The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde

THE FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE

For my Father

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde JARLATH KILLEEN Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

© Jarlath Killeen 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jarlath Killeen has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Company Ashgate Publishing Limited Suite 420 Gower House 101 Cherry Street Croft Road Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Aldershot USA Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Killeen, Jarlath, 1976– The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde 1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900 – Themes, motives 2. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900. Happy prince and other tales 3. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900. House of pomegranates 4. Nationalism in literature 5. Religion in literature I. Title 823.8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killeen, Jarlath, 1976– The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde / Jarlath Killeen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5813-9 (alk. paper) 1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Fairy tales–England–History and criticism. 3. Children’s literature, English–History and criticism. I. Title. PR5827.F64K56 2007 823’.8–dc22 2007008015 ISBN 978-0-7546-5813-9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents vii 1 Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction 21 41 I THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER TALES 61 1 ‘The Happy Prince’ 79 2 ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 97 3 ‘The Selfish Giant’ 4 ‘The Devoted Friend’ 107 5 ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ 125 141 II A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES 159 6 ‘The Young King’ 173 7 ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 189 8 ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 9 ‘The Star-Child’ Bibliography Index

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Preface and Acknowledgements This book began as my doctoral thesis many years ago, and underwent a number of mutations before it took its current form. Unfortunately, I cannot boast that this change is the academic equivalent of those transformations by the likes of the Happy Prince or the Young King, but I think that there has been some improvement in the argument and style. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1999–2001. In funding my doctoral research, the Council enabled me to lay the basis for the present study. Other debts go back to that period also. My doctoral supervisor Professor Declan Kiberd was generous with his time, his knowledge and his friendship over the years and has contributed greatly to the study I have actually written, as well as gently disagreeing with me at times. The examiners of my thesis, Professor Owen Dudley Edwards and Dr Jerusha McCormack were fair and diligent and gave very valuable advice about revision. Professor Edwards in particular gave much of his time and energy in going through my rambling and effusive prose and trying to save me from any major historical mistakes. Any that remain are, of course, down to me. My family looked both bewildered and horrified when I announced that another Wilde volume was on its way, but have borne with me despite reservations. I dedicate the book to my father. When I think of fairy tales it is still his voice I hear telling me of dark woods, wicked stepmothers and miraculous escapes. Professor Joe Bristow worked his way patiently through some of what would eventually become chapters in this book and the text is much clearer because of his advice. The staff at Ashgate have been encouraging and very helpful and have guided me through the publishing process with care. I want to thank my colleagues in English in University College Dublin, St. Michael’s in Toronto, Keele University and Trinity College, Dublin for their support and advice. As always Darryl Jones and Margaret Robson were kind friends and supportive colleagues. Ron Callan, Noreen Doody, Ann Dooley, Martha Fanning, Trish Ferguson, Ann Fogarty, William Galinski, Jeremy Harman, Kate Hebblethwaite, Ellie Herrington, Siobhán Holland, David Kilroy, Mary King, Gerardine McBride, Eimear McBride, Anne Markey, James Murphy, Máirín Nic Dhiarmada, Diana Perez-Garcia, Eoin Smith, Phil Smith, Moynagh Sullivan, Jean Talman, David Wilson, were all important in different ways. My students have had to endure my classes on these subjects for years; I can only hope that they have benefited from them in some way. I certainly learned a great deal from their comments, criticisms and often startling connections. In particular the postgraduate students in ‘The Victorian Child’ in Keele University and Trinity College changed my understanding of the stories enormously. My thanks to the staff in the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, London, and the libraries of Trinity College, Dublin, University College Dublin and the University of Toronto.

viii The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde My thanks also to Four Courts Press for allowing me to reprint some elements from two articles: ‘Diaspora, Empire, and the Religious Geography of Victorian Social Relations in Wilde’s Fairy Tales’ (2000), in P. J. Matthews (ed.), New Voices in Irish Criticism, Dublin, pp. 183–9, and ‘Woman and Nation Revisited: Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose”’ (2001), in Aaron Kelly and Alan Gillis (eds), Critical Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture, Dublin, pp. 141–7. All quotations from The Happy Prince and other tales and A House of Pomegranates are taken from Volume 10 of the Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, edited by Robert Ross. All biblical quotations come from the Authorised Version, edited by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett for Oxford World’s Classics. Mary Lawlor has put up with me, and this book, for a long time. In one of Wilde’s tales we are told that ‘Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the market-place’. The cynics have dismissed this as sentiment; she has made it real.

Introduction Is A House of Pomegranates intended for a child’s book? We confess that we do not exactly know … Pall Mall Gazette, 30 November 1891.1 This book is the first full-length study of Oscar Wilde’s two collections of children’s literature, The Happy Prince and other tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). Although the tales which comprise these collections have received some important critical attention they remain marginal in Wilde Studies, simply because most critics are unsure what to make of them. Wilde is collectively understood, and written about, as a subversive writer, an amoral aesthete and an enemy of Victorian social and sexual values, a judgement based on the corpus of works that generally engage interpreters’ critical faculties, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the critical essays, and the five major plays. In a strange way the two collections of fairy tales he wrote appear somehow anomalous, tangential, if not entirely unrelated to his canon and attempts to incorporate them have been, while often significant, few and far between. This is partly because children’s literature in general is considered a didactic and conservative form by many of the best writers on Wilde, and due to this there has seemed little to gain in looking at such theoretically conformist work when trying to put forward a case for Wilde as a social subversive. This book will attempt to explain the ‘mystery’ of the fairy tales through a close textual and contextual analysis, arguing that they should be read as containing both conservative and subversive energies, and that they allow us to see Wilde himself as displaying the qualities of a conservative as well as a radical writer. I contend that the fairy tales should be read in relation to the field of force from which Wilde drew much of his creative energies – Ireland – and that when placed in this context the strange, often disturbing, qualities of the stories begin to make sense. In re-situating these fairy tales in the complex nexus of theological, political, social and national concerns of late nineteenth-century Ireland, some of the difficulties critics have encountered in interpreting them will, hopefully, be removed and their relation to the Wildean canon will become clearer. This Introduction will examine the critical history of the fairy tales and attempt to explain why they have received relatively little attention. In May 1888 Oscar Wilde published a collection of stories entitled The Happy Prince and other tales and, in doing so, confounded his critics. He compounded this over three years later in November 1891 when A House of Pomegranates appeared. What confused his contemporaries was that their understanding of Oscar Wilde, the ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, sometimes seemed far removed from the constructions to which he was putting his name. A series of ostensibly orthodox fairy tales jarred with 1 A generous selection of the contemporary reviews of both The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates can be found in Beckson (ed.), pp. 59–62 and 113–18.

2 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde his shocking collection of Poems, which had received so much adverse publicity in 1887. This confusion has not really dissipated, and many commentators on Wilde now prefer to ignore the fairy tales entirely rather than work out how exactly they fit into the interpretation of Wilde at which they have arrived. Richard Pine has posed the vital question: ‘Why … do the stories remain a mystery?’ (165). The puzzle, in the 1890s as now, is in how they relate to Wilde’s other writings. It seems to me, however, that the problem arises from, firstly, the academic approach to Wilde and, secondly, the attitude of some Wilde critics to children’s literature itself. The dominant interpretation of Wilde as a ‘subversive’ writer is central to the problem of the fairy tales. Jonathan Dollimore and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the two critics at the forefront of the ‘re-evaluation’ of Wilde’s oeuvre, have tended to ignore the early tales and concentrate on the ‘major’ works, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest (performed 1895, published 1899). This avoidance has taken place despite the fact that, for example, both Intentions and Dorian Gray were published in book form in 1891, and were thus being written synchronously with both The Happy Prince and other tales and A House of Pomegranates. The erasure of the fairy tales from the critical canon is matched by the discomfort some critics experience when confronted with De Profundis (1905) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Dollimore, for example, worries that Wilde had effectively renounced his ‘transgressive aesthetic’ with the writing of his great prison letter, broken by the penal system and hard labour (95–8). However, the thesis that it was his horrific experiences in prison which led him to recant his subversive agenda is harder to maintain when the ‘conservative’ fairy tales are taken into account, as they were written at the height of Wilde’s creative powers. A large number of major Wilde critics have simply erased the fairy tales from their account of Wilde, including Lawrence Danson, Julia Prewitt Brown, Bruce Bashford, Alan Sinfield, Linda Dowling and Jeffrey Nunokawa. While I completely accept that it is simply not possible to deal comprehensively with the entire oeuvre of a particular writer in any one study, it is surely strange that the absence of the children’s literature is one of the few things that these critics have in common. Those critics who have engaged with the tales have often attempted to negotiate them into the dominant interpretation, one prominent instance of which is the endeavour to deny that the term ‘fairy tale’ applies to Wilde’s stories at all. Many critics have insisted that Wilde never wrote fairy tales but was, in fact, a writer of folk tales. Critics have claimed that while fairy tales are designed to socialise children, to ‘educate’ them into a pre-existing adult world, folk tales are counter- hegemonic challenges to the ‘adult’ aristocrats by ‘child-like’ peasants who desire some kind of social upheaval. The best example of this in Wilde criticism is Richard Pine who argues forcefully that: A fairy-story is an allegory designed to give children a picture of the real, adult, world, and to enable them, by understanding its constituent parts, to negotiate a satisfactory path in the real world. A folk-tale is more vicious, a parable: it is a tale for adults who have lost their way among the signposts and have experienced some of the disruption related in the tale … Wilde’s stories belong to the folk genre (165).

Introduction 3 Fairy tales are ideologically conformative; folk tales are primitively subversive; Wilde is subversive so his stories must be folk-tales. Such an analysis operates with the critical vocabulary mapped out by many historians of both folk and fairy tales. Oral folk tales have existed time-out-of-mind, probably from at least the Neolithic, and were passed from generation to generation through figures whose primary function was the preservation of these tales in memory. One important fact about such tales is their relatively fluid character; the storyteller would invariably change the tale to suit the audience, although this elasticity must not be exaggerated since it is probable that an audience would demand that certain elements remained the same in each re-telling. Some time in the medieval period, although where and when exactly this occurred is unknown for certain, the narrative elements which link the oral wonder tale and the folk tale to the literary fairy tale began to appear in Europe and these tales began to be written down, first in Latin and then, gradually, in the vernacular and the form of the fairy tale established certain relatively stable features and conventions. The key change from the oral folk tale to the literary fairy tale appears to have been the audience: whereas the folk tale emerged from and was composed for the ‘folk’, the peasants of feudal Europe, the literary fairy tale was written initially by and for the aristocracy and then by and for the middle classes and excluded the lower orders of society. What we effectively witness in this transition is the appropriation by the higher social orders of the tales of the peasantry; in this appropriation many elements were altered even though some of the conventions and beliefs of the oral tale were incorporated into the literary tradition. In his classic study The Morphology of the Folktale (English translation, 1958), Vladimir Propp identified 31 basic motifs and conventions common to both the folk and fairy tale. As Propp outlines the plot involves a protagonist who transgresses a prohibition for which he is banished. To overcome this banishment he must solve a problem and this will define his character. In the problem-solving task the protagonist will meet either enemies or friends, or sometimes both, and usually acquires a mysterious instrument or tool to help in the task, which he eventually succeeds in completing. There is normally a sudden setback for the protagonist, which is overcome miraculously, and he is rewarded with marriage or money or position or indeed all of the above. Propp’s study indicates that these conventions are the stable factors uniting oral and literary tales and probably evolved to usefully allow for easy recall for oral storytellers. Wilde himself, as many commentators have pointed out, certainly did stick closely to the conventions as outlined by Propp. In a close study of two of Wilde’s fairy tales David M. Monaghan concludes that they follow Propp’s conventions very closely (156–7). Critics often point out that these conventions allow for radical change and the transformation of the poor protagonist and his rise in status. Despite the fact that the stories may have been told with ideologically conservative motives in different communities, for many historians of the genre this conservatism is overcome by the emphasis on transformation: it suggests the liberatory possibilities of social movement. Jack Zipes, an important historian of the folk and fairy tale, has argued that although the ideology of the tale depended ‘on the position that the narrator assumed with regard to developments in his or her community’ (When Dreams Came True 6), ultimately the folk tale articulated a utopian desire by the peasantry for a better life, a life free from the

4 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde oppressive elements of hunger, poverty and fear. Marina Warner’s analysis supports this position since she argues that the oral tale was largely, though not exclusively, in the control of women and therefore largely reflected a feminine perspective on the universe (From the Beast to the Blonde passim). What happened when these oral transformative stories were written down and appropriated by the aristocracy and the middle class was that this radical potential was muted if not completely eradicated. According to Zipes, the upper classes had always been suspicious of the oral folk tale with its promise of sudden and total social transformation. When writers such as Charles Perrault (Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé [1697]), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Kinder- und Hausmärchen [1812]), and, especially, Hans Christian Anderson (Eventyr, fortale for børn [1832-42]), appropriated these folk tales they changed their ideological focus and effectively made them stories to socialise middle-class children rather than stories to offer hope to folk communities. While these writers did indeed (to some extent – a radically truncated one in Anderson’s case) gather tales from authentic folk populations they changed them to suit their own ideological purposes and it is these new versions which formed the basis for the fairy tale traditions of the West. The fairy tale was considered a useful instrument in countering the atomising effect of modernity on middle-class individuals and families; it was believed that through escapism the fairy tale could make life in a capitalist society easier to bear (Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell 4–16). Moreover, the middle classes found that the new fairy tales had an additional use in that, when given to working-class children, they educated them in the values important to the middle classes and thus helped to reconcile them to their subordinate position in society. Fairy tales and the middle class emerged simultaneously, they perpetuated middle-class morality and functioned to keep the middle class in power. The purported ideological difference between the folk and fairy tale is crucial to understand why it may be that many critics are uncomfortable with Wilde’s stories. While a psychoanalyst like Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment (1976) plays down the difference between the two genres and argues that both represent basic truths about the human condition which are crucial for a child to learn in order to cope with the world, Jack Zipes is equally certain that the fairy tale distorts the much more attractive folk tradition whose ‘radical’ vales he finds personally more attractive. Thus, Zipes contends that folk tales incline towards subversive tactics to a larger degree than fairy-tale. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion he argues that ‘Since the imaginative motifs and symbolical elements of class conflict and rebellion in the pre-capitalist folk tales ran counter to the principles of rationalism and utilitarianism developed by a bourgeois class, they had to be suppressed’, and that ‘the fairy-tale discourse was controlled by the same socio-political tendencies which contributed towards strengthening bourgeois domination of the public sphere in the first half of the nineteenth century’ (24, 98). Zipes’s overarching argument is that as folk tales were changed into fairy tales by emerging capitalist societies, the dominant culture attempted to repress the subversive potential in the utopianism of the oral tradition, with varying success. Thus, the ‘fairy tale’ has, for Zipes, a split identity: it is used by commercial and institutional interests to convey the ideology of the culture industry and make its readers passive but, in so far as it utilises the feudal utopianism of the underground, it disrupts this primary purpose.

