The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde

92 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde out by the Miller. We are told that the Miller cannot pass little Hans’ garden without ‘leaning over the wall and plucking a large nosegay, or a handful of sweet herbs, or filling his pockets with plums and cherries if it was the fruit season’ (214). We know that Hans depends on these ‘crops’ to live as without them he has nothing to sell at the marketplace, but the Miller takes them nonetheless, despite having ‘a hundred sacks of flour stored away in his mill’ (214). There is a sense here that in blaming the Miller and his class for the death of Hans, Wilde is reproducing the traditional nationalist complaint that during the Famine, while Ireland starved, exports continued to feed English mouths and imports of corn were prevented. In The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (1860), Mitchel made famous his image of Ireland being subject to theft by the English state, claiming that ‘a government ship sailing into any harbour with Indian corn was sure to meet half a dozen sailing out with Irish wheat and cattle’ (112). Wilde’s mother agreed with Mitchel’s analysis. Her poem ‘The Famine Year’, published in the Nation in February 1847, complained: Weary men, what reap ye? – Golden corn for the stranger. What sow ye? – Human corpses that wait for the avenger. Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing? Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing (5). Although historians have disputed this rather vehemently it remains a potent image for many Irish people, and indeed, Christine Kinealy has recently challenged the claim that Ireland could not have been helped by stopping exports of foodstuffs from the country. She argues that most of the analysis of this issue has restricted itself to examining exports of corn and has ignored the huge amounts of other foodstuffs including wheat, flour, oats, barley, meal and butter, pointing out that ‘much of the exports were made from areas where the greatest need for food existed, which would have made redistribution relatively simple and immediate’. She further argues that ‘the Irish poor did not starve because there was an inadequate supply of food within the country, they starved because political, commercial and individual greed was given priority over the saving of lives in one part of the United Kingdom’ (The Great Irish Famine 114, 116; see also Death-Dealing 79–83). The Miller’s robbery of Hans is supported by rhetoric as spurious as that which sustained continued food exports from a starving people. Representatives of the English state claimed that the food exports were all to the good for Ireland’s sake; the Miller insists that his devoted friendship for Little Hans lies behind his theft: ‘“Real friends should have everything in common”, the Miller used to say, and little Hans nodded and smiled, and felt very proud of having a friend with such noble ideas’ (214). Models of friendship based on a refusal to come to grips with human nature come under intense scrutiny in ‘The Devoted Friend’. One pamphlet of 1846, written by an evangelical Englishman, suggested, with the Miller, that starvation and blight proved friendship in the smithy of history: partial scarcities may perhaps be regarded as warnings that God does not intend that his children should live apart from each other in sullen independence, but should feel

‘The Devoted Friend’ 93 themselves part of a great whole, requiring from each other mutual aid and sympathy’ (quoted in Gray). The starvation of the Irish would be of use if it demonstrated clearly the friendship that England had for its colony. Without altruistic ideals, however, the response of most of the rich to the starving poor would always be the same: ‘friendship is one thing, flour is another’. Isaac Butt recognised the fatuousness of arguments based on the ‘partnership’ and ‘friendship’ between England and Ireland. In an article in the Dublin University Magazine in April 1847, he pointed out how such arguments were exposed during the Famine crisis: What can be more absurd, what can be more wicked, than for men professing attachment to an imperial constitution to answer claims now put forward for state assistance to the unprecedented necessities of Ireland, by talking of Ireland being a drain upon the English treasury? The exchequer is the exchequer of the United Kingdom … If the Union be not a mockery, there exists no such thing as an English treasury … How are these expectations to be realized, how are these pledges to be fulfilled, if the partnership is only to be one of loss and never of profit to us? (‘The famine in the land’ 514). Although political friendships such as those which form the basis of English colonialism are undermined, some critics have suggested that another model of friendship acts as a model against which others are judged. John Charles Duffy notes that male friendships were ‘idealised’ in much Victorian discourse, particularly in relation to homosexual relationships (329), and argues that ‘The Devoted Friend’ implies ‘that the ideal of devoted friendship is not to be rejected, only the Water-rat’s self-centred apprehension of the ideal’ (331). Duffy is here highlighting a system of male friendships that had been created in the very circles Wilde moved in, a model which praised male friendships as beautiful and selfless communities of pure love. Linda Dowling describes the model of male friendship promoted by both the Tractarians and also by the tutorial system in Oxford under Professor Benjamin Jowett as dependent upon a claim that ‘in the communion of souls one friend could show another the truth of his own “scarred and seamed soul”’ (44). In ‘The Devoted Friend’ Wilde seems less convinced of the possibility of such altruism in the real world. Owen Dudley Edwards has noted the recurrence of the idea of betrayal in Wilde’s writings, the image of one friend betraying the other as encapsulated in the image of Judas Iscariot kissing his friend Jesus to hand him over to the Roman authorities (‘Impressions’ 48–9). The Miller too keeps up the rhetoric of friendship right to the end, even to taking the best seat at Hans’ funeral. It is often forgotten, however, that Augustine was one of Wilde’s favourite writers and he had written a great deal about friendship in both his Confessions (397) and The City of God (early fifth century). Augustine had, in his youth, been part of a closed community of all-male friends, who discussed politics, the classics, intellectual affairs and he had what we would now call a ‘best friend’. His happiness in this group shaped his opinion that friendship was perhaps the highest good, but this came to an end after the shocking and sudden death of his best friend to a fever. This death caused him to have what Mark Vernon has called a ‘nervous breakdown’ which was only solved with his conversion to Christianity (76), a conversion

94 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde which initiated a complete change in his opinion with regard to the importance of friendship. Instead of seeing its benefits Augustine now saw only its dangers, chief among which was the danger of self-deceit. Friendship was, in all honesty, often a version of narcissism. We love in our friends what we wish to see mirrored back to ourselves, a view evident in the Water-rat’s delicious response to the question as to what a ‘devoted’ friend should be devoted to: ‘why, myself of course’ (212). Augustine thought that the solution to this narcissism was the self-renouncing love of God. As Vernon succinctly puts it: ‘When people love God and renounce their love of themselves, they can then love others with confidence. Their love is then primarily located in God and so unconditioned by the vagaries of life’, including betrayal (74). With the love of God at the centre, your friend cannot betray you because your friendship with him is mediated through your love of God and God will never let you down. The problem with the Miller and Hans is that their ‘love’ is mediated only through the Miller’s rhetoric; his love of the ‘higher things’ is purely a love of the sound of his own voice, beating the local clergyman in a competition of fine words. Hans’ mistake is that he fails to understand the difference between fine words and fine deeds and also that he does not know his own value in the world except as it is defined by the Miller, who tells him he is not worth even the risk of losing a new lamp. After Augustine, Christian thinkers looking at friendship tended to ‘question the very virtuousness of friendship itself’ rather than just renounce modes of it (Vernon, 77). The absence of God from this story is perhaps an explanation for the horrific versions of friendship perpetuated within it because without God narcissistic versions of the friendly state have been allowed to get out of hand. The Miller simply cannot recognise an authority higher than his own when it comes to understanding this issue and would certainly never grasp Christ’s injunction to give freely to all without thought of the self.1 This in itself may initially sound shocking to those who believe that the Socratic principles underlying much of Wilde’s own beliefs would surely have meant that friendship itself was valued by him rather than an object of suspicion and who would maintain that Wilde is merely critiquing a particular version of egotistical friendship in this story. However, Edwards is right to insist that it is betrayal which characterises friendships in Wilde’s work, from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), where Dorian kills his ‘friend’ Basil Hallward and is experimented on by another friend, Lord Henry Wotten, to The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), where ‘each man kills the thing he loves’. Betrayal is a familiar theme in Irish history, especially in relation to forms of all-male ‘friendships’ such as revolutionary secret societies and agrarian organisations where there was always some ‘traitor’ to the cause. Wilde tells his story of the dangers and radical ambiguities of friendship in the nursery to his own children (another all-male community) suggesting, I think, that more radical trust should be placed in forms of community outside of the bosom ‘friend’ entirely: in the family, the love of God. The kinds of all-male communities which Wilde associated with were, after all, always open to the threat of blackmail and betrayal (as he would find out to his cost during the libel trial) and that such blackmail was common was 1 I am indebted to Mark Vernon’s brilliant study of the relationship between friendship and philosophy for this section of the chapter.

‘The Devoted Friend’ 95 well known to those in the homosexual subculture. Hans may be stupid, but we can hope he has gone to heaven; England may have betrayed the colonies, but those who died during the Famine have become martyrs to a higher cause than false friendship; mutualism may fail but there is surely a republican independence which will make up for this; men and lovers may betray each other but surely there is an other love – that of God – which is secure and dependable. However, exploding an English version of the Famine, and even a colonial reading of the Union between Ireland and England, was not enough for Wilde. In order to finally change the way these two countries related to each other it was necessary to expose some of the thinking which concerned England’s own idea of itself as a liberal (perhaps the liberal) state, defined by tolerance, rationality, progressiveness. In ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ Wilde turns his attention to these values and attempts to explode the English state itself.

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Chapter Five ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ Please to remember the Fifth of November, Gunpowder treason and Plot. ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is, frankly, Wilde’s most critically neglected tale and this neglect is understandable. It is simply the least complex story in the two collections, and it is difficult to find anything useful to say about it. Walter Pater did praise its subversive ‘wit’ when he was sent a copy of The Happy Prince and other tales shortly after its publication, but as an attack on the narcissistic imagination the story is transparent enough. Rodney Shewan notes that the ego-driven imagination of the Rocket is the central target of the tale, but helpfully expands Wilde’s targets to include ‘egotism, self-fulfilment, the Romantic imagination and its passionate absolute’ (49). The section of William Wordsworth’s epic hymn to himself – The Prelude (1850) – where the child-hero goes boating certainly appears to bear the brunt of the story’s humour. In that section, the Wordsworthian self is so much more interesting than the environment in which he begins to discover that self for the first time. Indeed, that environment finds him more interesting than itself so that at one point a cliff seems to pursue the child in order to get a better look at him: ‘I struck and struck again,/ And growing still in stature the grim shape/ Towered up between me and the stars, and still … Strode after me’ (Book One, lines 380–85). Likewise, the Rocket, sojourning in the countryside, cannot seem to get over how much more important he is in comparison with his surroundings. Indeed, perhaps all the talk of explosions and pyrotechnics has its origin in the storming of the Bastille and the revolutionary turmoil that Wordsworth originally believed heralded a new dawn for the world, but which really only led to his construction of a more elaborate hymn to the individual personality. ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ may reveal that behind the apparently revolutionary events of the French Revolution, which ushered the modern world in with spectacle and display, was nothing but empty rhetoric. Some other critics see the satire hitting closer to home. Philip Cohen includes Wilde himself in the target audience of the story (93), a view he is supported in by Emmanuel Vernadakis for whom the Rocket is a portrait of Wilde at his most pompously self-aware (cited in Edwards, Fireworks 11). Owen Dudley Edwards extends this reading and sees the story as an oblique commentary on the conflict between James MacNeil Whistler and John Ruskin, both of whom were well known by Wilde. Famously, Ruskin had responded very negatively to Whistler’s 1875 painting Nocturne in Black and Gold – the Falling Rocket. When the painting was displayed in the Grovesnor Gallery in 1877, Ruskin viciously described it as an outrageous rip- of of the public complaining he ‘never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ (ibid 12). Whistler decided to

