Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives ed. by Joseph Bristow (review)

The introduction and thirteen chapters that comprise the substance of this well-edited book represent the outcome of a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored summer seminar entitled “The Wilde Archive,” held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 2007, followed by a conference under the same name held at the library in May 2009. The common title of the seminar and the conference points to the unprecedentedly rich materials in the Clark Wilde collection that served as sources of research and study for the seminarists and authors of these chapters. Their pursuit of a variety of topics has led to often fresh, sometimes deeply considered responses. There has been no attempt at a comprehensive overview of the state of Oscar Wilde studies today; after all, multi-handed studies of this kind may require upwards of half a decade to emerge. Yet it is precisely to individual essays of this sort, once they appear, that interested students look for signs of important new directions along with fresh critiques of the status quo. The seminar leader and editor of the collection, Joseph Bristow, provides an introduction explaining that we are in for a series of discoveries that are archivally oriented and yet simultaneously open-ended.

Readers may as a result perceive a certain heterogeneous character in the subjects of these essays, and yet certain common themes and topics emerge. Bristow has arranged the contributions chronologically, according to a five-part principle of descriptive organization, clarifying groups of chapters that share a similar orientation. First, there is Wilde’s early life in England and America, 1874–82 (Chris Foss on Wilde and romanticism; Elizabeth Carolyn Miller on nihilism in Vera; or, The Nihilists; and Gregory Castle on the American lecture tour); second, Wilde’s journalism (Molly Youngkin on aestheticism and The Woman’s World, and Loretta Clayton on aesthetic dress and theatrical costume); third, faith, belief, and fiction (James Campbell on sexual gnosticism and “The Portrait of Mr W.H.,” Rachel Ablow on Wilde and Newman, and Neil Hultgren on poetic injustice in Dorian Gray); fourth, Wilde and the stage (William A. Cohen on Salomé and Wilde’s French, Lois Cucullu on the modern woman’s emergent sexual identity, John Paul Riquelme on genetic criticism applied to An Ideal Husband, and Felicia J. Ruff on the complexity of stage props in The Importance of Being Earnest); and, fifth, a single essay positioned under the description “Modern Quests for Wilde”: Ellen Crowell’s reading of Christopher Millard’s mysterious involvement with A.J.A. Symons’s Quest for Corvo and Symons’s unfinished biography of Wilde.

If one were to identify a single theme underlying this ensemble of approaches, surely it would be the issue of how to read the superabundant sources that lie at hand but that set constant challenges for interpretation. Gregory Castle asks us to understand how Wilde deliberately encouraged misrecognition of his true intentions as an interpreter of cultural and literary truths; James Campbell persists in uncovering underlying gnostic meanings in Wilde’s fiction; Rachel Ablow poses the need for reading and rereading Newman and Wilde together; John Paul Riquelme calls for a genetic-critical reading of a prime manuscript of An Ideal Husband instead of a more traditional editing of the text; Felicia Ruff calls for a deeper reading of stage directions identifying cucumber sandwiches, cigarette cases, muffins, and teacakes so as to see them achieving a transformative presence in performance; and Ellen Crowell ingeniously explains how Symons’s Quest for Corvo may be read as a ghost-like quest for Oscar Wilde himself. If a second theme emerges, it is surely the nearirresistible subject of Wilde’s complex sexuality and related issues of sex and gender, presenting a sometimes daunting challenge to address.

It may be said that, in the process of pursuing a difficult argument, a few authors end up exceeding the limits of their scholarly searchlights, and some theoretical endeavours seem unnecessarily abstruse, straining the reader’s attention. Yet Wilde Discoveries ends...