Introduction 5 Indeed, he accepts that some fairy tale writers, including Wilde, did tap into the subversive aspects of fairy tales more than emphasising their conservative elements (Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion 111–21). It is, however, the genre’s conservatism thathasbeenintenselyfocusedonbymanyfairytalecriticsandhistorians (Stone; Lieberman; Dworkin). A similar process of bourgeois appropriation of folk traditions took place in nineteenth-century Ireland to that which had occurred earlier in Continental Europe, a process in which the Wilde family played a large part. This process was driven by the Protestant Ascendancy who began, in the late eighteenth century, to investigate and embrace aspects of native Irish culture through the study of, initially, antiquities and then of archaeology, mythology and folklore. These Protestants were descendents of those who had arrived in Ireland from England and Scotland during the Plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were ethnically, politically and religiously divided from the native inhabitants. Their antiquarian and archaeological worked helped wed the Irish Protestant community to Ireland in a period when they had become alienated from their ‘homeland’ – England. Traditionally, the Protestants of Ireland had been reluctant to accept the ethnic marker of Irish and preferred to think of themselves as simply Englishmen and women who happened to live in Ireland. The eighteenth century, however, witnessed a long process whereby England effectively abandoned the Protestants in Ireland to their own devices and also insisted that these Protestants were indeed Irish and had to accept this nationality. This caused a difficulty as native Irish culture was suffused with Catholicism, an aspect of Irish identity Protestants could clearly not appropriate. In the search for a basis for a common culture many Irish Protestants looked to the pre-Christian period and its remnants in contemporary Ireland as a means of bringing the different ethnicities together. Ancient Ireland and the folk-survivals of that period were thus doubly attractive to Irish Protestants (Canny). Antiquarians and folklorists produced a large amount of important work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This included General Charles Vallancey’s Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis (1770–1804), a multi-volume work on Irish folk customs, Charlotte Brooke’s collection Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789), which included folk songs and myths, Edward Bunting’s A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (1796) and the writings of Thomas Crofton Croker. Croker corresponded with the Grimms and published two important and influential collections of folklore: Researches in the South of Ireland, Illustrative of the Scenery, Architectural Remains and the Manners and Superstitions of the Peasantry (1824) and Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1925). These collections are indicative of both intense attraction for the Irish peasantry and yet discomfort with their ‘primitive’ and superstitious condition. Because of the theological transformation of middle- class Catholicism in the nineteenth century (during which many ‘folkloric’ beliefs and rituals were discarded in an attempt to purify Catholicism of its ‘pagan’ past), many Catholics had become increasingly embarrassed by what were now considered ‘superstitious’ beliefs in fairies, witches, ghosts and practices such as patterns and wakes, although many still retained their investment in these traditions. Intellectually such degraded beliefs and practices became almost the sole interest and preserve of Irish Protestants who found them both distasteful yet profoundly attractive,

6 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde both what they admired about the natives and what they hated (Bourke, ‘Baby and Bathwater’ 80–1). Croker is paradigmatic of this Protestant ambivalence. It is, of course, crucial to realise that fairylore and superstition were not really pagan or primitive alternatives to Catholicism for the Irish peasantry as many Irish Protestant antiquarians and folklore collectors maintained in their attempts to divest ‘essential’ Irish culture of the stain of Catholicism. The religion of Irish people up to the nineteenth century was a version of folk-Catholicism, an eclectic mixture of the theologically heterodox and the orthodox, common among communities which were relatively untouched by the modernising projects of church and state. In most communities ‘folk belief’ and Catholic orthodoxy lived side by side in people’s minds without any clashing or difficulty (see Ó Giolláin, ‘The Fairy Belief’ 199), and those who believed in, for example, fairies did not consider themselves less than Catholic because of that belief. This changed during the nineteenth century as a new group of intensely Tridentine priests and religious set out to purify Irish Catholicism of its folkloric past, but it was a slow transformation (see Chapter Eight for more on this). Wilde’s own parents contributed significantly to the tradition of Irish Protestant investigation of native religious conventions (see Pulido). His father Sir William Wilde was a noted folklorist, whose collection Irish Popular Superstitions (1852) was composed of stories and traditions he picked up in his time in the West of Ireland, both as a child in County Roscommon and also while staying at his holiday homes in Moytura House and Illaunroe Cottage, both in County Mayo. There he travelled to the cottages of the peasantry, offering medical help in exchange for stories (see Markey for a judicious study of Wilde’s knowledge of folklore). After his death his wife, Lady ‘Speranza’ Wilde, collected his notes and compiled two collections out of them: Ancient Legends (1882) and Irish Charms (1890). The key point to make about these three collections is that they conform to Zipes’ ideological cartography of the transition from oral folklore to literary fairylore: they exhibit both attraction to and unease with the traditions they are theoretically transcribing faithfully. Sir William Wilde was well aware of this duality. In Irish Popular Superstitions, he laments the passing of the folk traditions due to emigration, the Irish Famine (1845–1850), the loss of the Irish language, and urbanisation, but also notes that his own publications are part of this process of destruction: … these legendary Tales and Popular Superstitions have now become the history of the past – a portion of the traits and characteristics of other days. Will their recital revive their practice? No! Nothing contributes more to uproot superstitious rites and forms than to print them; to make them known to the many instead of leaving them hidden among, and secretly practised by the few (6–7). Sir William here acknowledges the damaging aspect to both folklore collection and fairy tale writing. Both undermine the very group, the peasantry, they depend on. Of course, in writing fairy tales Wilde may be as much reacting to, as well as fulfilling Matthew Arnold’s description of the Irish as a race which revolted against, and was revolted by, the despotism of fact (‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ 344). This would make his writing of such fugitive pieces an act of literary nationalism, an attempt, like his parents’, to identify with the West of Ireland peasants who told

Introduction 7 him versions of these stories in the first place. Jerusha McCormack believes that the fairy tales are ‘dangerous’ since they ‘drew their inspiration from a degraded culture, driven underground – whether that of the “little people”, fairies or children, or of the emerging gay subculture of the 1890s’ (102). However, in making such associations it is important to accept that Wilde must bear some responsibility for the endangering of such traditions by writing them down, a danger he knew of from his father’s warnings about the clash between the literary and the oral. Most of Wilde’s critics do not want to associate him directly with this destruction of folk traditions and instead try to see him almost completely within a liberatory folk history rather than a middle-class conformist fairy tale mode. Such attempts to make Wilde into a peasant in aristocratic drag are not completely convincing. Richard Pine makes the argument that Wilde is a folk-tale teller rather than a fairy-tale writer on the basis of ‘something apocryphal [in the stories], something existing before its composition …; Wilde’s storytelling [is] a form of self-identification with a Homeric and primitive society’ (165). This resonance of the primitive is found in the repeated motifs of Irish folklore in the stories: the changeling in ‘The Young King’ and ‘The Star-Child’; the obvious use of Famine legends in ‘The Young King’; the raiding of his mother’s Ancient Legends of Ireland necessary for the composition of ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’; the haunt of Tír-na-nÓg floating over both collections (177–83; see also Cohen 73–6; Edwards, ‘Impressions’ 52–60). Undue recognition of these elements is, argues Pine, the cause of the critical ‘mystery’ surrounding the tales. Moreover, so the argument goes, the stories in the two collections originate in performance, and Wilde is often configured as a kind of reverse-colonising seanachaí, deconstructing the literary culture of England through the most oral culture in Europe. André Gide insisted that ‘Wilde did not converse: he narrated’ (2), and W.B. Yeats believed that Wilde was ‘the greatest talker of his time. I have never and shall never meet conversation that could match his’ (Autobiographies 172). W. Graham Robertson termed Wilde ‘a born raconteur’ and recalled how ‘his stories seemed to grow naturally out of the general conversation and not to interrupt it; their length was not perceptible and his hearers did not realise how long they had been silent’ (in Mikhail, vol. 1, 208). The ‘orality’ of Wilde’s project has been a recurrent theme in much recent criticism, especially in the stimulating work of Deirdre Toomey (see also Pine 161; McCormack 97–103). The oral ‘intention’ of the tales, combined with the recurrent motifs of Irish legends, transforms Wilde, the middle-class writer of fairy tales, into the seanachaí providing parables of amoral liberation to the working classes. However, Wilde is not so different to others whose status as fairy-tale writers is not in doubt, including the Grimms. He probably accompanied his father into the homes of the peasantry and there picked up the basic plots and motifs he would use in his fairy tales (although see Markey for the argument that Wilde may not have followed his father into the West of Ireland cottages). In other words, like the Grimms, he collected folk material and then transformed that material for his own ends. After all, the use of folk motifs does not definitively make him a seanachaí since all fairy tales assimilate aspects of folk culture, often merely for ‘authentic’ window dressing, though more habitually to situate the fairy tale in a particular cultural milieu. The folk-motif argument is not, therefore, very convincing. The differences between the genres really indicate that with Wilde we are dealing with a fairy-tale writer and not a folk tale teller: folk tales are oral and custom-related;

8 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde they are traditional in form and transmission retaining a fixed plot structure; they are anonymous; they exist in different variants (Brunvand 12, 15). Working with this reading of folklore, it is clear that Wilde’s collections cannot be incorporated. These texts are fixed. Claims of Wilde’s orality work better in relation to his prose poems most of which he never wrote down, than with his collected stories. Deirdre Toomey argues that anonymity was important to Wilde in that he did not assert proprietorship over his oral tales. She cites as evidence the story of Wilde’s meeting with the young W.B. Maxwell who confessed to him that he had used one of his stories he had heard in a conversation. Wilde reportedly told him that ‘stealing my story was the act of a gentleman, but not telling me you had stolen it was to ignore the claims of friendship’, and asked him not to appropriate the oral story of Dorian Gray (Toomey 26). What this demonstrates is Wilde’s demarcation of the oral (folk) and the literary (fairy) genres: it was perfectly appropriate for an oral tale to continue being passed around, but he claims authorship (ownership) of a narrative he is about to write. Indeed, many of his acquaintances noted a marked difference between the stories- as-spoken and the stories-as-written. Yeats claimed that ‘the further Wilde goes from the method of speech, from improvisation, from sympathy with some especial audience, the less original he is, the less accomplished’ (Prefaces and Introductions 137). Likewise, Robertson contended that ‘when committed to paper, his tales lost much of their charm’ (Mikhail, vol. 1, 211). For his friends and acquaintances the oral tales were more vividly alive than the written stories; this indicates that to a middle-class constituency the oral stories smacked more of folk authenticity than the two collections. This division, in fact, follows Zipes’ formula very well: the oral tale is transformative, but in its transfer to a written culture the motifs lose their original agency and are muffled in the logocentric discourses of the ‘civilised’ world. Wilde himself, in a letter to John Ruskin in July 1888 distinctly refers to the The Happy Prince and other tales as ‘a little book of fairy stories’, not folk tales (Letters 355). Neil Sammells argues that claiming that Wilde is really an figure of orality rather than literacy is a means of absolving his decadence, dissolving his relation to a literature of fragmentation, in favour of a culture of authenticity and organicism (233), and he favours seeing Wilde’s texts as a hybrid form of oral-literate culture. Wilde is caught between two worlds and uses each to interrogate the other. This has been supported by Paul K. Saint-Amour who believes that a hankering after authenticity haunts most designations of Wilde as a practitioner of primal orality. He argues instead that Wilde’s work recognises that primary orality: is in part a construction by literate culture of its Other, and therefore not revivable in practice. Instead, Wilde’s more forcibly transgressive writings, and his career generally, suggest that to import the forms of primary orality into typographical England does less to ventilate literate culture than to translate orality into terms that literacy can recognise … Rather than naively imagine orality as a tonic to writing, as nature to writing’s artifice … Wilde recognised that the longing for orality as origin, nature and authentic prehistory may be the most characteristic thing about print culture, which thrives by manufacturing origins and measuring its distance from them in order, alternately, to wound or worship itself (64). Writing fairy tales may be a means of ending rural life, but also a means of identification with it; in neither case, however, does it make the writer one of the ‘people’.

