with Catholicism merely amounting to a desire for ornament – the very same criticisms which were levelled at the Ritualist movement. Since such criticism is ineffective as a means of analysing the Ritualists, it also fails to understand Wilde.

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In the first place conversion is not only a personal event but also a cultural strategy. Conversion functions as a mode of social action as much as inward transformation, a challenge to the very structures of society as well as the construction of the ego. Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out that conversion threatens the very identity of the nation.40 As England is configured as a Protestant country, the kinds of conversions to Catholicism that the movements represented by Tractarianism, the Oxford Movement and Ritualism encouraged caused considerable disquiet in the body politic. Although religious doubt was a growing feature of nineteenth-century English society, its organic and structural links with Protestant scepticism toward tradition meant that the agnostic was of far less importance as a challenge to English ideology than someone who converted to Catholicism, defined as the very opposite of English patriotism.41 In clarifying the difference between these two models of conversion, it may help to look at the difference between Speranza’s motives in having her children baptised into the Catholic Church and Wilde’s own constant gravitation towards Catholicism. Speranza’s decision to have her children baptised into Catholicism was not just a personal decision but one designed to perpetuate modes of social opposition. The probability is that the Famine had disillusioned her forever and alienated her from her own cultural roots in Protestant Ireland. Her search for an alternative cultural inheritance led her towards a greater solidarity with the people of Ireland. As she wished her sons would cause an impact in nationalist terms, it was appropriate that she have them baptised into the dominant religion of the people, and even more so that she should choose a convert priest to do it. It was an act of rebellion as important as her article ‘Jacta Alea Est’. The impact of this conversion model on her sons is less easy to quantify, but, if Earnest represents Wilde’s return to the issue, we might be enlightened by pursuing it here. In Speranza’s case conversion is an act of dissent or a refusal to participate in a particular culture (a desire she did not feel strongly enough to be converted herself). This is not what happens in the play. Jack and Algernon both wish to be newly baptised (a reconfiguration of the second baptism) in order to join a group rather than leave another. It is not alienation from their own culture that propels their need for baptism, but an attraction for Cecily and Gwendolen. This suggests more a seduction process rather than an act of protest. Thus we can usefully distinguish the two models of conversion narrative: one based on alienation, the other on seduction. The imagery of seduction is

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much stronger in Wilde’s narratives when the issue of the Catholic Church arises, so the extent to which it structures the text should not surprise us here. While John Henry Newman and Speranza were alienated from Protestantism and lodged a formal protest against it, Wilde found the fascination of the Catholic Church his calling. This is not to say that he was not profoundly critical of his Protestant heritage, but rather that this criticism comes on top of rather than drives the Catholic desire. Algernon and Jack desire to move beyond their muscular Christian vestiges, and realign themselves with a subversive and exciting world of religious paradox. While Newman’s conversion was due to his need to retrieve the original unity and authority of the Church, beyond the reach of the compromises of Anglicanism with the secular powers, Jack’s conversion suggest that, as modernity only leads to a terminus, he must discover that he has, all along, had the relatives that Lady Bracknell insisted he acquire before the mating season is up. Jack pretends that he is happy trapped in his ancestral position; an alliance with a cloakroom and a parcel has no appeal to Lady Bracknell, however. He pretends to be content, stuck with the train and the royal mail, images of modernity to the average Victorian, suggestive of the Anglican Church and its overbearing reasonableness, but his dichotomised lifestyle suggests only his discomfort. Lady Bracknell insists that he must discover his roots, whether in the Primitive Church or elsewhere. Like Newman, he discovers that he was Catholic all along, though unlike him he does not need a baptism. This is vital, because far from referring to his ‘second baptism’ in Glencree, I think that this issue refers more pointedly to Wilde’s failure to complete the conversion process in his life subsequent to Glencree. It should be clear that I am here speculating about the possible reasons for including the reference to second baptism in Earnest, not offering any definitive proof that this is indeed what Wilde intended. Wilde constantly hinted that he would ‘go over’, but this never seems to have occurred (the last events on his deathbed seem to me to be vague and ambiguous enough to allow a great range of interpretation). If we take this play as offering a reply to the question as to why Wilde failed to convert, it may be the same that Jack gives. He finds that his parents had generously supplied him with all luxuries, including baptism. Wilde likewise, did not need to ‘convert’ to Rome later in life as he was always already a baptised Catholic, a luxury (so he put it later) provided for him by his mother. In ‘converting’ to the framework and rituals as interpreted by Lady Bracknell and her kin, Jack and Algernon enter a counter-cultural

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community, involving Marianism, the Real Presence, ritual and ceremony, and anti-patriarchal thematics; they live in a community enlivened by a counter-ethics. This community is not, however, a distinct cultural space absolved from the demands of the Victorian world it finds itself in; indeed it must think and act in an alien space governed by others and attempt to carve out an alternative vision. In this church personal identity is structured around ritual and collaboration. Jack’s orphan status represents not only the loss but the destruction of the family: he finally reconstitutes it at the end of the play but it is by then a very different entity, with ‘brother Algernon’ and the manly woman, Lady Bracknell, at its centre. In a culture in which the family was constructed as racially pure, those posited outside the family were constituted as ‘foreign’, as foreign perhaps as Catholicism. While historians of Ritualism have pointed out that it liked to keep the public aware of its openly sectarian nature (in that it distinctively marked itself out as different through the use of vestments and music and theatricality) Wilde is suggesting an alternative possibility forged through his own secretive movement within Victorian England. His vestment is hidden in a name; the Real Presence is diffused through the comedic Ernest; the baptismal regeneration ceremony is concealed through the hilarious desires for a potent Christian name; the conversion narratives are only suggested via the dispute over name changes; the opposition to modernity and its Protestant engine is deflected through the jokes aimed at trains; the priest looks like a woman. There is still a ‘we’ and ‘they’ discourse, but it is more subtly inflected. This is still a fight, but the fight was to take place in a more subversive framework. This reading of the play has utilised the best recent criticism emerging from queer studies, but reoriented them towards a spiritual conclusion in the challenges to the patriarchal family that were being articulated by Anglo-Catholics in the late nineteenth century. This also shows that far from demonstrating that Wilde had moved far away from his early interest in the Church, as seen in his Catholic sonnets, for example, he was finding new and more subtle ways of codifying his continued interest, infiltrating his audience the better, and perfecting the means of recusancy. His imprisonment would provide the greatest challenge to this mode of subversive secrecy, and it is to Wilde’s attempts to confront this challenge that we now turn.

6 Realism and Romance: Between Protestantism and Catholicism in Wilde’s Final Writings

This chapter will look at Oscar Wilde’s final works: the fascinating prison letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas, which was initially published with the title De Profundis, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde’s last poem. After briefly describing the textual history of the prison letter, I will outline the analyses of scholars who have looked closely at it before going on to detail my own reading. In prison, and deprived of both an oral culture and a sufficient literary life, Wilde fell back on sole consumption of the King James Bible. This dependence on sola scriptura faith led him further along the road toward liberal Protestant thought than he had ever ventured before. His prison letter demonstrates a growing dependence on the methodology of the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and Wilde constructs a thoroughly secular and humanist life of Jesus of Nazareth. However, despite this being, in my opinion, the most ‘Protestant’ work that Wilde ever wrote, its ideological commitments to liberalism are undercut by its ‘Catholic’ moments. This undermining occurs because, while becoming more dependent on Protestant notions of a text-based faith, he also began to empathise more and more with the Pope as he too was a ‘prisoner’ (in the Vatican), the victim of secular forces in the outside world. At certain moments the letter becomes a papally inspired encyclical celebrating the rituals of nature Wilde witnessed in a folk-Catholic Mayo as a child. In the second section of the chapter I will demonstrate how the ritualisation of experience found in Wilde’s prison letter continued in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which recreates the meeting of English and Irish prisoners in jails throughout Britain as a mutually transformative experience through the imagery and theology of Catholic Transubstantiation and Protestant Justification. This poem reconciles the modes of both life and thought that characterise Wilde’s writing. 162

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I Between January and March 1897 in his cell in Reading Gaol, Wilde wrote a long (some 30,000 words) and fascinating letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, in which he revisited key moments in their often turbulent relationship, reflected on his own life, analysed the nature of his punishment and the reasons why he was sent to prison, and speculated as to what his future would be like when he was released.1 Wilde intended the letter to give an explanation of his extraordinary decision to have Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, prosecuted for libel. He intended to send this letter to Douglas but the prison authorities would not allow it to be posted and instead returned it to him when he was released in May. The letter was entrusted to Wilde’s friend and literary executor Robert Ross with specific instructions in regard to its copying, release and delivery. Ross gave Douglas the copy and kept the second, finally entrusting the manuscript to the British Museum in 1909. Ross had previously edited and abridged the manuscript in his possession and had this abridgement issued in 1905 under the title De Profundis. This heavily censored version was published with the intention of presenting Wilde’s own side of the scandal. The unedited version was not published until 1962. Critical study of Wilde has long recognised that the document we have learned to call De Profundis marks a critical juncture in Wildean self-fashioning, a shift in his general modes of expression, although exactly what that movement is has been a matter of some controversy. Traditionally, it has been argued that in this letter Wilde abandoned the ironic pose that can be found throughout most of his major writings, and in De Profundis becomes a sincere, penitent and emotionally mature writer. De Profundis, then, marks a shift from an ironic to a sincere mode of thought. Although failing to analyse the implications of this shift, Regenia Gagnier puts it down to the appalling conditions in which the letter was written.2 Jonathan Dollimore, in a more considered argument, claims that, under extreme pressure, Wilde abandoned the transgressive aesthetic he had perfected in his previous work for a new style of sincerity and humility, the very modalities he had been trying to subvert. The letter is Wilde’s capitulation to the Victorian temper, and Dollimore almost reads it as a betrayal of the liberatory trajectory in which he places Wilde’s other writings: the letter, he writes, is ‘a containment, a tragic defeat of the kind which only ideological coercion, reinforced by overt brutality, can effect’.3 Dollimore despairs over the

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letter’s intense interest in ‘atonement, expiation, and renunciation’, qualities which leave Wilde’s earlier investment in subversion far behind. Stephen Arata has also noticed a shift, but argues that this is not so much a shift in style as one of characterisation. Whereas early writings depict Jesus of Nazareth in a decadent fashion, a depiction which had clear links with Victorian Catholicism, Wilde’s representation of Jesus in his letter is more interested in establishing his complete humanity than in indulging in excessive mysticism. In a penetrating article, Arata argues that Wilde entertains no doubt about the humanity of Christ, and dismisses entirely any claims to his concomitant divinity.4 While his previous works had been at least ambiguous about this issue, here Wilde produces a ‘wholly secular’5 Christ in the mode of the New Testament demythologisers Ernest Renan and David Strauss. In De Profundis, his is the suffering Jesus but never, it seems, the risen Christ. The analyses of Gagnier, Dollimore and Arata need to be integrated. There is a conjunction between the appalling conditions in which the prison letter was written, the clear shift in tone towards a language of sincerity and seriousness which Dollimore notices, and the de-divinised Jesus who emerges from its pages. This is indeed a very different piece of writing from the other works we have considered, and not simply because of its unique textual condition, clearly delineated by Ian Small,6 and to which we shall return. The stylistic difference of the letter modulates itself around Jesus, because Wilde’s ‘biography’ makes him look more like the intense, serious Arnoldian, liberal Protestant man of letters who emerged from the burgeoning Victorian ‘Lives’ of Jesus genre, than a first-century Palestinian revolutionary.7 And it is the Protestant inflection of the letter which shall interest us most here. To Wilde, locked away in a cell, suffering the agony of abandonment and betrayal, of isolation and imprisonment, of public ridicule and vilification, and the ‘crucifixion’ of the body through the agonies of crippling diarrhoea, dysentery, gout, anaemia and ear-infection, Jesus as the scapegoat of a malignant and corrupt society became particularly appealing, especially as, during at least the first month of imprisonment, he had had nothing to read except the Bible. It was at this point that Romance turned to Realism for him. Wilde’s romantic version of prison in ‘The Soul of Man’ left him unprepared for the indignities of life under hard labour.8 His lifelong obsession with the law, from his mother’s two famous appearances in court, his boyhood fantasies of a theological case involving Wilde v. Regina, and his argument that prison actually improved the writings of Wilfrid Blunt, was shaken through the bodily pain he had to endure while he was in prison himself.9

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Romance is hardly possible when contemplating the sanitary conditions of prison life, and less so when forced to partake of them. Having absorbed the Bible as a child at the feet of his Protestant uncles, Wilde had deflected its literalness via oral narratives and folktales encountered through his parents, a process I analysed in Chapter 2. The turning point of prison, as opposed to that of Oxford, left him without the oral culture he thrived in and on. In prison, speech itself was punished, and Wilde was found to be in frequent violation of such rules, and was punished accordingly.10 Robert Ross reported that this had effectively caused Wilde to clam up even when his friends were visiting him.11 This deprivation of orality left him dependent on print as never before.12 While in Wandsworth prison Wilde must have read the Bible many times as it was the only book available to him. Unlike his previous encounters with the Bible, he could not refract it through its oral transformation in ballads and other folkloric texts. Such refraction was an impossible project when locked in a cell alone for most of the day, and when sickness forced him to attend to his own material existence with a greater care than ever before. A turn to Protestant bibliophilia may have been the only thing that saved Wilde from insanity during the first year in prison, a year in which he records deciding to commit suicide, a year of pathetic appeals and petitions for release, and calls for more and more books. The banalities and attendant dangers of prison life forced him to cling to the material facts of life – the bed, the floor, the bucket, the oakum picking and, vitally, the text. Biblical literalism appealed to him as it had never before, and he demonstrates the same skill with it as he had in Portora where he won a prize for his New Testament Greek. Facing up to Reality rather than Romance is the dominating tone of the prison letter, including the depiction of Jesus. Even the decision to write a quasi-Life of Christ places Wilde with the agnostics. Writers like John Seeley wrote lives of Jesus (Ecce Homo: a Survey of the Life and Work of Christ (1865)), which attempted to avoid controversy by placing the theological debate (over the authenticity of miracles, the Virgin Birth and, most importantly, the Resurrection) to the side. This strategy earned Seeley the contempt of Lord Shaftesbury who called Ecce Homo ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell’.13 Wilde, however, displays no theological scruples in dealing with such controversial matters as the Gospel miracles and Jesus’ Resurrection, and simply weighs in on the side of the empiricists. He grounds his picture of Jesus in theological naturalism, dismissing the issue of miracles magisterially: there are no genuine miracles, no

