Uwe Böker

Putting Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Back on the Irish Map

• Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Hg.): The Wilde Legacy. Dublin: Four Courts Press 2003. 172 S. 12 Abb. Hardback. IEP 45,00.
  ISBN: 1-85182-654-8.

Thomas Kilroy’s Question:
What if?

When the Irish dramatist Thomas Kilroy was giving his guest keynote address at a Vienna conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, it was a stimulating talk on the blind spots in William Blake’s biography and the topic of his new drama. What he sought to imagine was: what might have happened in case Blake had been secluded in a lunatic asylum. 1 His remarks in the panel discussion on »Wilde in the theatre« as part of the conference on The Wilde Legacy, held at Trinity College’s School of English in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s death, were devoted to a similar question. Kilroy’s opening remark in this panel discussion was: »One of the fascinating things about Wilde is that he is one of the writers out of the past of whom people are always asking ›What if?‹« (p. 103). What if he had written more, would he have had the same hold over twentieth-century theatre and writing, or in other words, what is the Wilde legacy for the present?

Remember what W. B. Yeats had remarked about Wilde with respect to the fairy tales:

Never did any man seem to write more deliberately for the smallest possible audience or in a style more artificial, and that audience contained nobody, it seemed, but a few women of fashion who invited guests to listen to his conversation and two or three young painters who continued in the tradition of Rossetti. 2

Nowadays this is a world-wide audience, and Wilde is popular even amongst Berlin graffiti sprayers inscribing the Irish poet’s famous epigramm »I am finding it harder and harder to live up to my blue china« (the German version is »Es fällt mir von Tag zu Tag schwerer, auf dem hohem Niveau meines blauen Porzellans zu leben«) on the front of a wooden gateway of the Linienstraße. 3

All contributions to The Wilde Legacy, in one way or other, ask this same question: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s essay on Wilde’s mother Speranza (the pen name of Lady Jane Francesca Wilde) as »an ancestor for a woman poet in 2000«, Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy’s talk on how to put Wilde’s fairy tales on stage for children today, the above-mentioned panel discussion, or Alan Sinfield’s remarks on the »queer Wilde« syndrome in twentieth-century British and Irish culture; and others. I will come back to these contributions shortly.

The Wilde Family
and its Legacy

But there is obviously another meaning to the title Wilde legacy, starting with the question of what had been passed on, from the ancestors to Oscar. As a reader from the continent, less intimate with the Dublin background and its impact on Irish culture, one is first of all astonished at »the mixture of Dublin traditions of art, learning, medicine, politics and family life« (p. 10) that is still a living presence. Consider Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s remembrance of her mother’s notebook who had copied out as a child The Ballad of Reading Gaol (p. 13), or her »first acquaintance with the work of Speranza [...] as a child in Cork« and the »present battered and tattered state of that book« she has still in her possession (p. 17). It is evident, although in a different way, in Peter Froggatt’s remembrance of the October 1971 unveiling of a plaque in honour of William Wilde, the ceremony being interrupted by curious gardaí moving in, suspecting »that only members of ›an illegal organisation‹ would brave the elements and be in trench-coats and listen to a speech in Irish while being soaked« (p. 67).

On the other hand, one is really impressed by the scholarly work done on a wide variety of subjects and the foregrounding of »the multiple Irish traditions to which they [the whole Wilde family] had so signally contributed, on the variegated talents and on their connection to Dublin« (p. 10). This research – already emphasized in D. Oakley’s Oscar Wilde: The Importance of being Irish (1994) and R. Pine’s The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (1995) – succeeds in putting Oscar Fingal Flahertie Wilde back on the Irish map.

