Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland (review)

By producing the only full-length study of Oscar Wilde in the Irish context, Eibhear Walshe has filled a significant gap in both Wilde scholarship and turn-of-the-century British studies more generally. Created by the tendency of Victorianists and modernists to focus exclusively either on Ireland or on the rest of the United Kingdom, this de facto division has placed individuals and movements that in their own time participated in networks of publication and influence extending throughout (and beyond) the British archipelago in an artificially narrow geo-political context. As a result, Wilde has until recently been viewed within the narrow context of metropolitan London, just as W. B. Yeats and George Moore, for instance, have tended to be fixed in Dublin.

Lamenting this gap between Irish and British studies is not to deny the value of the reclamation of Irish authors that has been perhaps the most influential trend in Irish studies over the past several decades as it has repatriated a range of figures from Burke, Swift, and Sheridan to Stoker, Bowen, and Beckett. But because Wilde’s trials and punishment have been so central to work in British cultural history, even as the Irish have generally been less eager to reclaim Wilde than, say, James Joyce, Walshe’s study both participates in Wilde’s Irish repatriation and promotes a broader understanding of Wilde’s life, work, and after-life that can only be grasped within a transnational framework.

As always, Walshe’s writing itself is a pleasure, and this new work offers a wealth of original research attending to what Walshe contends is the important “unfinished business” between Wilde and Ireland. The book’s chronological narrative is extremely helpful, keeping the reader continually abreast of changes in Irish society, literary and representational conventions, and critical approaches to Wilde and his literature. Both Irish studies and Wilde studies will benefit greatly from having all this material not only available in one place but assembled into a continuous narrative in which the significance of certain repeated patterns and distinctive shifts become newly visible.

The uneven and ambivalent history of Wilde’s repatriation mapped by Walshe stands in fascinating contrast to that of other similarly exiled and purloined Irish cultural figures over the second half of the twentieth century, including such other icons of gay history as Roger Casement, who was literally repatriated when his remains were reinterred in Ireland. Although Wilde’s figure has been subject to these larger dynamics, Walshe makes clear that Wilde stirred up even greater ambivalence than Casement, since anxiety concerning Casement’s sexuality was dispersed by raging debates concerning the authenticity of his diaries. Wilde, owing to the accident of history that made his name virtually synonymous with homosexuality, proved more difficult for even the most determined patriot to separate from his sexuality, even if many Irish writers and commentators have expended considerable ingenuity attempting to do so.

One of several fascinating patterns that Walshe maps across the periods and engagements with Wilde is of shifting emphases on some of the main characters in the Wilde story—most particularly Wilde’s mother, Speranza; his wife, Constance Wilde; and, of course, his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas—in response to particular cultural agendas. Speranza, for instance, has repeatedly been used either to downplay Wilde’s sexuality by making it in some way involuntary and pathological, a deplorable sexological hypothesis revived by Terry Eagleton in the 1990s, or to accommodate Wilde to a nationalist reading by making her his nationalist mentor, commanding him to come home with his shield or on it, thereby transforming Wilde’s self-defense into an expression of nationalist defiance.

Constance Wilde emerges from these chapters as a tragic figure in her own right. When Thomas Kilroy set out to write a play about Wilde, for instance, Constance eventually emerged at the play’s center, a development that seems closely connected to the abuse accounts that at the time were beginning to flow from...