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violations of the laws of nature. Anything that Jesus accomplished was ‘as exquisite as the coming of Spring, and quite as natural’.14 Wilde operates under a Humean imperative that anticipates any claim that a miracle has occurred by insisting that the laws of Nature are inviolable. Christ did not ‘cure’ pain by making its cause disappear miraculously, but rather the charm of his personality brought ‘peace to souls in anguish’ (743). Christ’s presence was so powerful that merely touching his cloak allowed those in pain to forget their agony. Likewise the idea that Jesus exorcised demons from the possessed. Such a claim requires a belief in both evil entities and the magical ability of some to exorcise them, both improbable in the harsh light of the nineteenth century. Instead, ‘evil passions’ (not possessions) ‘fled at his approach’ (743). Again, the stories of Jesus raising people from the dead are not to be taken literally but are metaphorical expressions of his ability to enliven those who lived ‘dull unimaginative lives’ (743). Feeding the five thousand was accomplished through beautiful words rather than through the multiplication of loaves and fishes: the sound of Jesus on the hillside allowed the crowds to ‘forget their hunger and thirst and the cares of the world’ (743), while to those who encountered him and listened to his conversation in Cana ‘the water had the taste of good wine’ (743). Wilde pursues a positively un-Catholic idea here: the transformation of material empirical items like bread and wine is not merely improbable but impossible. Rather than the substance of the food and drink changing while the accidents remain the same, here the accidental quality of taste is transformed but the actual substance remains unaltered. Wilde reads the Gospels as poems attempting to explain the literal through the metaphorical. Real occurrences are rendered metaphorical by the writers of the Gospels so that their readers could better grasp these events in the imagination. The Evangelists never intended the metaphorical to be taken as the literal, and it is only dull readers who make this mistake. Those who encountered Jesus really did feel better for their having met him: this was a historical event. The Evangelists were artists who expressed such historical events through the literary medium of the metaphor, and are not to be criticised for having such poor, ignorant readers ever since. Only now, with the critical and historical implements before us, can we see again the historical Jesus and learn to appreciate again the artistic nature of the mythology the Evangelists wove around him. They were forced into this because a rendering of the literal facts – people felt better around Jesus – seems, and is, too artistically illiterate to illustrate the overwhelming impression Jesus left on his followers. As an Artist he must acquire mytho-poetical

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accretions, as that is the only rational method by which an Artist can be captured by his fellow artists. The metaphorical method employed by the Evangelists is simply the best means of expressing something that is overpoweringly literal. Scholarly facts, such as the point that ‘it is extremely probable that we have the actual terms, the ipsissima verba, used by Christ’ (748), allow us to get closer to the historical Jesus. The Jesus of faith has simply dropped out of the equation. The translation of Romance to Realism is also clear in Wilde’s depiction of Lord Alfred Douglas. In response to being told that ‘Prince Fleur-de-Lys wishes to be remembered to you’ (716), Wilde accepts that Douglas was right to adopt a pseudonym, but argues that ‘surely there were many real names in real history which would have suited you better’ (717, emphasis added). Metaphor is of import only if it exactly corresponds to reality; empirical fact must contain and limit imaginative transformation. Wilde himself is at his most unmetaphorical in his letter. He is grounded in the mundane, obsessed with dates and times, and real people and places crowd the narrative. He insists that he is ‘not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact’ (685). He is obsessed with exactly rendering the events of the past as they happened, rather than as they are just recalled: I remember, for instance, in September ‘93 . . . During the first week you kept away . . . In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it was ultimately performed, the first act of An Ideal Husband. The second week you returned and my work practically had to be given up. I arrived at St James’s Place every morning at 11.30 . . . At twelve o’ clock you drove up, and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Cafe Royal or the Berkeley. Lunch with liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White’s. At teatime you appeared again, and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’s had to wind up the entrancing day. (686) Details are detailed; facts are recorded as into a diary; figures are totted up; blame is carefully dispensed. The radical improvidence Wilde mentions having possessed is bizarrely absent from this textual calculator, where he can remember the exact price of each cup of coffee he and Douglas consumed, and its return in terms of artistic production. Lunches with Douglas were a waste because, compared with similar lunches with

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Robert Ross, they were painfully inefficient. There is, however, the important glitch here that actually runs through the entire letter, and which we will return to again. The day with Douglas produced nothing tangible, Wilde tells us, but it was ‘entrancing’. Such Romantic traces indicate that perhaps the literal arguments of the letter are not quite so clear-cut. Thus, in general terms, Dollimore is right to insist that there is something radically different about Wilde’s style in this prison letter: a shift has clearly occurred from Romance to Realism, from the Catholicism of The Portrait of Mr. W. H., which rejected empiricism for the power of Willie Hughes’s personality, to a Protestantism which emphasises the empirical and the rational. However, this shift is not clear-cut. Ian Small has argued that the textual history of the prison letter is so convoluted that it is hard to apply one generic label to it,15 and it is in these alternative genres where different theological inflections can be felt. Robert Ross’s publication of an abridgement of the letter isolated one generic strand of the original text, that of spiritual confessional, but this left behind the spiritual biography of Douglas – which contains the most thoroughgoing of Wilde’s empirical detailing. In editing the letter in this way Ross may have been authorised by Wilde himself. In other words, Wilde may have wanted the confessional genre to dominate the published version of the letter, and it is thus important to pay attention to this genre as it may suggest an alternative methodology of reading than that contained in the other styles also contained in the original letter. The genre of spiritual confessional emerged from Augustine’s Confessions (AD 397), a book which Wilde read while composing his own confessional letter. Augustine’s aim in writing his confession was not to provide the reader with facts about his life, but to discern a narrative pattern behind these facts which gave his life meaning, a project which Arata believes is behind much of Wilde’s own letter.16 Augustine links his personal life to an evocation of a God of story and narration, drawing on the language and imagery of the Psalmist traditionally considered to be King David. The link between Wilde and Augustine in the prison letter may have motivated Ross to name his adaptation of the letter De Profundis, taken from the first words of Psalm 130 where King David begs God to forgive his sins: Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice: Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.

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If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, And with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities. The sexual nature of David’s transgressions (adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite) made him an appropriate type for both Wilde and Augustine both of whom were also guilty of sexual offences. In choosing De Profundis as the title, and thus positing Augustine and David as Wilde’s literary precursors, Ross highlights the tonal discrepancies of the original letter, discrepancies, for example, between selfconfession and self-justification. Wilde’s Davidic tendencies split him, as it split other autobiographical confessors. ‘I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly’ (685), the letter starts; ‘I blame myself for allowing an unintellectual friendship . . . to entirely dominate my life’ (685) Wilde insists; ‘I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me’ (689). These self-accusations, however, place Wilde in a completely passive role. It turns out that he did nothing actively wrong that put him in prison, but merely allowed certain things to be done to him. In other words, the self-accusations are really attacks on Douglas. ‘I am entirely at fault’, he constantly moans while clearly settling blame on Lord Alfred Douglas: ‘Having made your own of my genius, my will power, and my fortune, you required, in blindness of an inexhaustible greed, my entire existence. You took it’ (690). After listing Douglas’s faults he argues that they ‘were the origin and causes of my yielding to you’. If previous introspective attacks have placed blame at the door of his own passivity, this sentence posits even his passivity as the result of faults on Douglas’s part. Self-blame is both accepted and denied persistently. Wilde berates himself for having wasted his life in the pursuit of Pleasure, while claiming that he is not in fact sorry for having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. He attacks Bosie for loving the things of the gutter, but then suggests that ‘the sins of the flesh are nothing’ (714). He moves from Puritanism to Idealism in his search for a stable position from which to avoid blame for himself while betraying awareness of the

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spiritual fatuity of such avoidance. He is like King David acknowledging his faults and asking for forgiveness, but also desiring simultaneously to continue lying with Bathsheba. David (who was traditionally considered to have written the Psalms) and Wilde are supreme artists, ancestors of Jesus (with whom Wilde continually compares himself), both sinned against by a despotic father figure (Saul/Queensbury) for their love for a son (Jonathan/Bosie). They are both scapegoats of society, ‘guiltless’ victims, motivated only by Love (how often Wilde tells us he put up with Douglas only because he had an overabundance of love for him). However, they are also sexual thieves, transgressors of sexual boundaries, neglecting their wives and children, sins for which both must make full and frank confessions. This split – guiltless and guilty – is also the split between the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ inflections in the confessional tradition. David pointing at the aggressor Saul and at the moral degeneracy of the social body (‘If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who should stand’), but later on his own knees before God. Augustine the Calvinist precursor, puritan and self-conscious of his own moral superiority. Augustine the Catholic penitent falling on his knees and recognising the fortune of his fall into sin. This split can also be found in the secular version of spiritual confessions, inaugurated when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his Confessions (published posthumously in 1782). In this work Rousseau is both the Calvinist critic of society berating others for their failure to be perfect, translating all his crimes to the malignity of others and his sins to the grand corruption of civilisation, and also Rousseau the Catholic convert driven to a ritual confession of his own grievous faults. These literary forefathers are behind Wilde’s ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ divisions in De Profundis: on the one hand he protests against the cruelty of a society that put him in prison for sins which it commits itself, while puritanically proclaiming himself greater than all because of his greater self-consciousness; on the other hand he pleads for forgiveness himself and recognises his own sinful state. Protestant protestation and puritan moral superiority; Catholic confession and flagellating penance. Such rhetorical fracturing is everywhere in the letter, but clearest in its rhetorically exaggerated declaration of Agnosticism. Wilde famously allies himself with Matthew Arnold’s description of the ‘sweet reasonableness’ of Jesus as the means of self-transformation,17 and for this reason rejects Religion (a belief which goes beyond the evidence of the five senses) in favour of a strict empiricism that leads to tolerant Agnosticism. Religion cannot help him as the

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faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch or look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands . . . When I think about Religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Fatherless one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. (732) After this compelling defence of the agnostic mind, Wilde goes on, oddly, to reject Reason also. No commentator has yet remarked on how bizarre a turn the argument takes here. Wilde has just affirmed Agnosticism – the most reasonable of religious positions – but now undermines the very method that has allowed Agnosticism to arise in historical terms. It was, after all, only due to the ‘reasonable turn’ after the Reformation that Agnosticism emerged. Yet, Wilde rejects Reason because it tells him that ‘the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system’ (732), a conviction that will lead only to a bitterness that would eventually destroy his soul. Agnosticism about the existence of God has suddenly turned into a prevailing concern with the state of his soul, an entity a true agnostic would not worry unduly about as its existence is an unproved hypothesis. Wilde apostrophises Christ’s ‘sweet reasonableness’ but then abjures ‘Reason’ itself, warning that ‘the fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to a man’s being logical’ (707). The letter arches towards a consistent Protestant position, but undermines itself because Wilde’s ultimate loyalties are not to this tradition. These bizarre fractures – reasonable yet illogical; reason yet romance; guiltless yet guilty; accuser yet confessor; secular yet religious; Rousseau yet Augustine – are based on the dialectic Wilde drew on constantly for his work: the critical distinction between the reasonable Protestant heritage and the utterly illogical folk-Catholicism he encountered in his youth. This dialogue needs to be read back into his appropriations of such similarly conflicted figures as David, Augustine and Rousseau through the confessional-accusatory mode. Thus, to the Protestant mode of biography Wilde yokes the formal canon of confessional, seen in his own time as a peculiarly Catholic form. The Victorian public viewed confessional as a Catholic mode primarily because of the fame accorded to Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), a work which explained why Newman had come to accept Catholicism and renounce Anglicanism.

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It is strange that, in his generic analysis of the prison letter and Wilde’s literary intentions for it, Ian Small failed to link it with its Catholic precursors, despite the clear evidence of Wilde’s understanding of it within that tradition. Wilde wrote to Robert Ross of the copying of the letter that the lady type-writer might be fed through a lattice in the door like the Cardinals when they elect a Pope, till she comes out on the balcony and can say to the world ‘Habet Mundus Epistolam’; for indeed it is an Encyclical Letter, and as the Bulls of the Holy Fathers are all named from their opening words, it may be spoken of as the Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis.18 In the same letter Wilde stipulates that the letter should be typed on ‘good paper’ with a ‘wide rubricated margin’ for ‘corrections’.19 Small points out that the term ‘rubricated’ is typically used to refer to marginal commentaries and corrections made to liturgical work.20 In his use of the word Wilde inserts his own letter into a religious tradition. This Protestant letter, in which Wilde genuinely tries to structure himself in terms of the rational agnosticism of Matthew Arnold, is at times almost aggressively Catholic. In his deepest despair, Wilde, deprived of the imaginative instruments through which he had constructed his life of the spirit, does allow his visionary imagination to falter and be brought down to earth in the form of the secular Jesus. Yet, he never manages to make this transition fully, and the work is saturated with suggestions of an alternative means of interpretation. Wilde’s putative title transforms it into an always already Catholic document, a papal encyclical. Wilde’s imprisonment must have struck him as analogous to that of Pope Pius IX, the Prisoner of the Vatican after the Italian government marched on Rome in 1870. Rather than flee imprisonment, the Pope – in a precedent-setting example for Wilde – decided to ‘stay where he was, protest against usurpation, say his prayers, and trust in what providence held’.21 Wilde’s letter speaks for the prisoners, those deprived of the right to even speak to others, as the Pope could, after having been taken prisoner himself, speak for the homeless and the oppressed, and Christ spoke for the marginalised, the brutalised. Moreover, Wilde preaches here with great authority, allowing no errors (‘you will agree with me’; ‘you must admit now’ (697)). This is a text of ‘absolute’ and complete truth, the great truth of the imagination against the attempt by the state to shut him up, much as the Pope’s belief in his own Infallibility

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was, in one sense, an act of great imaginative power against his actual and growing dispossession. The declaration of Infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870 was made in the midst of controversy and after the great loss of political and temporal power. After February 1870 the Pope felt that a declaration of Infallibility was necessary as the world was increasingly against the Church in ideological and institutional terms.22 Cardinal Manning had vigorously promoted the concept of Infallibility so that the Pope could combat the deficiencies of the modern world and denounce them with authority, and, in his best-selling collection of sermons The Glories of the Sacred Heart (1876), Manning presented Pius’s political difficulties and his prisoner status as sacramental embodiments of the suffering of Christ: ‘The Pope, stripped of his “temporal glory”, was the living icon of the Sacred Heart.’23 Wilde attempts a likeminded project, when he consistently compares himself to the Suffering Christ, a sacrament to the needs of the world. He needs to do this, as he needs to arrogate authority to himself, in order to denounce as iniquitous the legal structures of the modern world, represented by England. Wilde, then, writes as the ultimate Catholic – the Catholic who controls and even appropriates the discourse of Protestantism. His talk of Jesus, while dominated by a thoroughgoing secularism, is also tinged with the vision of Jesus in his Catholic fairy stories, a Jesus who takes ‘children as the type of what people should try to become. He held them up as examples to their elders’ (750). This is, then, at least partly, still the Catholic Christ of the fairy tales, though he has been refracted through numerous other discourses. Wilde’s act and text of martyrdom is infused with Catholicism even as it seems to arch towards its denial. Importantly, this is an Irish Catholicism that is invoked. Imprisonment and social crucifixion, such as that suffered by Wilde and the Pope, is the means by which he envisions self-transformation occurring: ‘[Suffering] is the means by which we exist . . . Sorrow is the ultimate type in both life and in Art’ (696, 737). Martyrdom has been a constant theme in Irish literature, especially the literature of nationalists, and prison writing was a particularly popular form of nationalist expression. Acts of martyrdom are declarations that the present system of law and order is actually invalid and so acts as a powerful critique of the concept of the legitimate state, the target for most anarchists. As Irish nationalists could point to the dead of the Irish Famine (1845–50) as martyred proof that the British state was invalid, Wilde declares that his own prison suffering renders the law that sent him there, and the ideology underpinning it – Reason – invalid also. In dying, the martyr redeems his

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cause much as Christ redeemed the world in his Crucifixion. Wilde appropriates this imagery, taking ‘everything on his shoulders’ (702), and redeeming Lord Alfred Douglas. This is the one aspect of the mythological Christ that Wilde insists on vigorously. Jesus not only said that he took away the sins of the world, the sins of his own time, and all the past and all the future, he actually did. No metaphorical interpretation is possible here; no intellectual compromise is allowed. Wilde’s reading of his own imprisonment is profoundly providential, a Providence that is glorified through suffering, a version of martyrdom Wilde may have absorbed through the writings of the Irish Catholic convert Aubrey de Vere, a friend of his parents, who conceived of ‘a Providence punishing at once and exalting’.24 De Vere associated this historical suffering with the sufferings of Ireland and the Catholic Church: Ireland: 1851. O Thou! Afflicted and beloved, O Thou! Who on thy wasted hands and bleeding brow – Dread miracle of love – from reign to reign, Freshenest thy stigmata of sacred Pain: Lamp of the North, when half the world was night Now England’s darkness ’mid her room of light; History’s sad wonder, whom all lands save one Gaze on through tears, and names with gentler tones, O Tree of God! That burnest unconsumed: O Life in Death! For centuries entombed.25 Such imagery bears a striking resemblance to Wilde’s insistent apostrophes of pain and suffering as inflicting the wounds of Love: Love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the worlds have indeed, as I have said, been built out of Sorrow, it has been by the hands of Love. (738) In a reversal of his rationalist explanation of the ‘miracle’ of Christ’s curing of the sick, his feeding of the starving, his exorcism of the possessed, Wilde posits here a mystery explainable only in terms of faith: the ‘dread miracle of love’, that only a child (or the child-like Irish race) can understand.

