The Importance of Being Earnest

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Intentions and "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" intelligently. But he does not pause, for instance, over the question of whether the concepts of individualism central to both "The Critic as Artist" and "Soul" are really the same concept, and this may be a sign of not attending fully to the precise development Wilde gives his central ideas in his various works. In his closing chapter on Wilde's achievement, Raby notes that one mark of Wilde's stature is that he was a "herald of the modern tradition" (147). My sense is that Wilde is about to be established as a herald of the postmodern tradition. And on Wilde's own principle that "to be premature is to be perfect," this new work may further enhance his stature. But there is also the danger that since Wilde anticipates contemporary theory in some respects, his work will be reduced to illustrations of current dogma. Because his work is elusive, it offers only weak resistance to such treatment. Raby does not mention this impending re-evaluation of Wilde, and the signs of it apparent before he completed his study would have been faint. What Raby does do, as I have said, is to act as a discriminating companion for a reader, and surely that is the most important service to perform for the book's intended audience. Bruce Bashford State University of New York at Stony Brook THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Harold Bloom, ed. Oscar Wilde's 'The Importance of Being Earnest'. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. $19.95 THIS VOLUME in the Modern Critical Interpretations series is the second book of criticism on Oscar Wilde that Harold Bloom has edited lately. Its predecessor, Oscar Wilde (1985), presented some admirable but mostly familiar studies along with a lamentably brief introduction by Bloom himself. It may seem perverse to want more work from a critic already engaged in editing several series of books whose numbers must be measured by now in the hundreds (or is it thousands?), but I still wish that Bloom would work out more completely the fascinating and, in my opinion, extremely important comments on Wilde with which he launched The Anxiety of Influence. This volume does not fulfill that wish. Happily, though, it provides a better idea than its predecessor in the Modern Critical Views series of what has occurred in Wilde studies recently. And in comparison with Bloom's 1985 book of Wilde criticism, this new selection of studies on The 338 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Importance of Being Earnest gives us more of Bloom himself—about ten introductory pages. This is good news, even if it is not quite the Harold Bloom one expected. Without precisely saying so, the introductory essay acknowledges Wilde as a critic who practices the "strong misreading" that is Bloom's own trademark. It is perhaps from this perspective that Wilde's proclamation in The Decay of Lying that there is "no such country" as Japan, and "no such people" as the Japanese, appeals to Bloom as one of the great epiphanies in the history of criticism and an early instance of the turn of mind that would enable the creation of Canon Chasuble, Miss Prism, and Lady Bracknell. Yet none of the characters in The Importance of Being Earnest, according to Bloom, "is in any way at all original"—even though the root meaning of earnest is "to originate or set in motion." Bloom gives himself little space to elaborate on this provocative (and I believe profoundly true) claim. A passing attempt to link the speech of Lady Bracknell to Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson is intriguing, but leaves us at the threshold of whatever Bloom might yet have to say on Wilde in relation to "influence " in the unique sense with which he deploys that term. If Wilde experienced an anxiety of influence in writing The Importance of Being Earnest, then apparently, for Bloom, the dramatist met and quelled his precursor. But who was the precursor? What was the nature of the struggle, and by what stratagem was Wilde's victory achieved? Bloom's introductory essay leads not to any real answer...