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5. Reinventing Wilde the Irishman: 1960–2000
- Cork University Press
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The 1960s were to be a time of both radical change and apparent radical change. (Dermot Keogh)1 Ireland experienced radical economic, legal and social change during the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century and so the name of Oscar Wilde was refashioned to suggest or even invent a more inclusive sense of Irishness. In an unproblematic way, his name was gradually re-appropriated by contemporary writers and critics, and within cultural discourse as a symbol of modernity and new-found tolerance, but with many of the old stereotypes still embedded. In the wake of Micheál mac Líammóir’s normalising and popularisation of Wilde’s work, critical attention from Irish scholars led to this reclaiming of his Irishness; this was also paralleled with public interest in Wilde, in terms of lectures, summer schools, statues and exhibitions, during the 1990s and into the new century. Firstly, from the 1980s onwards, there was an increasing scholarly discussion around the Irishness of Wilde and his writings, including him within a broader tradition of reclaimed Protestant Irishmen and women like Swift, Shaw, Beckett and Bowen. This led to academic studies establishing Irish influences and patterns beneath the surface of his London society comedies and his prose. For the rest of this chapter, I want to consider the scholarly and critical versions of Wilde produced during this time of change and his altering cultural status within Irish public life, and then, in the next chapters, I will discuss the various imaginative representatives of Wilde’s life and sexuality into the twenty-first century. Later in this chapter I discuss the biographical writings of H. Montgomery Hyde, and Davis Coakley’s 1994 biographical study Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish, as well as Declan Kiberd’s 1995 Inventing Ireland, where links between Wilde’s national identity and his sexual ‘outsiderness’ were being made in a new and more direct way. During this time, Richard Pine’s 1995 The Thief of Reason stands out as the first full-length study linking Wilde’s sexuality and his Irishness. Then a collection of essays, Wilde the Irishman (1998), edited by Jerusha McCormack, extended the range of critical perspectives on Wilde’s Irishness, offering solid scholarly reflections upon the ramifications of Wilde’s racial identity and 5. Reinventing Wilde the Irishman: 1960–2000 69 70 Oscar’s Shadow suggesting his place within contemporary theories of Irish writing. However, mac Líammóir’s work took place in the face of stringent attitudes towards homosexuality and this was to continue until the early 1990s. Diarmaid Ferriter details the background in legal and political terms when he argues that ‘homosexuality was not something that was regularly discussed or acknowledged publically in the Republic in the 1960s’.2 He goes on to quote statistics to show that, between 1962 and 1972, there were 455 convictions of men for indecency with males and gross indecency, 342 of whom were over the age of 21 and would not have been prosecuted in Britain. While Wilde (like Burke, Swift, Shaw and Bowen, amongst other Irish protestant writers) was being re-appropriated as part of growing critical interest in Irish writing as post-colonial, side by side normative Irish sexual identities were also under pressure for reevaluation. J.J. Lee writes that ‘The preoccupations with sex, the virtual equation of immorality with sexual immorality, conveniently diverted attention from less remunerative tenets of Christian doctrine . . . Not until the 1970s did the idea take root, and then only precariously, that public morality could concern anything other than the sexual lives of public men.’3 This meant a gradual alteration in ideas around homosexuality and, eventually, around the idea of Wilde as both homosexual and also Irish. Wilde’s shadow was now to become a mirror, a reflection of social and legal change, and a signifier for modernisation. It is significant, I think, that all the important Irish studies, biographies and imaginative re-creations that attempt to reread and reclaim Wilde’s life come after decriminalisation of male homosexuality in June 1993. This change in the Irish law in 1993 came as the result of a twenty-year campaign for reform. The Irish Gay Rights Movement was founded in Dublin in 1974, five years after the Stonewall Riots in New York had galvanised worldwide politicisation for lesbians and gay men. The campaign for the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in Ireland (already abolished in the UK since 1967) came as part...