98 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde sue and though he won the case he was only awarded a farthing in damages and had to pay his own costs. Edwards argues persuasively that as well as invoking the verbal ‘fireworks’ between Ruskin and Whistler, Wilde is also thinking of his own run-ins with Whistler who, by all accounts, was a merciless friend, accusing him of stealing his best lines and making money out of their relationship. If this reading of the tale is accurate, and it is certainly a convincing contextualisation, then ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is a very pointed revenge indeed. After all, the Whistler-Rocket is not only a pompous and arrogant figure, he is an absolute fool as well (ibid 11–13). This personal and social context certainly illuminates the story, but it seems odd to end a collection as politically saturated as The Happy Prince and other tales on a note so thoroughly inward-looking. In ‘The Happy Prince’ Wilde was concerned with the marginalised and the poverty-stricken; ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ explored the social consequences of divine intervention; in ‘The Selfish Giant’ relationships between landlords and tenants were subjected to a destructive scrutiny; ‘The Devoted Friend’ examined the politics of amity in the Irish Famine; yet ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ initially seems unconcerned with these problems and instead represents a turning in by Wilde, not only on his own immediate circle of friends and acquaintances but also and more pointedly, on himself. Things may not, however, be so clear-cut. After all, the setting off of fireworks on a state occasion had very clear signification in nineteenth century England, a signification confirmed by the presence of a bonfire in the same story when the young boys at the end of the narrative light a fire which ignites the rocket; ‘So they piled the faggots together, and put the Rocket on top, and lit the fire’ (255). And the significance of the fireworks and the bonfire is indeed a political one and opens the story up to a more penetrating analysis. The historian David Cressy has claimed that the annual celebrations of the fifth of November are the locus of English celebrations of the nation itself. While other countries have celebrations of Independence day, the English have Gunpowder Plot Day. The fifth of November 1605 was, of course, the day when Guido Fawkes was discovered in the cellars beneath the House of Lords with enough gunpowder to blow up both houses of parliament, Fawkes and his fellow conspirators wanted to set the gunpowder off two days later, on the 7 November, when King James and some members of his family would be opening a new session of parliament. In this way the explosion would not only wipe out the King and the heir to the throne but also many members of parliament. The importance of the Gunpowder Plot to the story of ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is indicated by the manner in which the Rocket is eventually set off in the story: ‘Now I am going to explode’, he cried. ‘I shall set the whole world on fire, and make such a noise, that nobody will talk about anything else for a whole year’. And he certainly did explode. Bang! Bang! Bang! went the gunpowder. There was certainly no doubt about it. But nobody heard him, not even the two little boys, for they were sound asleep (255–6). This mirrors the disastrous, and rather pathetic, end of the real Gunpowder Plot of 1605. After Fawkes had been captured some of his fellow conspirators attempted to hide the remaining gunpowder in Holbeach House in Staffordshire. However, they had inexplicably carried the gunpowder on an open cart in the rain and having

‘The Remarkable Rocket’ 99 arrived in the castle put it in front of the fire to dry. Antonio Fraser estimates that ‘the Plotters were by now all so tired, as well as desperate … that they were hardly aware of what they were doing’ (222). They then sat down to rest. Likewise, the boys in ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ are so tired that they actually sleep while the rocket ignites and explodes. Horrifically for the Plotters, their own rest was very violently interrupted when a spark fell from the fire on to the gunpowder and it exploded, disfiguring some of the conspirators. The context of the Gunpowder Plot also explicates some of the other minor details of ‘The Remarkable Rocket’. The Rocket’s conversations with the Duck in the lake (251–4) possibly reference the fact that some of the meetings in which the Plot was hatched were held in an inn called the Duck and Drake (Fraser 117). High drama becomes low farce; a conspiracy which threatened to get the whole world talking had its beginnings in a comically- named tavern and ended in self-destruction, the powder meant to bring the entire English state to its knees simply disfiguring the conspirators themselves. The Rocket too talks up his role, claiming that the state is in debt to him, but he ends unnoticed and pathetic, bragging about himself while no one listens. The fifth of November was immediately established as a day of deliverance from the Catholic menace. The Gunpowder Plot was, after all, a Catholic conspiracy, and all the conspirators were dedicated Catholics. Indeed, it soon got around, partly promoted by the government, that the Jesuits were behind the whole thing and a few of them were rounded up, tortured and executed. The fifth of November was quickly incorporated into the national calendar and commemorated each year as a moment when God himself had delivered the Protestant nation from the attacks of the Papist enemy. The interpretation of the discovery of the conspiracy as a divine ‘deliverance’ (a phrase which is resonant of the Israelite exodus from Egypt in the Old Testament) was, indeed, incorporated into the 1606 legislation which commanded that the fifth of November be commemorated publicly and annually: Forasmuch as almighty God hath in all ages showed his power and mercy in the miraculous and gracious deliverance of his church, and in the protection of religious kings and states, and that no nation of the earth hath been blessed with greater benefit than this kingdom now enjoyeth, having the free and true profession of the gospel under our most gracious lord King James, the most great learned and religious king that ever reigned therein, enriched with a most hopeful and plentiful progeny proceeding out of his royal loins promising continuance of this happiness and profession to all posterity: the which many malignant and devilish papists, Jesuits, and seminary priests much envying and fearing, conspired most horribly, when the king’s most excellent majesty, the queen, the prince, and the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, should have assembled in the upper house of Parliament on the fifth day of November in the year of our lord 1605 suddenly to have blown up the said whole house with gunpowder; an invention so inhuman, barbarous and cruel, as the like was never before heard of (quoted in Cressy 71). There are at least two things to note about the legislation initiating a history of commemoration. The first is the strange irony that a deliverance from a horrific explosion should be celebrated with a volley of explosions – the gunpowder stored in the cellars of the House of Lords converted to fireworks blasting to mark an escape from explosion. The second thing to note is that this passage contains some

100 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde interesting fireworks of its own, not unlike those being expressed by the Remarkable Rocket himself: if the Catholic conspirators failed to explode King James, he is certainly capable of exploding himself. The Act is, after all, full of superlative praise for the delivered king, a superfluity that cannot be put down simply to traditional royal rhetoric. King James was not known for his modesty. He decided to address parliament on the ninth of November 1605 on the subject of the Gunpowder Plot and, as Antonio Fraser puts it, ‘he certainly knew how to blow his own trumpet’ (230). The king’s speech was a masterpiece of self-promotion and flowery pomposity. It covered his own merciful treatment of the Catholics in England prior to the Plot, thus demonstrating that there was no basis for Catholic complaints about their treatment under him; he then went on to outline the elements of the Plot and the scandalous innocent loss of life it would have caused. A great deal of his speech was, however, concerned with his own case, with how he had been threatened with treachery and murder all his life, even while he was in his mother’s womb, how he was particularly chosen by God for deliverance of the English nation, and then moved on to a disquisition on ‘his own unequalled brilliance in discerning what was to happen’ (231), a disquisition entirely misplaced since he was not the real discoverer of the conspiracy. Such self-flattery was actively promoted by other significant figures in the English establishment in the months after the discovery of the Plot. Fraser notes, for example, how the Bishop of Rochester, Dr. Barlow, also presented a famous sermon on the 10 November 1605 in which he praised the king as a brilliant scholar, superlative Christian, and indeed, ‘something of a Christ figure’ (234). The difference between Christ and King James in this instance was that whereas Christ sacrificed himself for the salvation of others, the king believed that others – in particular, Catholics – needed to be sacrificed to demonstrate the nation’s love of its sovereign. Such inflated (indeed, absurd) rhetoric is reproduced by Wilde’s ‘Remarkable Rocket’ who believes that the royal celebrations are in honour of him rather than the other way round: ‘How fortunate it is for the King’s son’, he remarked, ‘that he is to be married on the very day on which I am to be let off. Really, if it had been arranged beforehand, it could not have turned out better for him; but Princes are always lucky’ (240). The Rocket may reference King James, but there is another figure lurking behind the story, a figure James also liked to compare himself to. The explosions of the Rocket – both rhetorical effusions about his own importance and his eventual pathetic eruption – are comic reversals of the Christ event. The death of Jesus was an ‘explosion’ of reds and blacks also – the sky darkened, the blood flowed – but it was a death requiring self-renunciation. Compared to Christ, in other words, both the historical King and the literary Rocket, are not only rendered slightly ridiculous but blasphemous as well. The original Gunpowder Plotters also saw a link between their own actions and the death of Christ and they sealed their determinations at many stages before and after the events of the fifth of November by partaking in the Eucharist, the consecration of which both commemorates and re-enacts the crucifixion. At Christ’s death his final words were ‘it is consummated’, words which clearly have a sexual as well as a spiritual and existential edge to their meaning. His death on the

‘The Remarkable Rocket’ 101 cross was the sacred consummation of his love for others. The phallic explosion of the Remarkable Rocket on the other hand is indicative of a general impotence rather than redemptive power; Christ dies asking forgiveness for his enemies, but the Rocket’s demise is attended with declarations of his own greatness. Catholics had long been associated with dangerous fires. Many of the illustrations in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (first appearing in 1563), depicted images of Catholic bonfires burning to death Protestant martyrs, especially during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor. For example, Linda Colley recounts Foxe’s narrative of the martyrdom of the pregnant Katherine Cawches in 1556. While she was being burnt alive her child burst from the womb and miraculously leapt clear of the fire but was thrown back and killed at the order of one of Mary’s Catholic bailiffs (27). The key point about such stories was not simply the development of a language of horror around Catholics, a horror hideously illustrated in even some of the cheap editions of Foxe’s work, but the threat to Protestant reproduction at the heart of the Catholic threat, a threat reproduced in ‘The Remarkable Rocket’, where the Rocket is patently impotent rather than the star sexual attraction. The explosions of rockets are rather obvious metaphors for the sexual and reproductive potency of King James. After all, King James’ sexual prowess was a key factor in the festivities of the fifth of November and his very lions are celebrated in the legislation inaugurating the annual celebrations of the fifth. Indeed, the revels on the fifth of November can be seen as hymns to sexual potency. The legislation tells us that the king has ‘enriched’ the nation ‘with a most hopeful and plentiful progeny proceeding out of his royal loins promising continuance of this happiness and profession to all posterity’. After the childless reign of Queen Elizabeth the potency of King James was very important to the English as it appeared to banish worries about the future of the realm, worries which were bound up in religious concerns as a hereditary monarchy may sometimes have to look to Catholic branches of the royal family for the supply of the next sovereign. There was much talk prior to the accession of James that the Catholic Archduchess Isabella of Spain, who had a connection to the English throne lost in the mists of time (Fraser 9), would succeed Elizabeth. A king with healthy Protestant progeny would appear to guarantee English Protestant security for some years into the future. There is a great deal of reproductive anxiety in the story of ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ also. Not only does the Rocket himself fail to ‘go off’, but he predicts the tragic future death of the progeny of the Prince whose marriage is taking place: Perhaps the Prince and Princess may got to live in a country where there is a deep river, and perhaps they may have only one son, a little fair-haired boy with violet eyes like the Prince himself; and perhaps some day he may go out to walk with his nurse; and perhaps the nurse may go to sleep under a great elder-tree; and perhaps the little boy may fall into a deep river and be drowned. What a terrible misfortune! Poor people, to lose their only son! It is really too dreadful! I shall never get over it (244). Of course, James’ eldest son Henry, heir apparent, was to die tragically in November 1612 of typhoid, which meant that his younger and weaker brother Charles was left to succeed the throne in 1625. He became Charles I whose accession was to prove crucial to the descent of England into civil war and, briefly, republicanism. As Fraser