Thus David Oakley gives an account of the cultural background of nineteenth-century Merrion Square, then a fashionable residential area, and of Speranza’s political opinions, of the Young Ireland poet James Clarence Mangan, who in his essay on »Mannerism« had castigated the »sin of commonplace«, and of the gathering of writers, artists and scientists in the homes of William and Jane Wilde. Amongst them William Stokes, Regius professor of Medicine at Trinity College; the playwright Dion Boucicault who was to advise the young dramatist on the structure of Vera; 4 or John Pentland Mahaffy, his tutor at Trinity and author of the book The Art of Conversation, anticipating »The Decay of Lying«. 5 »Oscar was«, as Coakley remarks, »a mature student at [Magdalen College] Oxford. From early childhood he would have mixed with highly intellectual and cultured individuals and he was no stranger to aristocratic company« (p. 47). Amongst all this name-dropping he only in passing alludes to »the harsh realities of life outside [the gardens of Merrion Square] and in particular [...] the dreadful slums which were situated directly behind the elegant square« (p. 42). Indeed, one would have wanted to know what Wilde, future author of the unsocialist The Soul of Man under Socialism, 6 knew about those »harsh realities«. The worst that can be said about his family is that they »affected a disdain for trade« and had, perhaps, »some ›respectable‹ skeletons hidden in the cupboards of Merrion Square« (p. 48).

William Wilde’s
Life and Research

Peter Froggart gives a detailed account of Sir William Wilde (1815–1876) and his work on the Irish census, »that monumental labour of love« (p. 52). One might doubt if it really was a »labour of love« or rather a deeper concern about the »great convulsions which society of all grades here has lately experienced« (this from William Wilde’s 1852 Irish Popular Superstitions). In addition, Froggatt quotes from an unpublished letter: »I gave up all society and recreation for eighteen months and more than once impaired my health by the incessant daily and nightly labour devoted to this voluminous work« (p. 63). After receiving his licence from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1837, Wilde had accompanied a wealthy Glaswegian on a cruise to Madeira, written a travel book, studied at hospitals in London and Vienna, composed a biographical memoir of Sir Thomas Molyneux; after that he got the job of analysing the causes of not less than 1,187,374 deaths since the last Irish census of 1831. After being appointed Assistant Commissioner for the 1851 census, further statistical reports on disease causation were to follow.

All this must have been »a Herculean effort«, as Froggatt says, »ten foolscap volumes totalling 4,533 pages [...] three of these volumes [...] written solely by Wilde« (p. 58). His family study of deaf-dumbness in depth, making use of the pioneer methodology of »the double trawl« was, as Froggatt remarks, »hard-nosed research« (p. 59), so that one might call William Wilde, with respect to his systematisation, fact-gathering, ordering, analysis and deduction, »quasi-Benthamite« (p. 61).

But William Wilde was also, according to Froggatt, a medical historian, although an amateur one, collecting facts »bordering on mania« (p. 61), convinced of the Irishman’s »just right to glow with honest pride«, as he said in 1846 of the island’s monuments and history. Thus he was interested in the ancient Irish tribes, primitive medicines, relics, superstitions and arcana, writing essays like the one about the »Introduction and the Time of the General Use of the Potato in Ireland and its various Failures since that Period, with some Notice of the Substance called Bog Butter« (1856) or »On the Ancient and Modern Races of Oxen in Ireland« (1858). And in addition there is the more than 300 pages long catalogue of »pestilences, cosmical phenomena, epizootics and famines« (p. 63) in Ireland from pre-history to the present day, a part of the 1851 census.

We might wonder about this peculiar mixture of genuine research and »exuberant enthusiasm« that »represents a boundless sweep through the Irish experience« (p. 64). In the end, his ten-year intimate relationship with a patient, Mary Josephine Travers, and the accusation of »Wilde as a promiscuous voluptuary who took advantage of his professional position to satisfy his lusts« (p. 65) resulted in his withdrawal from Dublin activities. He might well be called a virtuoso in the seventeenth-century sense, although Froggatt’s quotation from Shelley’s sonnet on Ozymandias – »look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair« (p. 67) seems a bit out of place.

