Like many an Irish emigré washed up on the shores of England, Wilde
set about the business of becoming more English than the English, a project
he shared with Joseph Conrad, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, V. S. Naipaul
and a good many other luminaries of modern English literature. Most of
which, of course, was written by Americans, Irishmen, Indians and the
like. The Irish didnt only have to supply Britain with its cattle
and grain; they also had to write much of its literature for it. From
Goldsmith and Sheridan to Wilde and Shaw, the London stage is dominated
by these literary blow-ins and carpet-baggers, who landed on their uppers
in the English metropolis with little to hawk but their wits. All of these
men practised that most native of all Irish customs, getting out of the
place. At once in and out of English soceity, they could msater is conventions
while at the same time turning a subversive satirical eye upon them. They
could appreciate at once how farcically arbitrary such conventions were
to those within them - and this tension between anture and artifice is
the very stuff of comedy. Wilde whouls ho w the natives that he could
handle their conventions even more dexterous than they could themselves,
like the circus clown who cheekily nips off with the suitcase the s trong
man has been struggling to lift. But wehterh this was flattery or mockery,
parody or conformity, was never easy to say, least of all perrhaps for
Oscar himself. Or perhaps, as he himself would say, imitation is the sincerest
form of mockery. Even so, theres always the danger that ones
imitations will be too perfect - that one will be too meticulously, too
fastidiously the real thing, and so betray the fact that one actually
isnt. So though the Irish wit in England is allowed to play the clown,
from Oliver Goldsmith to Brendan Behan, this licensed jester must ultimately
know his place. He mustnt get his hands, however well-manicured,
on sons of the aristocracy, whose destiny is to marry and reproduce their
line, and, if he does, as Bernard Shaw knew very well, the English have
long experience in how to take care of such rotters, cads and bounders.
Wildes ambivalences werent just his own. He was born into
that most schizoid of social classes, the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy,
and like Yeats, tended to feel English in Ireland and Irish in Engliash.
The Anglo-Irish endured a kind of internal exile, at once natives and
aliens, rules and victims, both central and marginal to Irish life. If
they were formidably self-assured, they could also feel fearfully defensvie
and besieged, and Wilde, the patrician who himself [3] became persecuted,
reflects something of this ambiguity.
[
]
A similar duality haunts
the career of Wildes great compatriot and contemporary, Charles
Stewart Parnell, another Anglo-Irishman brought low by a combination of
sexual misdemeanours and a spiteful British Establishment.
Remarks
Eagleton quotes Wilde on The Happy Prince: I like to fancy
that there may be many meanings in the Tale
- for in writing it [...] I did not start with the idea and clothe it
in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough
to have many secrets and many answers. (Letter to Thos. Hutchinson,
7 May 1888; Hart-Davis, Letters, p.218; quoted in Angela Kingston,
Homeroticism and the Child in Wildes Fairy Tales, in The Wildean, July 2001, p.44.)
OW: [The stories] are studies in prose, put for Romances sake
into a fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those
who have ept the child-like faculty of wonder and joy, and who find in
simplicity a subtle strangeness. (Letter to G. H. Kersely,
15 June, 1888; Hart-Davies, op. cit., p.219; quoted in Kingston as epigraph, p.43.)
Note that
Eagleton contradicts the suggestion that there was any hint of pedophilia
in Wildes sexuality. |