102 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde notes, ‘for all the seeming fecundity of the Stuart dynasty, the seventeenth century was destined to draw to a close exactly as the sixteenth century had done: with problems of succession and religion’ (337). The Rocket’s prophecy is not so bizarre after all. These problems would not be resolved even at the Restoration and would require another act of deliverance of the English nation by God. Charles II was succeeded by his brother, the Catholic James II, and when his own son was born in 1688, presaging a potential long line of Catholic monarchs, panic descended on England and the securely Protestant William of Orange was invited to ‘take over’ the throne by a strange coalition of Tories and Whigs in parliament. William landed at Torbay on the fifth of November 1688, apparently confirming the providential importance of that date, and in the Glorious Revolution more or less ended the monarchic uncertainty which had dogged English history since the reign of Elizabeth. The Act of Succession which followed legislatively barred from the throne any Catholic. For Ireland the Glorious Revolution was not a bloodless one as William and James chose to fight for the throne of England there. William’s victory in 1691 at the battle of the Boyne and the battle of Aughrim was a disastrous one for the Catholic majority in Ireland where the eighteenth century was a penal era which came to an end only with the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Wilde had a personal as well as a national interest in these issues. His father’s ancestry was a source of embarrassment to him, as he seems to have believed the apocryphal story of the Wildes coming to Ireland via one Colonel de Wilde, a Dutch army officer who was said to have accompanied William of Orange to Ireland after the Glorious Revolution and for whose services was granted land in Connaught. H. Montgomery Hyde pointed out that: Oscar’s son Vyvyan … thought that his grandmother Lady Wilde may well have invented the story of the builder from Durham [whom Speranza claimed brought the Wilde name to Ireland] since, as a fervent Irish patriot, she had every reason to conceal her husband’s family connections to William of Orange. Although Oscar himself acknowledged it, Vincent O’ Sullivan … noted that ‘he did not seem particularly proud of this; at least he liked to say that he took after his mother’s family, which was pure Irish, more than his father’s’ (3–4). This story is not true, though Wilde certainly believed it. Notably, when Wilde’s second son Vyvyan was born, his birth was not registered for some weeks afterwards and then set at the third of November 1886, as Wilde wished to avoid any associations with the fifth. Constance’s brother Otho Lloyd told Vyvyan that the reason for this subterfuge was that Wilde did not want the public to make a link between the Aesthetic Movement and Guy Fawkes Day with, perhaps, the Glorious Revolution floating in the back of his mind also (Holland 34; Hyde 134). Wilde may also have become interested in the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot because a number of folklorists in the late nineteenth century were suggesting that the commemoration had a link with pre-Christian fertility rites, a link which was picked up on by Thomas Hardy at the very start of his novel The Return of the Native (1878) where the traditional bonfire is being lit on Egdon Heath: It was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into past ages and fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had before been familiar with the spot. The ashes of the original

‘The Remarkable Rocket’ 103 British pyre which blazed from that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread. The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires from Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day. Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendents from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot (20).1 Many believed that Guy Fawkes Day was simply a modern substitute for ancient fire festivals linked to the Celtic feast of Samhain. Indeed, this theory was most authoritatively expressed by James Fraser in The Golden Bough where he posited a link between the rhythms of the agricultural year and the lighting of the bonfires on the fifth (cited in Cressy 70). David Cressy emphasises that this speculation is in fact spurious, but Wilde’s parents certainly seem to have believed it. Sir William devoted a large section of Irish Popular Superstitions to May rituals, where he traced the bonfires and others customs of May back to ‘our Scandinavian and Celtic great ancestors’ (36). In subverting the modern Protestant use of these ancient and folk- Catholic rites, Wilde is engaging in a de-anglicising project his parents would have fully understood. Certainly the fifth of November rituals were controversial in the nineteenth century and were still very much sites for the expression of anti-Catholicism. 1850 saw the burning of effigies of the pope and Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop of Westminster in many towns and cities, and this anti-Catholicism was stirred up further when, in David Jardine’s A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot (1857) the Jesuits were blamed almost completely for not only encouraging but planning and consecrating the attack on the king and parliament (Fraser 355). The bonfires of November were used not simply to express anti-Catholic feeling but also to articulate any powerful antagonisms a particular local community was feeling at the time, including, for instance, anti-Irish aggression. Indeed, in 1879 Charles Stewart Parnell was burned in effigy in some bonfires (Cressy 83), linking anti-Irish racism with anti-Catholic hysteria. The exploding Rocket, self-assured, self-obsessed, is indicative of much of the character of the annual fifth of November celebrations; Wilde has the supreme irony in this story of the Rocket being told off by the Roman Candle (243–4) – a clear signifier of Roman Catholicism – whose own power is much more spectacular than the empty performances of the Rocket. The annual celebrations of the fifth of November were really occasions on which the English nation could express the profound anti-Catholicism that lies at the origin of the modern nation which emerged from the Glorious Revolution. As Linda Colley has controversially pointed out, ‘an uncompromising Protestantism was the foundation on which [the British] state was explicitly and unapologetically based’ (18), a Protestantism expressed every year in such events as the fifth of November fireworks. Wilde ridicules such festivities in the nonsensical spoutings of the Rocket whose self-obsession matches the xenophobic zeal involved in burning foreign and Catholic figures in effigy. The suggestion is that if you want to find real spectacle you should look, not to the English Rocket but to the Roman Candle, not to the English nation but to the Roman church. 1 Trish Ferguson brought my attention to this passage.

104 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde When the Rocket arrives in the countryside he is literally in an outlandish place. Linda Colley has stressed the degree to which Catholicism was associated with such spaces. The Rocket thinks that he is among the degenerates and he would be right since ‘Catholics were not just strange, they were out of bounds’ (23). After all, it was axiomatic that Catholicism produced poverty and Protestantism wealth, a belief thought sufficient to explain the economic difficulties of Ireland, but also serves to explain why the Rocket is so contemptuous of his sojourn in the countryside. In the Irish countryside, bonfires have always been associated with purgation, the cleansing and destruction of demons and banishing of the darkness. Lady Wilde tells us that in ancient times the Druids ‘lit the Baal-Tine, the holy, goodly fire of Baal, the sun-god, and they drove the cattle on a path made between two fires, and singed them with the flame of a lighted torch’ as a means of blessing them for the year ahead (Ancient Legends, 101). In burning the Rocket – symbolic of the defeat of both Catholic England and folk-Catholic Ireland – Wilde is purging the Protestant arrogance that dominated modern May celebrations, and allowing the ancient beliefs to re-emerge in triumph. ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ brings The Happy Prince and other tales to an explosive conclusion, and exposes the sectarian and bigoted basis of the modern English ‘liberal’ state. In releasing his collection into the marketplace, Wilde may have hoped to implant a subversive seed in the minds and hearts of the next generation of English children. Three years later he was to find that he was not yet finished with this audience, though he decided to appeal to a more select number of them in a new collection which would be lavishly decorated and expensively produced in an effort to attract the more discerning and well-heeled fathers and mothers. To match the elitism of this select audience Wilde pursued an even more elusive symbolical path in A House of Pomegranates.

PART II A House of Pomegranates

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Chapter Six ‘The Young King’ My own idea is that Ireland should rule England … Oscar Wilde (Wratislaw 13). ‘The Young King’ has been one of Wilde’s fairy tales subjected to a large amount of good critical analysis and it is worth taking time over the readings that have been offered. Criticism has tended to divide between those who have argued that the story has encoded within it Wilde’s sexuality in the depiction of the young King and those interested in the story because of its exploration of social and political exploitation. Gary Schmidgall argues that the story is ‘a distinctly more aggressive … assertion of homosexual themes’ than some of the other fairy tales (161), an aggression seen in the unambiguous references to the King’s worship of the images of Adonis, Hadrian and Narcissus, all significant figures in a ‘gay history’. He points in particular to the moment in the tale when the young King is found ‘pressing his warm lips to the marble brow of an antique statue that had been discovered in the bed of the river on the occasion of the building of the stone bridge, and was inscribed with the name of the Bithynian slave of Hadrain’ (7). Schmidgall claims that ‘A gay reader would certainly recognise this reference to Antinous, a classical type of the pederastic love object’ (161). Neil Bartlett also points to the reference to Antinous as a means by which a gay reading can be constructed, claiming that in worshipping the image of Antinous, ‘the young king is embracing a history he can only dream of’ (32). John Charles Duffy agrees with this and argues that the end of the story does not offer a repudiation of this transgressive sexuality but rather an enhancement of it. While the King turns from the aesthetic to the ethical, and thus from ‘languor to a manly determination’, he does not abandon his love of the male body but merely transforms it from a desire for his social inferiors into a desire for Christ’s body (335). Ellis Hanson’s reading of the tale supports that posited by Duffy and points out that in the final movement of the story the King does not abandon the aesthetic sensibility that encouraged his initial interests in figures from a gay history, but rather transfigures this aestheticism through a Ritualist prism. Just as Anglo-Catholic Ritualists in England were considered of suspect sexuality because of the intensity of their male friendships and the aesthetic inflection of their liturgy and spirituality, so the King’s sudden turn towards the costume of the Anglo-Catholic confers upon him both the uniform of decadence and the blessing of righteousness: The most striking paradox … is that the young king’s spiritual raiment is more gorgeous than his material one. It is not his aestheticism, nor even his effeminacy or homosexuality, that has been sacrificed, only the blindness of his hedonism (though we might wonder where the poor figure into all this) (262).