Oscar’s Father,
the Archaeologist

It is only in Michael Ryan’s essay that, although only in a footnote, we learn something about the impact of the cultural milieu on Oscar Wilde himself who had applied for an archaeological studentship at Oxford in 1879, being, as he remarked, accustomed to his father’s »visiting and reporting on ancient sites, taking rubbings and measurements and all the technique of open air archaeologica« (see p. 69, n. 2). As we know from De Profundis, his mother and his father »had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured not merely in Literature, Art, Archaeology and Science, but in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation« (p. 69).

It is William Wilde’s work in folklore and folklife that Ryan is devoted to, beginning with the early experiences in Roscommon, the mixture of patriotism and indignation at the suffering of the people, the acquaintance with Father Prendergast, the voyage with Robert Meiklam to the Mediterranean and the study of dolphins, the vaults of mummified ibis at Saqqara, of burial grounds in Jerusalem, the investigation of a site near Dunshaughlin, Co. Meath, and the interest in legendary material, culminating in his catalogue of Irish antiquities, organising the collection of the Royal Irish Academy. The archaeological assumptions underlying the Catalogue have been a matter of debate, as Wilde tried to reconcile the theoretical evidence with his belief in the historicity of legendary accounts: »[...] he found it hard to shake off a mindset formed when he first became exposed to Irish historical scholarship in the 1840s – a mindset reinforced by his innate romanticism« (p. 80).

Essays on
Oscar Wilde Proper

The problem with the first part of the book is that the readers learn much about mid-nineteenth century Dublin culture. But what exactly was the parent’s legacy to Oscar? We don’t hear much about that. The second part of the book is devoted to »Oscar Wilde« proper. Robert Dunbar is looking into the question of the fairy tales’ intended readership, Irish or English, children or adults, the impact of the translations of Grimm and of Andersen, of Frances Browne, John Ruskin, W. M. Thackeray and especially of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863). As Dunbar remarks, Wilde’s stories share with Kingsley’s »a humane concern with the evils of the underbelly of Victorian complacency and self-content« (p. 91).

In addition, there seem to be, in Wilde’s fairy tales, echoes of George MacDonald (1824–1905). 7 I have already mentioned Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy who had been asked to adapt Wilde’s fairy tales to a young audience, the problem being to engage »the concentration of the Playstation generation for an hour and half« (p. 96). What the producers chose was a theatrical form of storytelling, non-naturalistic settings, and the framing device of »a play about a group of animals, stranded in the forest during a blizzard« (p. 97). The Star-Child was produced by Storytellers Theatre in Dublin in December 2000, later on touring Ireland.

Underlying the panel discussion was the question of Oscar’s literary survival. To Marina Carr, herself a well-known younger Irish dramatist, Wilde was a playwright of many masks and faces who made »out of his life a work of art« (p. 102). Thomas Kilroy sees in Wilde’s plays »[t]hat particular disjunction between the action and word [that] haunts the twentieth century and its literature«, especially Beckett (p. 103). Wilde, however, stayed within the formula of his day, the already exhausted popular form of comedy, as Patrick Mason remarks. Wilde »took this exhausted, dying form by the scruff off its neck and invested it with not only his own concerns, but with his own personality« (p. 104).

Oscar Wilde
and the Sodomy Problem

Lucy McDiarmid looks at Oscar Wilde’s speech from the dock, an (Irish) genre marked by intertextuality that is evident from T. D., A. M., and D. B. Sullivan’s Speeches from the Dock, or Protests of Irish Patriotism (1867). The patriotic rebel paradigm, however, cannot be applied to Wilde whose speech lacked such undertones. He rather belongs, as McDiarmid says, to a group of »oppositional celebrities« like Lord Byron, Wilfrid Blunt or T. E. Lawrence, the origin being Milton’s Satan. The biographical connections McDiarmid points out seem to be, to my mind at least, irrelevant: Byron’s admiration of Milton’s Satan, Blunt as an admirer of Byron, married to his granddaughter, Lady Anne Noel, Wilde as a reviewer of Blunt’s prison poems and a member of Blunt’s »Crabbet Club«, Lawrence’s friendship with Blunt and so on. But the oppositional celebrities' paradigm is far from being a paradigm, as the author herself remarks. Thus, the concept seems to be overstrained, not to say superficial, from a historical point of view. On the other hand, what McDiarmid has to say about the attitude of Wilde’s mother and her attendance of the Charles Gavan Duffy treason trial of 1848, is of more importance.

