Wilde as Artist?

64 REVIEWS 1. Wilde as Artist? Christopher S. Nassaar, Into The Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde (New Haven & Lond: Yale UP, 1974). $9-75. Christopher Nassaar's literary exploration of Oscar Wilde is a study that ought, by right, to be welcomed by all scholars of Victorian literature. After all, Nassaar aims high. He wishes "to provide an adequate analysis of Wilde's major works and thereby lay to rest the idea that he was a literary failure" and "to provide a key by which the decadent movement may be understood." He decries available criticism on Wilde as neither perceptive nor engaging, seemingly because it is more biographical than literary. Alas, Nassaar's aim is high, but the blunderbuss is none too accurate a weapon. Certainly no one can quarrel with his choice of the major works: the fairy tales, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the plays, "The Ballad of Reading Goal," and De. Profundis. But what he does with those works will do little to establish Wilde's literary reputation (if indeed that was not long ago established). At best, as in his discussion of the fairy tales, Nassaar merely provides a summary, i.e., of "The Selfish Giant," and then forces that summary into a pre-stated pattern; the governing principle of the fairy tales is the "fall from the world of innocence and subsequent attainment of a higher innocence." At worst, he falls into the very trap decried earlier; the fairy tales, he tells us, might be read "as Wilde's attempt to assert the primacy of his family life and to reject the siren call of homosexuality." Actually , the discussion of the poetry and De. Profundis is nearly entirely biographical rather than literary. In between, Nassaar indulges himself in some puerile, pseudoFreudian psychology. The plays in particular suffer. Iokanaan in Salome becomes the unconscious spokesman for sexual impulses driven, by Christ's advent, into the dark recesses Of the mind; and Herodias, because she "exercises some restraint," emerges as the norm, a point of balance between evil and renunciation, the only character who remains alive and unharmed. The marriage of Gerald and Hester in A Woman of No Importance becomes doubly incestuous ; Gerald will have two wrves, both incestuously related to him: his mother and Hester who, by asking Mrs. A. to let her be a daughter, becomes Gerald's sister and thus his second incestuous bride. Poor Dr. Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest is like Iokanaan because both men are "continually baptizing people" and because "they are both celibates whose slips of the tongue betray deep sexual longings." 65 When he tries to provide a key to our understanding of the decadent movement, Nassaar rightly moves back in time. He sees Wilde in the Keats-Rossetti-Pater tradition, with Tennyson thrown in as well. In his analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sybil Vane represents "the art movement of Tennyson"; Basil Hallward's steady deterioration as an artist "is meant to symbolize the decline of Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism in general, and Ruskin's 'Moral Aesthetic'"; and Lord Henry Wotton's "terrible end is probably a jab at Pater, who was too timid to practice in any way what Wilde believed him to have preached." Poor Wilde. He always has deserved better than his critics have given him. Arizona State University Nicholas A. Salerno 2. Ralph Hodgson: A Beginning Wesley D. Sweetser, Ralph Hodgson: A Bibliography (Oswego, NY: Privately Printed for the Author, 1974TT Not for sale. Wesley D. Sweetser's bibliography of Ralph Hodgson - a poet described by T. S. Eliot as one around whose head finches and fairies skim in jubilant rapture - fills a small but important lacuna in ELT scholarship. Clearly, this bibliography is a labor of love, a bibliography which now requires the hand and eye of a trained bibliographer to turn it into a thoroughly useful reference book. The "Introduction" leaves something to be desired, in that Sweetser carries his own discussion of Hodgson only so far as where a memoir by Robert F. Richards picks it up. The result is that Hodgson comes off as a rather fey, entertaining character and good personal friend but...