108 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde The King’s conversion is not about shifting his gaze from the bodies of young men, but rather focusing his gaze on a single gorgeous male body: that of Christ. Hanson’s worry about where the poor fit into this aesthetic liturgy has been echoed in other analyses. George Woodcock enthusiastically proclaimed that the story: is a parable on the capitalist system of exploitation as severe as anything in William Morris, and it can stand beside the passages of Marx as an indictment of the kinds of horrors which, Wilde was fully aware, were inflicted on the toilers in this world’ (148–9). Philip Cohen also considers the story a social success claiming that the problems of social injustice are presented ‘realistically … Rather than merely bemoaning the fact of poverty, he isolates its causes and presents valid insights into the psychology of exploiter and exploited alike’ (81). Rachel Cameron believes that the tale is profoundly counter-cultural and that ‘by critiquing social structures, ‘The Young King’ appeals against forms of identification that promote inequality’ (‘The Fairy Tale as Countermemory’ 19–20). The comparison between Wilde and the likes of Morris and Marx has seemed to others rather hard to maintain, and they have cast a sceptical eye over the practicalities of the story’s moral, finding only an evasion of the real causes of and solutions to economic marginality. Norbert Kohl believes that there is ‘little insight into or analysis of the social causes and effects of poverty’ (54) and Rodney Shewan considers that the story’s politics ‘fail to convince’ and complains that ‘Wilde gives no indication of future benefits in [the King’s conversion] for the state’ (53, 54). Jack Zipes absolves the young King himself of any responsibility for the gap between rhetoric and action in the narrative. He is sure that the failure to provide a radical restructuring of society is not to be laid at the feet of the sovereign: The king epitomises the individual who refuses to compromise until the people learn to see that society must change. In contrast with the happy prince, who was ultimately crucified despite (or perhaps because) of his philanthropic measures, the young king points a way to utopia by setting a model of behaviour which he hopes everyone will recognise and follow (Art of Subversion 118). Zipes does not consider whether the Ritualist paraphernalia of the final appearance of the King has any input into the more socialist concerns he identifies, and indeed it is the relation between the socialist and the Ritualist elements of the story that pose the greatest difficulty in interpretation. Critics have not been able to explain why it is important, from a political as well as a sexual perspective, that the King re-emerges not as an aesthete merely but as a Ritualist aesthete, with Shewan bitterly complaining that the story ‘debouch[es] into a pantheon of conscience where Ruskinian ethics and the church-furnishings of the Oxford Movement vie for predominance’ (53). The answer to the difficulty of the relationship between Ritualism and socialism in the story may lie rather closer to Wilde’s home. The difficulty arises because critics are applying realist criteria to a non-realist tale and reading the story only within the context of nineteenth-century England. Ireland is, however, central to the tale especially considering its interest in both the dynamics of imperial exploitation and the problem of famine. Wilde was, after all, writing out of a family that had direct involvement in both the nationalist critique of England’s colonial relationship

‘The Young King’ 109 to Ireland, and the nationalist response to the Great Irish Famine. As I will try to demonstrate, this Irish dimension helps to explain how the rituals of Catholicism could be directly linked to the problems of poverty and marginalisation so frankly addressed by the story. In my analysis of ‘The Happy Prince’, I argued that there is a strong link between the child and the colonised in both colonial discourse in general and in Wilde’s tales in particular. If children do represent Ireland in Wilde’s stories then in ‘The Young King’, the whole issue of racial inter-relations and cultural boundaries becomes vital. For the child here is not a mere prince with aspirations to the throne – as is the case in ‘The Happy Prince’ – but the heir and only successor in a lineage gone very bad. In other words, the Irish are about to be elevated to the status of imperial rulers. Wilde was an enthusiastic supporter of such imperial alterations. He repeatedly argued that the dismantling of empires was not in anyone’s interest in an era of large scale geo- politics; however, he also announced that he would rather the colonised be placed in charge of the colonial court. In an interview while in America he reportedly said that: I do not wish to see the empire dismembered, but only to see the Irish people free, and Ireland still a willing and integral part of the British Empire. To dismember a great empire in this age of vast armies and overweening ambition on the part of other nations, is to consign the peoples of the broken country to weak and insignificant places in the panorama of nations (quoted in Mikhail, vol. 1 92). He jokingly repeated this view when, intervening in an argument between his son Cyril and the poet Theodore Wratislaw over the merits of Irish Home Rule, he announced, ‘My own idea is that Ireland should rule England’ (13). In that way the empire could be re-organised so as to allow structures of justice to emerge. In ‘The Young King’, however, Wilde depicts the inherent dangers in the ‘civilising’ process: the wild ‘Irish’ boy, brought up in the rustic beauty of the countryside is almost instantly corrupted into the perverted worship of the things of the empire (the aesthetic ornaments of imperial exploitation) upon his arrival in court. The Irish King becomes immediately converted to the ways of the court and is content to allow things to remain the way he found them. Wilde’s warning about the hypnotic effects of the empire on new recruits was not an unusual one in this period. In the year following the publication of The House of Pomegranates, Douglas Hyde gave a lecture to the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin (25 November 1892) complaining about how enthralled the Irish had become to the culture of their colonial betters and arguing that such anglicisation had damaged the cause of cultural nationalism since there was now little cultural difference between England and Ireland. Hyde encouraged an embracing of national Irish culture as a weapon against such assimilation and Wilde too wishes to call a halt to the erasure of difference. The ‘de-anglicisation’ prescribed in ‘The Young King’ is not, however, a return to some ideal of cultural integrity pre-existing the Norman conquest, but a present re-inscription of the Christ-event in contemporary England. The very origin of this reforming ‘Irish’ king is a secret marriage between a Saxon Queen and an Italian artist (England and Rome) without which he (and Ireland as we know it) would not exist. Thus ‘Ireland’ and the ‘Irish’ as concepts are very much the product of imperial

110 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde struggle between the colonial exploiter and the universal church. ‘The Young King’ prescribes any appeal to an identity prior to these conflicts and suggests instead that an Irish Catholic should rule England for the mutual transformation of both but that, at present, Ireland is too enamoured of what Jerusha McCormack has called the ‘gilded dross’ of Empire (104) to be effective, while the English are also gazing in the wrong direction for salvation. The occasion of the birth of this ‘Irish’ King is vital in understanding the story. An interest in succession was central to nineteenth century thought and an obsession with tracing origins can be seen in projects as diverse as Charles Darwin’s attempt to locate the Origin of Species, John Henry Newman’s analysis of the Primitive Church as the point of origin for Anglicanism and even George Eliot’s character Tertius Lydgate’s quest for the ‘primary tissue’ in Middlemarch (1871–1872) (see Gordon on the Victorian interest in origins). It is important that the story’s interest in familial relationships is signalled by the fact that the young King’s father was ‘an artist from Rimini’ (4). Rimini was famous for the Church Council held there in 359 at which the Arian controversy was debated. Arius had controversially claimed that Jesus was not co-eternal with the Father and his views had effectively split the church. At Rimini ‘semi-Arians’ appear to have manoeuvred bishops with traditional Trinitarian views on the relationship of the Son to the Father into accepting a compromise formula which declared that the Son was like the Father but crucially omitted the words ‘in all things’. The declaration of the Council was rejected by Pope Liberius for its heretical implications. ‘The Young King’ flirts with such heresy, the artist from Rimini intervening in the genealogical connection between the great King, a substitute for God the Father here, and his grandson who later becomes a representative Christ. The ‘co-eternity’ of their hereditary link is placed under extreme threat by the repudiation of the King and the story is in part about the restoration of such a relation. The Italian birthplace of the young King’s father also suggests a Continental Catholic element in his ancestry. Nineteenth-century England was a culture thoroughly used to policing sexual boundaries and terrified about the kinds of moral and physical dangers Catholics and crypto-Catholics could bring into English life. In an important article on maternity in Victorian medical discourse, Sally Shuttleworth has traced the extent to which the Victorians policed conception, pregnancy and birth in an effort to prevent the wrong people reproducing the wrong kind of children. The Victorians had read the Origin of Species (1859) very closely and believed that the Mother was the crucial factor in the battle for the physical survival and prosperity of the Saxon race. The key to this survival was healthy reproduction and a series of manuals and advice books on reproduction poured from the presses by eminent doctors and social commentators advising women on how best to ensure the best and most healthy child was produced. In her article, Shuttleworth examines the literature of the ‘uterine economy’ (32), looking closely at the kind of advice given to Victorian women on how to produce a healthy child. Women were warned not to emulate ‘morally listless’ aristocratic women (35) and to avoid strong emotions, since according to A Treatise on the Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy, Being a Practical Exposition of the Principles of Infant Training for the Uses of Parents (1854) by Dr. Combe, anxiety in pregnancy would result in children who were ‘a prey to nervous,

‘The Young King’ 111 convulsive, or epileptic disease, or displayed a morbid timidity of character which no subsequent care could counteract’ (quoted in Shuttleworth 38). Such warnings were in fact coded fears of Anglo-Catholic converts, who were popularly believed to display these characteristics. Charles Kingsley, perhaps the most famous promoter of the ideology of muscular Protestantism, had pathologised Anglo-Catholics as suffering from the disease of effeminacy. He complained that ‘in all that school there is an element of foppery – even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement’ (vol. 1, 201). Anglo-Catholic converts were believed to have inherited a defective disposition from their mothers. Given that his wife had just given birth to two children in close succession, Wilde would have been well informed of the thinking surrounding these issues of pregnancy and childbirth. In this cultural context, the King’s fears about his grandson’s hereditary are understandable. Breaching the reproductive rules the Princess and the architect from Rimini do indeed produce a strange child. The Princess in the story fits the description of the aristocratic women feared to be too physically vapid to contribute to the next generation; she is a pale ‘white girl’ and easily attracted by the aesthetic allurements of the Continental stranger, ‘the wonderful magic of his lute-playing’ persuading her to forgo the necessary rituals of conception to protect against effeminacy (4). The child produced from this union is certainly odd. The description of him as a ‘brown woodland Faun’ (3) marks him as being of ambiguous gender as, like satyrs, fauns were considered to be outside the sexual boundaries of ancient Greek culture. The young King is, in moral, theological and biological terms, thoroughly suspicious from a muscular Christian viewpoint. However, the version of masculinity which promoted muscular and aggressive ambition was very much a late Victorian ideal and, as Claudia Nelson points out, was not held in the early part of the century. For the early Victorians manliness was an emotional and moral, rather than a physical condition. The early Victorians believed women possessed a spiritualised and contained-restrained version of sexuality and men were exhorted to learn from them. A neutral male sex-drive was considered pious and blessed (Nelson 527–33). Male sexuality was believed to be extremely dangerous and while the late Victorians saw childhood disease as the fault of the mother, earlier in the century the sexually obsessed father was singled out as the guilty party. Some medical doctors promoted female sexlessness as an ideal men would do well to follow (ibid 529). The androgynous male was posited as the potential agent through whom male salvation could be achieved. This practical philosophy was supported by a theology which, as pointed out in Chapter 2, posited God as androgynous rather than aggressively masculine. Wilde’s young King harks back to this early and mid-Victorian ideal of the androgynous male suffused with a religious messianism. In his depiction of an androgynous and sexually ambiguous boy as a Christ-figure, Wilde was reactivating masculine ideals only recently abandoned. David Newsome has argued that the 1870s was the intellectual nexus for the change that positioned ‘manliness’ as the complete opposite of ‘effeminacy’, the former privileged, the latter a dangerous assault on English identity. This change was in a large measure due to the renewed vigour of the Catholic menace within the country after the

