Wilde: Diverse Traditions of Popular Culture

ELT 41: 1 1998 a detailed, textually-based argument about the link between Hardy's novels and the "new fiction" of women writers. In 1984, Kaja Silverman offered an equally detailed, challenging article about the coercive, masculine gaze of Hardy's narrators. More recently, Margaret Higonnet 's 1996 collection of essays, The Sense of Sex, paid tribute to the intricacy of Hardy's writing in thirteen diverse essays that explore how literature transforms and is informed by medical, scientific, class- and gender- based discourses operating in the nineteenth century. Within Pettit's volume, the critics tend to present Hardy's writing as admirable, rather than as complex, a preference that occasionally compromises argument. For example, the single study of gender and class, Morgan's article comparing Thomas Hardy with Toni Morrison, highlights multiple, transgressive examples of homoeroticism in Hardy's texts; but, disturbingly, Morgan's examination of this challenging topic recurrently slides from analysis into speculation: Given a shift in time, space and ethnicity, I think the Hannah Peaces of Morrison's world could find their way into Hardy's without much trouble.... [homoerotic passion] remains a latent, undeveloped, marginalized aspect of woman's experience not, I think, because he [Hardy] would willingly marginalise it but because he would more willingly represent it truthfully—as women would, in actuality, have experienced it: barely recognisable even to themselves, unrealisable even to themselves. This act of removing Hardy from his historical context strips his literature of much of its significance: his subversive texts arise out of particular , social conditions and discursive struggles, and the final product depends as well on literary conventions distinct from lived experience. The Pettit volume does not advance Hardy studies, but it does accent an aspect of literature often trivialized within the academy: the profound impact fiction may have on contemporary and later generations. The collected essays attest to the powerful role Hardy's writing still plays in individual lives. Grace Kehler The University of Western Ontario Wilde: Diverse Traditions of Popular Culture John Stokes. Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xiv + 216 pp. $49.50 JOHN STOKES'S THESIS is subtle, not so much argued as embedded in the research as a matter of faith: that Wilde is able to be all things to all people—Irish Republican and friend to English aristocracy; 80 BOOK REVIEWS socialist Oxonian and boulevardier; effeminate and feminist; Constance 's husband, Vyvyan's father, and Bosie's lover—because of his humanity: "because all lives involve love, fidelity, betrayal." Something like a common voice of humanity in the form of popular culture or intertextuality keeps Wilde's myth alive: the rich bedrock of farce that produced The Importance of Being Earnest, the bottomless pile of Gothic stories that supports Dorian Gray, the powerful tradition of prison protest that validates The Ballad of Reading Gaol, or the vestigial echoes of criptures to be heard everywhere in his work. On Stokes's last pages, this rich popular culture, embedded in Wilde's works and embodied in the man, is "necessarily multicultural," producing not only "bisexual drama in which 'bisexuality' is not just a universal sexual condition (though it is, of course, exactly that)" but also the 1989 all-Back Talawa Theatre Company's The Importance of Being Earnest at the Bloomsbury Theatre, a production acutely conscious of its blackness. Stokes believes that in the wealth of popular culture that we associate with Wilde—the derivative dramas, the banal truisms out of which he carved his witticisms , and all the rest—shines a collective Unconscious, "those ideal modes of collective living that always lie just beyond us, and even now can only be glimpsed on stage." Now as literary criticism goes, this seems a surprisingly new thesis: that humanism and "The Human" need not represent the transcendent abstraction so targeted by theory of the last quarter century, but rather the multiple and diverse traditions of popular culture. Yet while new in our critical climate, it's a new view that recalls that of Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929), when she wrote that masterpieces were not single births but the outcome of years of thinking in...