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This Irish background explains why Wilde insists on his nationality three times in the course of the letter, as marking him out as of a different temperament to Douglas’s Englishness. At times the letter reads like the battle of two civilisations. On one side is Wilde’s Celtic innocence – ‘the virtues of prudence and thrift were not in my own nature or my own race’ (687) – which he inherited from his parents – ‘She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured . . . in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation’ (721); on the other side is the Douglas malignity, ‘inherited from your father’, a heritage ‘burdened . . . with a terrible legacy’, not simply an individual fault, ‘but racial’ (708). This is a mirror of the dramatic convulsions of the soul between Protestant sectarianism and Catholic ecumenism, the rationalist and the mythographer, which I have uncovered in this letter. The issue is not which side will eventually triumph: if we accept the illogic of the work as associating secularising agnosticism with the mad, bad Douglas race (after all the Marquess of Queensbury was a famous agnostic), and faith-inspiring mythology with Wilde’s connection to Ireland, the former must always lose as it is always already constructed as the aggressor. But Wilde enacts another strategic move towards a national narrative. This strategy is found in his association of Christ with the fertility seasons in the calendar, a link which effectively demolishes the secular Protestant Jesus the letter also posits. Wilde sees Christ as greater than everything in Greek art, and as having a greater impact on history than the movements of Greek philosophy. The most ‘suggestive’ figures of Greek art and mythology were Demeter (the earth goddess) and Dionysius (746). These figures were associated with rebirth and regeneration, and with the spread of Art and Culture. In this they are central to Wilde’s conception of Christ, who does not simply surpass them but encompasses them and then transcends their limits. Interestingly, the concept of the Resurrection, left out of Wilde’s cursory life of Jesus, makes a metaphorical reappearance here as the changing of the seasons from death to life, winter to spring. Jesus makes Demeter and Dionysius obsolete. He fuses them in one great figure, and appropriates their functions. If Demeter and Dionysius remind us that death will yield to life, so too does Christ; if Christ is actually greater than both, then it is necessary that he incarnates the movement. The Resurrection is slyly assured while being denied. Demeter and Dionysius, gods centred on the holiness of the cycles of nature, were not simply important to Greek religion and culture. Pre-Famine Ireland was saturated with the religious language of the

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seasonal calendar because of the agricultural basis of Irish society. Except for Christmas and Easter, every festival in the Irish calendar was associated with an important agricultural event: St Brigid’s Day signalled the start of agricultural activity; St Patrick’s Day was the beginning of sowing; May Day (Bealtaine) was linked to the health of cows whose milk would be a major source of food; Midsummer’s Eve was the turning point in the agricultural year and the lead up to harvest which began on the feast of Lunasa; and Hallowe’en (Samhain) was the time for the return of cattle from summer grazing. An obsession with charting the religious rites and festivals associated with the ‘Celtic’ calendar runs through the writings of both Lady Wilde and Sir William, and their son’s return to such imagery suggests that, at the very least, he had imbibed it from their writings, the loss of which in his bankruptcy grieved him. He also explicitly links Christ with Ireland when arguing that Christ was probably bi-lingual like the Irish peasants (749), a surprising move as explicit as de Vere’s direct association between the down-trodden Irish peasant and the crucified Christ on Calvary. Such links also explain Wilde’s otherwise bizarre ‘longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the Sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth’ (776). He desires to return, via Christ, to the foundational discourses of a folkloric, even primordial, religion, antecedent to all other modes of existence. But this is not, of course, a simple return to the basics. These elemental properties are important to him, but Wilde desires the cleansing powers of Nature only because Jesus had revealed the ‘mystical meaning of the wine and the real beauty of the lilies of the field as none, either on Cithaeron or at Enna, had ever done it’ (746). In other words, Jesus had baptised such primitive pieces of prehistoric religious imagination and refracted them through himself. The beauty of the lilies of the valley did not simply indicate the generosity of some Mother Earth, but showed that God the Father cared for even the most seemingly insignificant things. The wine was not the wine merely, but the blood of the Messiah. As I have shown, Lady Wilde, in Ancient Legends, had argued again and again, that precisely the same process had occurred in Ireland: the coming of Christianity had not eradicated the pagan rites and rituals of the Celts but had instead transformed them and protected them in new guises. Wilde’s regret that no Christians had existed since Christ contains an exception (755): Saint Francis of Assisi who loved Nature and recognised the sacramental value of the seasons. Wine – the symbol of Dionysius – is similarly transformed: at the Last Supper Jesus posits it as a symbol of both self-sacrifice and the new life of a renewed

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covenant: ‘it will be shed for you and for all, so that sins may be forgiven’. Wilde notes that ‘We call ourselves a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that Water can cleanse, and Fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all’ (777). This sentence reworks one by his father in Irish Popular Superstitions. Sir William laments that the customs he describes are no more: ‘Alas! What are we dreaming about – things that were, not are – memories of other, of better and happier times – of ancient customs sneered away by modern utilitarianism.’26 Wilde and his father directly appeal to the folk practices that persisted in the west of Ireland, and which were the source of Irish cultural difference from England, the difference he celebrates as separating him individually, racially and nationally from the English Douglas family. Wilde’s channelling of these folkloric references through the figure of Jesus is suggestive of the pattern that such pagan practices underwent on the introduction of Christianity into Ireland. Lady Wilde imagined this baptism vividly: These were the great festivals of the Druids, when all domestic fires were extinguished, in order to be re-lit by the sacred fire taken from the temples, for it was deemed sacrilege to have any fires kindled except from the holy altar flame. St Patrick, however, determined to break down the power of the Druids; and, therefore, in defiance of their laws, he had a great fire lit on May Eve, when he celebrated the paschal mysteries; and henceforth Easter, or the Feast of the Resurrection, took the place of the Baal festival.27 Fire does, as Wilde notes, ‘purify’ (777). Not only were cattle and children passed over such fires – to signify the constant purification of the new generation – but the fire of Easter was a renewed baptism, where (in St Paul’s words), we died with Christ on the Cross only to be born with him again to a new life on the morning of the Resurrection. Wilde’s letter itself is the means whereby complex folk-Catholicism, repressed through the ministrations of the foot soldiers of the ‘devotional Revolution’, resurges through symbols and metaphors apparently quite alien to one another. As an attempted liberal Protestant work Wilde’s prison letter contains silences where Catholicism makes itself heard and transforms the text. The mytho-poetic accretions to the narrative of Jesus’ life that Wilde detects – which would presumably also mean the Resurrection although this is never clearly stated – are anticipated also

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by The Rise of Historical Criticism (a very early essay by Wilde written in 1879) where Wilde complained that the arrival of a great personality onto the stage of history would always prompt the creation of myths and legends. In De Profundis these shiftings reappear in his musing on primal religion, on the link between Greece and Christ, and, by implication, Ireland. This section of the chapter has tried to integrate the critical opinions on Wilde’s prison letter, and indicate that the letter reads so unlike Wilde’s other work partly because of the domination of a Protestant consciousness within it, especially in the construction of a life of Jesus. However, despite the prevailing Protestant mood, Catholicism and Ireland erupt into the work at crucial points, and re-orient it to an encounter with the shape-shifting Catholicism of the west of Ireland, a Catholicism of fire and water, rebirth and renewal. These textual moments mean that previous readings of the letter as confirming Wilde’s construction of a ‘religion of unbelievers’ must be reassessed, and the generic and spiritual conflicts of the letter unearthed. Once this is done Wilde’s full engagement with a subtle and shape-shifting Catholicism becomes clear, a Catholicism that would soon confidently reassert itself in The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

II On 19 May 1897, Oscar Wilde left Reading Prison having made two significant decisions: to change his name to ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, and to go into monastic retreat. Discussing this idea with friends gathered in the house of Stewart Headlam (an Anglican priest, Christian socialist and one of Wilde’s acquaintances who had put up bail when Wilde was arrested in 1895), he announced that ‘I look upon all the different religions as colleges in a great university. Roman Catholicism is the greatest and most romantic of them.’28 He sent a letter to the Jesuits at Farm Street asking permission to partake in a six-month retreat there, but was informed that they would have to deliberate the issue for at least a year. ‘At this he broke down and sobbed bitterly.’29 This has been viewed as a desperate measure in the face of a broken life, Wilde lurching from one enclosure to another.30 Yet, Wilde may well have viewed the possibility of a monastic retreat as an act of true liberation. His experiences in prison had led to a reflection that life in the sinful world was hardly a spiritually fulfilling one. Writing to Robert Ross, Wilde complained that ‘I know that on the day of my release I shall merely be passing from one prison into another, and there are

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times when the whole world seems to me no larger than my cell, and as full of terror for me.’31 Having been physically crushed, a retreat, literal and metaphorical, to his days with the Jesuits in Gardiner Street, Dublin, would have provided a necessary interval in which his ‘choreography of the soul’ could be re-perfected. ‘Cells’ had always been spaces of fascination for Wilde, from the student’s cell he occupies in The Sphinx, and the enclosed spaces of his fairy tales, to the prison world he was once inclined to romanticise. Movement from one kind of cell to another may seem to the secular reader an improbable start for a Wilde desperate to escape the confines of Reading Gaol, but whereas spiritual desolation was promised by one room, spiritual possibility might exist in another. If the monastic cell could be transformed into a great religious college, then a truly Romantic experience, after the existential desolation of prison, might just be on offer. The shift in names is also important. It has been seen as simply a combination of his favourite saint and homoerotic icon Sebastian with a character in his great-deeply anti-Catholic uncle's most famous novel. However, the name was suggested to him by the intensely Catholic Robert Ross, and its symbolic connotations can hardly be overlooked in a man just emerging from prison. Melmoth was also a prisoner of unhealthy desires: his unhealthy craving for life was so overwhelming that he was willing to give up his soul. It is unsurprising that he wanders round the dungeons of monasteries and asylums, as his diabolical pact has left him a virtual self-prisoner, though ostensibly free to move aimlessly around the globe. Saint Sebastian was in many ways the opposite of Melmoth. A Roman martyr, he suffered under Diocletian in the third century. According to his Acts he was a soldier, enlisted c. 283 at Rome, strengthened the confessors Mark and Marcellian in prison, and was created a captain of the praetorian guards by Diocletian who did not know he was a Christian. After Sebastian had sustained other martyrs, Diocletian reproached him and had him shot with arrows. He miraculously recovered and confronted the emperor for his cruelty for which he was beaten to death with clubs. Sebastian is important because he transformed prison life into a meaningful struggle towards a greater communion with God, and, unlike Melmoth, he sacrificed his life for the sake of Christ and so ‘found it’. The conjunction of the two names suggests a conversion, a move from the rejection of God to his active acceptance, and the transcendence of physical pain to harmony with the love of God: the baptising of Melmoth, the Christianising of the pagan. If Wilde’s wish for a Jesuit retreat signifies his desire to transform

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a place of confinement into a space of spiritual growth, then his change in names indicates his continuation of the methodology of his prison letter to Alfred Douglas where the elemental powers were touched by the power of Christ. This need to transform potentially limiting experiences into opportunities for spiritual, Christian sacraments is also evident in Wilde’s final great work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was composed during the summer following Wilde’s release from prison, at Berneval-sur-Mer in Normandy. It was published in February 1898 under the authorship of ‘C. 3. 3’., which was Wilde’s number while in Reading, although it was widely known who was the actual author. The Ballad is very long (109 stanzas), and very uneven in quality, though, as Declan Kiberd has written, some of the stanzas have a ‘whiff of greatness’ about them.32 If the prison letter indicates Wilde’s uncertainties concerning the divinity of Christ, any such doubts have been dispelled by the time The Ballad of Reading Gaol came to be written. Here the ‘he’ of In Carcere et Vinculis becomes an unambiguous ‘He’. The poem posits a world of victims and victimisers, where all are equally indebted to the great sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. Critics have necessarily drawn attention to the complexities of the poem’s material construction and its literary debts to writers as diverse as A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and Irish nationalist poetry.33 More recently, Karen Alkalay-Gut has argued that in this poem Wilde elides the ethical problems involved in writing about murder, especially the domestic murder of a wife by her husband, by shifting the guilt from the killer to the institution that punishes him.34 The ethical issue which Alkalay-Gut raises needs to be confronted, and I suggest that not only is the poem acutely aware of this ethical problem but also that it attempts to solve it through the rituals of Catholicism. It is not that the dead wife of the soldier is not considered a victim of a crime; her victimhood is of a different order than that of the man who killed her. Whereas she passively suffers, he has brought the punishment on himself. This is what links him to Wilde. Not simply have they both destroyed their family life, and particularly the lives of their wives, but this destruction was a wilful operation. However, it is this self-punishment through guilt that reveals a universal truth to the Speaker of the poem: we are all both victims and perpetrators. The blood on the hands of the Trooper (195), indicate the Augustinian transmission of the Adamic fall through biological generation. The crime of the Trooper is not glossed over in this interpretation of universal guilt, but seen as a typical product of the fall from grace in which everyone is implicated. If ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, but