Introduction 9 It is in relation to the subversive agenda, of course, that critics have attempted to deny that the two collections are to be considered fairy tales or indeed, and bizarrely, even children’s literature, as it is still a critical commonplace that the literature written for, and approved of as being good for, children is predominantly conservative (code word for patriarchal, Eurocentric and logocentric). Karin Lesnik-Oberstein argues that most literary critics still assume (rightly) that children’s literature is a highly politicised genre rather than a value-free carrier of oral home culture (an innocent text) (24; for the politics of children’s literature, see also Tease; Zimet; Leeson; Bratton; Stephens). It is pertinent to point out that children’s literature became a subject of major academic interest in the 1970s and 1980s. The excavation of the reactionary and conservative nature of children’s literature happened to coincide with a re-emergence of the interest by radical critics in Wilde’s writings. The two projects seemed mutually exclusive. A large number of articles and books charting and examining the development of writing for children in the late nineteenth century emphasised how it, explicitly or implicitly, inculcates the dogmas of patriarchy, empire and capitalism into young minds (see Bristow; Dunae; Fox; Applebee). To assert that Wilde was a major contributor to the burgeoning market for this genre was to risk labelling him orthodox. Of course, some critics have accepted this interpretation of Wilde as an orthodox children’s writer. John Allen Quintus claims that Wilde’s moral affirmations in his stories ‘in simple terms … propose decency and generosity in human relations’ (710), while Kimberly Reynolds posits that while in general Wilde was a writer who set out to deconstruct social values, ‘in writing which was intended to include children in its audience, even Oscar Wilde felt it necessary to provide instruction’ (21). The ‘even Oscar Wilde’ is particularly illuminating. Reynolds is prepared to accept the critical orthodoxy of Wildean amorality but finds the fairy tales the exception that proves the rule. Regenia Gagnier claims that the fairy tales ‘reek of middle-class virtue and sentimentality’ (63), while Vincent O’ Sullivan, a friend of Wilde’s, believed that such morality is everywhere in his work in general and that ‘one is struck by the facility with which he runs into moralising – indirect moralising, it is true’ (207). A terror of the moral appears to have convinced many to go to great lengths to remove Wilde from the community of writers for children. Critics contend that Wilde effectively disguised his collections as children-oriented in order to ensure that his work reached the Victorian parents, arguing that Wilde was writing, ‘not for nursery children … but for adult-children’ (Pine 165), and appeal to Wilde’s letters to support such a claim. Declan Kiberd, in a very carefully phrased sentence, suggests that ‘Wilde’s fairytales are intended, perhaps mainly, for adults – but for children too’ (Irish Classics 326). A recent article by Michelle Ruggaber insists that while The Happy Prince and other tales may have been for children, A House of Pomegranates certainly was not and that the stories in that collection, ‘while they can still be enjoyed by children, are meant to challenge and destabilise the expectations of adults’ (142). Rodney Shewan’s Art and Egotism is a brilliant examination of Wilde’s work in the round, but his discomfort with the category ‘children’s literature’ provokes him to extreme measures to absolve Wilde. He states that ‘with one exception, all of his recorded remarks about the tales make it clear that they were not primarily children’s stories’ (36). This ‘one exception’ is Wilde’s letter to William Gladstone in June 1888,

10 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde to whom he explicitly professes that the stories in The Happy Prince and other tales are ‘really meant for children’ (Letters 350). We know, however, that Wilde initially intended the stories to entertain his own children and, although definitions of ‘children’s literature’ are problematic, it would be perverse to exclude texts explicitly conceived for children and this means that Wilde’s tales should be included. Vyvyan Holland recalled that Wilde told all the stories in the volumes to himself and his brother (53–4) and Wilde remarked to one friend that: It is the duty of every father … to write fairy tales for his children. But the mind of a child is a great mystery. It is incalculable, and who shall divine it, or bring to it his own peculiar delights? You humbly spread before it the treasures of your imagination, and they are as dross (Le Gallienne 252). Like George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis, Wilde saw himself as writing for the ‘child-like’ rather than simply ‘children’, but this certainly does not exclude the young (Letters 388). In a letter to a fellow writer G.H. Kersley, Wilde states that the tales are ‘meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy’ (ibid 352). This indicates a more divided audience, but the adults he incorporates are those who have not yet lost a child-like perspective. Wilde himself was child-like, a fact noted by many of his contemporaries. Max Beerbohm, for example, called him ‘a huge overgrown schoolboy’ (286) and in a letter to Leonard Smithers in May 1898 he claimed he possessed a ‘childlike simple nature’(Letters 1073). Ian Small is, I think, correct in his argument that the ‘constancy of Wilde’s affection towards his children … goes some way towards explaining that initial decision to write fairy stories’ (‘Introduction’ xv). Rodney Shewan is uncomfortable with the designation ‘children’s literature’ because it seems too slight to hold the philosophy he thinks defines the stories: nihilism. He insists that, far from potentially didactic tales set up to educate the young into a form of morality, ‘Wilde’s characteristic morals are anti-morals’, obsessively pessimistic and destructive of all moral opportunity (38). Shewan is explicit in his belief that sophisticated philosophy cannot be aimed at the young and considers this the vital issue in determining audience. Recent analysts of children’s literature, however, have pointed out that children’s books are certainly not different from their adult-oriented counterparts in terms of subject matter, tone or emotional complexity. According to Natalie Babbitt, there are few, if any, differences in content between adult and children’s fiction (157). This lack of difference between the contents of children’s and adults’ books is crucial to this study as a whole, because a complaint may be raised that the readings offered here are ‘far beyond’ either children’s capacity for understanding or their general knowledge. I contend, however, that not only is there no real difference between the issues tackled by children’s and adults books, or the relative complexity of their treatment, but that it is not necessary to think that the contemporary children’s audience ‘picked up’ on the references or understood the contexts I posit as essential to analysing the tales. Wilde himself appears to have been committed to a theory of Gnosticism whereby knowledge is transmitted from the initiated to acolytes through codes and symbols and he also believed that such codes and symbols often operated in some

Introduction 11 mysterious and magical fashion on the human mind. This may seem strange but such Gnostic beliefs were hardly alien to the literary culture of the 1890s. It is well known that W.B. Yeats believed in the existence of secret knowledge that could only be reached through the use of symbols and that he considered the Irish peasantry to be in possession of a repository of such symbols as encoded into their myths, legends and folklore. Wilde’s father believed similar things about the Irish peasantry when he worried that printing folk beliefs would unfortunately lead to ‘make them known to the many instead of leaving them hidden among, and secretly practised by, the few’. As a Freemason, Sir William saw his intimate contact with the Irish peasantry as a privileged access to a hidden and encrypted form of knowledge. While it is well-known that Oscar Wilde was also a Freemason, having joined while at Oxford, it is not so widely known that his wife Constance was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, perhaps the most important Theosophical society in the British Isles in this period. She had joined the Order in 1888 after being previously involved with both spiritualism and the Theosophical Society. She would not have been lonely there as Wilde’s brother Willie was also a member. Wilde himself was present at some Theosophical meetings and also associated with some groups at the periphery of the theosophical movement (Owen, Enchantment 62–3, 108). The Order of the Golden Dawn was designed to appeal to those, like Wilde, attracted by Freemasonry and was in fact set up by Freemasons. In Oxford Wilde had advanced very quickly upwards in the Freemasons, a training for occult knowledge which prepared him well for the theosophists. Masonic imagery pervades his writing. As Marie Mulvey-Roberts points out, the symbol of the Rose-Cross is important in Masonic iconography as a symbol of female sexuality combined with the phallus (140), which goes some way to explaining the importance of the rose in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’. For Irish Protestants there was a link between their interest in native Irish culture and their attraction towards occultism. The apparently mystical and magical beliefs of the Irish peasantry were seen by many Protestant nationalists as versions of occult and secret theologies and Wilde’s childhood initiation into the mysteries of the religion of the Irish peasantry would have laid the foundation for his later occult development. The naming of A House of Pomegranates is significant in this context. The Greek myths tell the story of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, who was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld. In protest at the kidnap of her daughter Demeter refused to let the crops grow and Hades was forced to return Persephone to her parents. After her return, however, they discovered that while in the underworld she had eaten the seeds of a pomegranate, and as the pomegranate is a symbol of fertility, by eating it Persephone had effectively consummated her relationship with Hades. Demeter agreed to let Persephone go back to Hades for three months of every year, during which time Winter descends and no crops grew. The fertility symbol Wilde met with in Greek mythology would have resonated with the fertility symbols and rituals he encountered in the West of Ireland and in his parents’ folklore and which we will have occasion to return to again. The image of the pomegranate represents a fertile but dangerous descent into the occult underground required by both Theosophy and folk and fairy lore, and opens up onto a vast repository of myth and symbology never made explicit in Wilde’s stories. The

12 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde tales in these two collections are built out of such symbols and resonate with Irish and folk-Catholic meanings. Wilde’s refusal to make such connections explicit is crucial in understanding the tales. Although many mystics and occultists believed that access to hidden (or forbidden) knowledge needed to be kept to an elite few who would gain in occult wisdom as the Mason moves through rites of initiation, others felt that the signifiers of this knowledge, particularly certain symbols, should be dispersed through works that would be read and experienced by larger numbers. In his 1896 essay on ‘William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’ for example, Yeats wrote that ‘A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame’ (Essays and Introductions 116). Symbols were the active articulators of a world beyond this one, and could put those who encountered them into contact with transcendent reality, even if they were completely unaware of this process. Wilde, indeed, did not expect his child reader to grasp in a conscious fashion the issues being raised or the symbols being used in the fairy tales, but rather hoped that they would operate mysteriously on both parent and child. This means that the fairy tales are multi-layered and operate with a high level of both occult symbolism and allegorical inflection. This kind of hermeneutic intensity is not unusual in Irish writing which has often been read as deeply attracted to allegorical coding and doubleness (Donoghue, 3–18, 148–52). Jerusha McCormack has argued that ‘doublespeak’ is a characteristic of Wilde’s writing in general, a doublespeak characteristic of the occult imagination (97). Indeed, the occult and Irish context of these stories could explain why Wilde took different approaches to the publication of the collections: while The Happy Prince and other tales was published to appeal to a large and popular market, A House of Pomegranates was a much more expensive volume and was clearly designed to only tempt connoisseurs. The failure of the symbolic structure of the first volume to transform the Victorian public may have led Wilde to use even more arcane discourses which could only be understood by a self-elected elite who could afford a collector’s book and read it to their children. Wilde may have felt that some audiences would understand him better than others. He was, after all, a member of an Irish elite (the Ascendancy), many of whom would have readily understood the esoteric codes he was employing. In his essay on ‘Protestant Magic’, Roy Foster has ably demonstrated how attracted to and involved in occult and theosophical societies and rituals were a large percentage of the Protestant Ascendancy. Of course, allegory, codes and hidden knowledge were widely used in Ireland more generally; agrarian culture was deeply invested in secret societies, folkloric beliefs and quasi-mystical religion and this ‘doubleness’ may be linked to the colonial situation. It is widely accepted that allegory is a teleological mode of writing as it points to a future possibility, a way of life that is better than that being lived now, and so is attractive to societies undergoing historical trauma. The most obvious example of this allegorising is the book of Revelation, composed by a people undergoing exile and persecution, and which depends on past models for its allegory to work (including the Garden of Eden, city of God, New Jerusalem, sheep and goats, beast, whore of Babylon), but points forward to a future of hope in the new Garden of Eden and the new city of God. As Laurence Coupe has written in his important study of

