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In this chapter, I trace Wilde’s presence within the emergent Irish state at a crucial time of a cultural programme of self-invention and nation building. Ireland had achieved political autonomy in 1922 and what was being gradually constructed in the late 1920s and into the 1930s was an official or state version of the idea of ‘Irishness’. This national identity actively supported and promoted the ideal of linguistic, economic and cultural self-sufficiency as a necessary adjunct to political independence and had a certain idealism inherited from earlier revolutionary times. It has been argued that, as a result, intellectually and culturally Ireland became stagnant in the late 1930s and 1940s, with what Terence Brown describes as ‘the devastating lack of cultural and social innovation in the first decade of Irish independence.1 He goes on to state that ‘an explanation for this social and cultural conservatism of the new state is, I believe, to be sought and not found in the social composition of Irish society’.2 Maria Luddy notes that ‘the process of Irish independence was disruptive in a number of ways: traditional ideas about gender were challenged to a greater extent than ever before by the advance of the suffrage campaign’3 With the building of an overwhelmingly Catholic state of twenty-six counties, the sense was that all the radicalism of the previous decades was now gone. R.F. Foster argues that ‘The rigorous conservatism of the Irish Free State has become a cliché; what matters most about the atmosphere and mentality of the twenty-six county Ireland in the 1920s is that the dominant preoccupation of the regime was self-definition against Britain – cultural and political.’4 The Cork novelist and short-story writer Frank O’Connor puts it this way: After the success of the Revolution . . . Irish society began to revert to type. All the forces that had made for national dignity, that had united Catholic and Protestant aristocrats like Constance Markievicz, Labour revolutionaries like Connolly and writers like AE [George Russell], began to disintegrate, and Ireland became more than ever sectarian, utilitarian, the two nearly always go together, vulgar and provincial . . . Every year that has passed, particularly since de Valera’s rise to power, has strengthened the grip of the gombeen man, of the religious secret societies like the Knights of Columbanus, of the illiterate censorships.5 31 3. Wilde in the new Irish state: 1930–1960 32 Oscar’s Shadow Thus, the consolidation of the idea of an Irish republic led, amongst other measures, to the introduction of censorship in 1926 and this has been seen as an intensification of Catholic influence on the idea of an Irish state. But was it? Undoubtedly, censorship in Ireland had one target, the expression and depiction of sexuality. Tom Ingles writes that ‘The inculcation of Victorian prudery throughout Irish society was not a universal or homogeneous process. It was a strategy of a new class of tenant farmer that emerged in the social space between the peasantry and the Protestant ascendancy class.’6 This inculcation of prudery meant that the eroticised body, in any form, was absent from public discourse, yet during the Wilde trials his body had become the site for his unmentionable crime. Cheryl Herr comments on this disappearance of the body in Irish culture thus: ‘Most writers on Ireland sooner or later put forward one trait that they see as definitive of the “Irish mind” or the “Celtic consciousness” . . . But one feature that almost no one mentions is the relationship between the Irish mind and any kind of Irish body.’7 One result of the profound antipathy towards all public notions or acknowledgement of the body was a denial of the existence of homosexuality and so any discussion of homosexuality and of Wilde would be fraught with difficulty. Yet the historian Diarmaid Ferriter raises the question as to the conservatism of de Valera’s Ireland. From the perspectives of cynic’s writings in the 1980s, it was 1930s oppression, and a failure to modernise, which meant that Ireland was simply not an interesting place to live in during this era. This, as Brian Fallon has recognised, ignores the degree of cultural vitality that continued to exist in Ireland; and just because this culture was imported does not mean that it should be ignored.8 This may be true, but the discourse of homosexuality presented a real challenge to the ideology of the new country. The question I want to consider is...

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