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‘each man does not die’ (196), this is because of the hypocrisy of life in Victorian England, which operates under the Calvinist doctrine of ‘total depravity’, but whose capitalist system isolates some few to carry the burden of this depravity. Wilde’s point is not that there has been no terrible act committed, but that compassion should not be limited. It is not that the Trooper should not be punished, but that in committing such an act he has already been punished, as he has at least recognised the full implications of his contamination with sin. Crime here makes victims even out of the perpetrators. The man has killed the thing he loved. Laws are superfluous in this region, beside the point. In his crime he dehumanised himself, but in his preparedness to suffer he is redeemed. The poem orbits around the central diagnosis of a sick society: the deflection from universal guilt imposed at the Fall. The second section of the poem elaborates its theology of universal guilt. The death of this woman allows society to posit her killer as its scapegoat. The Law sentences him to death not because of this crime but because of its own guilt; Society is the criminal’s Caiaphas. This means that the Trooper is not really being punished for what he did, but for Society’s crimes. All are guilty of crimes against others, but the Law singles out certain people to bear the burden. Intention is at the centre of the text. The man killed his wife out of an excess of love. His act was wrong, but passion and love lie behind it. The act of Society in executing him is different as it coldly dispenses ‘justice’ to protect itself. To mitigate their sins social bodies transfer guilt to such people as the hanged man (Christ), and have him killed by a passionless Law. Humanity believes itself holistically sinful, totally depraved, but equally finds this an impossible burden to bear, so that visible sins must be punished harshly in mitigation for the sins that go unseen. Puritanism places such an unbearable weight on so many, that only some few will ultimately bear the consequences of its theology. A central irony runs through Wilde’s language, however. If one man will bear the guilt of society, that society will end up crucifying Christ. If the Victorians insist on making their own the logic whereby the few suffer for the many, then Jesus will die on the Cross again and again. The murdering soldier becomes the sinless Christ, not by his own actions, but because of the allegorical nature of the punishment inflicted upon him. And, even more ironically, the Victorians are themselves saved by their actions in killing this soldier, not in a merely psychological way in that the man will suffer for their sins and so relieve them of the burden of total depravity, but actually because Christ’s death redeems all. Wilde wrote that Christ did not die simply to save us, but

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so that humanity would save itself: men and women must become self-sacrificing Christs for one another. Each punishment inflicted on another becomes a Mass where the Crucifixion itself is re-enacted, and where crucially, the world is transformed, for the broken body and spilled blood of Christ become the nourishment for the community who will consume both in the form of bread and wine. If ‘blood and wine were on his hands/When they found him with the dead’ (195), then that blood and wine will be transubstantiated at the Trooper’s own death into the food and drink for the community that kills him. Just as we are saved because of and although we killed Christ, so Victorian society is saved although and because it kills this man for its own sin. The irony is that the Victorians will be saved through the very rituals they had rejected so vehemently – the rituals of Catholicism where wine becomes blood. Wilde was, by the time he wrote the poem, attending Mass again, and had been able to dispel any doubts about the divinity of Christ or the efficacy of the Atonement that troubled him while in relative isolation in prison. He had also rejected the empirical method that attracted him there. He chastised Robbie Ross for demanding that he date his letters, and ironically overburdened letters with ‘the date and other facts’, such as the year ‘AD1897’.35 Looking back from a free perspective, Wilde in retrospect can see the prisoners he walked in circles with in Reading as members of the community of Christ: they dwell in hell – the imagery of Dante’s Inferno is unmistakable here (‘I walked, with other souls in pain,/Within another ring . . . ’ 195) – and suffer the tortures of those in Purgatory, but are raised to new life through the death of this one man. The movement from a strictly Protestant approach to the issues of punishment and redemption to one of Catholic salvation is seen not only in the transformation of Dante’s Inferno into Purgatorio but also in the clash of registers so dominant here. The poem has often been criticised for its failure to maintain a consistent style: it shifts between the intense realism of the quicklime on the warders’ boots to the ‘romance’ of the allegorical sufferings and the propagandistic passages. Wilde recognised this himself and wrote that ‘the poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic: some poetry, some propaganda. I feel it keenly, but as a whole I think the production is interesting . . . ’36 In the tonal variations, where realism fights with romance, everything is placed onto an a priori narrative pattern drawn from the Mass. This clash of registers is much more obvious than that which occurs in Wilde’s prison letter, and it is clear that ultimately it is the romance

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that wins out. The poem refuses to concentrate its interest in this particular prisoner and his hanging (an insistence that one can imagine the Wilde who wrote the letter to Alfred Douglas making), and persists in making its case in far more general terms. As Buckler writes, ‘the narrator seems perpetually inclined to transform a realistic action into a romantic feeling’.37 In allowing Romance to overcome Realism, Wilde is also hoping to transform the prison conditions he suffered, and also the colonial imprisonment that had locked England and Ireland into a mutually debilitating language. Much of this language was concerned with what to do with the Republican prisoners who were populating the gaols of England. The Ballad of Reading Gaol configures an unspoken meeting between the English soldier – the hanged man who has a ‘scarlet coat’ and a ‘cricket cap’ (198) – and the Irish prisoner (Wilde), an encounter that has resonance beyond this poem. Wilde takes his imagery of the circling prisoners from Dante as described by his mother. She portrayed Irish Catholics in terms her son echoes here in descriptions of the prisoners: [T]he people sank into a dull lethargy, in which a sense of wrong and a desire for revenge without the power were the only living principles. A benumbed torpidity, like that which follows from a protracted torture; a frozen deadly stillness, in which no generous emotion, no passionate enthusiasm, could exist. A state like that lowest hell, described by Dante, as of ice.38 Likewise, the prisoners in Wilde’s poem are visited by ‘the Lord of Death with icy breath’ (206): ‘Something was dead in each of us,/And what was dead was Hope’ (206). His prisoners, too, sit ‘quiet . . . and dumb’ (207). When Wilde expressed a desire for Michael Davitt, the founder of the Irish National Land League, to write an introduction to the poem, he was not simply being extravagant. Here the English soldier (Trooper of the Royal House Guards, a synecdoch of all English soldiers), who administered such harsh justice to Ireland – perhaps the dead woman that he loved – is afflicted with the stigmata of the suffering he has administered. In this space, Wilde, the Irish prisoner suffering a peculiar kind of English justice of his own, meets and identifies with him. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, like many of the other ballads of Irish nationalism, not only has English associations of its own, with Kipling and Henley, but stages a meeting between English and

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Irish figures in the prison yard. In suffering both nationalities are redeemed. If the Irish were often sacrificed on the tails of British justice, many English men and women were killed by Irish revolutionaries. While Wilde seems still unable to give up the logic of physical force – he insists that brave men kill with the sword, while voicing the traditional complaint of the secret societies that Judas (informants) betrays with a kiss (196) – he envisions that physical force tradition being changed through Christian imagery. English and Irish relations, in other words, are transformed through a transubstantiated prism. The plaintive note that ‘Like two doomed ships that pass in storm/ We had crossed each others way . . . ’ (200) is not merely a pessimistic summation of seven hundred years of Irish oppression by the English empire. The allegorisation of Irish history has been one means by which it has been made more palatable as it is transformed into a deterministic cliché – ‘Two doomed ships’ crashing into one another and sinking. However, in ‘crossing’ each other’s paths they can now go home by a different route. The death of Christ on the Cross has given both an alternative version of history, providential yet giving free-will. Such a ‘crossing’ through suffering is an allegory for Wilde’s life too: he always saw himself torn between predestination and the possibilities of good works. If from the beginning he talked of a date with destiny, he also spoke of fate lying in his hands. The earth of Ireland that had soaked up the bodies and blood of martyrs, like the spot of ground where the dead man now lies, is by conventional Victorian theology unconsecrated ground, but the grace of the Catholic Church which allows for viaticum as well as Baptism tells a different story. If the Anglican priest can refuse to kneel at the grave of the Trooper, the Catholic priest must give last rites to all. While soaking up blood the soil is also prepared to do more: ‘God’s kindly earth/Is kindlier than men know,/And the red rose would but blow more red,/The white rose whiter blow’ (210). If, as Seamus Deane has pointed out, the language applied to the soil in a colonial context has been determined by economistic rationalisations of appropriation and acquisition,39 then Wilde returns the soil to a sacred and grace-anointed role in the salvation of all, containing and transforming the bones of tradition and ancestral heritage. Wilde takes the grave of the Trooper as a forever-Irish spot, yet as indicative of an unbreakable fusion of the English and Irish in a non-oppressive relationship. In this meeting, Wilde could finally resolve some of the tensions that had pervaded his texts for years.

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The Ballad of Reading Gaol takes the sectarian tensions in the prison letter and reconciles them in an aesthetic and ethical reaction to issues of justice and punishment, colonialism and oppression. In this final poem, Wilde’s compassion moves outwards to encompass both Ireland and England, Catholicism and Protestantism, and so resolve the tensions which lay behind much of his own literary experimentation.

Conclusion

On his deathbed Oscar Wilde was conditionally baptised into the Catholic Church, with the blessing, and also the misgiving, of Robert Ross. Though Wilde did hold up his hand in response to Fr Cuthbert Dunne’s questions, ‘he was never able to speak and we do not know whether he was altogether conscious’.1 As I have argued, this does not ultimately matter: Wilde had been Catholic in factual as well as in cultural terms at least since his second baptism in Glencree and the death of his sister. All the other seductions of the Church which he experienced in his life were directed towards getting him out of the Catholic closet and into the limelight. The final viaticum is the final step in this process. Richard Ellmann picked up on Robert Ross’s doubts and speculated: ‘The application of sacred oils to his hands and feet may have been a ritualised pardon for his omissions and commissions, or may have been like putting a green carnation in his buttonhole.’2 For Wilde, however, as for many Ritualists, there was little if any difference between the two acts. Edward King, the Ritualist priest, had already conflated such extravagance of ornamentation with the Anglo-Catholic movement, observing that we live in an age of decoration. Look at the working-boys in the streets, how elaborate are their Sunday button-holes! It is in all matters, not merely ecclesiastical ones, that the spirit of adornment has caught hold of us, and unless there is positive wrong in any of these things, we have no call to repress them.3 Wilde’s final years wandering Europe are evidence enough of his own ability to link Catholicism with excess. In his final visit to Rome in 186

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April 1900, after all, he was blessed by Pope Pius IX on seven different occasions. The sheer number of visits Wilde made to the Pope on this occasion not only shows the Church’s power of attraction for him but also demonstrates the extravagance of that attraction. His letters in these years also demonstrate his need to talk about and discuss his faith, complaining bitterly that his friends ‘treat me like a Dissenter. It is very painful, and very unjust.’4 Aware that his friends did not take his religious desires all that seriously, Wilde was comforted by his belief that a higher tribunal was ready to accept him. Writing to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897 Wilde records one of his many attendances at Mass: ‘I am seated in the Choir! I suppose sinners should have the high places near Christ’s altar? I know at any rate that Christ would not turn me out.’5 He informed Frank Harris that ‘there are powers in God . . . of which the world has up to the present known little’.6 Through his deathbed ‘conversion’, Wilde entered into the Immortals with incense burning at his feet. His priest on that final night had himself no doubts about Wilde’s desire to be baptised. Father Dunne later wrote that he was fully satisfied that he understood me when told that I was about to receive him into the Catholic Church and give him the Last Sacraments. From the signs he gave as well as his attempted words, I was satisfied as to his full consent. And when I repeated close to his ear the Holy Names, the Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope and Charity, with acts of humble resignation to the Will of God, he tried all through to say the words after me.7 Of course, symbolic rites of initiation were necessary for a writer like Wilde who lived in perpetual fear of being found out, of being understood. His ‘fascination’ with the esoteric cult of the Masons and his lifelong interest in the metaphor of ‘baptism’ both illustrate his arcane desire to remain always already elusive: we must, after all, see the object in itself as it really is not in order to comprehend it. Wilde was, in one sense, hiding from the world. His spirituality remained in the closet even longer than his sexual preferences, only emerging periodically when he felt safe. In a conversation with Coulson Kernahan, Wilde admitted that he felt intense relief meeting someone ‘to whom one can talk about [religious] matters without cant’. Wilde revealed that his primary desire was to remembered, not as a Decadent, but as an evangelist, the writer of a new Epic of the Cross that would reveal Christ as the beautiful symbol and model that he believed in. He also

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told Kernahan that this was a wish he did not expose to anyone in fear that he would himself be exposed.8 Wilde operated like a recusant, a ‘Jesuit in disguise’, who could gain more disciples in secret than through any open evangelisation. His final letters to his friends reveal the extent of his continued desperation over the issue. He pleads with Robert Ross to write to him about his religious beliefs: ‘Dear boy, I wish you would tell me if your religion makes you happy. You conceal your religion from me in a monstrous way.’ Yet he cannot quite come far enough out of the closet to reveal how important the issue is to him, and must ironise in order to conceal himself: ‘you treat me as the President of Mansfield College: and after I had canonised you too!’9 Only now, through a thorough understanding of his religious culture, can we begin to decipher Wilde’s allegories of holy desire. This book has attempted to correct the underemphasis in Wilde studies on the importance of Catholicism to his work, and to link his religious devotion to his political belief in Irish nationalism. Irish folkCatholicism was Wilde’s way of interpreting the world. Both religion and nationality were bequeathed to him by his parents, and his life was spent exploring the Irish tensions they personified, tensions between elite and popular culture, England and Ireland, Protestantism and Catholicism, orthodoxy and subversion. While much powerful work has been done excavating the sexual expressions of such antinomianism, its religious implications need to be teased out, and religion itself taken more seriously by those with a stake in Wilde’s canon. Much as his parents saw the remnants of a global ur-culture finding expression in Irish folklore,10 so Wilde saw Irish folk-Catholicism as a potential world-unifier which could convert the English empire from its imperial dedication to oppression and hegemony, to a leadership of the marginalised – the poor, the weak, the prisoners (including the Pope) – an empire as truly liberating of the self as the old one was concerned with limiting and containing transformative energies. Wilde’s Catholic desires set him in conflict with the religion of his birth, and a struggle with Protestantism in its theological and cultural expressions can be traced through his writings. Though at times he almost capitulated to its power, especially during those dark days in prison, he was never convinced it could offer freedom to the soul. Irish folk-Catholicism, a religion of the seasons and the senses, of the irrational and irreality, of performance and perversity, seduced and compelled his life-long attention. This study has only, however, been an interim report. Much remains to be written of the issue of Catholicism in Wilde’s texts not studied

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here: the emphasis on the seasonal calendar in Wilde’s earliest poems reflects the importance of the agricultural year to Irish Catholics in the West; the rejection of religious and biological predestination in ‘Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime’; the rather obvious Ultramontanism of his fairy tales;11 the emphasis on conversion in the society comedies; the celebration of ‘lying’ in the critical essays; and many other avenues of analysis become clearer once the importance of folk-Catholicism is accepted. This is the challenge for future students of Wilde.

