Wilde the Irishman. - Review - book review

Criticism, Fall, 1999 by Cristine M. Carlton

Wilde the Irishman edited by Jerusha McCormack. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi 205. $30.00.

An influential trend in nineteenth-century literary criticism of recent years sees the writings of Oscar Wilde in light of Irish tradition and culture--a critical turn notably furthered by Jerusha McCormack's Wilde the Irishman. While not the first writer to suggest a connection between the forms of Wilde's "Irishness" and the representations of those idioms in his work, McCormack brings together a collection of essays by Irish critics and cultural commentators that not only reclaim the late-Victorian writer for Ireland but situate his aphoristic style within what she describes in the introduction as "an ancient, but increasingly marginalized and despised native tradition" (3). Tracing this cultural indebtedness in her own essay on Wilde as "Aesthete and Anarchist," McCormack uses a conceptual framework constructed from letters, essays, and reviews to expose his particular brand of Anglo-Irish nationalism. Likewise, Declan Kiberd on "The Artist as an Irishman," Deidre Toomey on "Oscar Wilde and Irish Orality," Owen Dudley Edwards on "Impressions of an Irish Sphinx," and Derek Mahon's critique of Richard Ellman's biography of Wilde usefully incorporate cultural studies, aesthetics, and political theory to explain the complex inversions that inhabit such comedies as Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. (For additional commentary on Wilde, see Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation [London: Jonathan Cape, 1995].) Distinct from other critical works on Wilde's plays, however, McCormack's book (as a whole) considers their comedic and social content not as a succinct formal model for political action, but as an intangible form marked by contradiction and fluidity of meaning--a less literal model that empowers a style that is simultaneously Irish Bull and Empire-speak, the monotone voice of English "passion, commitment and command" (88).

Thus when Algernon Moncrieff tells Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest that "The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility," he attends to the tenuous linkage between art and imitation--between art and national freedom--that Declan Kiberd sees as an integral part of Wilde's utopian view of Ireland. According to Kiberd, Wilde sought to create "not only an image of revolutionary possibility for Ireland but also a rebuke to contemporary Britain" in his writing (23). And just as Algernon tells Jack: "literary criticism is not your forte ... Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University," he reverses the site of literary production from the autocratic elite to the powerless--from the colonizer to the colonized. Kiberd argues, moreover, that such re-appropriation was, and still-is, crucial in understanding how Wilde created texts that not only ascribe "value" to the occupier culture but promote it as a "testing ground for Irish ideas and debates" (21). On this basis, he extrapolates Wilde's use of language as a tool to contain and structure the chaotic and disordered state of late nineteenth-century Ireland. Though Kiberd returns to many of the concerns regarding national identity raised in McCormack's introduction (with the result that the negative criticism surrounding Wilde's influence on Victorian Englishmen developed there transfers a certain instability to his presentation), his essay makes insightful comparisons between Wilde's work and that of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and, of course, the aesthetic preferences of Speranza--Oscar Wilde's Irish nationalist mother.

If Kiberd's reading of Wilde appears somewhat uncontentious, Deirdre Toomey's treatment of his "Irish Orality" comes close to being the piece de resistance of McCormack's book--a critical work in its own right. Toomey's remarks about Wilde's "lack of ownership" in his early (oral) tales not only contextualize the various types of writing produced throughout his career, but clarify how larger cultural and political issues are incorporated into his story telling. According to Toomey, the absence of "ownership" or authorship is an identifying characteristic of oral cultures. The text, in effect, belongs to the whole community (26). Drawing from W B. Yeats's recollections of Wilde, Toomey notes that although the former "manifested a productive tension between extreme endorsement of oral culture [and] extreme concern with the text elaborately realized in an object, the book ... the tension between writing and talking for Wilde was a hostile symbiosis" (25). The cathartic effect of Irish oral tradition is most obvious in Toomey's reading of Chapter Two of The Picture of Dorian Gray and, I might add, her penetrating assessment of his biblical tale, "The Woman Taken in Adultery," and later work entitled "The Poet." We are reminded near the end of the essay, however, that the body of images found in these tales is hardly considered an isolated phenomenon. Like Yeats, Lady Wilde, and other Protestant nationalists, Wilde associated himself with a cultural tradition that was more often despised than lauded by British lexicographers. Clearly viewing the historical context in which Wilde lived as the impetus for his writing, Toomey raises what might be considered more general questions about Irish oral culture and its "hold" on his consciousness.