Introduction 13 Myth, ‘all myths presuppose a previous narrative, and in turn form the model for future narratives. Strictly speaking, the pattern of promise and fulfilment need never end’ (108). In Ireland, the use of myth during the period called the Celtic Revival worked in exactly this way in that the patterns of the Fianna and Cuchulain myths were seen, not as a way of closing off history and bringing interpretation to an end, but of opening up new hope and possibility in an historical situation that seemed full of doubt and despair (especially after the death of the great nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell). Fairy tales work like this too. Wilde ‘rewrites’ models he takes from both the literary tradition of Hans Christian Anderson, and the oral folk traditions of the peasants of the West of Ireland, and in his allegory attempts to create a tentative history of the future as well as a diagnosis of the past. At least one critic has argued that the unconscious influence of symbols and archetypes in Wilde’s fairy tales is one reason why they remain popular today. Clifton Snider has claimed that ‘those literary fairy tales which have endured have done so precisely because they appeal to the collective unconscious’ (1). Placing these texts in this occult and historical context also explains the political and intellectual sophistication of the ideas encoded within them in symbols. For a true believer, contact with these symbols will eventually transform the children who read the stories, give them access to a world of hidden knowledge and thus change the world. Occultism is often as conservative as it is liberatory and linking Wilde with this movement may not ease the anxiety of some critics who see in children’s literature a sinister space for socialising of the vulnerable into oppressive ideologies. Although both Alison Lurie and Juliet Dusinberre have argued that children’s literature is actually subversive rather than conservative, it is fair to say that the general critical consensus is that a strict morality is inherent in most writing for children (Lesnik- Oberstein, Children’s Literature 4). Placing Wilde’s collections into the realm of children’s literature seems unavoidable and didacticism is the most pervasive note in such writing. As Kimberley Reynolds argues, ‘no literature is neutral, but children’s literature is more concerned with shaping its readers’ attitudes than most’ (ix). Marina Warner broadly agrees and accepts that ‘fairy tale is essentially a moralising form’ (From the Beast to the Blonde 24). Quite simply, children’s literature has always been a crucial repository of authoritarian ideology. Ellen Terry recognised this didactic quality in Wilde’s stories when she wrote to him stating: They are quite beautiful, dear Oscar, and I thank you for them from the best bit of my heart … I should like to read one of them some day to NICE people – or even NOT nice people, and MAKE ’em nice (quoted in Murray 9). Critics of Wilde do not like to see him as a moralist and even his best commentators are wary of designating the tales ‘children’s literature’ for this reason. For example, Jerusha McCormack is concerned about the claim that Wilde was a children’s writer. She insists that as readers we must become as subversive and radical as the stories themselves, and that we too must alter our perspectives, from being subjects of the patriarchal order to being its objects: ‘It is from the margins of society, from the perspective of the poor, the colonised, the disreputable and dispossessed, that these stories must be read’ (102). Our current perspectives assign us within the dominant

14 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde order, but this blinds us to the power of the tales which are rubrics against personal property but advocates of social freedom, socialist and permissive, and engaged in actively conscribing boundaries and limits to personal expression to the past. She castigates those who see the tales as directed at children as engaging in a ‘stupefied reading’(105). However, I believe that the volumes were designed to be contributions to debates on contemporary moral and political issues as well as didactic texts for children’s instructions and, in avoiding this, critics are being unnecessarily elusive. Much of this critical work has come from those who wish to definitively shift Wilde to the political left and repudiate the view of Friedrich Engels that he was merely a sedan-chair socialist. The idea of Wilde as a moralistic, conservative writer of middle-class fairy tales for children does not fit comfortably with a ‘socialist’ and transgressive view of him. However, it is perfectly possible to be a conservative moraliser and a subversive critic; it is possible to write didactic children’s literature and simultaneously preach the overthrow of oppressive social, political and religious structures. In other words, Wilde can be both subversive and conservative, both a didactic children’s writer and a social radical – indeed, I would contend that most writers of children’s literature are precisely that. It is possible to reconcile the views of Wilde critics that he was radically transgressive with the possibility that he was also a conservative moralist. The main problem is with setting unworkable dichotomies: if subversive, not conservative; if written for children then unsophisticated and hegemonic; if fairy tale, then repressively conservative. With this type of framework in place, and with the radical architecture already erected around Wilde, critics are faced with a dilemma when interpreting the two collections. It is illustrative to reflect that this same dilemma, or ‘mystery’, confronted the original reviewers of the stories: radical or conservative? Morally dangerous or morally edifying? This is aptly demonstrated in the anonymous review in the Pall Mall Gazette, 30 November 1891, which admitted a confusion in the provenance and intended audience of A House of Pomegranates: ‘Is [the collection] intended for a child’s book? We confess we do not exactly know …’. Most reviewers thought that they were the best things that Wilde had written and were a relief after the subtle and not-so-subtle decadence of Poems. The Universal Review of June 1888 stated that the volume The Happy Prince and other tales ‘shows Mr. Oscar Wilde’s genius at its best’, while an unsigned note in Athenaeum claimed that ‘the gift of writing fairy tales is rare, and Mr. Oscar Wilde shows he possesses it in a rare degree’. The September 1888 edition of the Athenaeum compared the stories to those of Hans Christian Anderson whose work has come in for much criticism from left-wing critics. In contrast, the brother of Robert Ross in the Saturday Review, 20 October 1888, detected in the tales ‘a bitter satire differing widely from that of Hans Anderson’. The Pall Mall Gazette was divided on the matter. It thought that: the stories are somewhat after the manner of Hans Andersen – and have pretty poetic and imaginative flights like his; but then again they wander off too often into something between a “Sinburnian” ecstasy and the catalogue of a high art furniture dealer (all found in full in Beckson 6–7, 60, 61, 113).

Introduction 15 What we may be detecting in the critical reception of the fairy tales is a conceptual confusion: commentators seem unable to accept the possibility that the stories may be simultaneously subversive and conservative; that they may at once attack and criticise the dominant contemporary social and moral order and yet concurrently resurrect another conservatism to take its place. However, such a technique is not alien to the genre of fairy tales. We should remember Zipes’ conception of the split identity of the fairy tale: it is used to convey interests and ideologies that may be considered conservative, but insofar as it utilises the feudal utopianism of the underground, it remains subversive. Wilde’s two collections are subversive in that they undercut the morality of late Victorian England and yet they are conservative as they serve to legitimate the moral claims of another orthodoxy: that of folk-Catholicism. It will be this latter explanation that will be put forward in this book as a possible solution to the ‘mystery’ of the fairy tales. After all, the history of the fairy tale is not one of straight-forward appropriation. Jack Zipes does argue that ‘subversive’ writers could put the usually conservative form of the fairy tale to good use, and he includes Wilde, L. Frank Baum and even George MacDonald in a group of such subversive writers (Art of Subversion 97–133). Zipes holds that in the appropriation of folk tales by the middle-class writers of fairy tales many subversive elements were contained and modified (purposely) to rob them of their emancipatory power, but that this does not mean that the fairy tale is by definition conservative, firstly because the attempt to regulate subversive elements was not a complete success, and secondly because the subversive material is still there ready to be set free if the right author comes along. We must never accept the utterly conservative reading of the fairy tale implicit in many commentaries and should instead remember, with Ernst Bloch, that the fairy tale can also be read as a means of disrupting the monological tendencies of the epic as well as the rationalist and realist orientation of the novel. As Zipes says of the fairy tale, ‘the once upon a time is not a past designation but futuristic: the timelessness of the tale and lack of geographical specificity endow it with utopian connotations’ (When Dreams Came True 4). This allows some writers to use the fairy tale form as a means of reflecting a radically different future for a hegemonic society. Fairy tales are in the dubious (or perhaps beneficial) position of having thus come under attack from both the political left (which see in them the usual patriarchal, misogynist, elitist, conservative ideology we have all been fed for the past few millennia) and the political right (which see them as dangerously distracting, immoral, violent, sexual, unreal, the kind of stuff that lefties like). A writer like Wilde, caught between these ideological poles, would have seen in this form the perfect means of articulating his view of the world. The fairy tale is also usefully refracted through the form of the short story which originated in part in mythic narratives and Old Testament tales such as the stories of Noah’s flood and Joseph in Genesis and is also connected to the fables of Æsop and the parables of Jesus. Indeed, along with myth, the short narrative may be the prototypical Hebraic and Western literary form. Wilde saw the Bible as an anthology of such narratives and told one friend: ‘Do you know, the Bible is a wonderful book. How beautifully artistic the little stories are!’(Gide 7). He may have seen his own collections as emulations of, and perhaps even versions of, these biblical stories. He had once famously complained that ‘when I think of all the harm that book [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it’ (quoted in Pearson 165).

16 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Many anthropologists and literary critics have argued that the short story operates on the borders of the sacred and the profane; it is not necessarily a religious form but it is implicated in ways that the secular novel is not with versions of a sacred past. Just as the mystical experiences of ancient communities came in brief episodes, fragments of the divine, so the short narrative was viewed by many as an effective formal device to express such momentary revelations. In some ways the short story as a form is deeply implicated in the sacred which may be why Joyce used it as a means of articulating ‘epiphany’ in the narrative methodology of Dubliners (1914). As Mary Rohrberger writes: The metaphysical view that there is more to the world than that which can be apprehended through the senses provides the rationale for the short story which is a vehicle for the author’s probing of the nature of the real. As in the metaphysical view, reality lies beyond the ordinary world of appearances, so in the short story, meaning lies beneath the surface of the narrative’ (141; see also May 1–5; Wheelwright 148–153). Many have noticed the religious accent that dominates the short story form, an accent which links well with the view of J.R.R. Tolkein that fairy tales ‘have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect … they open a door on Other time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself maybe’ (128–9). The door Tolkien believes fairy tales open may allow what Rudolf Otto calls the ‘mysterium temendum’ to enter and be experienced again by modern readers. But that experience of Great Otherness is always mediated through a particular historical moment and the structures of meaning available at that moment – and this is where nineteenth-century Irish folk-Catholicism comes in for Wilde, as it is how he allows the numinous to comment on the world he lives in. This scared history also helps to explain the attraction of the short story to writers from societies whose entry into modernity was problematised by disruptions such as those caused by colonisation. Frank O’ Connor called such societies ‘submerged population groups’ (18); they are places where the transition into secular time was delayed or never fully realised and which exist on the edges of the supposedly ‘civilised’ world. Declan Kiberd notes that ‘the short story is particularly appropriate to a society in which revolutionary upheavals have shattered the very idea of normality’ (Irish Writer and the World 43–4). Taking this view allows us to pull together the universalising understanding of fairy tales put forward by the likes of Bruno Bettelheim and in the context of Wilde Studies by Clifton Snider and the more historicised interpretation given by Jack Zipes and Richard Pine. Fairy tales tap into basic narrative structures and patterns which have been around since the Neolithic and which articulate what Mircea Eliade calls ‘an ahistorical, archetypal behaviour pattern of the human psyche’ especially as it relates to the relations between humans and the sacred (Myth and Reality 196), but they do so in a way deeply inscribed by historical context and local influences, in a different way in different places at different times. Wilde stands somewhere between what Angela Bourke calls the ‘marginal verbal art’ of Irish fairylore and the sophisticated constructions of literary fairy tales (‘Virtual Reality’ 7). Fairy tales, which have strong connections to the oral and literary worlds, are also means of tracing the boundaries between these two conditions, as well as between the

Introduction 17 worlds of the sacred and the profane, the Irish and the English, colonised and coloniser, children and adults, tradition and modernity; they belong uneasily to both and yet to neither. Telling fairy tales may also have been a means by which Wilde could feel connected with the rural Irish emigrants in London for fairylore is, as Angela Bourke points out, ‘a shared intellectual resource’ (ibid 17). Wilde articulated his position in these forms which are essentially linked to versions of the sacred. As Ellis Hanson notes, ‘like Christ, he spoke in proverbs and parables of a sort’ (231). This essentially religious and national context for the fairy tales has been rather ignored by most critics. Those who have looked at the fairy tales have tended to do so from a sexual perspective searching for evidence of Wilde’s sexual practices and politics in them. Gary Schmidgall has argued that ‘the sense of estrangement felt by a late-Victorian homosexual … helps to explain the subtle strangeness in several of the most moving tales’ (152), while John-Charles Duffy believes that ‘once one becomes familiar with the various ways in which Wilde and his contemporaries conceptualised male love, one can begin to see how these conceptualisations make their way into the fairy tales’ (329). Naomi Wood supports this reading arguing that ‘Wilde’s choice of the fairy tale was part of his own pederastic mentorship of youths into aesthetic fulfilment’ (81). Likewise, though less positively, Christopher S. Nassaar argues that ‘the movement … through The Happy Prince and other tales to the tales of A House of Pomegranates is toward an increasing awareness of the demonic [homosexual] and a corresponding inability to control or contain it’ (Into the Demon Universe 31). I perhaps here need to stress that this book in no way wants to negate such analyses. I have learned a great deal about the stories from previous critics, especially those who have elucidated the sexual-textual relations within them. I hope that far from negating or contradicting, my attempt to situate the tales in a religious and national context will build on and complement the body of critical work that already exists. Reading the tales against both Irish history and Wilde’s theological engagements (primarily Catholic since this was the Christian denomination Wilde was most interested in) merely opens them up to further research. The chapters which follow look at each of the stories in the two collections individually. Each chapter follows roughly the same pattern, starting with a brief synopsis of previous critical readings, before setting out my own interpretation which will supplement these readings. I am suggesting that recognising the Irishness of these tales and their folk-Catholic elements helps to banish some of the critical mystery that has adhered to them. Wilde encountered the fairy tale and folklore traditions he uses through an Irish lens first and while this certainly does not mean that he was not influenced by other sources, it does mean that it is important to take serious account of this Irish material. The other sources for Wilde’s creative genius have been (and are still being) brilliantly examined by other scholars – here I am just trying to add an Irish layer, and not seeking to cancel out other approaches. Throughout, the connections between Ireland, the Gnostic, the folk-Catholic and Wilde should become clearer and a new, and even more interesting Wilde, should emerge from ‘once upon a time’.

