The Hermeneutic Hazards of Hibernicizing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

CHASUBLE: … My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing…. I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days. The last time I delivered it was in the Cathedral, as a charity sermon on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders. The Bishop, who was present, was much struck by some of the analogies I drew.¹

IN 1954, DURING DUBLIN’S CENTENARY celebrations of Oscar Wilde’s birth, playwright Lennox Robinson stated that he “wanted to stress Wilde’s Irishness” and “emphatically claim Wilde as a great Irish writer.”² Despite Robinson’s aspiration, the critical mass for successfully repatriating Wilde “as a great Irish writer” took over three decades to gather, with the process quickening during the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, as scholars and advocates examined Wilde’s Irish ancestry, his upbringing, and those occasions (usually in letters and conversations, but sometimes in lectures, essays, and book reviews) when he explicitly commented upon Ireland and identified himself as an Irishman or Celt. For example, Davis Coakley and Owen Dudley Edwards skillfully evoked the social and intellectual environment in which Wilde grew up and highlighted almost every reference he made to Ireland.³ Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s, some scholars began to question the methodologies used to Hibernicize Wilde’s literary writings as opposed to his life. Ian Small argued that several essays in Jerusha McCormack’s edited collection Wilde the Irishman were “highly speculative and seem to strain to make connections,” so that “the ‘Irish dimension’ (for the want of a better term) seems rather gratuitously tacked on.”⁴

This article builds upon Small’s analysis, identifying methodological problems in early and recent attempts to Hibernicize Wilde’s works, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray. The goal is to contribute to what Small describes as a “useful project for future studies of Wilde”—“to reconcile the insights generated by critical theory with the attention to secure evidence associated with traditional empiricist historiography.”⁵ The methodology here is also indebted to Steven Mailloux’s concept of rhetorical hermeneutics, which argues that “the hermeneutic problem of how text and reader interact” is “ultimately inseparable” from “the rhetorical problem of how interpreters interact with other interpreters in trying to argue for or against different meanings.”⁶

Surveying Strategies of Similitude

Owen Dudley Edwards and others have explored how Wilde may have transmuted within his own literary writings Irish folk material originally assimilated from his parents.⁷ However, David Upchurch illustrates the challenges of such genetic criticism when he identifies the mysterious power that permits Dorian Gray to remain youthful while his portrait ages. First, he speculates that “the pink-flowering thorn” (mentioned in the novel’s first sentence) growing in the garden of Basil Hallward’s studio is a hawthorn.⁸ Next, he notes Lady Wilde’s claim that Irish peasants believed the hawthorn’s branches housed “the good people” or fairies.⁹ Then, he concludes that it is “the Irish fairies” who answer Dorian’s prayer: “They are the most logical supernatural force because they are interested in youth and beauty, and they travel on the winds” to London, where they dwell in the branches of “their sacred tree,” outside the studio.¹⁰ This intriguing hypothesis highlights the major challenge facing Hibernicizers of Wilde’s writings: his fictional works contain no explicitly Irish characters or settings. In fact, one of the few references to his compatriots in Wilde’s drama or fiction is Mrs. Chevely’s remark (in An Ideal Husband) that if “one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here [in London] would be quite civilised.”¹¹ One response to this absence might be to insist (by adapting Basil Hallward’s words about Dorian) that Ireland “is never more present in [Wilde’s] work than when no image of [it] is there.”¹² There may be truth...