Notes Introduction 1. Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar (Derry: Field Day, 1989), vii; Jerusha McCormack, ‘Preface’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), xv–xvi. 2. Jerusha McCormack, ‘Wilde the Pervert: Catholicism as Subversive’, unpublished paper delivered at the Oscar Wilde Autumn School, October 2000, Bray, Co. Dublin. 3. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 229–96; Ronald Schuchard, ‘Wilde’s Dark Angel and the Spell of Decadent Catholicism’, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandulescu (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 371–96. 4. For the origins of this phrase, see W. J. McCormack, The Dublin Paper War of 1786–88: a Bibliography and Critical Inquiry, including an Account of the Origins of Protestant Ascendancy and Its ‘Baptism’ in 1792 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993); James Kelly, ‘The Genesis of “Protestant Ascendancy”: the Rightboy Disturbances of the 1780s and Their Impact upon Protestant Opinion’, Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History, ed. George O’Brien (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 93–128. 5. This is, clearly, a very simplified version of nationalist organisation in the mid-Victorian period. For an excellent (though polemic) introduction to modern Irish history, which draws out well the multi-faceted aspects of Protestant nationalism, see R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988). 6. Quoted in Robert D. Pepper, ed., Oscar Wilde, ‘Irish Poets and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century’. A Lecture delivered in Platt’s Hall, San Francisco on Wednesday, April Fifth, 1882 (San Francisco: Book Club of California Press, 1972), 32. 7. See Joy Melville, Mother of Oscar: the Life of Jane Francesca Wilde (London: Allison and Busby, 1999), passim; Brian De Breffny, ‘Speranza’s Ancestry – Elgee, the Maternal Lineage of Oscar Wilde’, The Irish Ancestor 4: 2 (1972), 94–103. 8. Horace Wyndham, Appendix I, Speranza: a Biography of Lady Wilde (London: T. V. Boardman, 1951), 197–204. 9. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant, introd. Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 95. 10. For a powerful study of the Young Irelanders, see David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (London; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 11. Quoted in Pepper, ed., Oscar Wilde, ‘Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century, 33. 12. Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: the Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House and Country House, 1994), 9. 13. Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza (Dublin: James Duffy, 1864), 4. 14. Ibid, 9. 190

Notes, pp. 5–12

191

15. The original article can be found in the National Library of Ireland, but can more easily be accessed as an appendix to Wyndham, Speranza, 197–204. 16. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Lady Wilde, 5 September 1868, in Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, eds, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 3–4. 17. See Terence De Vere White, The Parents of Oscar Wilde: Sir William and Lady Wilde (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967), 108–9. 18. ‘Our Irish Portrait Gallery: Lady Wilde’, Irish Society (December 1892), 1269–70. 19. Brian De Breffny, ‘The Paternal Ancestry of Oscar Wilde’, The Irish Ancestor 5: 2 (1973), 96–100. 20. Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1972), 11, 38. 21. Sir William Wilde, Memoir of Gabriel Beranger (London: Bentley, 1880), 141. 22. Sir William Wilde, The Census of Ireland for the Year 1852 (Dublin, 1856), vol. 1, 57. 23. Douglas Hyde, ed., Beside the Fire: Irish Folk Tales (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1978), xix. 24. Angela Bourke, ‘The Baby and the Bathwater: Cultural Loss in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, eds, Tadhg Foley and Sean Ryder (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 79–92. 25. ‘. . . from my boyhood I have been accustomed, through my Father, to visiting and reporting on ancient sites . . .’ Oscar Wilde, Letter to A. H. Sayce, 8 December 1879, Letters, 85. 26. Dedication Page, Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza. 27. Alan Warner, A Guide to Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981), 5; Roger McHugh and Maurice Harmon, A Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from Its Origins to the Present Day (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1982), 145. 28. Seamus Deane, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day, 1991), vol. 2, 721. 29. Declan Kiberd, ‘The London Exiles: Wilde and Shaw’, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 2, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), 272–515 (272); see also Neil Sammells, ‘Rediscovering the Irish Wilde’, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandulescu (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 362–70. 30. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), 325. 31. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Penguin, 1998), 40. 32. Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, 9 May 1893, Letters, 563. 33. Coakley, Oscar Wilde, 3. 34. Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘The Impressions of an Irish Sphinx’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 52–60 (48); Edwards, ed., The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1989). 35. Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), 1. 36. Jerusha McCormack, ‘Introduction: the Irish Wilde’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–5 (1). 37. Jerusha McCormack, ‘Wilde’s fiction(s)’, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96–115

192

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

Notes, pp. 12–17 (102); idem, ‘The Once and Future Dandy’, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandulescu (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 269–73; idem, ‘The Wilde Irishman: Oscar as Aesthete and Anarchist’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 82–94; see also the Richard Kearney, ed., The Irish Mind (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985), for a similar version of Irish identity. Eagleton, Saint Oscar, 11. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Essays in Irish History (London: Verso, 1998), 333. See also, in this context, the emphasis on lying and Wilde in Declan Kiberd, ‘Oscar Wilde: the Resurgence of Lying’, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 276–94. Quoted by H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1976), 45. A good survey of the body of criticism devoted to an examination of the influence of Ireland on Wilde can be found in Noreen Doody, ‘Oscar Wilde: Nation and Empire’, Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 246–66. Edwards, ‘Impressions’, 48. ‘John Hogan’, Dublin University Magazine 35: lvii (1850), 72. L. C. P. Fox, ‘People I Have Met’, Donahoe’s Magazine 53: 4 (1905), 397. Ibid. For good introductions to the Oxford Movement see R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833–1845 (London: Macmillan, 1891); E. R. Fairweather, ed., The Oxford Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Raymond Chapman, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970). For Ritualism see Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian England, 1830–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: the Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, Tennessee: Tufton, 1996). James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 98. Hunter-Blair wrote a short, though important, study of Oscar Wilde at Oxford which deals in some detail with his attraction to Catholicism. See ‘Oscar Wilde as I Knew Him’, Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. K. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1979), vol. 1, 3–12. Lord Ronald Sutherland-Gower, My Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), vol. 2, 134. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Reginald Harding, 16 June 1877, Letters, 54. See Edmund Burke, ‘Oscar Wilde: the Final Scene’, London Magazine 1: 2 (May 1961), 37–43. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1989). For the many factual errors in this biography, see Horst Schroeder, Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, 2nd edn (Braunschweig: privately published, 2002). Ibid, 32. Schuchard, ‘Wilde’s Dark Angel’. James Joyce, ‘Oscar Wilde: the Poet of Salome’, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), 204–5.

Notes, pp. 17–22 193 56. See Liam Brophy, ‘An Immortal Dandy’, The Divine Word (1954), 6–8. See also Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (London: HarperCollins, 2000). 57. Sir Shane Leslie, ‘Oscar Wilde and Catholicism’, The Month 8: 4 (October 1962), 234–7 (236). 58. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, 233–4. 59. A good survey of the recent scholarship on Wilde and religion can be found in Patrick R. O’ Malley, ‘Religion’, Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 167–88. 60. Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 155. 61. David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 148. 62. The best general study of the relationship between popular and institutional religion in post-Reformation Europe is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991). For the version of popular religion prevalent in Ireland, see S. J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001). 63. Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–1875’, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (Dublin: Four Courts, 1997), 57–90. 64. Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions, 11. 65. For a good example of this, see Bernard Bergonzi, The Turn of a Century: Essays on Victorian and Modern English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1973); R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold, 1983). 66. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 67. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 68. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 14. 69. It also ignores the fact that Wilde could be genuinely reactionary at times. This is most evident in his support for the Boer War and also his antiSemitism as seen in his reaction to the Dreyfus Affair. See J. Robert Maguire, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Dreyfus Affair’, Victorian Studies 41: 1 (1997), 1–30. 70. Largely because ‘seriousness’ is now an outlawed term in Wilde studies. 71. Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, incl. My Memories of Oscar Wilde, by George Bernard Shaw. Introd. Lyle Blair (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), 31. 72. Ian Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research: a Supplement to ‘Oscar Wilde Revalued’ (Greensboro, North Carolina: ELT Press, 2000), 12. 73. Small chides these critics for having ideological axes to grind. Oscar Wilde: Recent Research, 59. 74. Ibid., 67. 75. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, transl. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127–86 (162–4). 76. Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 77. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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Notes, pp. 23–30

78. David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 2. 79. While the original French publication of this play was called Salomé, when the English translation was published in 1894 the accent was absent, and I follow this practice here.

1. Child and Man: the Development of a Catholic Mind 1. Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, foreword by Merlin Holland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 12. 2. Robert Harborough Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Werner Laurie, 1906), 90. 3. Quoted in Stuart Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, intro. Timothy D’Arch Smith (London: Bertram Rota, 1967), 295. 4. Ellman, Oscar Wilde, 24. 5. Melissa Knox, Oscar Wilde: a Long and Lovely Suicide (New Have and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 13. Knox’s book has attracted a great deal of critical comment, much of it related to her argument that Wilde’s work should be read as the expression of a man who believed he had syphilis. Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, reviewed the book in the Times Literary Supplement, 13 January 1995. This review was attacked by Susan Balée’s review of Knox’s biography in Victorian Studies 38: 2 (1995), 319–21. Merlin Holland posted a response in Victorian Studies 39: 4 (1996), 539–41, to which Susan Balée responded in the same issue, 542–3. The issue of Wilde’s possible ‘incestuous’ relationship with Isola became marginalised in the debate over whether Wilde had syphilis. See also Ellis Hanson, ‘Wilde’s Exquisite Pain’, Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 101–23, who argues that Knox’s application of an unsophisticated Freudian paradigm to Wilde’s life leads to a serious misreading. 6. Knox, Oscar Wilde, 13–14. 7. For a good account of the scandal, see Coakley, Oscar Wilde, 86–92; De Vere White, The Parents of Oscar Wilde, 153–204. 8. Knox, Oscar Wilde, 18. 9. Ibid., 13. 10. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, Poems, eds Karl Beckson and Bobby Fong, under the general editorship of Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. All quotations from Wilde’s poems are from this edition and page and line numbers will appear in parentheses in the main text. 11. Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, The Religious Situation: 1968, ed. Donald Cutler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 639–88 (653). 12. Ibid., 663. 13. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: the Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 48. 14. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland; with Sketches of the Irish Past, to which is appended a chapter on ‘the ancient races of Ireland,’ by the late Sir William Wilde (London: Ward and Downey, 1887), 82.

Notes, pp. 30–8

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15. Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1979), 121. 16. Quoted in Heather White, Forgotten Schooldays: Oscar Wilde at Portora (Fermanagh: Principia Press, 2002), 67. 17. Ibid., 84. 18. Ibid., 85. 19. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 120. 20. E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (London: Routledge, 1957), 290. 21. Ibid., 290–1. 22. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 122–3. 23. Ibid., 119–20. 24. Ibid., 213. 25. Knox, Oscar Wilde, 9–14. 26. Wilde himself wrote about being attracted by ‘the wiles of the Scarlet Woman’. Letter to William Ward, c. 14 March 1877, Letters, 41. 27. See Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 28. Oscar Wilde to William Harnett Blanch, January 1894, Letters, 581. 29. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 145. 30. John Henry Newman, ‘The Second Spring’, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), 163–82 (163). 31. Oscar Wilde to William Ward, c. 14 March 1877, Letters, 41. 32. Oscar Wilde to William Ward, week ending 3 March 1877, Letters, 39. 33. Edwards, ‘Impressions’, 48. 34. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884–90), vol. vi, 364. 35. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, xi–xii. 36. Lady Wilde, Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland: Contributions to Irish Lore (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 4. 37. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 73. 38. Wilde, Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, January–March 1897, Letters, 743. This letter is, of course, known popularly as De Profundis. 39. Sir William Wilde, Ireland Past and Present (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1864), 25. 40. Sir William Wilde, The Beauties of the Boyne and its Tributary the Blackwater (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1849), 161. 41. Quoted by W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1926), 90. 42. Donald Lawler, ‘The Gothic Wilde’, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandulescu (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 249–68 (258). 43. Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde (New York: New Directions, 1986), 8–9. 44. Wilde said this to W. B. Yeats. Quoted in a letter from Yeats to Sturge Moore, 6 May 1906, W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 9. 45. Quoted in Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 185. 46. Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), 57. 47. Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions, 79, 80, 81.

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Notes, pp. 39–46

48. See Connolly, Priests and People, 91–140. 49. Wilde had first published this story as ‘Lady Alroy’, in The World: a Journal for Men and Women 26 (25 May 1887), and reprinted it with its new name in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891). Oscar Wilde, The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross (originally published as The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 15 vols (London: Methuen, 1908–22), London: Routledge, 1993), vol. 2. All quotations, except where a more reliable text can be located, will be taken from this edition, and placed in parentheses in the main text. 50. For this scandal, see David Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies 25: 2 (1982), 181–210 (192–3). 51. Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 255, 363. 52. Walter Walsh, The Secret History of the Oxford Movement (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1899). 53. Hanson, Decadence, 254. 54. Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly’, 188. 55. Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 15. 56. G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1926), 57–64.

2. Faith and Reason: the Bible, the Catholic Church and Wilde’s Scandalous Writings 1. H. Montgomery Hyde, ed., The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1948), 130. 2. Kevin Kopelson, ‘Wilde, Barthes, and the Orgasmics of Truth’, Genders 7 (1990), 22–31 (29). 3. Isobel Murray, ‘Introduction’, Oscar Wilde: Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Isobel Murray (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1–18 (13). 4. Lawrence Danson, ‘Oscar Wilde, W. H., and the Unspoken Name of Love’, English Literary History 58: 4 (Winter 1991), 979–1000 (981). 5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Part II, II, Q. 1, Article 4, quoted in John Hick, Faith and Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1967), 14. 6. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, passim. 7. Edward Stillingfleet, A Rational Account of the Grounds of the Protestant Religion (London, 1665), 109, 111. 8. Ibid., 111. 9. Gerald R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason: a Study of Changes in Religious Thought within the Church of England, 1660 to 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 42–59; Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth Century England: a Study of the Relationship between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 106–7. 10. William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation. Or, an Answer to a book entitled Mercy and Truth, or, Charity maintain’d by Catholiques [written by Matthew Wilson under the pseudonym Edward Knott], which pretends to prove the contrary (Oxford: Leonard Litchfield, 1638), 8, 9.

Notes, pp. 47–52 197 11. [George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax], A Letter to a Dissenter, Upon occasion of His Majesties Late Gracious Declaration of Indulgence (London, 1687), 15–17. 12. Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101. 13. John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984), 250. 14. On the impact of the Higher Criticism, see Gerald Parsons, ‘Biblical Criticism in Victorian Britain: From Controversy to Acceptance?’, Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. 2, Controversies, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester University Press, 1988), 238–57. 15. For this Quest, see Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: a Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery, intro. James M. Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1968). See also D. L. Pals, The Victorian ‘Lives of Jesus’ (San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 1982), 32–50. 16. C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). 17. Joss Lutz Marsh, ‘ “Bibliolatry” and “Bible-Smashing”: G. W. Foote, George Meredith, and the Heretic Trope of the Book’, Victorian Studies 34: 3 (Spring 1991), 315–36. See also Marsh’s book, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). 18. The new ‘Creation Scientists’ fall into the same trap. 19. This was succinctly expressed by a letter by one Henry Sidgwick to The Times on 20 February 1861, which pointed out that ‘what we all want is, briefly, not a condemnation, but a refutation . . . a large portion of the laity now . . . will not be satisfied by an ex cathedra shelving of the question, nor terrified by a deduction of awful consequences from the new speculation. For philosophy and history alike have taught them to seek not what is “safe” but what is true.’ Quoted in Josef L. Altholz, ‘The Warfare of Conscience with Theology’, Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. 3, Interpretations, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester University Press, 1988), 150–69 (166–7). 20. Stephen Arata, ‘Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ’, Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 254–72 (262). 21. Guy Willoughby, Art and Christhood: the Aesthetic of Oscar Wilde (London and Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1993), 115. 22. The text for this chapter is taken from the Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (London: Harper Collins, 1999), which is the only readily available edition which prints Wilde’s revised text. For the best study of the textual history of Mr. W. H., see Horst Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. – Its Composition, Publication and Reception (Braunschweig: Technische Universität Braunschweig, 1984). 23. See, for example, George C. Macauley, ‘New Views of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: the “Other Poet” Identified’, Blackwood’s Magazine 135 (June 1884), 727–61; 137 (June 1885), 774–800; 139 (March 1886), 327–50. 24. ‘An attachment to some female, which seems to have touched neither his heart nor his fancy very sensibly, was overpowered, without entirely ceasing, by one to a friend; and this last is of such an enthusiastic character, and so extravagant in the phrases that the author uses, as to have thrown an unaccountable mystery over the whole work . . . and it is impossible not to

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25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

Notes, pp. 52–63 wish that Shakespeare had never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and mis-placed affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments.’ Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 3 vols (1837–39; rpt, New York: Johnson, 1970), vol. 2, 504. Quoted in Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, 14. For a clear analysis of the emergence of the categories of the ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, see Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement (London: Cassell, 1994). Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: the Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 106. Joseph Bristow, ‘ “A complex multiform creature”: Wilde’s Sexual Identities’, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195–218 (197). For ‘muscular Protestantism’, see Norman Vance, Sinews of the Spirit: the Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 124. Timothy d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). This lies behind Wilde’s otherwise absurd speech at his second trial in which he claims spiritual status and justification for his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Unfortunately, Wilde never became a defender of modern conceptions of homosexuality. David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature, vol. 2, From 1700 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 180. Quoted in Dowling, Hellenism, 71. For the replacement of religion by science as the metanarrative of the nineteenth century, see Stephen Prickett, Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Fount Paperback, 1977), 218–19. John Henry Newman, Letters and Diaries, eds Charles Stephen Dessain et al. (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1961–), vol. 19, 482. Quoted by Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 13. Quoted in Brand Blanshard, Reason and Belief (London: Unwin, 1974), 31. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 144. Ibid., 145. Ibid., xi. Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions, 17. The text for this section is taken from Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford Drama Library; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 61–92. This takes its text of Salome from the first English edition. All page numbers of quotations will be placed in parentheses in the main text. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1959), 64.