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Part I The Happy Prince and Other Tales

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Chapter One ‘The Happy Prince’ My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom … [But] the other side of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course, all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my art. Some of it is in ‘The Happy Prince’. Oscar Wilde (Letters 739–40). Oscar Wilde appears to have come up with the story of ‘The Happy Prince’ when, on a visit to Cambridge in 1885, he was asked to entertain some student friends. Critics have found the biographical impulse almost irresistible when looking at this tale, and it has most persistently been read as an oblique commentary on Wilde’s sexual history. Richard Ellmann claimed that the story turned ‘on the contrast … of an older, taller lover with a younger, smaller beloved’ (253), and thus mirrored Wilde’s first known homoerotic relationship with the young Canadian Robert Ross, whom Wilde met in 1886. Often this biographical reading has been quite literal in its application of personal names and histories to the characters in the story. Robert K. Martin has argued that ‘a good deal of Oscar’s experience with Constance [Wilde]’ informs the relationship between the Swallow and the Reed, since Constance ‘though attractive, was hardly literary and was intellectually incapable of sharing her husband’s life’ (76), a claim with which Gary Schmidgall agrees believing that ‘it is difficult to read of this romance without thinking of Constance’ (155). In this reading the story is configured as ‘a miniature, and moving, celebration of a tragedy of the Love that dare not speak its name … a melancholy evocation of gay experience in a frosty, inclement, threatening society’ (156). Schmidgall is supported by John Charles Duffy in this, who believes that the relationship between the Prince and the Swallow is best seen as a ‘patently non-sexual’ but ‘spiritually transforming’ same-sex passion mirroring the intense friendships favoured by Oxford Platonism (331). Other critics have pointed out that the story is best read as an attack on the utilitarian and pragmatic mentality which governed public and political dealings with the poor in nineteenth century London and an attempt to find a more compassionate, and effective, means of dealing with what seemed to be an intractable problem. Philip Cohen claims that the story ‘looks outward on human suffering and ponders the problems of economic inequality and injustice’ (81), an analysis echoed by Jack Zipes who, somewhat improbably, claims that Wilde’s intention is ultimately to expose the actions of the Prince as wrongheaded: ‘though Christlike behaviour is laudable, it is not radical enough … Wilde uses the figure of Christ [in the Prince] to show the need to subvert the Christian message’ (Fairy Tales 116). Zipes is here influenced by a straight reading of Wilde’s later article on ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), which denounced philanthropy, arguing that ‘it is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate

22 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property’ (Collins’Complete Works 1174). Rodney Shewan, too, worries that the Prince’s sacrifice has been for nothing as ‘the beauty of the acts of self-sacrifice seems marred by the obtuseness of their objects’ (41). Guy Willoughby points out that ‘in concrete terms’ the sacrifice of the Prince is ‘quite futile’ (Art and Christhood 26). Society continues on in exactly the same way after the Prince’s sacrifice as before. These critics are disturbed by the fact that the self-immolation of the Prince ultimately appears to change nothing in the political or economic establishment. His gifts of gold and jewels have merely provided a local and temporary respite for some from the full rigours of the capitalist system which inevitably marginalises so many. Either Wilde’s tale exposes private charity as a misguided, though understandable, activity or it has no answers to the problems of economic exploitation it poses. Wilde himself was clear enough on his intentions in writing the story. In a letter to Leonard Smithers he explained that ‘the story is an attempt to treat a tragic modern problem in a form that aims at delicacy and imaginative treatment: it is a reaction against the purely imitative character of modern art’ (Letters 355). The letter is a warning that although the story is indeed tackling real social problems, the problems of unemployment, poverty, exploitation, unjust social structures, the very problems ‘imitative’ (for which read ‘realist’) literature has been ‘blowing loud trumpets’ about (ibid 355), Wilde believes that a different form – and perhaps a different solution – is necessary to properly tackle these issues. Where the realists were making rather large claims as to the anthropological and social importance of their art, Wilde inverts their logic believing that an entirely different approach is required to correct wrongs which are as much moral as they are social. By using a fairy tale to examine these questions, the very form considered escapist by the realists and the middle classes, Wilde suggests that social inequality cannot be solved by a radical shake-up of the political system, but only through a radical moral transformation of the individual. As Willoughby insists, ‘charitable gestures may be [socially] useless, but in individual terms … such sacrifices are vital’ (Art and Christhood 26). And this moral transformation takes a very theological character in the shape of both Prince and Swallow. Moreover, a close reading of the tale demonstrates not only its theological (rather than social) character, but also the extent to which Wilde was influenced in his reading of social problems by his Irish background. This chapter reads ‘The Happy Prince’ as concerned with, not only the economic problems of Victorian London, but also the dynamics of Irish immigrant life there. When the Irish poor fled an impoverished existence to work in England, legend has it that they believed they would find the streets of London paved with gold because the British economy was such a paper success. Indeed, it was, by most economic indicators, the most successful in the world. Other economies depended upon it, using its ships, its banks, and its people for global trade. The British economy grew by approximately 1 per cent per annum every year between 1860 and 1914, facilitating a rise in both wages and life expectancy, from 40–41 years in 1871 to 50 years by 1901 (Floud 1–7; Baines 145–6), and London was at the centre of this economic hit. Asa Briggs calls it the ‘world city’ due to its enormous influence on the global economy (323–72).

‘The Happy Prince’ 23 Social researchers, however, found that beneath the official statistics, a very different London could be discovered. John Knox complained that: When we look at this great city, with all its pomp and splendour – its wealth, power, and greatness – its palaces, cathedrals, and mansions – its courts of justice, academies of science, and institutions of philanthropy – surely we mourn that such a city has so much wickedness, degradation, infidelity, heathenism, and profligacy … The swarms of wretched, filthy, haggard, dissolute, profligate, careworn, outcast masses who inhabit the dingy courts, dingy cellars, and miserable garrets of our great towns, call loudly upon us to go and carry the message of peace to their benighted homes … (quoted in Dyos 13–14). The phenomenal growth in the economy had disproportionately benefited the middle-class, and the economic and social divisions between most of the population and those in the top 5 per cent increased. While economic growth did bring about an overall improvement in welfare, as evidenced by the increase in life expectancy, it ‘left behind a substantial residue of the population in poverty’ (Floud 9). While the wealthy moved out of the centre itself and migrated to the suburbs, the poor and the immigrant took up residence in the confining streets and laneways (Dyos and Reeder), and a ‘deep gulf’ became established between the ‘experiences and values’ of slum dwellers and suburbanites (Briggs 326). Living conditions in big cities and towns were almost indescribable. In a spectral reverse image of the salubrious conditions of middle-class life, and the unbridled luxury of the aristocracy, the working-class resided in appalling circumstances. A large percentage of the urban poor were actually migrants of some form, either from the countryside or the colonies (indeed in 1851 half the adult population in London was migrant) and one cause of urban disease appeared to be the continuation of rural sanitary practices in an urban environment. Contemporary observers struggled to articulate the conditions they discovered on studying these places. In November 1883, Punch described how, to reach the slums, investigators had to ‘penetrate courts reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all directions. You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin …’ (quoted in Dyos 19). Without an adequate sewerage infrastructure, the accumulation of such refuse polluted rivers and drinking water and saturated the air to such a degree that even religious charities found it next to impossible to be of any assistance. Urban areas were overwhelmingly more precarious places to live than their rural counterparts and those in the worst jobs, such as bargees, watermen, soot merchants and chimney sweepers, died at a horrifying rate of 150 per cent higher than the clergy (Floud 10). Charles Booth has become famous as the most thorough and extensive researcher of social conditions in Victorian England. He had initially been driven to this research by scepticism when he read a report which claimed that 25 per cent of all Londoners lived in some form of poverty. Believing this was simply socialist propaganda he set out to disprove it through his own research which he carried out between 1889 and 1902. Out of this research he produced his massive, 17 volume Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1902). Rather than disprove the original claims he was so suspicious of, his work tended to confirm the worst descriptions of poverty. For example, he found that in the East End, at least 35 per cent of the population

24 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde lived in poverty. Perhaps his most important discovery was that this poverty was not simply the result of inveterate working-class laziness and alcohol-consumption but was a function of the economy itself, especially employment and family situation (as well as Booth, for a vivid description of the state of life in the London slums of the period, see Davin 29–61; Lees 71–87). There is a large cognitive gap between language and experience, especially when it comes to describing life for the poor. The word ‘slum’, for example, indicates not just another mode of living but another form of language: by the 1820s, ‘slum’ was a slang expression for taverns, loose talk and gypsy language and a room in which ‘suspect’ activities took place (Dyos 7–8). In official-speak a ‘slum’ indicated a house that was ‘unfit for human habitation’, a rather ironic description since such places tended to be teeming with human life (ibid 9). These structures were an architectural obscenity: an ugly reminder of the grim face of capitalism, but a self-reflecting mirror of Calvinist assumptions of predestined misery. They drove many to radical action and the eruption of socialism and philanthropic charity; they confirmed to others the depravity of the poor and guaranteed their positions at the margins of society. Wilde decided that such liminal spaces, hovering on the edges of language and meaning, required analysis through a form less obvious than the realist novel: the problem of poverty needed ‘delicacy and imaginative treatment’ rather than a merely fictional version of the sociological researches of Charles Booth. As I outlined in the Introduction, the fairy-tale form operated in this marginal space, hovering between hegemony and rebellion, conservatism and subversion and thus was a suitable location for the site of social critique. Wilde, a middle-class writer with aristocratic pretensions, who was irresistibly drawn against Victorian hypocritical piety towards the peasant Catholicism of the Irish, was in a good position to contemplate such issues. London is important to our interests because it is clear that it is the intended subject of many of Wilde’s fairy tales and it is vital to be aware of the conditions that existed in the city in order to fully grasp the aims of the social critique he conducts. Any journey into the world of fantasy, where statues and birds communicate freely and even reeds take on anthropomorphic qualities, must begin within the normative, the dominant order (see Jackson), which for Wilde was the political and social economy of Victorian London. ‘The Happy Prince’ is a fairy tale emerging from Victorian facts concerning the poverty so evident in London, but it refuses to present these facts in a sociological rather than an imaginative form. The story is populated with ‘Charity Children’, destitute seamstresses, poor artists and the generalised masses who congregate in the back alleys and lanes. In ‘The Happy Prince’ Wilde sets up a disruption of the ‘real’ London – the London of Charles Booth – so as to facilitate a more interrogative position and enable him to posit some type of potential solution to the issues he raises. London poverty was an appropriate subject for Wilde (see also Von Eckhardt, Gilman and Chamberlin 131–158). His son Vyvyan Holland points out that the reality of poverty was close at hand to the Wilde’s home in Tite Street. He records that ‘the west side of the street backed on to Paradise Walk … one of the most forbidding of Chelsea slums. It was a row of tenement houses with wretched, filthy back-yards, from which the sounds of bawling arose nightly’(51; Schmidgall points to this also, 155). This fact has important bearings on the story, as it introduces an

‘The Happy Prince’ 25 autobiographical influence perhaps more pertinent than Wilde’s sexual proclivities. Looking out over Paradise Walk from the upper floors of his home in Tite Street gave Wilde the same visual perspective on poverty as the Prince has in his story. Moreover, the name ‘Paradise Walk’ suggests religious and biblical connotations implied throughout the narrative. ‘Paradise’ is theologically, both the lost Garden of Eden in Genesis, and the promised new heaven and new earth of Revelations. Indeed, the Bible is commonly conceived of as the journey from the first Paradise to the second, a journey in which humanity must grapple with its fallen nature and attempt to overcome it. The image of a street leading to Paradise is a typographical appropriation of the nature of the biblical narrative, but it also suggests the psychological movement of the Prince in the story, from initial Paradise of ignorance in Sans-Souci, to the new heaven of love in the final paragraph, via the Augustinian fortunate fall into a knowledge of sin and redemption. To reach the New Kingdom, the Prince must undergo a ritual of self-sacrifice (being deprived of beauty) and love (illustrated by the Swallow’s loyalty), much as the Christ- event inaugurated in terms of biblical and salvation history. This supports the overwhelmingly Christian inflection of the story. Critics have indeed noticed the Christian message central to the tale. Philip Cohen points out that the Prince and the Swallow must learn to ‘reject lower forms of pleasure as they come to realise that the highest happiness results from Christian love’ (87–8), while Jerome Griswold has noted the modelling of the Prince on Christ (103). However, Christianity is crucial to the entire structure of the story which enacts narratively what Paradise Walk performs typographically: both suggest a possible methodology for transforming the real city of London into the mythic New Jerusalem, both suggesting that what stands in the way are forms of egotism. Wilde’s tale attempts to take in all levels of the English society in which he now lived, from the exalted aristocracy to the immigrant periphery. The upper class is isolated and distant, the monarchy especially has become reified, ignorant of the social realities existing outside its ivory towers. When the Prince was alive he lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, ‘where sorrow is not allowed to enter’ (171). Thus mummified, the Prince can possess no information with which to make qualified judgements about the world as a whole. His Garden of Eden contains no Tree of Knowledge and is isolated from all things by a ‘very lofty wall’ (171). Epistemologically, the Prince cannot but have been ignorant of even the meaning of the name of his home: only ever having access to pleasure (later suggesting that he and the entire court had mistaken pleasure for happiness – ‘happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness’ 171), the logic of its opposite can have had no phenomenological reality. He is, as Rodney Shewan points out, a type of egotist, whose penance is ‘to stand as a monument to that perfect happiness which he now realises to have been imperfect and illusory’ (40). The dark side of the garden had no meaning to him and only through a miraculous intervention does it become a reality for him. The Prince’s extreme reaction on critically experiencing the world for himself ironically comes when he is literally metallic, as opposed to the artificial mummification he endured while alive. While the monarchy live a life of constant pleasure, it is the middle-classes that effectively control and fashion society after their own image. This malign bourgeoisie appear in the guise of the Town Councillor, the Mathematical Master,

