The Subversive, Revolutionary Wilde?

BOOK REVIEWS Wilde. Such a stance is consistent with Stokes's book, and it maps out an important direction of study of the fin de siècle. In the essay on the magic ball, he writes, "life imitates art because art draws on life in the first place, not life as nature, but life as culture, popular culture, so 'popular' as to be unspoken, invisible much of the time." In making the invisible visible—as in "I am one for whom the visible world exists "—Stokes is the scholar-magician. Regenia Gagnier _______________ University of Exeter The Subversive, Revolutionary Wilde? Sos Eltis. Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 226 pp. $60.00 Jody Price. "A Map with Utopia": Oscar Wilde's Theory for Social Transformation. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. 249 pp. $44.95 IN THE 1890s, as Wilde's society comedies reached the stage, reviewers focused on his obvious borrowings from French well-made plays. One hundred years later, critics frequently view Wilde's plays as "subversive"—much as Eltis now regards them—in their undermining of the dramatic conventions and the bourgeois views of the audiences. In his study, Eltis announces that he "will attempt to justify Wilde's own estimate of his plays as genuinely innovative, challenging rather than reproducing the conventions of the popular nineteenth-century dramas on which they were modelled...." If Eltis's study had appeared 50 years ago, it would have seemed more challenging, for writers on Wilde often dismissed his plays as amusing but inconsequential: hence, serious evaluations of his work were rare before Edouard Roditi's study in 1947. In Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (1990), Kerry Powell has revealed how Wilde, by transforming the exhausted theatrical devices of his day, emerged as a herald of the New Drama. In his study, Eltis seems to be catching up on recent critical views of Wilde's plays. To regard Wilde, as Eltis does, as a "political radical" and to propose that his plays have a "subversive" subtext of "revolutionary" attitudes towards morality and society raises the inevitable question: How does Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, benefit from such an approach? Despite the trenchant satire of bourgeois attitudes inEarnest, the play ends without any necessity to join a society or write a check—as Virginia Woolf once said of "incomplete" realistic novels by such figures as Wells and Bennett. Like many writers of his 83 ELT 41:1 1998 time, Wilde was, as Norbert Kohl has suggested, a "conformist rebel" so that Eltis's simplistic term revolutionary loses the exquisite sense of Kohl's oxymoron. One of Eltis's oddest remarks reveals a basic confusion concerning Wilde's view of his relationship to his audience: "Though he was forced to work within the constraints of censorship, and though financial necessity obliged him to pursue commercial success, Wilde wrote for the select few, not for the general public." The notion that it was financial necessity that obliged him to pursue commercial success obscures the point concerning Wilde's narcissistic need for acclaim. Following his remark that Wilde wrote for the "select few" rather than for the "general public," Eltis states (apparently contradicting himself): "Wilde's plays can easily be treated as primarily commercial vehicles, filled with all the tricks and clichés of the contemporary popular theatre, clever combinations of sophisticated wit for the circle and extravagant melodrama for the gallery and the pit." In his discussion of Vera; or, The Nihilists Eltis points to Wilde's "revolutionary" commitments to radical change, but, in his play, Wilde does not embrace Nihilism as a solution to oppression: melodrama is the motivating impulse rather than propaganda, and Vera's passion and suicide are, in fact, betrayals of her revolutionary ideals. Eltis has unearthed plays about Russian nihilists that may have provided Wilde with the dramatic sources for Vera, though newspapers during this period extensively covered the activities of the anarchists in their attempted (and actual) assassinations. Eltis also discusses, at some length, several Russian nihilist plays that were produced years after Vera; hence, one wonders what his strategy is...