Nevertheless, there was no intertextual tradition of homosexual speeches from the dock in Ireland. Wilde had to improvise, although there seem to be some connections with Wilde’s speech at Blunt’s »Crabbet Club« in 1891 and some further remarks in The Picture of Dorian Gray that distinguish between homosexual and »noble and intellectual« love. It is only with The Ballad of Reading Gaol that McDiarmid detects a »transformation of the male community of the speeches from the dock [...] into a potentially political group« (p. 133).

The last contribution is Alan Sinfield’s, author of The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (1994), here looking at »Oscar Wilde« as a twentieth century cultural icon. He somewhat misleadingly bases his arguments on the supposed continuity between the original theological formula for sodomy (»amongst Christians not to be named«) and Lord Alfred Douglas’s line about the love that dare not speak its name. It is true that the standard form of indictment may be found as far back as in Sir Edward Coke’s The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, Or, a Commentary upon Littleton: »a crime not fit to be named; peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum«. 8 But this does not mean that ›sodomy‹ in the meantime became »a term for something which had been hardly named hitherto« (p. 136). In eighteenth-century trial accounts or in the Newgate Calendars sodomy is called an »unnatural crime«, but these reports neither remove the term ›sodomy‹ from their title-pages nor are they ashamed of giving rather savoury descriptions of what was going on during sexual encounters between males. 9

Even Blackstone comments on sodomy in Of Public Wrongs, volume four of his Commentaries. After discoursing upon rape which he calls a »most detestable crime, and therefore ought severely and impartially to be punished with death«, he mentions sodomy as another case of »a still deeper malignity« that »ought to be strictly and impartially proved, and then as strictly and impartially punished«. Blackstone’s emphasis is obviously on the problem of proof, although he then adds a section in which he points out that the law against sodomy is »not merely a provincial [...] precept«, but a universal one. 10 It is true, however, that the nineteenth century became a bit squeamish, as might be seen in a broadsheet on the Life, conduct, and execution, of Samuel Wright, Who suffered this day, at Ipswich, Saturday, April 17, 1830, for a crime, the infamy of which wants a name! 11 But I wonder if Sinfield does not exaggerate when he assumes that »people such as W. B. Yeats and Frank Harris didn’t believe the charges [...] they didn’t recognise Wilde as a homosexual because they didn’t know what that unnamed creature looked like. They didn’t know, as we do, that he looked like Oscar Wilde« (p. 137). They certainly did.

We have to bear in mind that the 1828 »Offences Against the Person« bill no longer defined sodomy as a capital offence but as a normative transgression, and in 1861 sodomy was altogether removed from the list of capital crimes. 12 The legal injunction under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 went further than that: the indictment »shifted the locus of culpability from a particular kind of act to a particular type of actor«. 13 It is this kind of »actor«, from now on identified above all with Wilde, that Sinfield is concerned with. He is quoting numerous remarks by Beverley Nichols and Robert Roberts, Flora Thompson and T. E. Lawrence, John Betjeman and Paul Bailey. One of the striking things is, according to Sinfield, »that queerness is supposed to be unspeakable, almost unknowable« (p. 140), although the Wildean image was influential among gay men. Queerness of this sort seems to have been an English, not an Irish phenomenon, according to Terry Eagleton’s play Saint Oscar: »There are no buggers in Ireland; the Church would not allow it. [...] To try a man in this country from homosexuality is as illogical as trying him for foxhunting« (p. 144).