26 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde the Professor of Ornithology and the Watchman, all of whom police the social boundaries set by themselves, defining the terms of working-class action. In both Victorian London and Wilde’s mythical City, the middle class preach the gospel of respectability, improvement and courtesy. They formulate an ideological manifesto implicitly designed to defend and extend their social position. For example, the Town Councillor delineates the imperfection of the statue of the Prince as arising from its impracticality. It is ‘as beautiful as a weathercock … only not quite so useful’ (167). The statement of the Councillor hides his implicit recognition of the supreme usefulness of the statue: it cajoles the working class into silence. If he can be happy, the message goes, so too should they. The Prince died young and yet has retained his happiness; his message to the working class is that the answer to poverty is not social unease but cheerful drudgery. Likewise, the sensible mother quietens her imaginative child by pointing to the statue of the Prince (‘Why can’t you be like the Happy Prince? ... [who] never dreams of crying for anything’ 167); the Mathematical Master warns against the futility of dreams ‘for he did not approve of children dreaming’ (168); the dysfunctional courtship of the Reed and the Swallow exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian mating rituals, especially since ‘she has no conversation … and I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind’ (169); the pampered princess frets over the laziness of the over-worked seamstress and is concerned that her dress ‘will be ready in time for the State-ball’ (173); and the Professor of Ornithology dazzles the populace through long words rather than penetrating social comment: ‘Every one quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand’ (174). The middle class protect their privileged position of power by constructing an impenetrable discourse that allows no place for the working class except as cheerful instruments of general economic prosperity. However, the Town Councillor knows he must pay homage to practicality since it headed the list of Victorian values. By the mid-century a broad consensus had been reached concerning the kind of value system that would best serve a cohesive culture, consisting of rationality, self-reliance, knowledge, independence, education, respectability and improvement. These values permeated the entire edifice and interior of Victorian culture, through the schools, universities, trade unions, churches and social clubs (Tholfsen 161–4). As Tholfsen points out, this ideological structure was upheld fervently and was penetrated with the values and enthusiasm of the evangelical movement. Ordinary activities were given the religious validity of pilgrimage and, indeed, the Victorian gospel of success and enterprise should be thought of in religious terms. Of course, this religion of work and practicality was conducive to the maintenance of the status quo and was in the end a middle-class bulwark. As Tholfsen puts it, ‘Implicit in the articulation of formally universal consensus values were social presuppositions that bent them into the shape required by an inegalitarian society; differential social roles assumed middle-class pre-eminence’ (197). Wilde unveils utilitarianism and the gospel of success as disguises for egotism: the Town Councillors end up arguing, not about the greater good, but about who the greatest is among them. Indeed, typical Victorian values – such as respectability, independence, rationality, individual dignity – were really code words for the middle- class point of view, although each was propounded as if of universal significance. Rationality, perhaps the most important value in the story, the value that informs

‘The Happy Prince’ 27 utilitarian and pragmatic views of economic deprivation, was really an expression of an ability to ‘understand the middle-class point of view’ (Tholsfen, 219). Those who disagreed with this version of reality could easily be dismissed as irrational and therefore irrelevant. The working classes were urged to practise the traits deemed valuable by their social betters in order to reconcile themselves more completely to their subordinate position in society. The lonely child must learn to stop ‘crying for the moon’ in Wilde’s story the sensible mother knows he will never get it (167); the ‘Charity Children’ must not imagine the Prince is an angel because this indicates the possibility of an alternative social system. Thrift, orderliness, punctuality, early- rising, work-enthusiasm, were all imbued with a theological fervour, but all worked to ensure the working class would not need to call upon their social betters for financial support. Kenneth Fielden notes that all this could be summed up in one idea: ‘It is your own fault if you are not prosperous’ (161). Importantly, the miserable ‘condition of labour’ was also allayed at this time through the middle-class appropriation of fairy tales, which leavened the burden of working class life through the medium of escapism while providing another outlet for the inculcation of the social gospel. Originally the middle class had feared that fairy tales lacked the moral qualities that would be useful in a capitalist society and would encourage escapism and social transformation on children and the lower classes. Jack Zipes has pointed out that the Victorians initially frowned on fairy-tales as primitive and dangerous. They were not considered appropriate in the education of children in civilised values (‘Introduction’ to Victorian Fairy Tales xiii). In the mid-Victorian period the middle class changed its mind. The fairy tale became seen as a means of ‘entertaining’ the masses, and distracting them from their subordination. Likewise, middle-class morality was increasingly written into both bowdlerised versions of classic tales and newly composed works: Middle-class writers, educators, publishers, and parents, began to realise that the rigid, didactic training and literature used to rear their children was dulling their senses and creativity. Both children and adults needed more fanciful works to stimulate their imagination and keep them productive in the social and cultural spheres of British life. Emphasis was now placed on fairy-tale reading and storytelling as recreation (ibid xvi). In precisely the same way, the City Fathers bestow the statue of the Prince on the inhabitants. They emphasise that the statue never appears sad or dissatisfied with his lot in life, and accompany this emphasis with a doctrine of the practical to ensure the ever-increasing workload is met with passivity. There is never any sense in this story that the starving artist, the dying match girl, the distressed seamstress, will ever gather together to launch a collective revolt against the system that has put them in this position. Their tendency towards revolt has been educated out of them by the value system promoted everywhere. A central component of this emphasis on the education of the poor – the very education the ‘Charity Children’ are being given in the cathedral – was the elimination of superstition and ‘irrationality’ from society as a whole. The middle- class set out to divest the working-class world of the remaining traces of superstition, traces which were read as the lingering of effects of a more primitive worldview

28 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde than was appropriate to the nineteenth century (Tholfsen, 201). By the 1880s the gospel of Rationalism had permeated many aspects of English life. W.E.H. Lecky’s celebrated History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865) argued that as reason spread to all classes and peoples superstition would be gradually, but surely, overcome. Thomas Huxley famously argued that ‘the improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the unpardonable sin’ (40–1). Many abandoned Christianity in favour of the apparent rationalism of agnosticism, encouraged by the geological discoveries of Charles Lyell and the biological theories of Charles Darwin. Both Lyell and Darwin appeared to offer the possibility that both physical and moral progress could be achieved through purely natural rather than supernatural means. Those who did stay in the Established Church demanded that anything of a suspicious nature – suggestions of magic or the supernatural – be rooted out in favour of a rational religion and urged taking this new knowledge to the ignorant masses. One set of such ignorants was, of course, the Roman Catholic poor who stalked the streets of London, especially those who had travelled from the Irish countryside; their non-linear, vernacular system of thought was irreconcilable with the rationality of the English Protestant natives (Parsons; Samuel and the many articles of Gilley). And these ignorant Irish immigrants were very much on Wilde’s mind when he came to write ‘The Happy Prince’. While the immediate object of the narrative is London, Davis Coakley has argued that a Merrion Square/Dublin backdrop should be acknowledged in some of the fairy tales, and this is certainly true for ‘The Happy Prince’. Wilde grew up on Merrion Square, one of the most fashionable squares in Dublin: One of the advantages of living in Merrion Square was that residents had a key to the private gardens that formed the centre of the square … This was a fine park where the young Wildes, Willie, Oscar and Isola, could run and explore without encountering children from the lower classes (109). Wilde’s childhood was certainly analogous to that of the Happy Prince in this story: the Prince must be transported from the rustic ignorance of the garden in Sans-Souci, to the urban nightmare of poverty, in much the same way that Wilde had to move from the salubrious suburbs of Dublin to the poor districts in the West of Ireland to understand fully the nature of poverty and desperation. Even the exotic-sounding ‘Sans-Souci’ was, in fact, locally inspired. Wilde most likely took it from the name of a mansion in Booterstown, to the east of Dublin city, a mansion as geographically cut-off from poverty as his own idyll in Merrion Square. Moreover, Coakley’s observations lead us to a more nuanced reading of the story, for in it we see London and Dublin merging as sites requiring a psychic transformation. London was, after all, divided between natives and foreigners and in the nineteenth century it often contained what were known as ‘Little Dublins’, nomadic families of Irish immigrants wandering the streets, some of them no doubt lighting upon the Paradise Walk so close to Wilde’s own home. Realising this provides a means of recognising subtle indications in the story that Wilde has the Irish immigrant experience in London in mind when constructing his version of urban

‘The Happy Prince’ 29 poverty – perhaps as a way of compensating for those years spent in the gardens of Merrion Square ignoring it. This is particularly the case in relation to the occupations of the poor in the story and the tale’s interrogation of the imagery of identity. We know that between 1841 and 1911, over one million Irish immigrants took up residence in Britain. So great were the numbers arriving that by 1850 it is estimated that about 3.5 per cent of the population of England and Wales had been born in Ireland. Half of these Irish-born arrivals lived in the cities of London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow (Baines 55–6). Many of these Irish immigrants arrived in their new homes with nothing, and were sent straight to the least attractive areas, living and working in the centre of the cities where there was a pressure on housing. The Prince singles out the seamstress as being in particular need, ‘her face is thin and worn, and she has coarse, red hands, all pricked by the needle’ (171–2). Of the female Irish immigrants 17 per cent became seamstresses, and Irish women dominated the trade in London. It was considered to be one of the most difficult trades in the city, involving very long hours at very low rates. Many earned less than five shillings per week for work of more than 15 hours a day, so the help given by the Prince would have been welcome indeed (Lees 93). One historian notes that the trade of seamstress in London was ‘less a skilled occupation that brought pride in craftsmanship than oppressive labour at subsubsistence wages’ (ibid 95). The match-girl in the story too is typical of the child-labour the Irish were forced into in an effort to survive. Henry Mayhew estimated in 1850 that at least 10,000 Irish made their living hawking in London, concentrating on the least attractive and least profitable products such as matches (104). Thus, although Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Little Match Girl’ (1845) is clearly an influence on the story, there were also more pressing and more local reasons why Wilde took particular interest in such an occupation. In other words, Wilde is combining formal and national influences in his choice of characters. His poor reside in ‘dark lanes’ and ‘black streets’ (180), like the real London Irish who were forced to occupy the most crowded and dilapidated areas of the major cities due to the racial hierarchy that operated even among the poor and destitute. I am not suggesting here that many other groups and individuals did not find themselves in the same marginalised position as the London Irish, but only that as an Irish immigrant Wilde would most likely have noticed the large amounts of other Irish immigrants in London (especially since they were so numerous), and that the wretched condition many of them were in may have alerted him to the kinds of discrimination rife in the late Victorian city. Wilde’s position as a foreigner in England made him aware of the problems of the poor – especially since so many of them were foreigners of one class or another themselves. Many of the poorest working class English considered the Irish immigrant to be one step below them. Benjamin Disraeli signified the working class as a whole as a ‘separate nation’ indicating how the discourses of class and race intersected in the popular mind. If the working-class was a separate nation, then the Irish working-class was a nation once again: most Irish immigrants lived in the districts of Whitechapel, St. George’s and St. Giles’, all located on the periphery of ‘the City’ itself. In many of these districts the Irish population rose to 74 per cent and were renamed the ‘Holy Lands’ or ‘Little Dublins’ to signify this (Lees 62, 66, 68).

