The Importance of Being Paradoxical: Maternal Presence in the Works of Oscar Wilde by Patrick M. Horan (review)

Reviews 507 provocative resource. Threaded throughout the Companion is aconsistent line of self-reflexive questioning on the meanings of its own key terms and the functions of its own canonicity. It thus makes an exemplary self-critical canonical text that not only provides "content" - which playwrights did what, when, and with what effects - but also suggests critical practice - how a companion should operate, why, and with what effects. PATRICK M. HORAN. The Importance ofBeing Paradoxical: Maternal Presence in the Works of Oscar Wi/de. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, t 997. Pp. 144· $29.50 (Hb). Reviewed by Russell Jackson, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham Patrick Horan offers a comprehensive account of the identifiable influences of Oscar Wilde's mother, the formidable Lady Wilde, on the dramatist's literary and dramatic work. "Speranza" (her pen-name as a nationalist poet) was a prolific and energetic writer and a formidable personality. The accumulation of detail in the study is impressive, but not all its applications convince. On the very first page of his introduction, Horan quotes The Importance of Being Earnest: "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his" (13). The claim that this "clearly suggests" how much the dramatist"admired his own mother" seems to attribute to Wilde a directness of personal statement not common in his writing. At times, the book's points depend too much on the long arm of supposition. For example, citing the speech in which Mrs. Erlynne urges Lady Windermere to go back to her child, whatever her husband's behaviour may have been, Horan observes, "No doubt when Wilde wrote this speech he considered his own mother who dedicated herself to keeping the Wilde household together and educating her children despite Sir William's absence and infidelity" (1012 ). Wilde may well have thought of her, but surely he also considered several other things at the same time, including the demands of a familiar melodramatic situation. The readings of Wilde's texts tend to become singleminded . The Importance of Being Earnest, we are told, "concerns a young man's quest to find his family and to affirm the importance of having a mother as well as being earnest" (106). Asked about his objectives, as if in a Stanislavskian exercise, would Algernon (or Jack) describe them this way? Would Wilde? A more sophisticated work than Horan's might tell us why neither the character's nor the author's (imagined or documented) opinions were of any consequence - but that is not the level at which the interpretation game is being played here. Horan goes on to make the perceptive observation 508 REVIEWS that Wilde "once again I...J depicts a world that is populated by concerned mothers and devoid ofcompassionate fathers" (106); but, again, the perception needs contextualization in relation to other plays and ideas of the time, rather than simply Wilde's own feelings and experiences. Although its thoroughness commends it to the student of Wilde's life and works, the simplicity of the book's method is a serious limitation. The invocation in its subtitle of "maternal presence" might imply a theory of maternal-filial relationships, grounded in psychology (if not psychoimalysis), or an engagement with Wilde's troubled sexual identity, but this is not the case: Freud does not figure in the index. One might also expect some study of the discourses of maternity and sexuality current in the 18805 and 18905, if only as exemplified in responses to Wilde's work and personality, but this also is absent. It is not a pleasurable task to indicate so many of a scholarly work's limitations, but readers need to be aware both of what is and of what is not delivered by it. Even Horan's title, The Importance of Being Paradoxical, is more striking than useful. That Lady Wilde enjoyed paradox merely places her . alongside other influences on her son's thinking. It is shown (quite reasonably) that Wilde shared many of his mother's enthusiasms, including her ideal of the poet as public figure, her views on women in society, and her interest in folk and fairy tales, and that he...