Notes, pp. 63–7

199

46. Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 47. For a good study of these sources, see Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex: the Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Techniques (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1987). 48. Peter Raby, Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 105. 49. Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: the Works of a Conformist Rebel, transl. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 192. 50. Christa Satzinger, The French Influences on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994). 51. Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing, 16. 52. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 384. 53. Edmund Bergler, ‘ “Salome”, the Turning Point in the Life of Oscar Wilde’, Psychoanalysis Review 43: 1 (1956), 97–103 (100). 54. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Hart-Davis, 1971), 152–6. 55. Victoria White, ‘Women of No Importance: Misogyny in the Work of Oscar Wilde’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 158–65 (163); see also Irene Eynat-Confino, ‘Oscar Wilde and Dramatic Strategies’, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandulescu (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 127–36. 56. Charles Bernheimer, ‘Fetishism and Decadence: Salome’s Severed Heads’, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, eds Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 72–83 (76). 57. Jane Marcus, ‘Salome: the Jewish Princess Was a New Woman’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974–75), 95–113. 58. For Wilde’s manipulation of the Salome tradition, see Helen Grace Zagona, The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art’s Sake (Geneva: AmbillyAnnemasse, 1960); Robert C. Schweik, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Salome, the Salome Theme in Late European Art, and a Problem of Method in Cultural History’, Twilight of Dawn: Studies in English Literature in Transition, ed. O. M. Brack, Jr (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 123–36; Austin E. Quigley, ‘Realism and Symbolism in Wilde’s Salomé’, Modern Drama 37 (1994), 104–19. 59. Quoted in John Russell Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama, 1824– 1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 112. 60. Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, 124. 61. Enrique Gomez Carrillo, En Plena Bohemia, in his Obras Completas (Madrid: n.d. (?1919–22)), XVI, 190ff., quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 323–4. 62. Quoted in Mikhail, Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, 25. 63. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1987), 174–5. 64. For this see Jerusha McCormack, ‘Wilde the Pervert’. 65. Quoted in E. R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), 174. 66. Oscar Wilde to Campbell Dodgson, 23 February 1893, Letters, 556. 67. Quoted in Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 139–40.

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Notes, pp. 67–77

68. Professor Own Dudley Edwards alerted me to the importance of Wilde’s Evangelical background for this play. 69. See Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70: a Study of Protestant-Catholic Relations between the Act of Union and Disestablishment (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978). 70. Quoted in Bowen, Protestant Crusade, 111. 71. See R. S. Brooke, Recollections of the Irish Church (London: Macmillan, 1877); James Godkin, Ireland and Her Churches (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867). 72. Quoted in Bowen, Protestant Crusade, 219–20. 73. See Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), passim, for the reading of the Famine as a providential act of God. 74. Though some Evangelicals did clearly argue that material distress was a potential ally in the proselytising mission. James Maher argued that ‘if ever there was a time for England to make a great effort for the evangelising of Ireland it is the present – the poor are ready – the great distress has softened the heart of the poor. A famine shows the poor Romanist the incapacity and tyranny of their priests . . .’ Quoted in Bowen, Protestant Crusade, 191. 75. Bynum, Holy Feast, 175. 76. Ibid., 3. 77. Nicholas Joost and Franklin E. Court, ‘Salome, the Moon, and Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetics: a Reading of the Play’, Papers on Language and Literature 8 (1972), 96–111. 78. Patrick O’Farrell, ‘Millennialism, Messianism and Utopianism in Irish History’, Anglo-Irish Studies 2 (1976), 45–68. 79. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990). 80. Irene Whelan, ‘The Stigma of Souperism’, The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Poirteir (Cork: Mercier Press, 1995), 135–54 (144). 81. Oscar Wilde, Letters, 874. 82. Quoted in G. D. Zimmerman, ed., Songs of Irish Rebellion: Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs, 1780–1900 (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1967), 34. 83. Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza, 24. 84. Ibid., 23. 85. Philadelphia Press, 9 May 1882, quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 186. 86. Quoted in E. H. Mikhail, ed., Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, 190. 87. Lady Wilde, Ancient Cures, 255. 88. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 205–6. 89. Katherine Worth, Oscar Wilde (London: Macmillan, 1983), 65. 90. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 89. 91. Ibid., ‘The Fairy Dance’, 30–2. 92. Bynum, Holy Feast, 168. 93. James S. Donnelly Jr, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock: Millenarianism and Sectarianism in the Rockite Movement of 1821–4’, Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, eds Samuel Clarke and James S. Donnelly Jr (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 102–39. 94. Angela Bourke, ‘The Virtual Reality of Irish Fairy Legend’, Éire-Ireland 31: 1–2 (1996), 7–25 (7, 20).

Notes, pp. 80–4

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3. Body and Soul: Nature, the Host and Folklore in The Picture of Dorian Gray 1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 204–7. 2. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. 3. Although George Levine has pointed out that, even by the mid-Victorian period, novelists often did not feel their status was so secure. Indeed he uses a range of quotations from novelists of this period to show that they continued to see their craft as somehow marginal and under attack from the public. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 17. 4. Literature and Dogma: an Essay towards a Better Appreciation of the Bible, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 6: Dissent and Dogma, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 146. 5. For realism and science, see Levine, The Realistic Imagination, passim. 6. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 25. 7. George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 271. 8. Émile Zola, ‘Preface’, Thérèse Raquin (Paris: Bordas, 1989). My own translation. 9. Scots Observer, 5 July 1890. 10. The text used is here is The Picture of Dorian Gray, Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York-London: Norton, 1988). Page numbers will appear in parentheses in the main text. 11. Wilde, Collected Works, vol. XIII, 413. 12. Wilde, Letter to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle, 30 June 1890, Letters, 436. 13. Rachael Bowlby, ‘Promoting Dorian Gray’, Shopping with Freud (London: Routledge, 1993), 21. 14. Kerry Powell, ‘The Mesmerizing of Dorian Gray’, Victorian Newsletter 65 (1984), 10–15; idem, ‘Tom, Dick and Dorian Gray: Magic Picture Mania in Late-Victorian Fiction’, Philological Quarterly 62 (Spring 1983), 147–70. 15. Isobel Murray, ‘Introduction’, in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford English Novels; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), vii–xxv (xx). For another non-realist reading of the novel, see Joyce Carol Oates, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde’s Parable of the Fall’, Contraries: Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 3–16. The one critic I have come across who dissents from this view is Shelton Waldrep who claims that Dorian Gray is a realist novel: ‘Wilde had to work within the confines of some specific variation on the theme of realism’, ‘The Aesthetic Realism of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 29.1 (Spring 1996), 103–12 (103). 16. David Lloyd, ‘Violence and the Constitution of the Novel’, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 130. 17. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 147. 18. It should be noted that McCormack insists that ‘it is impossible to know whether Gray was Wilde’s lover’. John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1991), 88. Balancing the

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Notes, pp. 85–92 probabilities it is unlikely that some form of sexual relationship did not emerge between the two of them. For Wilde and Gray, see also McCormack’s more recent The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). I find this second work more problematic than the first which was a straight biography. In this second work McCormack bravely tries to do something new: ‘I resolved . . . to place the fragments of Gray’s life before the reader . . . and to piece them together with a kind of fictive glue’, x–xi. Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Arrow Books, 2004), 178. McCormack, John Gray, 51. McKenna, Secret Life, 164. Huysmans, Against Nature, 215. Oscar Wilde, Letter to E. W. Pratt, 15 April 1892, Letters, 524. For Huysmans and Dorian Gray, see Walther Fischer, ‘The “Poisonous Book” in Oskar Wilde’s Dorian Gray’, Englische Studien 51: 1 (1917), 37–47; Lucius Cook, ‘French Sources of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Romantic Review 19 (1928), 25–34; Schuchard, ‘Wilde’s Dark Angel’, 378–81. ‘A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde’, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). John Pick, ‘Divergent Disciples of Walter Pater’, Thought 23 (March 1948), 114–28 (121). Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 299. See Ellis Hanson’s account of Pater in Decadence and Catholicism, 169–228; see also Gerald Monsman, ‘Pater’s Aesthetic Hero’, University of Toronto Quarterly 40: 2 (1971), 136–51. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 91. Terri A. Hasseler, ‘The Physiological Determinism Debate in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’, The Victorian Newsletter 84 (Fall 1993), 31–5 (31). John Wilson Foster, ‘Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 113–24 (117). Heather Seagroatt, ‘Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 38: 4 (1998), 741–59 (741). Ibid., 756. Hassler, ‘Physiological Determinism’, 32. Seagrott, ‘Hard Science’, 742. Letter to William Ward, c. 14 March 1877, Letters, 41. Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 51. All quotations taken from ‘The Second Spring’, 163–82. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 165–6. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 164.

Notes, pp. 95–108

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47. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 255. 48. ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ examines what a Soul without a Body would be like. 49. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 89. 50. Jerusha McCormack, ‘Wilde the Pervert’, 14. 51. Ibid., 14. 52. Ibid., 12. 53. Christopher S. Nassaar has written a (slightly) interesting piece on the changing weight of the portrait: ‘Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Explicator 57: 4 (Summer 1999), 216–17. 54. Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions, 20. 55. From The Wild Garden, quoted in Miles Hadfield’s A History of British Gardening (London: John Murray, 1979), 362. 56. Ibid. See also Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s recently published The London Town Garden, 1700–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 57. See L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971). 58. Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. Francis E. Kingsley (London: Macmillan, 1901), vol. 3, 111. 59. Reproduced in Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 1882 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), facing 82, 101. 60. This is the general argument of Arnold’s ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 3, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super, assist. Sister Marion Hoctor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 291–386. 61. David Upchurch, Wilde’s Use of Irish Celtic Elements in The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 25–6. 62. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 6. 63. Ibid., 7. 64. See Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Literary Representations of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1996), 68–156, for a detailed and thorough discussion of all aspects of antiquarian interest in Ireland in the nineteenth century. 65. Curtis Marez, ‘The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s Opium Smoke Screen’, English Literary History 64 (1997), 257–87 (272). 66. See also Mary King, ‘Typing Dorian Gray: Wilde and the Interpellated Text’, Irish Studies Review 9: 1 (2001), 15–24 (16). My thanks to the author for sending me a copy of this article. 67. House of Commons Speech, 8 April 1888. Quoted in D. G. Boyce, ‘ “The Marginal Britons”: the Irish’, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, ed. Robert Colls and Phillip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 230–53 (234–5). 68. Theodore Wratislaw, Oscar Wilde: a Memoir (London: Eighteen Nineties Society, 1979), 13. 69. For an entirely different reading of this issue, see Marez, ‘The Other Addict’, 266. 70. Lecture contained in Kevin O’ Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada: an Apostle for the Arts (Toronto: Personal Library, 1982), 62–3.

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Notes, pp. 109–18

4. Religion and Politics: Wilde’s Social Philosophy 1. Percival W. H. Almy, ‘New Views of Mr Oscar Wilde’, Theatre 23 (March 1894), 124, quoted in Mikhail, Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, 232. 2. The text for this essay will be taken from Collected Works, vol. 7. 3. Isobel Murray, ‘Oscar Wilde and Individualism: Contexts for The Soul of Man’, Durham University Journal 83: 2 (July 1991), 195–207; J. D. Thomas, ‘ “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”: an Essay in Context’, Rice University Studies 51: 1 (1965), 83–95 (85–8). 4. George Woodcock, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 153. 5. Kiberd, Irish Classics, 326. 6. Josephine M. Guy, ‘ “The Soul of Man under Socialism”: a (Con)Textual History’, Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 59–85. See also, David Rose, ‘Oscar Wilde: Socialite or Socialist?’, The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years, eds Ewe Boker, Richard Corballis and Julie Hibbard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 35–55. 7. Guy, ‘ “Soul of Man” ’, 66. 8. Ibid., 76. 9. Ibid., 73. 10. R. N. Berki, Socialism (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), 12. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. John Goode, ‘Gissing, Morris, and English Socialism’, Victorian Studies 12: 2 (December 1968), 201–26 (226). 13. Vincent, K. Steven, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 47. 14. Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 15. G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. 2, Socialist Thought: Marxism and Anarchism, 1850–1890 (London: Macmillan, 1954); Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London: Croom Helm, 1983). 16. David Miller, Anarchism (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1984). 17. Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘Anarchism in British Public Opinion, 1880–1914’, Victorian Studies 31: 4 (Summer 1988), 487–516 (488). 18. Erin Williams Hyman, ‘Salome as Bombshell, or How Oscar Wilde Became an Anarchist’, unpublished paper, University of California, Los Angeles, 6–7. I am grateful to Professor Joseph Bristow for providing me with a copy of this paper. 19. Shpayer-Makov, ‘Anarchism’, 492 20. Ibid., 493. 21. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5, ed. R. H. Super, assist. Sister Marion Hoctor (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1965), 121–2. 22. Arnold, ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, 347. 23. McCormack, ‘Wilde Irishman’, 86. 24. Coakley, Oscar Wilde, 43.