30 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde As many Irish immigrants came directly from rural Ireland, particularly from the West which was denuded of people by the effects of the Famine, they were a very visible section of the urban world they came to live in. Their difference was commented upon frequently, not only in the press but by well-respected commentators and social reformers. A Royal Commission ‘Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain’ compiled in 1836, commented: When the outskirts of a rapidly increasing town … become the seat of an Irish colony, who invariably fasten on the cheapest, that is, the worst and most unhealthy situations, bringing with them their uncleanly and negligent habits, often more suited to a country than a town life, and herding in large numbers in the same house, so that several families frequently occupy each room from the cellar to the garret, the whole presents an appearance of filth, neglect, confusion, discomfort, and insalubrity, which it would be vain to seek in any English town inhabited solely by the natives of the place (cited in Lees 15–16). If poverty was widespread in the urban centres, it was widely believed that the Irish – and other colonial immigrants – brought it with them (Davis 104–33). Wilde’s life in London had clearly made him aware of the issues inherent in the immigrant question and he was also conscious that his mother had addressed this issue long before him. In 1881 he sent a copy of her The American-Irish (1878) to James Knowles, editor of Nineteenth Century identifying its importance as a ‘political prophecy’ (Letters 115–16). Lady Wilde’s pamphlet had argued that it was with the immigrant Irish, particularly those who had gone to America, that the future of Irish nationalism lay because journeying abroad would teach them the importance of human freedom and dignity, ideals they would bring back to the homeland. The American-Irish focuses predominantly on the situation of those Irish who have gone to America, but it does reflect briefly on the Irish in England. It is particularly interesting for its emphasis on the distinction between Irish immigrants and the native English they would have had to commingle with. Lady Wilde trenchantly insists that ‘the factory smoke in England is so thick the people cannot see Heaven. In their hard industrial life their eyes are never lifted from toil … [But the Irish] can at least live in the visible presence of God’ (Wyndham 236). That she means by this the Irish in London as well as the Irish at home is indicated by her claim that ‘the Irish may live for years in England, yet they never acquire the English manner …’ (ibid 207). Thus, the Irish look to heaven; the English are barred from ever seeing it. Paradise is the possession of the one race and not the other. Having just recently re-read his mother’s article – and impressed with it as a piece of ‘political prophecy’ as well as ‘practical republicanism’ (seeing it, in other words, as a powerful combination of realism and idealism just like his own fairy tale) – it is not surprising that Wilde structures as a key moment in the story the (Irish-like) Charity Children turning their eyes to heaven, while the (English) Mathematical Master seems unable to clear the smoke of hard industrial fact from his vision: ‘He looks just like an angel’, said the Charity Children ... ‘How do you know?’ said the Mathematical Master, ‘you have never seen one’. ‘Ah! But we have, in our dreams’, answered the children; and the Mathematical Master frowned and looked very severe, for he did not approve of children dreaming (168).

‘The Happy Prince’ 31 As an Irish artist resident in London Wilde could identify with the displaced people of the Famine and his experience with those left behind in the post-Famine West of Ireland as a child would have impacted strongly also. He fittingly includes himself in the story as one of the disenfranchised, in the figure of the unemployed playwright, unappreciated by society and living close to complete poverty waiting for the attention of the ‘Director of the Theatre’ to fall on him: He is leaning over a desk covered with papers, and in a tumbler by his side there is a bunch of withered violets. His hair is brown and crisp, and his lips are red as a pomegranate, and he has large and dreamy eyes. He is trying to finish a play for the Director of the Theatre, but he is too cold to write any more’ (175–6). Like other Irish immigrants, he is in exile from his native country desperately seeking qualification from this other world. It was an appreciation that had yet to arrive, given the failure of his play Vera (1880), and the hostile critical reaction to his Poems (1881). In the transplantation of rural Irish Catholics into the sprawling urban slums of London, several communal beliefs were retained. Many commentators on the Irish immigrants in London claimed that the Irish immigrant was ‘Catholic by instinct’, remaining loyal to the belief in the mystical power of the church, and in the person of the priest as the intermediary between God and man, a belief that Anglicans found unpalatable. Lynn Hollen Lees quotes one Marist priest, L.M. Petit, S.M., who remarked in 1853 that ‘the Irish never lose their faith or respect for the priest … The faith of the Irish saves us from proving our power over souls; more likely we must protest that we do not have the gift for working miracles’ (187). A serious Protestant mission to convert Irish Catholic immigrants and undermine this traditional Catholicism was conducted through such societies as the Bickersteths, the Irish Church Missions and the Reformation Society (Gilley, ‘Protestant London II’ 21–46). The magazines of these societies railed against the chief evils inherent in such a demonic combination as Ireland and Catholicism: superstition and blindness to Protestant enlightenment. For example, in November 1851, the London City Mission Magazine complained that: There are millions of Popish countrymen living at our own door, who are almost as thoroughly sunk in ignorance, idolatry, and moral degradation as are the Hottentots and the negroes of Africa (ibid 26). The experiential difference between Catholics and Protestants was considered crucial in determining values in this period. I believe that Wilde’s depiction of the children and the poor in this story, and the values of the story itself, taps into this difference. His own mother had recognised this sectarian division when she theorised Catholicism as a denomination open to the influences of myth and poetry, whereas the rationalism and common sense of Protestantism had closed such imaginative doors. Lady Wilde’s pamphlet on The American-Irish characterised the Reformation as the division of Europe into the dogmatic, ‘enlightened’, empirical (Protestants) and the superstitious, imaginative, highly theological (Catholic), which she also categorised awkwardly as the English and the Irish (236–9). In her introduction to

32 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde her collection of Ancient Legends she posits an image of the Irish crucial to the imagery of ‘The Happy Prince’: [The mythopoetic faculty] only exists now, naturally and instinctively, in children, poets, and childlike races, like the Irish – simple, joyous, reverent, and unlettered, and who have remained unchanged for centuries, walled round … from the rest of Europe (7). Her version of the Irish and the Catholic as naturally child-like links her imagery strongly with that of her son whose ‘Charity Children’ troop out of the Cathedral defying the ‘pedagogic disapproval’ of their social masters through their imagination (Shewan 38). In ‘The Happy Prince’, the Mathematical Master demonstrates the Anglican disapproval of such innate nativism in the face of an obviously Irish belief in angels. As the Irish children are homogenised by middle-class philanthropy into ‘Charity Children’ uniformly clothed in ‘bright scarlet cloaks, and … clean white pinafores’ they maintain their essential difference from the values of society by their persistence in dreaming (168).1 They appropriate the figure of the Happy Prince that the middle-classes have erected as a chastisement to working class dissatisfaction, into their own vocabulary. To them he looks like an angel encouraging their superstitions, while to the ‘sensible mother’ he is a figure with which to rebuke the ‘little boy who was crying for the moon’ (167). The divisions of the story are religious rather than merely social: doctrine separates the city’s inhabitants, but it may also be the vehicle for their potential salvation. The children are different because they are Catholic (and, by Lady Wilde’s logic, Irish) but the implication is that they are also better off than the grim formulaic figure of the Master unable to reach into the intangible. Catholics were often considered childish in the Victorian press. In 1872 a writer for the Evangelical Magazine claimed that Roman Catholicism was a religion fit only for children and other under-developed people, as it refused to engage the intellect and depended entirely on symbols, the imagination and an appeal to the senses (cited in Wallis 38–9). Wilde is also exploiting one of the chief symbols of the Irish for the Victorians: that of the child. The Victorians utilised the discourse of childhood in speaking about the Irish in an attempt to infantilise them. Declan Kiberd points out that British imperialism notioned the association of colonised peoples with children very early in its imperial history: Within British writing, there had long been a link between children’s fiction and the colonial enterprise, which led to an identification of the new world with the infantile state of man … All through the nineteenth century, the Irish had been treated in the English media as childlike (Inventing Ireland 104). Edith Balfour’s reaction on meeting some of the natives is a powerful demonstration of just how natural the link between the child and the Irishman became in the British mind: ‘[The native Irish] are like children still listening to old fairy stories … They are like children who are afraid to walk alone, who play with fire, who are helpless; like children who will not grow up’ (quoted in Curtis, Anglo-Saxons 53). 1 Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’, in Songs of Experience (1794), also makes reference to the annual procession of the charity children to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

‘The Happy Prince’ 33 Wilde preferred to tell the English fairy stories of his own rather than listen to the old ones, and here he ironically allows the Irish child to interrogate his imperial parent. Indeed, he configures the English monarch as a child, a child who will never grow up, but instead remains in a perpetual Tír-na-nÓg (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 101). As Richard Pine points out, to the English, Ireland was an ‘unreal place – the otherworld’ (37), like a land of perpetual youth. It is thus easier for the ‘Charity Children’ to identify with the Prince because he is already one of them, a child and so a representative Irish figure. Here too, Lady Wilde’s architectural metaphor of the Irish being ‘walled round’ from the rest of Europe becomes problematised. Her son suggests that such isolation is not so much the solution to the colonial situation as part of the problem. As the walled Happy Prince was ignorant until he found himself in the big bad world, so his symbolic role as the Irishman becomes apposite. The Irishman must get out of the walled space that is Ireland and engage with Teutonic rationality in order to become truly transformative. Wilde’s suggestion is, ironically, that the true Irishman is the immigrant who immerses himself in English society only so as to transform it with his Irishness and his Catholicism. His own disguise of an English upper-class artist is here displayed as the necessary pose to become the impetus for change. Thus the Irish child posing as the English Prince can truly be transformative only outside the enclosing spaces of Irish life itself. Such a position was not unusual in Irish immigrant circles. Desmond Ryan, Irish immigrant republican, wrote caustically in 1934 on the Victorian period: To leave Ireland often means to know Ireland better, and too few of those who should leave this country for their country’s good have the sense to do so. The ‘expatriates’ … do for Ireland what Ireland so seldom does for herself (373). The opposition the story exploits, then, is between English Protestant adult rationality and Irish Catholic childish imagination, between English materialism and Celtic idealism, structured in a very strict hierarchy. It becomes clearer why, in the story, the Anglican cathedral is never invested with the same positivity as irrational Catholicism. The ‘Charity Children’ are trooping ‘out of the cathedral’ where they have been receiving strict Anglican instruction when they begin to see their identity mirrored in the statue. The cathedral is the site of homogenisation, while the origin of plurality rests in the imaginative transformations of Catholic folk belief. Wilde’s undermining of the Established Church chimes very much with criticisms of the Anglican establishment that were current in the nineteenth century. In 1851 Robert Mann compiled an important report on religious observation in England which found that, overwhelmingly, the working class did not attend church. He pointed out that, since the upper and middle classes rented the best pews in church, the working class were left to fill the empty seats, a fact hardly likely to induce attendance. Mann’s analysis also revealed that the working class were suspicious of the motives of the clergy, many suspecting them of a devotion to their own comforts rather than the Gospel. The majority of the clergy were from the gentlemen and scholarly classes which did not serve their cause with the working class either (see Thompson).

34 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Wilde himself may have found Anglicanism unattractive and justified working class alienation from it for a further reason, a reason aptly echoed by the obsessive materialism of the middle classes in the story. It was widely believed within Anglican circles that the generation of ever-increasing wealth was not only acceptable but an obligation placed on the elect by God. The goal of the bourgeois businessman was respectability and salvation, and the achievement of financial wealth was considered indicative of both. Crudely, if you were rich, you were saved (Houghton 189-95). This attitude was exemplified in the ‘Protestant work ethic’ which valued firm discipline and action over contemplation. Indeed, by the mid-seventeenth century, most Calvinist groups seem to have equated worldly success with the possibility of salvation. As Max Weber puts it, ‘[the] acquisition [of wealth] … as a performance of duty in a calling, [was] not only morally permissible, but actually enjoined’ (163).2 Such a theology, of course, allowed for the type of capitalism evidenced in the story. The Mathematical Master frowns on speculation and imagination; the Town Councillor wants practicality and pragmatism to be the bye-words of philosophy; the lady-in-waiting criticises anything she sees as laziness; and the Prince mournfully reflects that ‘the living always think that gold can make them happy’ (180). The converse side of this capitalist obsession was the widespread belief that poverty was the result of predetermined damnation. Indigence was the external sign that God had already pronounced the ultimate fate of those living in the hovels and this belief legitimated leaving them there. Historians have noted the increasing tendency, throughout the nineteenth century, for the Anglican Church to slowly retreat from the city centres, perhaps in response to this belief. Wilde sees Catholicism as a means of combating the spiritual slavery of the people. It eschewed predestination and focused on good-works rather than work. Its priests came from the people and religious gatherings in cities like London were more likely to take place in attic rooms and crude huts than mighty cathedrals. Catholicism in the 1880s and 1890s was dedicated to forging a common identity between Catholics in England. Raphael Samuel claims that ‘the Catholic “Poor Schools” to which the Church devoted so remarkable an effort in the third quarter of the century, were planted in the very midst of the poor, quite without regard to the reputation of the “low” Irish neighbourhoods’, and further remarks that ‘the priest, in the Irish mission, lived in close vicinity with his flock, having no society other than that of his parishioners’ (273, 275). Charles Booth noticed as much in his survey of London: As a rule the better Catholic the better Irishman, and the better Irishman the better Catholic: their priests, being often of Irish blood, are at one with the people, and in sentiment are even more Irish than they are Catholic (vol. 7 246). Samuel claims that in the latter part of the nineteenth century the Catholic Church stood out from the other Christian denominations in continuing to minister to 2 Some difficulties lie in Weber’s direct link between a profit ethic and predestined salvation, in that ‘profit’ itself was viewed in quite contradictory ways by many Protestant groups. However, capitalist employers and theologians more heavily influenced by a conception of a ‘capitalist’ society argued that being poor was not in itself a sign of damnation, but that the poor were poor because they were lazy and indolent, which were signs of damnation.