112 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde reinstitution of the hierarchy in 1851 and the interaction of Newmanian Apostolicity with Darwinian degeneration fears. There were consistent charges that the men who were attracted to Catholicism were deeply flawed biologically and not only in their theological leanings. Terms such as ‘unwholesome’ and ‘degenerate’ were frequently used to describe Ritualists and Anglo-Catholics. In 1898 John Kensit, founder of the Protestant Truth Society, complained that the congregations of Anglo-Catholic services were full of ‘very poor specimens of men … They seemed a peculiar sort of people, very peculiar indeed’ (quoted in Hilliard 191). In the late nineteenth century the asexual male became both undesirable and dangerous, while the ‘manly’ boy became a physical rather than a spiritual ideal. Self-controlled responsible asexual androgyny became synonymous with degenerate Catholic effeminacy. The young King is precisely the kind of adolescent who would grow up to be an Anglo-Catholic traitor. Not only does he show ‘signs of that strange passion for beauty’ (5) that was characteristic of the Ritualists, but the court is full of wild rumours about him and he is often ‘accompanied by the slim, fair-haired Court pages, with their floating mantles, and gay fluttering ribands’ (6). Here, the heir to the throne is the offspring of an Italian-Catholic and a physically languorous aristocratic woman, a union that by late Victorian standards was bound to produce a threat to the dominant masculine order. This lies behind the king’s banishment of his grandson to the world of nature and the care of a ‘common peasant and his wife’ (4). Women of the upper-class were often exhorted to closely examine the behaviour of working and lower-class women who could labour all day and still produce strong, robust children. Abandoning his grandson to the wilds of the peasants, the king may be understood as attempting a perverse education in masculinity, hoping that a return to the Rousseauvian natural state may well produce a ‘natural’ man. The old King in Wilde’s story is merely reflecting the kinds of thinking quite common in Victorian England where an emphasis on athleticism in the public school system took hold in the middle of the century. As fears of racial and religious degeneration began to infiltrate the middle-classes, reaction led to an over- obsession with the promotion of masculinity as a physical ideal. This obsession was reflected in the Clarendon Commission’s report on public schools in 1864: It is not easy to estimate the degree to which the English people are indebted to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most – for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their public spirit, their vigour and manliness of character ... their love of healthy sport and exercise. These schools have been the chief nurseries of our statesmen … [T]hey have had perhaps the largest share in the moulding of the character of ‘the English Gentleman’ (quoted in Mangan 153). This is a rhetorical defence of the English Constitution, especially in such phrases promoting the combination of ‘freedom with order’. Linda Colley has demonstrated how central Protestantism was to the whole notion of Britishness in the long period after the Act of Union between Scotland, England and Wales in 1707: Protestantism coloured the way that Britons approached and interpreted their material lie. Protestantism determined how most Britons viewed their politics. And an

‘The Young King’ 113 uncompromising Protestantism was the foundation on which their state was explicitly and unapologetically based (18). Roman Catholicism was considered a major threat to the constitution due to the apparent dual loyalty of the Catholic to both the sovereign and the pope. Many believed that the Papacy had a grand imperial plan in operation, one element of which was the overthrow of the English Crown. The English could, of course, point to a whole list of historical events which adequately demonstrated this theory including the reign of Bloody Mary, the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot (1605) and the Popish Plot (1678). Indeed, even a figure as sympathetic to Anglo-Catholicism as William Gladstone could argue, in The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation (1874), that the Declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1871 had effectively compromised the civil loyalty of English Catholic citizens, absurdly declaring that ‘That no one can now become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another’ (13). The conviction that a Catholic could not be loyal to the English state was what created the conditions which allowed the Act of Succession to be passed in 1701 to prevent any Catholic from ever ascending to the English throne. In ‘The Young King’, the king’s banishment of his grandson to the woods has deep ideological causes. However, having abandoned him to an English education, the king is forced to have him recalled while he is himself dying, in order to assert the line of succession. Unfortunately, the attempted masculinisation of his grandson in the forests of England does not work. He is found with ‘pipe in hand’ (4), indicating his artistry rather than his athletic prowess. His preference for the company of ‘slim, fair- haired Court pages’ would have confirmed what Protestants always feared about the sexual practices of Catholic men (6). The popular press was continuously (and rather tiresomely) highlighting the dangers in the Catholic ideal of chaste relations between men who lived together in monasteries. Kingsley feared the results of allowing effeminate men to live in close contact with each other. As John Shelton Reed points out, ‘For Kingsley, the heart of the matter was celibacy. It was an affront to his most deeply held beliefs about the holiness of marriage and family life. More than that, it was a crime against nature’ (220). Scandals in monasteries publicised and exacerbated these fears. David Hilliard recounts the scandal surrounding the leaking, to the Norfolk News, of a love letter, written by a Brother Augustine to a boy chorister in the monastery of Elm Hill in Norwich in 1864 (92). This was only one of a number of rather minor scandals which were blown out of all proportion in the press. ‘The Young King’ is an acute examination of what would happen if one of these men – Irish, Catholic, sexually non-normative – actually became king of England, placing the manly Protestant constitution under erasure. The dramatic quality in reading the story is derived from the young King’s dreams which bring him to abandon the palace of Joyeuse for the state of Christ in poverty, to revoke his highly ornamental ‘robe of tissued gold, and the ruby-studded crown, and the sceptre with its rows and rings of pearls’ (8), for a ‘leathern tunic and rough sheepskin cloak’ and a crown of ‘wild briar’ (21–2), as he learns that the paraphernalia of court is based on imperial exploitation and a global system

114 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde of class and ethnicity, with assumptions of racial and class superiority legitimating such activities. Wilde wrote this story, after all, in the aftermath of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and indeed Victoria is a key figure behind the text, having literally become the personification of England shortly before it was written. John Lucas claims that ‘The Queen became identified as the embodiment of England during the latter half of the nineteenth century’, a process involving ‘not merely the creation of Victoria as England but of England as Victorian’ (quoted in Langland 14). The Jubilee was celebrated on 20 June and the Queen was driven through lavishly- decorated streets from Windsor Castle to Windsor station and from Paddington in an open landau to Buckingham Palace with crowds cheering her way. A large gathering of princes and kings met her and the next day she attended a thanksgiving ceremony in Westminster Cathedral. All London was decorated and celebrated with fireworks and illuminations (Marshall 210–11; Longford 499–501). Such pomp and ceremony lies behind the failed extravagance of the young King’s ritual as he rejects such displays of wealth given the extreme poverty of the citizens of the Empire. Importantly however, and in a precedent-setting example for the King in this story, Victoria refused to wear her crown or her robes of state, a decision which caused consternation among the people: ‘even the … coachman deplored her driving to the Abbey “with a bonnet on”’ (Langland 500). Likewise the King’s refusal to wear the elaborately bejewelled crown causes the people to consider rising up against him. However, while Victoria was delighted to be crowned Empress of India in 1876, the King here is disturbed by the magnitude of the responsibility that lies on his shoulders. Victoria was famously appalled by the rise of Ritualism in the Church of England, the Ritualism which finally dresses the King at the end of the story. She told Disraeli that, together, the High Church party and the Evangelicals posed a danger to the integrity of the Church of England (Bentley 7). Victoria distrusted Catholic converts and objected to the reinstitution of the Catholic hierarchy in 1851, seeing it as a challenge to her sovereignty. She used her influence on Disraeli to push through a Public Worship Regulation Act to curb Ritualism in the Church of England in 1874. This Victoria, colony Queen and Protestant warrior against Catholicism, is gently mocked in Wilde’s story. The first indications of the narrative’s obsession with colonial space is in the young boy’s banishment to ‘a remote part of the forest’ (4), and the tale subsequently names Greece, Bithyniana, Egypt, Persia, Tartar, Afghanistan, India and Samarcand, all important arenas of British imperial conflict in the late nineteenth century. The King’s journey through the palace at the start of the story as he explores its rooms, is compared to a great colonial adventure: ‘journeys of discovery … real voyages through a marvellous land’ (6). Voyages of discovery were central metaphors in much Victorian literature for the process of socialisation and the development of masculinity in the growing boy, and adventure stories formed a useful ideological complement for public schoolboys to the athletic training they received on rugby and football pitches. As Geoffrey Best has written, ‘there was a clear relationship between militarism and sport in the British public schools’ as sport not only provided the male with the physical health required to go out and conquer and administer the empire, but also taught him the key skills of leadership and team-work, essential in an army (141). Joseph Bristow has traced how important novels like R.M. Ballantyne’s

‘The Young King’ 115 The Coral Island (1857) were in promoting ideas of imperial desire in its readership. Adventure stories took ‘the boy into areas of history and geography that placed him at the top of the racial ladder and at the helm of all the world’ (21). However, while it is true that such adventure stories were committed to promoting imperial masculinity as the proper destiny for any true English boy (Phillips, 5), this is clearly not the case with the young King’s journeys in this story. Instead of crushing difference by imposing a normative English identity on foreign lands, Wilde exploits the terror which generated these adventure stories, the terror of an encounter with the Other, and exposes how colonisation works at all levels of personal and institutional psychology. While the King thinks he is exploring and declaring as his the vast rooms in the castle, they are actually working their functions back onto him. After all, these rooms are not really ‘blank spaces’ on a map but are the means by which the King will fall in love with the trappings of power and come to understand himself as a conqueror of space. Having made these rooms in the castle his, the King will not find it so strange to send his subjects out on missions to make foreign lands part of his empire as well. However, this ‘reverse mapping’ onto the explorer also has implications for those who would scramble for overseas colonies. These places are not blank spaces simply waiting for the white man to discover them either. The native populations may ‘pollute’ the colonisers with their own taxonomies and cultural systems. This is what happens to the King in his dreams, as his own geographical imagination is subverted and radically changed. To most Victorians, foreign lands seemed to be frighteningly distant spaces separated from England by dangerous voyages (like the dream trips undertaking by the Young King, so perilous that he wakes up uttering a ‘great cry’ of fright and existential angst, 15). However, domestic and foreign spaces, home and away, are actually existentially linked and are defined in terms of each other. While the King is exploring the terra incognita, he is simultaneously ‘in his own chamber’ (12). This allows Wilde to interrogate the domestic and civilised; ‘abroad’ is not so very unlike the world of home. Thus, the places the King visits are populated with ‘men like himself’ (11) but whose figures are ‘pale, sickly-looking’, ‘faces … pinched with famine’ (10); the rulers of some areas are ‘black as ebony’ yet are wearing ‘crimson silk’ as colourful as the King’s own (13). He sees children like himself but at continual labour. The mirror held up to him in the third dream is unsurprisingly shows his face: ‘And he looked into the mirror, and, seeing his own face, he gave a great cry and woke’ (19). Thus, in encountering these ‘uncivilised’ others, the King is exposed to the ambivalence inherent in colonial discourse. This ambivalence is well described by Homi K. Bhabha who argues that while colonial discourse always attempts to fix the colonial other in negative stereotypical paradigms, such as the designation of the Irish as lazy or drunken or bestial, so negative that the Other has no relation to the colonial Self, this discourse never works completely. Although the negative stereotyping of the colonised Other is crucial, colonisers also, simultaneously, try to erase this otherness through a ‘taming’ the Other, so as to make the colonised Other safe, bring him closer to Western ideals of humanity. Bringing the colonised closer to the coloniser undermines the belief that an unbreachable barrier exists between Self and Other, and this effectively splits the discourse of colonialism, as the colonised is always both too far away from Western ideals and always too close