Notes, pp. 118–31 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

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Oscar Wilde, Letter to John Barlas, 19 January 1892, Letters, 511. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 344. Ibid., 345. Arnold ‘From Easter to August’, Nineteenth Century 22 (September 1887), 321. This is astutely pointed out by McCormack, ‘Wilde Irishman’, footnote 28. Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 14–18. Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Oscar Wilde: the Soul of Man under Hibernicism’, Irish Studies Review 11 (Summer 1995), 7–13 (11). Although it may be argued that it was the First Home Rule Bill and the divisions it caused within the English Liberal Party that effectively ended the Home Rule cause for a generation. Edwards, ‘The Soul of Man under Hibernicism’, 11. See Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 215. See W. J. McCormack, ‘Wilde and Parnell’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1998), 95–102 (101). Quoted in Tony Claydon, ‘The Political Thought of Charles Stewart Parnell’, Parnell in Perspective, eds D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 151–70 (163). A. E. Dyson, ‘Oscar Wilde: Irony of a Socialist Aesthete’, The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony (London: Macmillan, 1965), 141. Quoted in Paul Bew, C. S. Parnell (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980), 33. James Joyce argued that ‘Nations have their ego, just like individuals . . .’ ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, 154. L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington D. C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 41–4. Newman, Letters and Diaries, vol. 30, 32–3. See also Alderson, Mansex Fine, 79. Kiberd, Irish Classics, 332. Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book By a Man Too Busy to Write One (1881; New York, 1969), 414. Quoted in Mikhail, Oscar Wilde, 92. Wratislaw, Oscar Wilde, 13. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Robbie Ross, 21 April 1900, Letters, 1183. Eamonn Hughes, ‘Joyce and Catholicism’, Irish Writers and Religion, ed. Robert Welch (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), 116–38 (125). Henry Edward Manning, Miscellanies, 3 vols (London: Burns and Oates, 1877–88), vol. 1, 229. Ibid., 179. This was made absolutely explicit in the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, but, as Andrew Greeley makes clear, the high tradition is merely following and formalising a widespread low tradition, whose origins are difficult if not impossible to locate. No Bigger Than Necessary: an Alternative to Socialism, Capitalism, and Anarchism (New York: New American Library, 1977). Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (LincolnLondon: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 278. For this encyclical and Catholic social policy in general, see Donal Dorr, Option for the Poor: a Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983). Dorr, Option for the Poor, 12.

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Notes, pp. 133–43

52. Oscar Wilde, ‘Review of Mr Froude’s Blue Book (The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: or An Irish Romance of the Last Century)’, Pall Mall Gazette 13 April 1889, in Collected Works, vol. XIII, 476–82. 53. Christopher Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 11–29. 54. Quoted in ibid., 14. 55. This is not to suggest at any point that there was not a great deal of sympathy and distress experienced in England at what was happening during the Famine. It is merely to point out, as has been argued by a great many Famine historians, that the English population in general, and the English government in particular, seemed trapped in the privileged discourses, in which the spectre of the Famine dead was a self-perpetuating heresy. See Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics. 56. For this lecture, see Kevin O’ Brien, ‘ “The House Beautiful”: a Reconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s American Lecture’, Victorian Studies 17 (1974), 395–418.

5. Art and Life: the Politics of Ritualism in The Importance of Being Earnest 1. This chapter will mostly use The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Russell Jackson (London: Ernest Benn, 1980), but will occasionally draw attention to lines from the Licensing Copy which now lies in the British Library. Act and Line number will appear in parentheses in the main text. See also Russell Jackson, ‘A Classic without Danger: the National Theatre’s Importance of Being Earnest’, Critical Quarterly 25: 2 (1983), 73–80. 2. Christopher Craft, ‘Alias Bunbury’, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), 112–13. 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993), 63 4. Ibid. 5. Quoted in John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle, 235. 6. Ibid., 142. 7. Ibid., 236. 8. Reprinted in Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, 194. 9. Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (London: Macmillan, 1991), 171. 10. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Robert Ross, 5 June 1897, Letters, 884. 11. On King, see Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, 109–18. 12. Reed, Glorious Battle, 28. 13. John Francis Bloxham, founded the ill-fated Oxford magazine, the Chameleon; he met Wilde through George Ives’s rooms at the Albany (E. 4). 14. For a useful collection, dealing with Kingsley and others of the same ideology, see Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 15. Both these quotations can be found in the Licensing Copy of the play now in the British Library. See Appendix III, ‘Longer Textual Notes’, in the Russell Jackson edited edition we are using, 127. 16. Quoted in Reed, Glorious Battle, 211.

Notes, pp. 144–59

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17. For the construction of ‘homo-’ and ‘hetero-’ sexuality, see Sinfield, Wilde Century. 18. Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly’, 181. 19. The scandals were fairly tame stuff. In 1850 at St Saviour’s church in Leeds, a Sunday school teacher and a choirboy were caught up to no good. The Benedictine establishment of Fr Ignatius in Norwich was a den of iniquity if we are to believe press reports, and a fairly innocuous love letter from the choirmaster Brother Augustine to a choir member was published to great fuss in the Norwich News. See Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly’, 181–3. 20. See Joseph Bristow, ‘Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency’, Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992), 44–63. Also, Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 21. See Craft, ‘Alias Bunbury’, passim. Also Jan B. Gordon, ‘ “The Wilde Child”: Structure and Origin in the Fin-De-Siècle Short Story’, English Literature in Transition 15: 4 (1972), 277–90. 22. For this, see Claudia Nelson, ‘Sex and the Single Boy: Ideals of Manliness and Sexuality in Victorian Literature for Boys’, Victorian Studies 32: 4 (Summer 1989), 527–50. 23. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the Industrialisation and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986). 24. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 58. 25. Octavius J. Ellis, Some Time Among Ritualists (London: Hatchards, 1868), 10–11. 26. Quoted in G. W. Soltau, A Letter to the Working Classes on Ritualism (London, 1873). 27. See Reed, Glorious Battle, 239 28. For drag, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London-New York: Routledge, 1992). 29. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 59. 30. James Laver, A Concise History of Costume and Fashion (New York: Scribners, 1969), 182. 31. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85. 32. In this she is the opposite of Lord Henry Wotton, who says all the wrong things but never does anything dangerous. 33. Quoted in Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: a Cultural History (New York and London: Norton, 1992), 132. 34. Otto Reinert, ‘Satiric Strategy in The Importance of Being Earnest’, College English 18 (October 1956), 14–18 (17). 35. See note 14 above. 36. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987), 112. 37. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 65. 38. See note 14 above. 39. Kiberd, Irish Classics, 331. 40. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998). 41. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1992).

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Notes, pp. 162–78

6. Realism and Romance: Between Protestantism and Catholicism in Wilde’s Final Writings 1. Although Ian Small, in his new edition of De Profundis (part of the authoritative Complete Works from Oxford University Press), suggests that it may have been written prior to January 1897 (The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 2, De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005)). 2. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 177–95. 3. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 95. 4. Arata, ‘Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ’, 265. 5. Ibid., 262. 6. Ian Small, ‘Love-Letter, Spiritual Autobiography, or Prison Writing? Identity and Value in De Profundis’, Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 86–100. 7. For this genre, see Pals, Victorian. 8. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 454. 9. See Elaine Scarry for a study of the effects of The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 10. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 465. 11. Ibid., 469. 12. For the importance of orality to Wilde, see Deirdre Toomey, ‘The Story Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Irish Orality’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 24–35. 13. Quoted in Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G., 3 vols (London: Cassell, 1887), vol. 3, 164. 14. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, January–March 1897, Letters, 748. Subsequent page numbers will be placed in the main text. 15. Small, ‘Love-Letter’, passim. 16. Arata, ‘Oscar Wilde’, 263–4. 17. For Matthew Arnold’s study of the Bible and of Jesus, see Literature and Dogma. 18. Letter to Robert Ross, 1 April 1897, Letters, 782. 19. Ibid., 781. 20. Small, ‘Love-Letter’, 92. 21. Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 220. 22. Ibid., 181–214. 23. Eamonn Duffy, Saints and Sinners: a History of the Popes (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1997), 228. 24. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works, vol. 5, xxxi. 25. Aubrey De Vere, Irish Odes and other poems (New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 1869), 159–60. 26. Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions, 34. 27. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 102. 28. Quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 495. 29. Ibid., 496. 30. The most recent reading of the event argues that it did not happen in this way at all. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis point out that Stewart Headlam claimed that Wilde simply asked him to send for a Jesuit priest to

Notes, pp. 179–88

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

209

engage in the religious discussion that they were having in the house, and that ‘it is implausible that Wilde would have considered exchanging one form of confinement for another’. Letters, 842. At the moment neither view has been accepted as authoritative, although Professor Owen Dudley Edwards tells me that he believes Headlam’s version of events has more evidence to back it up, as Wilde had other friends waiting to see him. That Wilde could act impulsively, without giving due notice to his friends’ opinions, however, was well demonstrated in the weeks leading up to his trial. I find the version given above more persuasive, especially since Wilde’s letters while in prison indicated a fear of the outside world. See also Horst Schroeder, Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, 2nd edn (Braunschweig: privately published, 2002), 187. Schroeder also believes that the story is a ‘jest’ or a ‘myth’ invented by Ada Leverson, 191. Letter to Robert Ross, 1 April 1897, Letters, 781. ‘Preface’ to the Poems in the Collins’ Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: Collins, 1999), 739–43 (742). See Coakley, Oscar Wilde, 210–11; Norman Page, ‘Decoding The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, ed. C. George Sandalescu (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 305–11. Lucy McDiarmaid, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Speech from the Dock’, The Wilde Legacy, ed. Eiléan Ní Chuileanáin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 113–35. Karen Alkalay-Gut, ‘ “The Thing He Loves”: Murder as Aesthetic Experience in The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Victorian Poetry 35 (1997), 349–66. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Robert Ross, 3 June 1897, Letters, 877. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Robert Ross, Friday 8 October 1897, Letters, 956. William E. Buckler, ‘Oscar Wilde’s “chant de cygne”: The Ballad of Reading Gaol in Contextual Perspective’, Victorian Poetry 28: 3–4 (1990), 33–41 (41 footnote 2). Lady Wilde, Notes on Men, Women and Books: Selected Essays (London: Ward and Downey, 1891), 183. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 72.

Conclusion 1. Robert Ross, quoted in W. S. Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914 (London: Martin Secker, 1920), part two, 126. 2. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 549. 3. Quoted in Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, 257. 4. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Robert Ross, 31 May 1897, Letters, 866. 5. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, 6 June 1897, Letters, 886. 6. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Frank Harris, 13 June 1897, Letters, 895. 7. Father Cuthbert Dunne’s Narrative, Letters, 1224. 8. Coulson Kernahan, ‘Oscar Wilde’, Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols, ed. E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1979), vol. 2, 316–17. 9. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Robert Ross, 31 May 1897, Letters, 866. 10. See Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 1–10; Sir William Wilde, Voyage Around Madeira. 11. On which see my unpublished PhD Thesis, ‘Religion, the Nation, and Oscar Wilde’, University College Dublin, 2001.

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1. Works by the Wilde Family (a) Oscar Wilde The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross (originally published as The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 15 vols (London: Methuen, 1908–22; London: Routledge, 1993)). Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (London: Harper Collins, 1999). Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Isobel Murray (London: Oxford University Press, 1979). The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, Poems, eds Karl Beckson and Bobby Fong, under the general editorship of Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 2, De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Russell Jackson (London: Ernest Benn, 1980). Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford Drama Library; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford English Novels; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). The Picture of Dorian Gray, Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York-London: Norton, 1988).

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(c) Sir William Wilde The Beauties of the Boyne and its Tributary the Blackwater (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1849). The Census of Ireland for the Year 1852 (Dublin, 1856). Ireland Past and Present (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1864). Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1979). Memoir of Gabriel Beranger (London: Bentley, 1880). 210

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Index Act of Union (1801), 2 Adams, James Eli, 15 Against Nature (Huysmans), 63, 84, 85–6 Alderson, David, 18 Alkalay-Gut, Karen, 180 Althusser, Louis, 22 Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen, 129–30 anarchism, 109–37 Angelico, Fra, 30 antiquarianism, 106–7 Antiquities of the Jews ((Josephus), 62 Apologia pro Vita Sua (Cardinal John Henry Newman), 14, 171 The Apparition (Mareau), 62 Aran Islands, 7 Arata, Steven D., 50, 154 Arnold, Matthew, 80, 104, 106, 107, 110, 112, 117–19, 164, 170, 172 Arnold, Thomas, 47, 140–1 Auerbach, Nina, 28 Augustine of Hippo, 169, 170, 171 Barbes, Armand, 114 Barlas, John, 118–19 Bazard, Saint-Armand, 114 Beardsley, Aubrey, 16 Belinda (Edgeworth), 80 Benedict XVI, 130 Bennet, William, 67 Bergler, Edmund, 64 Berki, R. N., 112–13 Bernheimer, Charles, 64 Bew, Paul, 123 Bhabha, Homi, 149 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 51 Blanc, Jean-Joseph-Charles-Louis, 114 Bloxham, J. R., 141, 142 Blunt, Wilfrid, 164 Bourke, Angela, 8, 77 Bowden, Rev. Sebastian, 16 Bowdler, Thomas, 51, 54

Bowlby, Rachael, 83 ‘Bridge of Sighs’ (Hood), 33 Bristow, Joseph, 52 British Association, 7 British Magazine, 142 Buchez, Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin, 114 Buckler, William, 183 Butt, Sir Isaac, 2, 9 Cabet, Étienne, 114 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 62 Catherine of Siena, St, 66, 70, 76, 77 The Catholic Church and Conversion (Chesterton), 42–3 Catholic Emancipation, 2 Catholicism, 16–18, 22, 23–4, 30, 33–4, 36, 37, 45–50, 59–62, 84–8, 112, 126–37, 166, 168, 170, 172–8, 179–85, 186–9 English, 14–16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 34–5, 38, 40–3, 44, 53–4, 59–61, 89–95, 97–100, 138, 140–9, 152, 154, 156–8, 159, 161, 171–2, 173, 186 Irish, 1, 2, 3, 6, 13–14, 18–19, 21, 22, 25–34, 35, 37, 38, 44, 45, 65–77, 89, 127, 128, 158–61, 162, 171, 173–8, 183–5, 188 Cellini, Benvenuto, 127, 128 Celticism, 6, 10, 19, 36, 104–8, 118–19, 176 Chesterton, G. K., 42–3 Chicago Anarchists, 119 Chillingworth, William, 46 Christian Socialism, 114–15, 178 Coakley, Davis, 10–11, 118 Colenso, J. W., 49 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 48 Columbkille, St, 72 communism, 110 222

Index Confessions (Augustine of Hippo), 168 Confessions (Rousseau), 170 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Coleridge), 48 Connolly, S. J., 39 Considérant, Victor Prosper, 114 Craft, Christopher, 139, 140 The Creed of Christendom (Greg), 47 Culture and Anarchy (Matthew Arnold), 117 Cummins, J., 141 Daily Chronicle, 83 Dallas, Rev. Alexander, 69, 72 Danson, Lawrence, 44, 52 Dante Alighieri, 51, 182, 183 Darwin, Charles, 48, 81, 88, 89, 94, 95, 99, 103, 110, 134, 142, 145–6, 151, 152 Davidson, Samuel, 49 Davis, Thomas, 3, 4 Davitt, Michael, 183 De Vere, Aubrey, 35, 37, 174 Deane, Seamus, 9, 184 Derrida, Jacques, 20 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 80 Dickens, Charles, 84 Dijkstra, Bram, 63–4 Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau), 104 Dollimore, Jonathan, 20, 163–4, 168 Donisthorpe, Herbert, 111 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 26, 67, 162, 163, 167–8, 169, 174, 175, 180, 183, 187 Dowling, Linda, 53 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 82, 146 Dublin University Magazine, 134, 135 Duffy, Charles Gavin, 5 Dunne, Fr Cuthbert, 16, 186, 187 Dürer, Albrecht, 62 Dyson, A. E., 123 Eagleton, Terry, 1, 12, 84, 96 Ecce Homo (Seeley), 48, 165 Edgeworth, Maria, 80 Edwards, Owen Dudley, 11, 13, 35, 119