‘The Happy Prince’ 35 the poorest of the poor. This was primarily because of the sheer amount of Irish immigrants among Catholic congregations. Indeed, the Irish immigrant community often thought of itself primarily in religious rather than ethnic, social or national terms. During the taking of the 1871 census in Ancoats, for example, a batch of returns completed at a local public house had, in place of occupation, the designation ‘Catholic’ scribbled (cited in Samuel 279). Catholicism operated positively for the disenfranchised community of immigrants as a discourse of empowerment. Dislocated from their homes and families it offered a language with which to express their culture and release their imagination. Instead of meditating on the edifying cultural and economic value of a statue like that of the Prince, they subverted his function and radicalised him in their projections. This subversion of Victorian hierarchies of value is a feature of the story. Even as imagination is opposed to rationalism the (predominantly English) reader has been co- opted on the side of imagination – after all, he is reading a fairy story. As the children ‘mis-interpret’ the political symbol of the Prince, so the story ‘mis-interprets’ the genre of the fairy tale. When the middle-class Victorians finally allowed the infiltration of the fairy tale into culture after condemning it for so long, it was as recreation rather than education. The reading of the fairy tale was construed as a space outside ideology, a rest from the didacticism of instruction and refinement (Zipes, ‘Introduction’ to Victorian Fairy Tales xi). Wilde, like other writers, uses this free space as a didactic instrument for his moral instruction. Moreover, and crucially, he appropriates the very language and tone used by Victorian moralisers in their admonishments to the working classes to be respectable, rational and hard-working. Much of this language was saturated in the phraseology and rhythms of the King James Bible and it is in this very language Wilde couches his tale. He co-opts the very weapons of Victorian respectability – monarchy, philanthropic consciousness – for his disruptive purpose, transposing these normalising elements directly onto oral Irish folktales, through such sources as Lady Wilde’s poem ‘The Voice of the Poor’ (Murray 2): Before us die our brothers of starvation: Around are cries of famine and despair! Where is hope for us, or comfort, or salvation – Where – oh! where? If the angels ever harken, downward bending, They are weeping, we are sure, At the litanies of human groans ascending From the crushed hearts of the poor (11). There is one angel listening, or at least the Charity Children believe so when they tell the Mathematical Master that the Prince looks like an angel. As Lady Wilde articulated the oppression of the Catholic majority in Ireland, so her son speaks on behalf of the Catholic minority in London; both communities are the victims of a laissez-faire political economy and mentality and require a new discourse which transforms hard-hitting realism into imaginative transfiguration. These denominational and national divisions I have been teasing out help to clarify the theological imagery activated by Wilde in his description of both Prince and the Swallow. Jerome Griswold has demonstrated the importance of religious

36 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde imagery to deciphering their resonance. The Prince himself is ‘twice-born, his death is a merciful gift to others’. Moreover, he acts as the ‘bread of life’ who breaks his own body so it can be distributed as food for the community (106). This is emphasised when poor children receive the statue’s gold leaf and announce ‘We have bread now!’ (180). Griswold fails to point out that this is specifically a Catholic understanding of Christ’s action in the world. What the children receive is quite literally the body of their salvific Prince; he really distributes his body for their sustenance. In an era when debates on the Real Presence were causing such scandal within High Anglicanism, with those priests who emphasised the consecration as a moment of radical and holy transformation condemned as Roman defectors, Wilde’s emphasis on Christ as the bread of life marks the Catholic emphasis of the tale. The Prince is a Eucharistic Christ above all. This Catholicism also infuses the entire question about the Swallow’s position in the story. Indeed, Wilde is crude enough to ensure the significance of the Swallow is not missed. After he makes his first mission of mercy, he arrives back to the Prince announcing, ‘I feel quite warm now, although it is so cold’ (174). His subsequent salvation and elevation to heaven demonstrates the power of good works over the principle of faith, one of the central theological divisions of the Reformation. The Swallow’s persistent evocation of Egypt and its exotic and imaginative landscape is also central to his link with Catholicism. His psychic connection to the warm climes of the Middle East seem to aid his sojourn in the English winter: his imagination allows him to visit there and gain some of its benefits without ever physically making the journey. Egypt is a version of Catholicism here, as it represents the Oriental spirituality the Victorians believed characteristic of Catholicism. Edward Said has described Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient …’ (3). He theorises the Oriental exotic as a site of Western fantasy, an exotic Other, onto which Europe can safely project the perversity found in the Self, and argues that ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate or even underground self’ (3). What this means essentially is that for imperial England, the Orient operated as a kind of id, a site of displaced desire for the unacknowledgeable wishes that operated as part of collective repression – a desire for the exotic, the weird, sexual perversion, excess: ‘Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the east, “them”)’ (43). In ‘The Happy Prince’, these English desires are articulated in the form of religious ritual. The Swallow wants to visit ‘the tomb of the great King … wrapped in yellow linen, and embalmed with spices’ (172). He imagines that the ‘river- horse couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne sits the God Memnon’ (175). These images are primarily metaphors for the God-in-the Tomb of the New Testament and the God-on-the-Throne of the Old. This Christian vision is mingled with exotic and erotic religious ritual that would have meant only one thing to a late nineteenth century Anglican in the midst of debates over Tractarianism and Ritualism: Roman Catholicism. While the political and social desires expressed in Orientalism were mostly articulated in relation to the geographical Middle East, these tropes could also voice the traditional English Protestant unease with the

‘The Happy Prince’ 37 oriental presence at home in the shape of the Roman Catholic. Roman Catholicism had operated as an alternative Self to Protestant England since the Reformation (see Haydon for this). The Catholic Other was present, not only in the exotic ritual of the Tridentine Mass – with its elaborate vestments, incense and Latin – but it the suspicious sexuality of the ordinary Catholic, viewed as a sexual predator since the sixteenth century. The Catholic Church functioned as the site for a kind of ‘orientalism’ in the centuries following the Reformation, a space of Protestant fantasy onto which perversion and exoticism were projected and therefore disposed of. English culture had for centuries considered Catholicism as its Oriental Other. In the eighteenth century the term applied to Catholics most often was ‘outlandish’, which meant ‘foreign’, terminology apparently legitimated by the fact that most Catholic gentlemen and priests were educated abroad and returned to England with strange accents (Haydon 27–8). In contrast to Victorian culture, which structured this ‘Oriental’ Catholic Church as a site of desire and yet fear, of need and yet degradation, in this story Wilde structures the Church as a force for, if not ultimate social liberation, at least social communication and finally salvation in heaven. The story disrupts the middle-class control of orthodoxy and its manipulation of ideology and presents an alternative vision of religious union. In dialectical opposition to the vernacular of Low Church Anglicanism was the Latin Mass, the doctrines of Transubstantiation, the iconography of ritual, all of which suggested the paganism of the East rather than the rational Enlightenment of the Protestant faith. This positive interpretation of Egypt is opposed by Griswold who claims that Egypt is the Swallow’s equivalent to the Prince’s Sans-Souci, as both represent an ‘infantile and absolute (if not autistic) pleasure’ (106). Martin supports this, claiming that: The Swallow’s Egypt represents a symbolic state not unlike that of the Prince’s Sans- Souci: it is characterised by forgetfulness (‘large lotus-flowers’), sleep, and death. It stands for the death of the soul, in a world of comfort which ignores suffering. The Swallow’s willingness to stay one night with the Prince is the first postponement of his desires, the first recognition of the possibility of a higher claim (173). However, both ignore the function of Egypt in the story as a form of metaphoric sustenance to assist the Prince’s charity, and when the Prince tells the Swallow that he can now go to Egypt, he dies, signalling the link between Egypt and heaven. The Swallow’s equivalent to Sans-Souci is his selfish introspection with the Reed. The politics of laissez-faire become the fairy (faire) politics of spiritual example and salvation. The English setting is slowly placed under erasure as a type of radical poverty is preached. The Prince renounces his gold and jewels, products of colonial exploitation, to become as poverty-stricken as his subjects. For this he is rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. The implicit lesson is that England must become more like Ireland (or perhaps is already more like Ireland than she is willing to admit) if she is to become truly philanthropic. The oral imagination of an Irish folk-tale pervades the literate print culture of educated England, reflecting the story’s origin in Irish legend and Wilde’s own position as an Irish conversationalist in urban London. The text is a hybrid cultural product, like the fairy tale and the author it represents, attempting

38 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde to radicalise the traditions from which it emerges. The form of social transformation configured by the text is, then, equivalent to the salvation of Christ as interpreted by the Catholic Church. The Prince transforms himself into a Christ-like saviour offering deeds of sacrifice and redemption for his people. The story ends, not with the melting of the Prince in the foundry but in the assumption of the metallic heart and the Swallow’s body into heaven. God sends his angel into the city to redeem the most precious items to be found there and he is presented with the broken heart of the Prince, and the dead Swallow: ‘“You have rightly chosen”, said God, “for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me”’ (183). This sets up a retrospective justification of the actions of both and suggests that we need to judge the demands of society and various social creeds (including the socialism that some want to see implemented here) against the Christian message, and dismiss them if they are found wanting. Jack Zipes understandably objects that ‘the mayor and town councillors remain in control of the city … and the philanthropic actions of the prince will go for naught’ (Art of Subversion 117). However, the textual emphasis is on the abnegation of the self and ego-desires for the communal good. The Prince earns salvation because he had faith in the spiritual rather than the material. He obeyed the warning of Christ, ‘you cannot serve God and Mammon’. More importantly he did so despite realising he could not change society. He recognises that ‘the living always think that gold can make them happy’ (180) and is proved correct by the reactions of each recipient of his generosity. To the Prince, the world has fallen into materialism, a sin the poor are guilty of as much as the rich. In becoming poor himself, the Prince is associating himself with the masses, yet in his recognition that ‘there is no Mystery so great as Misery’ (179–80), he shows his realisation that transforming the self is not the same as social change. He recognises his own poverty before the overwhelming suffering of men and women, and opts to transcend that physical suffering by the spiritual gift of humility. The story clearly holds him up as a general example for others to follow, indicating that such conversion of the soul must always precede social revolution. It is society that must align itself with the Prince, not the Prince who must somehow forcibly alter society. The Prince does not overthrow capitalism, but he sets an example of radical self-sacrifice for others to follow. The major point is that only the Prince and the Swallow are blessed by God which justifies them both. Wilde’s story offers a Catholic response to social problems rather than either a socialist or a realist one. His early reviewers and later critics are wrong in this respect. Wilde’s position reflects that of Henry Edward Manning, convert Archbishop of Westminster from 1865 to 1892, rather than Karl Marx. Manning was one of the greatest social reformers of the time. While ‘The Work and the Wants of the Catholic Church in England’, his blueprint for Catholic action, printed in the Dublin Review in July 1863, argued that the Church should ‘ripen and … elevate the social and political life of men by its influences of morality and law’, he specified that the first duty of the Church was ‘to save souls (and) to lead men to eternal life’ (cited in McClelland 195), not a better material existence. This is the theology of ‘The Happy Prince’ also. In ‘The Happy Prince’ Wilde deconstructed the orthodoxies of Victorian middle- class hegemony and reconstructed an argument which suggests that the periphery can only hope to achieve some version of empowerment through the doctrines and

‘The Happy Prince’ 39 discourses of the Catholic religion, which many of them (i.e. the Irish immigrants) have brought over with them from a foreign land. Diaspora critiques empire from within. In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ national and religious issues would be approached in a much more symbolic manner.

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Chapter Two ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose, Enfold me in my hour of hours … W.B. Yeats, ‘The Secret Rose’ (lines 1–2). The apparent narrative pessimism of ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ comes as something of a shock after the ostensibly uplifting conclusion of ‘The Happy Prince’ where God rewarded both Prince and Swallow for their sacrifices with a place in heaven. Here, the beautiful death of the Nightingale appears pointless, not simply because the Student and his object of interest, the Professor’s daughter, fail to appreciate it (after all, the poor of ‘The Happy Prince’ fail to understand the importance of what has been done for them either), but because God does not intervene at the end to justify that sacrifice. Philip Cohen explicitly argues that ‘God … has deserted the nightingale’s world’ and believes that the story exposes the Nightingale’s theories of love as ‘mere delusion’ (89, 90). Rodney Shewan states that the tale ‘makes no use of Christian machinery’ (43) and admits to being somewhat baffled by the end of the story as it leaves the Nightingale’s theories of love in limbo: ‘We are left with two alternative inferences: that self-sacrifice for altruistic motives is futile and wasteful, or that self-sacrifice in pursuit of a personal vision … is as egotistical as any other form of self-realisation’ (47). Neither alternative sounds particularly attractive, especially since most readers identify with the Nightingale and are shocked by what happens to her sacrifice. Clifton Snider concurs with Shewan that God is simply absent and that the story as a whole ‘avoids explicit Christian iconography’ (5). He sees the story as advocating – somewhat hopelessly – the need for ‘wholeness’ in Victorian culture, a balance between the ‘masculine’ Logos (symbolised by the Student’s study of metaphysics) and the ‘feminine’ Eros (the Nightingale’s version of love) (5–6). Contrarily, Christopher Nassaar assumes that the Nightingale, because of her sacrifice, ‘goes straight to heaven’ (Into the Demon Universe 29), but never offers any reason why anyone should believe this. In all these readings, the ending remains an unresolved difficulty. Of course, some critics have avoided this central problem of the text completely and focused on other angles. John Charles Duffy sees coded into the story a warning of the unsatisfactory nature of hetero-normative relationships. While the proposed liaison between the Student and the Professor’s daughter comes to nothing, that between the Nightingale and the rose-tree produces the most beautiful rose in the world. The penetration of the Nightingale by the thorn should be ‘read as a sex-act’ and though technically non-reproductive (in that separate species cannot fertilise each other) the story, counter-intuitively, sees it as the most fecund and fulfilling relationship.