Oscar Wilde

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 In fact, for anyone seeking a complete edition of Hardy's short stories with a helpful and judicious overview to Hardy's short fiction and a guide to its particulars solidly grounded in the background facts and eminently sane in its literary judgments—all at a price these days that is very reasonable—this edition of Hardy's collected short stories with introduction by Desmond Hawkins and notes by F. B. Pinion would be the appropriate choice. Robert C. Schweik State University of New York College at Fredonia OSCAR WTLDE Peter Raby. Oscar Wilde. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Cloth $34.50 Paper $12.95 THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE SERIES British and Irish Authors: Introductory Critical Studies published by Cambridge. Raby discusses nearly all of Wilde's work in ten chapters that, with a two-page bibliography and index, add up to a 164 pages. It is a book that general readers would find accessible, and general readers do maintain a steady interest in Wilde. In the American university at least, the appropriate audience would be advanced undergraduates. The other surveys of Wilde's writings that come to mind first, Rodney Shewan's Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (1977, now out of print) and Richard EUmann's Oscar Wilde (1988), are both important studies, but neither is as readable as this book. Besides being readable, the book has two other general virtues. While Rab^s primary focus is on Wilde's texts, he supplies considerable information about the biographical, artistic, and intellectual contexts of those works. In his chapter on Wilde's lectures and essays, for instance, Raby discusses the influence on Wilde of Pater, Ruskin, Gautier, and Flaubert. Here, of course, Raby cannot match the analysis available in longer studies, but he does tell his intended reader a lot that reader probably will not know. Raby is also a discriminating practical critic. This is an especially important virtue for someone writing about Wilde because his work is so often elusive: one wonders what effect or judgment Wilde is seeking. What Raby does so well is not to dispel all our uncertainty but rather to record precisely where a careful reader may end up; thus he observes of "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," that Wilde creates "a fictional world that is demonstrably related to the social setting inhabited by his readers and yet one which apparently functions, in terms of success and happiness, on 336 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 a reversed, indeed perverse, moral system" (54). The main value of Raby's book, in my view, is to provide an articulate companion for someone reading Wilde. In Raby's preface, he states that his study "is based on a conviction that dramatic form, and the dramatic mode, are the unifying factors in [Wilde's] work" (vii). The book does reflect this conviction, and the special strengths and limitations of Raby's analyses can be traced to it. The works that yield most readily to Raby's perspective are obviously the plays, and his treatments of Salomé and The Importance of Being Earnest are excellent. It is difficult to know when Raby is going beyond the critics whose aid he acknowledges, but my guess is that in these two discussions he extends the existing commentary. He concludes his chapter on Salomé, for instance, by examining the extensive evidence we have for Charles Ricketts's conceptions of how the play should be staged. This is eminently worth doing because the very identity of this work depends on its manner of performance: "style is the essence of Salomé" (116). And in reply to Shaw's charge that Earnest is "heartless," Raby argues persuasively that the play, in fact, is concerned with the emotion of love: the emotion is felt as implicit in the comic form that Wilde both adopts and parodies (12829 ). Raby's larger claim that the dramatic mode functions to unify Wilde's work is certainly plausible, but as Raby realizes, this unity is not easily stated. There is a dramatic aspect of Wilde's conception of an artist; as Raby says, his "vocation as an artist demanded that the...