Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland

2. Nationalising Wilde: 1900–1928

How far and in what ways the dissemination of the Wildean queer images might apply to Ireland needs a lot more investigation. (Alan Sinfield)1 The years after Wilde’s death in 1900 and up to the foundation and consolidation of the new Irish state in the late 1920s constituted a period of intense debate over political self-definition in Ireland, as outlined, for example, by Lucy McDiarmid in her study The Irish Art of Controversy.2 I argue in this chapter that Wilde’s reputation and the contestation of his racial and sexual identity became part of this larger debate, this moment of national remaking, and I examine the ways in which he became nationalised as Wilde the Irish rebel. R.F. Foster writes that, The Boer War at the beginning of the century focused much moderate Irish opinion into an anti-imperial mould and provided a mobilising ‘cause’ against the government; the European War of 1914–18 altered the condition of Irish politics beyond recognition. The radicalisation of Irish politics (and to a certain extent, of Irish society) took place between these two events and largely because of them.3 Wilde’s posthumous reputation was implicated in this radicalisation, to his benefit. In England after the trials, as Alan Sinfield notes, Wilde’s name had become forbidden and silenced, and yet, somehow, he was made even more visible by virtue of being silenced. On perceptions of Wilde’s sexuality in retrospect, Sinfield observes: ‘The Wilde Trial had done its work’, Carpenter wrote, ‘and silence must henceforth reign on sex-subjects’. However, it was a Wildeshaped silence. The Echo wrote: ‘The best thing for everybody now is to forget all about Oscar Wilde, his perpetual posings, his aesthetical teachings and his theatrical productions. Let him go into silence, and be heard of no more.’ But of course, this very injunction is reproducing Wilde.4 In Ireland in the years after his death, as I will show, Wilde was far from invisible, with productions of his plays in mainstream theatres, reviews of 17 2. Nationalising Wilde: 1900–1928 his writings and mentions in the national newspapers, as well as in interviews and memoirs. Most striking was the way in which Wilde was commandeered by fellow Anglo-Irish writers to become part of a particular tradition of Irish nationalist discourse. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Wilde was ‘nationalised’ (a phrase from Margot Norris)5 , that is, claimed as a figure of transgressive aesthetic empowerment by Yeats, Joyce, Shaw and other Anglo-Irish writers central to debates about Irish cultural nationalism in this period. My argument in this chapter is that Wilde came to be read by subsequent Irish writers as heroic in his disruptive ‘sinfulness’, a figure of anti-colonial resistance; and this reconstruction in some ways mitigated his aberrant homosexuality for those writers and indeed for their society. This process of nationalisation derived partly from James Joyce, writing in 1909 in Trieste to celebrate the poet of Salome as the prophet of sin, and partly from the accounts of Shaw and Yeats casting Wilde as the tragic hero. Wilde became a figure of profound emblematic and aesthetic empowerment for both Joyce and Yeats and thus was a powerful shadow for the two most influential Irish writers of the twentieth century. Wilde’s contemporary , Shaw, cited his Anglo-Irish pride as a key support for his heroic stance, and, when The Importance of Being Earnest was staged in the Abbey Theatre in 1926, Lady Augusta Gregory reflected in her journals on Wilde’s poetry and on his tragic stature. His Protestant Anglo-Irish identity became an important protection for his homosexuality, as it was intertwined in these accounts with his mother’s status as a nationalist poet. Common to many of these accounts of Oscar the Irish rebel is a need to situate his homosexuality within discourses of Anglo-Irish feudal pride, and Speranza, Lady Wilde, is seen as central to any account of Oscar the rebel. Indeed, throughout this book, I will examine the ways in which Irish writers portray not only Wilde himself but also central figures in Wilde’s life, like Speranza, Bosie, his wife Constance, and suggest that, as Ireland changes, so do representations of Wilde and of those closest to him. The whole saga of his upbringing, his marriage and his homosexuality is reinterpreted in light of the political and cultural position of Irish biographers and commentators...