The Irish & Pictorial Wilde

BOOK REVIEWS The Irish & Pictorial Wilde Jerusha McCormack, ed. Wilde the Irishman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xvi + 205 pp. $30.00 Merlin Holland. The Wilde Album. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. 192 pp. Cloth $19.95 JERUSHA MCCORMACK (born in the USA, now teaching at University College, Dublin) remarks in her preface that Ireland, even after living there for twenty-five years, has eluded her "in so many directions —historical, cultural, even linguistic—that I decided that this was a project I would have to undertake with others : not academic colleagues only, but those creative spirits who are, at this present time, redefining what it means to be Irish." In her introductory essay, McCormack poses a question, the answer to which is clearly predictable: "Was Wilde Irish or British? The true answer is, he was both___" The contributors to McCormack 's volume attempt to develop a redefinition of Wilde by providing an Irish context for him, previously provided by Davis Coakley in Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (1995) and Richard Pine in The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (1995), both of whom McCormack cites. In her introduction, McCormack remarks that Wilde "redefined what it means to be Irish. What Wilde's life demonstrates is that to be Irish is to have multiple, and divided loyalties: to be both colonizer and colonized , native and official, within the Pale and beyond it... to inhabit a space where contraries meet. . . ." But "divided loyalties" are not, of course, qualities unique to the Irish; they are often universal human conditions. As a contributor to her own volume in an essay titled "Oscar as Aesthete and Anarchist," McCormack focuses on "The Soul of Man under Socialism," which, she writes, "is one of the only Wilde essays that is usually read 'straight,' as sincere and from the heart," but she also warns that "mischief is afoot" because Wilde is not advocating socialism but "pure anarchy." But anarchy clearly differs from anarchism, the latter a political theory that replaces formal government with cooperative social organizations, as opposed to mere social chaos within the state. "The Soul of Man," Wilde's most challenging essay, deconstructs itself by its internal contradictions: his intent, clearly, is to elevate individualism to a philosophical principle. The artist (the central figure of the essay ) can best achieve individualism in an anarchist state, for one is released from the external demands of government and particularly of 77 ELT 42 : 1 1999 the "People," whose authority is "a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People." The remainder of McCormack's essay is a discussion of Wilde's plays, which do not seem to follow logically from the discussion of "The Soul of Man." McCormack's sixteen contributors include such well-known writers as DecÃ-an Kiberd (in an essay previously published), Owen Dudley Edwards , Bernard O'Donoghue, and Seamus Heaney. Frequently, they emphasize Wilde's attitudes towards his fellow Irishmen as well as his views of England's long history of domination. Kiberd alludes to Yeats's view of Wilde's "snobbery" as "the clever strategy of an Irishman marooned in London whose only weapon against Anglo-Saxon prejudice was to become more English than the English themselves, thereby challenging many time-honoured myths about the Irish." Such a "gamble," writes Kiberd, could result in a "suppression of personality," but in rejecting the "stage-Irish mask," Wilde enabled himself to attain selfhood; as an "urbane Englishman," however, he seems to have "exchanged one mask for another," thereby giving rise to the suspicion that there was "no face at all" behind the masks. Kiberd turns to Victorian "gender-antitheses," as in Jack Worthing's speech in The Importance of Being Earnest: "Why should there be one law for men, and another for women?" Kiberd asserts that, in the play, "it is the women who are businesslike in making shrewd calculations about the attractions of a proposed marriage, while it is the men who are sentimental , breathless and impractical." But Gwendolen and Cecily dream of marrying someone named "Ernest," whereas Jack and Algy arrange to be baptized...