223

Elcho, Lord, 111 Eliot, George, 48, 80–1, 83, 84 Ellis, Octavius, 147 Ellmann, Richard, 16–17, 26, 36, 86, 87, 186 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 110, 111 Enfantin, Barthélemy Prosper, 114 Engels, Friedrich, 110, 113 The English Flower Garden (Robinson), 101, 103 Enlightenment, 80, 81, 87, 134 Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture (Thomas Arnold), 47 Essay on Ritualism (Gladstone), 41 Essays and Reviews, 49 Faber, Fr Frederic William, 141 Fairbairn, Rev. Patrick, 49–50 Famine, Irish, 4, 5, 65, 69–72, 76–7, 84, 132–7, 146, 159, 173, 175 Fénéon, Félix, 116 fenianism, 116, 118, 124–5 Ficino, Marsilio, 53 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Deane), 9 First Vatican Council, 60, 173 Five Sermons on the Errors of Catholicism (Maturin), 67 Flaubert, Gustave, 63 Florio, John, 53 folklore, 6, 7–8, 12–13, 21, 23, 28–34, 35, 61–2, 73–7, 100, 104–8, 109, 162, 165, 171, 175–9, 188 Foote, G. W., 48–9 Fors Clavigera (Ruskin), 115 Fortnightly Review, 82, 110 Foster, John Wilson, 88 Foucault, Michel, 113 Fourier, François-Marie-Charles, 114 Fox, Fr Prideaux, 13 Frankenstein (Shelley), 82 Frazer, Sir James, 106 Freemasons, 38, 157, 187 Freethought, 48–50 Froude, James Anthony, 133 Gagnier, Regenia, 163, 164 Gardening (Robinson), 101–2

224

Index

Gautier, Théophile, 84 Geertz, Clifford, 27–8 Gladstone, W. E., 41, 107, 120 Glories of the Sacred Heart (Manning), 173 Godwin, William, 118 The Golden Bough (Frazer), 106 Gonne, Maud, 113 Goode, John, 113 Gourmont, Remy de, 116 Grave, Jean, 116 Gray, John, 16, 18, 84–5 Greenblatt, Stephen, 22 Greer, Rev. Samuel, 31 Greg, W. R., 47 Gregg, Rev. Tresham, 68 Guide to Anglo-Irish Literature (Warner), 9 Guy, Josephine M., 22, 110–12, 115, 119, 124 Halifax, Marquess of, 46–7 Hallam, Henry, 52 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 22 Hanson, Ellis, 1, 17–18, 21 Harmon, Maurice, 9 Harper’s Weekly, 103 Harris, Frank, 21, 187 Hassler, Terri, 88, 89 The Head of John the Baptist (Rubens) 62 Headlam, Stewart, 178 The Hebrew Monarchy (Francis Newman), 47 Henley, William, 183 Hennell, Charles, 47 Herbert, Auberon, 111 Herodias (Flaubert), 63 Higher Criticism, 23, 45, 47–50, 54–62, 78, 79, 162, 165 Hilliard, David, 42, 144 Hobbes, Thomas, 128 Holland, Vyvyan, 25 Home Rule, 2, 9, 30, 112, 120–7, 130 Homer, 36 Hood, Thomas, 33 Housman, A. E., 180 Howard, Anne, 146 Hubbard, John, 140

Hughes, Eamonn, 128 Hughes, Thomas, 114, 115 Hume, David, 80 Hunter-Blair, David, 15–16, 30 Huxley, Thomas, 88 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 18, 63, 84, 85–6 Hyde, Douglas, 8 Hyman, Erin Williams, 116 Illanroe Cottage, 7 Immortale Dei (Leo XIII), 129 Impartial Reporter, 32 Individualism, 111, 123–4, 133 Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (Hennell), 47 ‘Ireland: 1851’ (de Vere), 174 Irish Society, 5 Irving, Henry, 122, 128 Johnson, Lionel, 16 Josephus, Flavius, 62 Jowett, Benjamin, 49, 54–5 Joyce, James, 17, 84 Jung, Carl, 148 Keble, John, 14 Kernahan, Coulson, 187–8 Kiberd, Declan, 9–10, 110, 125, 158, 180 King, Edward, 15, 141, 186 Kingsley, Charles, 103, 114, 115, 142, 143 Kipling, Rudyard, 180, 183 Knox, Melissa, 26–7, 33 Kopelson, Kevin, 44 Kropotkin, Peter, 110, 118 Kuryluk, Ewa, 64 Lamennais, Abbé Félicité Robert de, 114 Land League, 112, 120–7, 130, 183 Larkin, Emmet, 19 Lawler, Donald, 36 Leo XIII, 126, 129, 130–1, 137 Leonardo da Vinci, 87 Leslie, Sir Shane, 17 Letter on Toleration (Locke), 128–9 Levy, Joseph, 111 Liberty and Property League, 111 The Life of Jesus (Strauss), 48

Index Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 79, 82 Lloyd, David, 23 Locke, John, 128–9 Lodge, David, 80, 84 Ludlow, J. M., 114 McCormack, Jerusha, 1, 11–12, 84–5, 97, 99, 118 McCormack, W. J., 121 MacCumhaill, Fionn, 8 McHugh, Roger, 9 McKay, Thomas, 111 McKenna, Neil, 84 MacPherson, James, 8, 104 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier), 84 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 63 Mahaffy, John Pentland, 15, 30 Malthus, Rev. Thomas, 133 Manning, Cardinal Henry, 90, 112, 113, 114, 129–30, 173 Mareau, Gustave, 62–3 Marius the Epicurean (Pater), 84 Marx, Karl, 113 Mary Spencer (Howard), 146 Maturin, Charles Robert, 3, 39, 67, 84, 179 Maurice, F. D., 114 Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 3, 39, 84, 179 Meltzer, Françoise, 63 Merrill, Stuart, 116 Michelangelo, 87 Miller, David, 115 Millett, Kate, 64 Mills, Dean, 141 Mitchel, John, 4 Montaigne, Miguel de, 53 Morris, William, 110, 113 Moytura House, 7, 120 Murray, Isobel, 44, 83–4, 110, 111 Nation, 4, 5 Newman, Francis, 47 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 14, 15, 34, 37, 41–2, 59–60, 61, 89–95, 97, 100, 125, 130, 141, 160, 171

225

Norfolk News, 41 Norman, E. R., 90 O’ Brien, Flann, 84 O’ Connell, Daniel, 73 O’ Shea, Katherine, 119–20 ‘Ode: Against False Freedom’ (de Vere), 35 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Matthew Arnold), 104, 118 The Origin of Species (Darwin), 48, 81, 103, 145 Oscar Wilde (Coakley), 10 ‘The Oval Portrait’ (Poe), 84 Oxford Movement, 14–15, 19, 42, 97, 140, 159 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 9, 11, 112, 119–26, 128, 130, 132, 137 Pater, Walter, 18, 84, 86–7 Pecquer, Constantin, 114 Phoenix Park Murders, 124 Pick, John, 86 Pigott, E. F. S., 64 Pine, Richard, 11 Pius IX, 15, 90, 126, 127, 128, 172–3, 187 Plato, 53, 54–5 Platonism, 53–5, 57, 59 Poe, Edgar Allen, 84 Ponsonby, Spencer, 64 Portora Royal School, 9, 11, 31–2 Powell, Kerry, 83 Pratt, E. W., 86 Pre-Raphaelites, 28 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 105–6 La Princesse Maleine (Maeterlinck), 63 Protestant Ascendancy, 2, 7 Protestantism, 22, 34, 39, 46–50, 60–1, 170–2, 181, 182 English, 14–16, 18, 34, 40–3, 52–3, 57–8, 59, 79, 96, 114–15, 117, 142–9, 152, 160, 164–8, 178 Irish, 2–3, 5, 7–8, 11, 12–13, 18, 19, 31–2, 61, 65–77, 135, 137, 165 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 110, 118 Punch, 42, 134, 148 Pusey, Edward, 14

226

Index

Quarterly Review, 142 Queensberry, Marquess of, 44, 163 ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’, 48–50, 57–61, 162, 164, 165–8, 175 Raby, Peter, 63 Raffalovitch, Marc-André, 16 A Rational Account of the Christian Religion (Stillingfleet), 46 realism, 78, 79–82, 83–4, 87, 108 Reformation, 2, 33, 39, 46, 97, 171 The Religion of Protestants (Chillingworth), 46 The Renaissance (Pater), 86–7 Renan, Ernest, 48, 62, 110, 164 Republic (Plato), 54 Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII),130–1 Retté, Adolphe, 116 Revelation Readings (Dallas), 72 Ribbonmen, 38 Ripon, Marquess of, 38 Ritualism, 15, 19, 24, 38, 41, 138, 140–9, 152, 154, 156–8, 159, 161, 186 Ritualism (Cummins), 141 Roden, Frederick S., 18 Rubens, Peter Paul, 62 Robinson, William, 101–4 Rockites, 76 Roditi, Edourd, 37 Ross, Robert, 16, 128, 163, 165, 168, 169, 172, 178–9, 182, 186, 188 Rossetti, D. G., 28 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 104, 105, 170, 171 Rouvroy, Claude Henri de, 114 Royal Irish Academy, 6, 9 Ruskin, John, 113, 114–15 Saint Oscar (Eagleton), 12 Saint-Simon, Comte de, 114 Salmon, George, 67 Salome bringing the Head of John the Baptist (Dürer), 62 Salome Dancing (Mareau), 62 Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (Caravaggio), 62 Schuchard, Ronald, 1, 17 Schwob, Marcel, 116

Scobell, Rev., 147–8 Scots Observer, 82 Sebastian, St, 3, 39, 179–80 Seagrott, Heather, 88–9 ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, 3, 39, 178–80 The Second Spring (Cardinal John Henry Newman), 35, 90–2, 97, 100 secret societies, 38–9, 76–7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 139–40, 147, 148, 157 Seeley, John, 165 Sexual Politics (Millett), 64 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 165 Shakespeare, William, 22, 44, 50–62, 72 Sonnets, 44, 50–62 Shaw, George Bernard, 10, 12, 110, 119 Sheares, John, 4 Sheares, Henry, 4 Shelley, Mary, 82 Sherard, Robert Harbourough, 25 Shpayer-Makov, Haia, 115, 116 Singer, Joseph, 67 Small, Ian, 21, 22, 24, 164, 168, 172 Smith, Timothy d’Arch, 53 Smith, William Robinson, 49 socialism, 109–17 Sonn, Richard, 131 Spencer, Herbert, 110, 152 Spirit of the Nation, 4 Steele, Frederick, 31 Sterne, Laurence, 84 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 82 Stillingfleet, Edward, 46 Strauss, David Friedrich, 48, 164 Summa Theologiae (Thomas Aquinas), 45–6 Sutherland-Gower, Ronald, 15 Swift, Jonathan, 133 Symons, Arthur, 18 Symposium (Plato), 53, 55 Tertullian, 60 Theatre, 109 Thérèse Raquin (Zola), 82 Thomas, J. D., 110 Thomas Aquinas, 45–6, 95, 98

Index Time and Tide (Ruskin), 115 The Times, 124 Tractarianism, 14–15, 54, 138, 140, 159 Tracts for the Times, 14, 97 Travers, Mary, 26, 28 Trollope, Anthony, 84 Tucker, Benjamin, 126 Tumbleson, Raymond, 47 The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (Froude), 133 Two Sermons on the Interpretation of the Bible (Thomas Arnold), 47 Tylor, Edward, 105–6 Ulysses (Joyce), 84 Unto this Last (Ruskin), 115 Upchurch, David, 105 Vanita, Ruth, 42 The Vatican Decrees (Gladstone), 41 Victoria, Queen, 150 Vie de Jésus (Renan), 48 Viswanathan, Gauri, 159 Walmesly, Charles (‘Pastorini’), 72 Ward, William Welmsford, 15, 34 Warner, Alan, 9 Warren, Emily, 5 Warren, Captain Samuel, 5 Washington Post, 103 Watt, Ian, 79–80 Webb, Sidney, 110 Weitling, Wilhelm, 113–14 Westminster Review, 80–1 Whelan, Irene, 72 White, Victoria, 64 Whiteboys, 76 Wilberforce, William, 42, 143 The Wild Garden (Robinson), 101 Wilde, Isola, 23, 25–34 Wilde, Lady Jane (née Elgee), 2, 3–5, 6, 8, 9, 12–13, 14, 26, 29–30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 61, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 100, 105, 109, 118, 120, 125, 135, 159, 160, 174, 176, 177, 183, 188 works: Ancient Cures, 8, 35, 74; Ancient Legends, 8, 29–30, 32, 35, 105, 176; ‘The Brothers’, 4; ‘The Enigma’, 4; ‘Jacta Alea Est’, 5, 6, 125, 159; Poems, 9

227

Wilde, John, 5 Wilde, Oscar and Catholicism, 1, 13–18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23–4, 25–43, 44, 49, 59–62, 65–77, 84–8, 89–95, 97–100, 108, 126–37, 138, 140–9, 152, 154, 156–61, 162, 166, 168, 170, 172–8, 178–85, 186–9 and folklore, 6, 7–8, 12–13, 21, 23, 28–34, 35, 61–2, 73–7, 100, 104–8, 109, 162, 165, 171, 175–9, 188 and Ireland, 1, 3, 8–13, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23–4, 25–34, 35–7, 43, 44, 49, 61–2, 65–77, 89, 100, 103–8, 109, 112, 116–26, 127, 130–7, 146, 158–61, 162, 173–8, 179, 183–5 and Protestantism, 3, 11, 12–13, 15, 16, 18, 31–3, 34, 35, 39, 40–3, 56–60, 135, 137, 142–9, 152, 160, 162, 164, 165–8, 170–2, 178, 181, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189 works: Commonplace Books, 55; De Profundis, 16, 17, 24, 36, 50, 126, 162, 163–78; ‘The English Renaissance’, 120; The Happy Prince and other stories, 41, 86; ‘The House Beautiful’, 136; The Importance of Being Earnest, 9, 24, 138–61; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, 78, 79–108; The Portrait of Mr W. H., 16, 23, 44–62, 77, 168; ‘Requiescat’, 23, 25, 27–34; The Rise of Historical Criticism, 178; ‘Rome Unvisited’, 30; Salome, 23, 44–5, 50, 62–78; ‘San Miniato’, 30; The Sphinx, 13, 23, 25, 35–9, 127, 179; ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’, 23, 25, 39–43

228

Index

Wilde, Ralph, 5 Wilde, Sir William, 2, 5–8, 10, 12–13, 14, 19, 26, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38–9, 50, 61, 77, 100, 109, 118, 120, 135, 174, 176, 177, 188 works: Beauties of the Boyne, 8; ‘Ireland – Past and Present’, 50; Irish Popular Superstitions, 6, 8, 19, 177; Lough Corrib, 8; Narrative of a Voyage, 6, 36 Willoughby, Guy, 50

Wilson, Henry, 16 Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas, 90 Woman’s World, 107 Woodcock, George, 110 Working Men’s College, 114 Wratislaw, Theodore, 107 Yeats, W. B., 2, 10, 36 Young Irelanders, 3–5, 9, 73, 76–7 Zola, Émile, 81–2, 86