116 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde for comfort: ‘colonial discourse produces the colonised as a social reality which is at once “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible’ (70–71). This is the problem for the King here: those he finds he is exploiting are both radically like and unlike him. This exposes the undecidibility of colonial language and, in the King’s case, makes him aware of the inherent exploitation at the heart of his sovereignty. Looking at the Other suddenly and radically relativises the centrality of the Self. When the King sees himself-as-(an)Other, and thus both like and unlike those his system is crushing, he can no longer return to a way of life based upon naked exploitation. The story is obsessed with looking, gazing and the visual. The young King is observed in almost everything he does. A Burgomaster had ‘caught sight of him kneeling in real adoration before a great picture’ (7); ‘he had been seen … pressing his warm lips to the marble brow of an antique statue’ (7). The King himself lives on the look. A sigh of pleasure ‘broke from his lips when he saw the delicate raiment and rich jewels’ (5); he was discovered ‘in one of the northern turrets of the palace gazing, as one in a trance, at a Greek gem carved with the figure of Adonis’ (7); another occasion had seen him pass the night ‘noting the effect of the moonlight on a silver image of Endymion’ (7); in his mind’s eye he imagines the glory of his coronation and ‘saw himself in fancy standing at the high altar of the cathedral in the fair raiment of a King’ (8). It is altogether appropriate that he has a ‘laughing Narcissus’ (9) above his bed and that revelation should come to him only when he shuts his eyes. According to Jacques Lacan, the gaze of the world should not be sought avoided because it is a crucial aid to existential discovery. We learn who we are through the looks of others because in the gaze of the Other we can discover how we are perceived by the world. Central to this encounter with Otherness is coming under the maternal gaze at the infant. The image reflected back to the infant in its mother’s eyes is internalised by the infant as the perfect representation of what s/he could be in the world. In ‘The Young King’ this is represented by the boy’s substitution of object for mother (aesthetic instead of emotional mirrors), and also, Britain’s incessant longing for a vision of its own greatness in the children/ colonies it possessed. Such gazing and being gazed at is central to the emergence of subjectivity. The King visions himself in the objects of beauty he wishes to appropriate while in the court: the gold threads, the rubies, the diamonds. According to Lacan, the subject can only understand him or herself when seen from the point of view of the other (67–104). Unfortunately, such looks are dangerous – reflections are fickle lodging-places for one’s value, as the young King finds out. In his desire for objects of beauty, it was he who had: sent away many merchants, some to traffic for amber with the rough fisher-folk of the north seas, some to Egypt to look for that curious green turquoise which is found only in the tombs of kings, and is said to possess magical properties, some to Persia for silken carpets and painted pottery, and others to India to buy gauze and stained ivory, moonstones and bracelets of jade, sandalwood and blue enamel, and shawls of fine wool (7–8). In this way he became initiator of exploitation and chief coloniser. Such navel/naval gazing is entirely representative of Britain’s imperial position in the late nineteenth century. The ‘new imperialism’ of the post-1870 era was what Paul

‘The Young King’ 117 Kennedy refers to as an ‘imperialism of fear’ (‘Continuity and Discontinuity’ 34). As the century ended the economic dominance possessed by Britain was threatened by a reunified Germany, an expanding United States and France and Russia were also catching up with Britain by emulating its strategies (see Burgess). Some historians have argued that it was in response to this decline in economic power that foreign and imperial policy was designed in this period (Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy 21–2). As Freda Harcourt has pointed out, ‘the idea of enhancing Britain’s imperial status was seized upon by Disraeli in 1866 as the obvious, indeed, the only way of confirming Britain’s position as a great power in a rapidly changing world’ (87). It is in relation to this relative failure that foreign policy was conditioned in this period. One indication of the pessimism that relative economic decline generated can be seen in the words of Meredith Townsend, a Liberal MP in 1888: For whether for good or evil, a great change is passing over Englishmen. They have become uncertain of themselves, afraid of their old opinions, doubtful of the true teaching of their consciences. They doubt if they have any longer any moral right to rule anyone, themselves almost included (quoted in Hyam 93). As economic advance appeared close to an end, Britain configured the consolation of Empire: the new imperialism considered that future great powers would be those with the largest extent of territory. The frantic effort to control land rested on a particular diagnosis of the basis on which power was in the future to rest. However, anxieties arose about the extent to which these overseas territories could be held and controlled by the empire. This anxiety was, as Ronald Hyam notes, fuelled by two political crises of the 1880s: the occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the Home Rule crisis of 1886 (93). The Middle East was important to the Victorian economy in a strategic sense as the region through which the short routes to India passed and for that reason Britain wished to ensure that French and Russian interests would be kept out of a country like Egypt. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 made this aim very difficult as it posed as a possible route for all countries to India and an ending of British control of the Cape route. This meant that Egypt now had to be taken into full account in forming British foreign policy. Britain initially bought shares in the canal, but eventually resorted to annexing the country itself after a local rising led by the Egyptian nationalist Urabi Pasha threatened the safety of the trade route (see Hyam 252–4). With the crushing of Urabi the Liberal government thought it could set Egypt on its own feet in a comparatively short space of time and, having constructed an effective native government, leave the country to administer itself. To this job it appointed Lord Cromer. Cromer, however, was not enthusiastic about the chances for Egyptian independence. He refused to accept the notion that Egypt should be given its independence, claiming that ‘the Egyptians are not a nation, and never can be a nation’. He was contemptuous of Egyptian nationalism and declared that to install them in an independent government was an idea ‘only a little less absurd than the nomination of some savage Red Indian chief to be Governor-general of Canada’ (Hyam 254–61). Wilde is clearly aware of the Egyptian crisis and makes Egypt the centre of the young King’s colonial enterprise for the exotic – ‘the curious

118 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde green turquoise which is found only in the tombs of kings [of Egypt]’ (7) – and also the centre of his imaginative journey to the land where Arabs with spears attempt to ward off invasion only to be killed. The centrality of the Egyptian adventure in ‘The Young King’ is linked to the prominence of Ireland in the story, as the Egyptian and Irish situations were considered analogous by many British politicians in this period and Paul Kennedy points out that in the press, the glories of the British Empire were always linked closely to Irish problems (Realities Behind Diplomacy 55–7). The debate on the uprising of Urabi coincided with the attempt by the Liberals to pass an Irish Arrears of Rent Bill and a Coercion Bill in close succession. Many Whigs were uncomfortable with the notion that opposition in Ireland should be dealt with in a more lenient way than that in Egypt and wished to see Irish nationalism strenuously put down. While William Gladstone believed that Home Rule offered the best solution to Irish unrest, others saw in his proposal a threat to the integrity of the Empire. The first earl of Kimberley complained in 1869 that to lose Ireland would be to lose the Empire itself, writing that ‘England must for her own safety hold Ireland, come what may’, while in 1886 George Goschen wrote that no sign was ‘more dangerous in this Irish controversy than the effect which surrender and defeat in Ireland would have upon our position in the world’. H.M. Butler declared that Home Rule would lead to the ‘relinquishment of Gibraltar, the abandonment of India, the repudiation of the Colonies, and the resignation of our duties as a great fighting power in Europe’ (all quoted in Hyam 89–94). This was the crux: in the face of economic competition, Britain relied on her colonial possessions to reflect back in her eyes the glory and righteousness of imperial manliness. This masculinity was being threatened at home by a reconstituted Catholic Church and a phalanx of Catholic convert-perverts; it was now being threatened abroad in the colonies by Irish and Egyptian nationalism. Ireland, like Egypt, is central to the fairy tale under examination here. It figures most obviously in the third dream where Death and Avarice fight over three grains of corn and Death sends her servants Ague, Fever and Plague into the land killing its entire inhabitants. Wilde is directly imitating his mother’s personifications of the Plague Spirit and Famine in her poem ‘Foreshadowings’: With crown and with bow, on his white steed immortal, The Angel of Wrath passes first through the portal; But faces grow paler, and hush’d is earth’s laughter. When on his pale steed comes the Plague Spirit after. Oremus! Ormeus! His poison breath slayeth; The red will soon fade from each bright lip that prayeth. … Oh! the golden-hair’d children reck nought but their playing. Thro’ the rich fields of corn with their young mothers straying; And the strong-hearted men, with their muscles o iron, What reck they of ills that their pathway environ? There’s a tramp like a knell – a cold shadow gloometh – Woe! ’tis the black steed of Famine that cometh (16–17).

‘The Young King’ 119 Indeed, Speranza is a major influence on this story as a whole. Wilde found his images of destitution in her poetry and his desolate final image of the land full of the dead owes much to her ‘Lament for the Potato’ (translated from the Irish): There is woe, there is clamour, in our desolated land, And wailing lamentation from a famine-stricken band; And weeping are the multitudes in famine and despair, For the green fields of Munster lying desolate and bare (63–5). The imagery of the poem borrows from Jeremiah’s Lamentations and the Book of Revelation, unsurprisingly also witnessed in Wilde’s own visual panorama: And out of the slime at the bottom of the valley crept dragons and horrible things with scales, and the jackals came trotting along the sand, sniffing the air with their nostrils (19). Wilde is here appealing to mythic time pondering the need for some type of Apocalypse. He grasps here what Brendan Bradshaw has termed the ‘cataclysmic aspects of Irish history’ (215), and he takes his place with his mother and the poets of the Nation in responding emotionally to the Irish holocaust of the 1840s. Owen Dudley Edwards has pointed to the importance of the Famine to the Wilde family as a whole and terms Avarice in ‘The Young King’ a self-deluded ‘benevolent’ landlord (‘Impressions’ 52–6). Richard Pine echoes this in his claim that ‘the redemptive quality of the young King’s true poverty and humility might speak for all those whose degradation under the Famine had been noted by his father’s coldly analytic pen and the strident sympathy of his mother’s verse’ (178). This is true even in the young King’s belief in the prophetic power of dreams which associates him with a kind of knowledge which was fast going out of fashion in the nineteenth century. It is in this Irish context that the relationship between the ultramontane and Ritualist Catholicism of the King’s final costume and the social and political reconfiguration required by the ‘socialist’ element of the tale can be understood. Through his dreams, the King gains an understanding of the exploitation of the colonies and the sin involved in looking to the conquered for an image of the self. Instead of glory he is confronted with the imagery of Apocalypse; he converts and transforms, renouncing material wealth. In his renunciation of the accoutrements of wealth the young King is actually rejected by the world. He is decried as a madman and a representative of the poor tells him that his new attire serves only to insult them: ‘Sir, knowest thou not that out of the luxury of the rich cometh the life of the poor? By your pomp we are nurtured …’ (28). The gaze of the poor is still being misdirected, as is that of the officials of the state. The eyes of the state rest on its head as much as on the colonies and they still require a reflection of worth. This is not, as some critics believe, a failure of Wilde to present a vision of political change. Wilde’s point is precisely that political and economic change is always of only secondary importance. The story is a Christian one and the world presented in it is fallen. It is no coincidence that the King moves from the Edenic happiness of Joyese to the post- lapsarian horrors of a famine-stricken Ireland through the gaining of knowledge. The Fall (fortunate here) is the initiation into salvation: without sin and fall there is no requirement for the saving grace that occurs at the end of the story. The impact