As a matter of fact, in The Importance of Being Oscar (1960), a play by the Londoner Alfred Willmore, who afterwards moved to Ireland, renaming himself Micheál MacLiammóir, there is a »strong sense of the terror that has lurked around his [Wilde’s] name« (p. 148). But the play assumes that the Irish audience would know about Wilde’s passion: »The Wildean queer, as MacLiammóir found in his own life, may be at home in Dublin« (p. 151). And one might point to other Irish literary texts, such as Michael Harding’s award-winning play Sour Grapes (1997), exploring homosexuality. Sinfield’s message is:

[...] if the Wildean model of the queer man is a rightful part of Irish inheritance, that does not mean that this is what Irish gays must be like. To the contrary, as in England, the Wildean legacy is there to be recovered, contested and negotiated. It is a tool for thinking with, not an identity to be adopted. (p. 151) 14

›Speranza‹ Wilde:
A Model for Woman Poets in the Present?

We should not forget that the editor of this book, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, in her contribution looks at »Speranza, an Ancestor for a Woman Poet in 2000«. It is well known that Ní Chulleanáin is familiar with the Irish-Gaelic heritage as well as with the European culture, as her six volumes of poetry testify. According to P. B. Haberstroh she is degendering the hero, challenging »traditional concepts of heroism«, demonstrating »the value of simple actions and the human scale. While her numerous images of water, travellers, and pilgrims reminds us of the deepest human fears and needs, images also catalogue the importance of the ordinary and the domestic [as] new metaphors for human experiences and emotions.« 15 Ní Chuilleanáin’s essay traces her own return to Speranza as a person and the »lesson, that it is possible to have a warm and generous character and look after and remain close to one’s children while holding on to the egotism that makes one a writer. It’s both as a person and as the kind of writer she is that she functions as exemplar and ancestor« (p. 20). Above all, Speranza should make us aware, as Ní Chuilleannáin says, of »how poetry in our day may be effective as political persuasion and remain credible as poetry, as was possible in the era of Dryden or of Shelley« (p. 20).

No wonder that her account of the present political situation of the mid-century made her take over the role of the prophet in the figure of the biblical Miriam from the Book of Exodus and an apocalyptic, almost Blakean tone. Ní Chuilleanáin detects a succession of politically minded poets from Speranza to Katharine Tynan and to Eva Gore-Booth, but also a gap between the twenties and the sixties:

[...] in England and Ireland women had been, as it were, warned off writing poetry – as if indeed the pansified reputation of the poet after Oscar Wilde had made it emphatically necessary to make poetry safe for males by insisting on its macho credentials – and to challenge that exclusion seemed worth doing. (p. 27)

What she does not want is women »as the new peasantry, deprived of history and entrapped in immemorial labours« (p. 29). Speranza is for her a present-day female writer making it possible to contact a feminine past, the past of her folkloric writings and the whole of the Irish tradition and its political and aesthetic meanings. »I hope we can continue to learn from her wiliness« (p. 34). But this will certainly be restricted to Ireland and Irish poetry.

On the whole, The Wilde Legacy is a stimulating book; the essays share the concern with the whole Wildean past, although they cover quite heterogeneous topics. By the way, it is a pity, that Thomas Kilroy’s sequel to his The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, My Scandalous Life, commissioned by the symposium and produced for the symposium at the Abbey Theatre, is only mentioned in the introduction. One would like to have read more about this play, and about the reasons why playwright Moises Kaufman, author of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), Tom Stoppard, author of The Invention of Love (1997), and even David Hare, author of The Judas Kiss (1998), though invited, did not attend this conference.

Prof. Dr. Uwe Böker
Technische Universität Dresden
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Zeunerstraße 1c
DE - 01062 Dresden

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Uwe Böker: Putting Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde Back on the Irish Map. (Rezension über: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Hg.): The Wilde Legacy. Dublin: Four Courts Press 2003.)
In: IASLonline [09.12.2004]
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