Abstract
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.
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Notes
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.
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.
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.
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).
Quoted in Robert D. Pepper, ed., Oscar Wilde, ‘Irish Poets and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century’. A Lecture delivered in Piatt’s Hall, San Francisco on Wednesday, April Fifth, 1882 (San Francisco: Book Club of California Press, 1972), 32.
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.
Horace Wyndham, Appendix I, Speranza: a Biography of Lady Wilde (London: T. V. Boardman, 1951), 197–204.
Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant, introd. Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 95.
For a powerful study of the Young Irelanders, see David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: fames Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (London; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: the Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House and Country House, 1994), 9.
Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza (Dublin: James Duffy, 1864), 4.
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.
See Terence De Vere White, The Parents of Oscar Wilde: Sir William and Lady Wilde (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967), 108–9.
Brian De Breffny, ‘The Paternal Ancestry of Oscar Wilde’, The Irish Ancestor 5: 2 (1973), 96–100.
Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1972), 11, 38.
Sir William Wilde, Memoir of Gabriel Beranger (London: Bentley, 1880), 141.
Sir William Wilde, The Census of Ireland for the Year 1852 (Dublin, 1856), vol. 1, 57.
Douglas Hyde, ed., Beside the Fire: Irish Folk Tales (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1978), xix.
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.
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.
Seamus Deane, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day, 1991), vol. 2, 721.
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.
Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), 325.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Penguin, 1998), 40.
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).
Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), 1.
Jerusha McCormack, ‘Introduction: the Irish Wilde’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–5 (1).
Jerusha McCormack, ‘Wilde’s fiction(s)’, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96–115 (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, 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.
L. C. P. Fox, ‘People I Have Met’, Donahoe’s Magazine 53: 4 (1905), 397.
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.
Lord Ronald Sutherland-Gower, My Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), vol. 2, 134.
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).
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.
See Liam Brophy, ‘An Immortal Dandy’, The Divine Word (1954), 6–8. See also Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (London: HarperCollins, 2000).
Sir Shane Leslie, ‘Oscar Wilde and Catholicism’, The Month 8: 4 (October 1962), 234–7 (236).
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.
Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 155.
David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 148.
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).
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).
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transi. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
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 anti-Semitism 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.
Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, incl. My Memories of Oscar Wilde, by George Bernard Shaw. Introd. Lyle Blair(New York: Dorset Press, 1989), 31.
Ian Small, Oscar Wilde: Recent Research: a Supplement to ‘Oscar Wilde Revalued’ (Greensboro, North Carolina: ELT Press, 2000), 12.
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).
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).
David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 2.
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© 2005 Jarlath Killeen
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Killeen, J. (2005). Introduction. In: The Faiths of Oscar Wilde. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503557_1
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