120 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde of sin on life reaches into every facet of existence and sin is simply defined as disobedience to the commands of God – the inability to direct the worshipping gaze to the proper object. The first of God’s commandments is found in Exodus 20:2–5: I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them. It is out of Egypt that both Britain and the king in this story need to be taken also, and the gods of imperial desire – the need for naval gazing – need to be dismantled. As we have seen, the story is concerned with the misdirection of gaze: the young King prays to the aesthetic; his subjects look to him for validation; the court relies on overseas possessions for its worth. The death of a Christian culture is the palpable reality in the story. The world is not transformed simply because the King now sees the light. The ultimate solution to society’s problems here is the Parousia; the ultimate Christian hope is the new heaven and the new earth. Wilde does not compromise this by initiating some type of social redemption through government intervention in the marketplace. What he emphasises is that personal and social salvation should occur together but that this is unlikely. The King must forget about looking for some type of positive reinforcement from society at large, from his courtiers and even from the church and instead revert his eyes to Christ and pray for salvation. Of course, justification and transfiguration comes finally as Christ alone crowns the King. The dreams are best understood in a biblical context: ‘Hear now my words. If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream’ (Numbers 12:6). Dream visions are part of the trappings of prophecy and are bestowed on those favoured by God – Joseph in Genesis, and his namesake the father of Jesus, the prophets Ezekiel, Daniel and Isaiah. Through the visions he has, the King is brought to a renunciation of empty materialism and miscellaneous gods of culture, symbolised by Adonis, Narcissus and Hadrian. The King worshipped these dead figures when he should have been on his knees before the risen Christ; he was found ‘kneeling in real adoration before a great picture that had just been brought from Venice’ while he should have been examining the image of Christ in the cathedral built by his father (7). Both Adonis and Narcissus are seen as semi-divine and worship of them is specifically condemned in the first commandment, the breaking of which is the focus for much of the story. Hadrian is important here because his page Antinous drowned himself in the Nile in AD130 to show his devotion to his master: another example of false worship. Antinous was then deified by the Egyptians as a Nile god. The King must renounce the worship of such meaningless aestheticism and find release in the worship of the suffering Christ, who sacrificed himself for all. He does finally kneel ‘before the image of Christ, and the great candles burned brightly by the jewelled shrine, and the smoke of the incense curled in thin wreaths through the dome’ (26). The new

‘The Young King’ 121 garment that is woven around him is the garb of spiritual righteousness, created by a miraculous intervention into a scene of imminent disaster: And lo! through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him, and the sunbeams wove round him a tissued robe that was fairer than the robe that had been fashioned for his pleasure. The dead staff blossomed, and bare lilies that were whiter than pearls. The dry thorn blossomed, and bare roses that were redder than rubies (26–7). His aesthetic metamorphosis is vital to any reading of the story. It takes place to ‘oppose the private paradise of physical beauty to the moral beauty which seems to attend its renunciation’ (Shewan, 51). The King recognises the true ugliness of the world of sin, despite its gorgeous façade and turns to the world of God to find a permanent beauty in a new realm that blesses meekness and self-abnegation (the King as shepherd and the suffering Christ) and to them grants a beauty beyond material evaluation: ‘whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it’. What Wilde does is demonstrate that everyone is looking in the wrong place for solutions to difficulty: England to the colonies; the poor to the rich; the country to the King; the King to his material possessions. What is necessary is the final gaze towards God and it is this gaze that is posed as an example for the populace to follow. Wilde is suggesting that society should, quite simply, put its faith in God. This is why, on turning to God, the King is safe walking out of the coronation chamber although only moments before, his life was being threatened. The poor reject a King willing to become like themselves, preferring some type of temporary government intervention into the labour market. However, what social injustice requires is a spiritual transformation on behalf of all involved; the poor as well as the courtiers are willing to reject the King’s efforts as they believe the class divisions that created them must be maintained: ‘To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still’ (23). They have no conception of the true radicalism of the King’s ultimate message: radical trust in God. They argue that without society they are doomed: ‘Thinkest thou that the ravens will feed us?’ (23). Their very words condemn them however. 1 Kings 17:4–6 refers to an incident in the life of the prophet Elijah who lived in a desert during a major famine without any food. The Bible records that God told him: ‘I have commanded the ravens to feed thee … And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening’. Like the poor, the King’s courtiers cannot accept the implications of his identification with the destitute and his concern for their welfare: ‘Shall a man not eat bread till he has seen the sower, nor drink wine till he has talked with the vinedresser?’ (21). God, in the parables of Christ, is both sower and vinedresser and to refuse to know God is to cast oneself into the darkness of sin. The message of the story is dogmatically Christian: turn to Christ and be saved or remain in the valley of the shadow and the degradation of spirit that exists there. The justification of the king becomes the justification of Catholicism and in particular, Irish Catholicism. The statue of Christ in the story has all the iconography of the Ultramontane church, rather than that of the English Gothic, which stressed paucity and minimalism within the church doors. Interestingly, critics have failed to make the link between the King’s startling visage and that of Moses: ‘But no

122 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde man dared to look upon his face, for it was like the face of an angel’ (27). While Luke 9:29 and Matthew 17:2 speak of Jesus’ face ‘shining like the sun’ during the Transfiguration, this tropos links directly back to Exodus 34:29: And it came to pass, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, then Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him … and behold, they were afraid to come nigh him. The blossoming sceptre of the King also has Mosaic reference. Most critics have pointed to the obvious link between this episode and the Tannhäuser legend and this connection is indeed important and relevant as Tannhäuser was yet another example of a figure whose worship and gaze were misdirected. Legend has it that Tannhäuser found the Venusburg, the secret home of the goddess Venus, and he was so enchanted by her that he spent a year in rapt worship. He then went seeking forgiveness from the Pope, Urban IV who told him that forgiveness could only be given if the papal staff blossomed. This happened three days after Tannhäuser had left. However, when the King’s ‘dry thorn blossomed’ (27), this also refers to an biblical incident in Numbers 17:8 where the Israelite high priest and bother of Moses, Aaron, was challenged to prove his authority, ‘and his stick ‘budded, and brought forth buds, and budded blossoms, and yielded almonds’. This distinction and link between Moses and Jesus is vital for the story, because Moses was essentially a political leader who led his people out of colonial subjugation to a stronger race in Egypt. Such an identification of the Young King with Moses and the Catholicism of Famine Ireland reverberates from the 1820s when the millenarian prophecies of Pastorini found articulation. ‘Pastorini’ was a pseudonym used by an English Benedictine, Charles Walmesley, whose The general history of the Christian Church chiefly deduced from the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle (1771) and The Fulfilment of the Revelation of St. John Displayed, from the Commencement of the Prophecy … to the Battle of Waterloo (1819), predicted the end of Protestantism in 1825 and the arrival of a new Moses to lead the Catholic peoples into ascendance. Many in Ireland identified this new Moses with the politician Daniel O’Connell who was pursuing Catholic Emancipation. O’Connell was dubbed the Liberator, a title displaying at once political and messianic power (O’Farrell 51–3). Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh argues that the Irish peasantry: had a rich and vital oral tradition … which encompassed a peculiar politico-social and religious millenarianism. In the aisling (dream poem) genre of the eighteenth century it was forecast that when the hero (the Stuart pretender) returned to free the maid (Ireland) from bondage, on that day the Gaill (usually cited as English-speaking Calvinist usurpers) would be put down and the Gael (Irish-speaking and Catholic) restored to their ancient glory (66). O’Connell’s mass appeal and his charismatic power in a campaign he couched in distinctly millenarian terms (Catholic Emancipation harkens back to the freeing of the Israelites from their Egyptian bondage) led to these epitaphs being placed on him. That ‘The Young King’ is actually a gesture towards O’Connellism is indicated in the epitaphs given to him after he renounces wealth: ‘My lord, the people wait

‘The Young King’ 123 for their king, and thou showest them a beggar’ (22); ‘Where is this King, who is apparelled like a beggar’ (26). In his own lifetime, O’Connell was derided, even by those he had benefited as the ‘King of the Beggars’, and held up to scorn by his enemies as a loathsome agitator. Wilde’s admiration for Parnell has been well documented, but he had good reason to be aware of O’Connell’s importance to nineteenth century historiography. His mother wrote a tribute to him when he died, in which she refers to a type of spiritual coronation taking place independent of political exigencies: Crowned with a liberated people’s love, Crowned by the Nations with eternal fame … God crowned him Victor for his work well done (71–72). Moreover, in an article on him, Lady Wilde praised him as a messiah for Irish Catholics, claiming that his life ‘is, indeed, the history of Ireland for nearly a century … [and that] he lived through all, incarnated all, and was the avenger, the apostle and the prophet of the people’ (Notes on Men Women and Books 197). Indeed, at a dinner in the House of Commons in 1891, when he heard an Englishman claim that the nineteenth century was the century of the Macs rather than the O’s, Wilde replied: ‘You forget. There are O’Connell and O. Wilde’ (Coakley, 196). It is in this O’Connellite reconfiguring of the protagonist that the political, social and religious meanings of the story come together for O’Connell was precisely the kind of visionary leader of the people that the young King is trying to emulate. Catholic ritual and political activism belonged together in O’Connell’s campaign on behalf of the Catholic masses, and here the young King acts as a spiritual Liberator, freeing the poor from psychic bondage. Destroying the spiritual bondage of the Irish Catholics to another nation is one issue; another was the interrogation of the Irish Catholic Church itself. In ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ and ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’, Wilde turns away from a direct examination of colonialism and takes a closer look at the internal dynamics of the Catholic Church and exposes the structures of oppression within it.

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Chapter Seven ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ This story first appeared in Paris Illustré (30 March 1889), as ‘The Birthday of the Little Princess’, and has attracted relatively little critical analysis. John Charles Duffy points out that ugliness was often a signifier of perverse sexuality in Victorian culture, with homosexuals considered as monsters. In privileging the monstrous male over the beautiful female, Wilde may be indicating his privileging of same-sex desire over heterosexual marriage (348). Other readings have concentrated on the apparent critique of the aesthetic movement contained in the narrative undermining of the artificiality of the Infant’s beauty. Rodney Shewan reads the story as an attack on artificiality as it infects both the palace and the gardens which surround it. The palace is ‘opposed to joy, laughter, and all spontaneous feeling’ and revels instead in playing authenticity in its ceremonials and its rituals. However, the gardens are not any better because here ‘nature is innately grotesque … and no different in kind from art, ceremonial, or mountbankery, since all serve to entertain’ (57). Only the Dwarf stands in real opposition to this court of bizarre hypocrisy as he is the ‘innocent romantic’ trapped in a wall of mirrors (58). The story is ultimately pessimistic about the possibility that anything real can survive being touched by the cult of art for art’s sake. Christopher Nassaar largely agrees with this reading and he sees the story as Wilde’s clearest attack on the notion of aesthetic self-sufficiency that he is too often seen advocating in his other work. The Infanta is the epitome of beauty but she is ‘a moral monster, repulsive in spite of her dazzling outward appearance’ (‘Anderson’s “Ugly Duckling”’ 84). In a complete reversal of Hans Christian Anderson’s message in ‘The Ugly Duckling’ which links physical beauty and psychological happiness, the Dwarf may be ugly but he is a more psychologically healthy figure than his beautiful counterpart, the Infanta. Moral beauty is demonstrated as superior to physical attraction. Guy Willoughby is not so convinced that the Dwarf offers an adequate subversion of the Infanta. His ignorance is a problem in a story without any apparent redemption for its hero and his ignorance of a ‘wider synthetic vision’, such as was offered by Jesus Christ, means that ‘without a transfigurative myth of submission and renewal, he has no other recourse than to die’ (Art and Christhood 41). In this the story seems to be guilty of the same lack of hope and transformation that critics generally see in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, and ‘The Devoted Friend’. I want to approach the story from a different angle and think that this may illuminate some of the more confusing aspects of the narrative than a contextualisation in the aesthetic movement achieves. Throughout this study I have been arguing that we need to take much more seriously Wilde’s attraction to Catholicism. Many critics, including myself, have recently, and correctly, drawn attention to Oscar Wilde’s interest in the Catholic Church and have argued that, far from a childhood or adolescent indulgence, as Richard Ellmann famously argued (63–4, 297), this

126 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde attraction was both lifelong and vitally important to his aesthetic. This critical rehabilitation of the relationship between Wilde and the Church has been hard- won and has introduced a new density to Wilde studies which takes account of the institutional and theological complexity of Catholicism, as well as the experiential intricacy of an individual’s religious life (see Hanson; Schuchard; Killeen). However, I have always felt there remains unfinished business in the exploration of Wilde’s relationship with the Catholic Church. If Wilde was so concerned with Catholicism, why did he remain so long in the religious as well as sexual closet? One explanation lies in his fetishisation of secrecy and his recognition that Catholicism in both England (where to be a Catholic was to be always already marginal to the state), and in his native Ireland, where Tridentine policemen were busy crushing folk- Catholic rituals and practices during the devotional revolution (Larkin, Historical Dimensions 57–89), required a certain amount of concealment and code. However, I want to suggest that one further possible cause lies in his unease with the Catholic Church’s obsession with power and the means by which it sought to hold on to that power, particularly its dependence on assimilating and thereby neutering traditional images of female strength and autonomy. This concern with power-politics can be seen in Wilde’s consideration of the position of the Virgin Mary within the Roman Catholic economy of salvation. I have already demonstrated how interested Wilde was in Marian theology in my reading of ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, but his use of the Catholic doctrines concerning Mary there were almost entirely positive. What I want to suggest in this chapter is that a much more critical attitude towards the Church’s relation to Mary can be found in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’. That Wilde fully accepted the doctrines concerning Mary – particularly the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – should not be in much doubt. In July 1876 he had written a letter concerning the issue to William Ward in which he criticises Protestant, even High Anglican, reticence about the centrality of the Virgin Mary to Christianity: I never knew how near the English Church was to joining with Rome. Before the Promulgation of the Immaculate Conception [Edward Bouverie] Pusey and [Henry Parry] Liddon [both important figures in the early Oxford Movement] and others were working hard for an Eirenicon and union with Rome, but now they look to the Greek Church. But I think it is a mere dream, and very strange that they should be so anxious to believe the Blessed Virgin conceived in sin (Letters 23). Wilde was reading Pomponio Leto’s The Vatican Council, Eight months at Rome during the Vatican Council (1876) at the time and was keeping up to date on the latest thinking about that controversial council. His faith in the Blessed Virgin Mary survived this study and in March 1877 he wrote to Reginald Harding while on his way to Rome: ‘I shall not forget you in Rome, and will burn a candle for you at the Shrine to Our Lady’ (Letters 43). That he was, in general, an enthusiast in Marian terms is confirmed by a letter he wrote to his friend the Reverend H.R. Bramley, a tutor in Magdalen College and a Tractarian, on 2 April 1877. Wilde had been cajoling his friends and acquaintances alike with his Catholic leanings and his vacillating between public conversion and personal conviction and in reply Bramley presented him with an unnamed book on the subject of Catholicism. Like most Tractarians,

‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 127 Bramley was attracted to Catholicism but worried about its traditional emphasis on papal primacy and infallibility. Wilde read the book and replied while travelling through Genoa with his former lecturer Professor Mahaffy: We came first to Genoa, which is a beautiful marble city of palaces over the sea, and then to Ravenna which is extremely interesting on account of the old Christian churches in it of enormous age and the magnificent mosaics of the fourth century. These mosaics are very remarkable as they contained two figures of the Madonna enthroned and receiving adoration; they completely upset the ordinary Protestant idea that the worship of the Virgin did not come in till late in the history of the Church. I read the book you kindly lent me with much interest; the Roman Catholics certainly do seem to confuse together Christian doctrine which we may all hold and the supremacy of the Pope which we need not hold (Letters 45). Wilde is probably referring here to the mosaics in the San Apollinare Nuovo of Mary enthroned and attended by angels which is most probably sixth century (rather than fourth century). He uses the antiquity of such mosaics to gently mock Protestant reticence on the centrality of the Virgin to a Christian theology. If the Virgin Mary played such a publicly prominent role in early Christian worship, then the Protestant claim that Marianism was a late and corrupt addition to theology was plainly wrong. In Pusey’s Eirenicon (1685) he denounced the ‘vast system as to the Blessed Virgin’ and attacked the recent proclamation of the Immaculate Conception as a major obstacle to the reconciliation of Anglican and Roman Catholic communions, claiming that there was clearly a development in doctrinal attitude towards her during the Middle Ages that was simply not present in the early church (see Graef, vol. 2 109–111). John Henry Newman had replied in a Letter to Pusey (1866), that while devotion to Mary had certainly increased, all the elements of contemporary Marian doctrine could also be found in the ancient Church (ibid 111). In his Apologia pro vita sua (1864), Newman made clear that his devotion to the Blessed Virgin had been central to his thinking for many years and he claims that her ‘Immaculate Purity I had in one of earliest printed Sermons made much of’ (222). Wilde agrees with Newman’s assessment that while the doctrines concerning Mary have undergone some development they were essentially present in the early church and has clearly searched for evidence in Ravenna. However, Wilde has linked his clear approval of the prominent position of Mary in Catholicism to a warning against Papal Infallibility, clearly reacting to the fact that many of his contemporaries were claiming that the two issues were part of the same Catholic problem. He opposes a linking of the doctrine to the position of a man in Rome, to his supreme authority over Catholics, an attack on the imagination as powerful as the Protestant belief in the rationality of faith that translates sola fidae into belief in that which is only logical. It is clear to what Wilde is referring here. His criticism of the Protestant position on the Virgin Mary is a hint that the book Bramley lent him was about the relation between the declaration of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 by Pius IX to the same Pope’s definition of Papal Infallibility in 1870, a relation that the Protestants were keen to claim demonstrated the tendency to tyranny that defined the Catholic Church itself.

128 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Wilde’s letters, then, reveal him interested enough to pursue a course of reading on the issues surrounding the proclamation, but also enough of a believer to light a candle to the Virgin while in Rome. A deep understanding of the issues would have served to heighten his concerns about the misuse to which the church was putting the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which probably appealed to Wilde because of what Mary Daly has termed its ‘baffling … inconceivable’ (Pure Lust, 103) quality. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was finally officially defined on 8 December 1854 in the encyclical Ineffablis Deus: We, by the authority of Jesus Christ our Lord, of the blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, and by our own, declare, pronounce and define that doctrine which holds that the blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instance of her Conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the omnipotent God, in consideration of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore is to be firmly and constantly believed by all the faithful (quoted in Graef, vol. 2 81–2). The declaration proclaims that Mary is the only human being to have been preserved from the stain of original sin because of her future role in the economy of salvation, her role as the Theotokos, the Mother of God. This declaration caused a scandal to Protestants who claimed that the Catholic Church was in effect deifying Mary and making her a Mother Goddess equal to God the Father. The Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, famously complained that the Roman Catholic Church was a ‘whole system which does place on the Mediator’s throne the Virgin mother instead of the incarnate Son’ (22). Belief in the Immaculate Conception of Mary had been a Catholic staple for centuries, particularly among the illiterate, and had been the subject of major theological debate between those within the Church who supported and those who were uncomfortable with it. Pope Sixtus IV gave his approval for the celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1476, but it is very significant that it was during the pontificate of Pius IX that the doctrine was declared mandatory for all Catholics and firmly defined (Benko 204). This significance is clear for many different reasons. In the first place, the middle of the nineteenth century is the period associated with the growth of what historians now call ‘first wave’ feminism. Mary Daly has pointed out that the first Women’s Conference in Seneca Falls, New York had taken place only a few years before the declaration, in 1848, where American feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton found a platform for their views (Pure Lust 102). The convention ratified a list of 11 resolutions contained in a Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Stanton, which declared the complete equality of men and women in all spheres, including politics (controversially including a demand that all women seek the right to vote in elections), the workplace, and theology (complaining that men had, in effect, usurped God’s place in creation and arrogated to themselves the power that belonged to him and attempted to suppress the natural right of women to an equal place in the church). As these forces were moving towards the greater participation of women in social and political life, the Church attempted to protect itself from being fundamentally changed by such challenges. Instead of accepting that ontological equality required social and political articulation, the Church attempted to subvert the women’s movement by

‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 129 co-opting the Virgin Mary in the battle for theological orthodoxy. What Pius tried to do was to stabilise the social and political environment, including the new mobilisation of women, by lifting ideal femininity out of secular time altogether. This was very far from a promotion of female participation in the public world. Ineffablis Deus attempted to define the limits of female power, to shore up the borders of feminine activism. However, the declaration of the Immaculate Conception was crucial for other reasons as well. While it elevated Mary above common humanity, and also, therefore, from common human concerns beyond the boundaries of criticism it also, and simultaneously, elevated the Pope since he was the one who had officially defined the dogma. In the declaration, both Mary and her champion, Pius IX, were protected from the realm of criticism. This was important to the Pope because he was under intellectual, social and political siege at the time.While he was uneasy with the growth of the women’s movement, he was more concerned with the loss of secular Papal power. During Pius’ pontificate he was exiled from Rome for a time and also lost the Papal States, which were the final remnants of the Papacy’s once awesome territorial power. This upheaval pushed a pope who had been considered a liberal at the time of his election towards an increasing social conservatism. Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti had been elected pope in 1846 and in what had seemed to be a precedent-setting act defining his papacy, he declared an amnesty for political revolutionaries in the Papal States, and set about modernising his territory by improving infrastructure and reforming the taxation system. However, with the increasing politicisation of Italy and the nationalism of Mazzini, Pius became more and more wary of social change and, just prior to the revolution of 1848, which established an Italian secular republic, Pius fled Rome in fear of his life, went into exile and only returned under French and Austrian guarantee. The Papal States were absorbed into a united Italy and the last remaining territorial power of what Pius believed to be the ‘Patrimony of Peter’ slipped from the Pope’s fingers (Duffy, Saints and Sinners 286–9). His loss of political power led him to look to the theological and religious realms as areas where this power could be substituted and Mary was the means he chose for this substitution (Hamington 18). As the Pope’s chamberlain, Monsignor Talbot claimed, ‘the most important thing [about the Immaculate Conception] is not the new dogma itself, but the way in which it was proclaimed’, wholly dependent on the authority of the Pope himself (quoted in Duffy, Saints and Sinners 292). In both the declaration of the Immaculate Conception and the ruling on Papal Infallibility religious authority acted as a defence against secular change. The Immaculate Conception was a preparation for the decision on Papal Infallibility. Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverria argue that: Far from having coincidental gestation, the dogmas are reinforcing and complementary. They are the consummation of an alliance between Rome and ‘Mary’ since earliest times. As the invisible and maternal supervisor of the Church becomes equal to God – or as ‘pure’ as the Second Person of the Trinity – so her visible paternal counterpart makes a commensurate advance. When the world questions the Chair of Peter and its prerogatives, celestial confirmation is required. In turn, this supernatural factor can be ratified only by an incontrovertible, superhuman voice: that of infallibility (121). After all, for many people the ‘Immaculate Conception’ renders Mary a quasi-divine figure and thus makes her link with common humanity tenuous. By raising her status

130 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde like this, however, the Catholic Church is also protecting itself, since as a divine dignitary she can grant heavenly favour on that Church which has declared itself for her cause. As Maurice Hamington notes, ‘The Immaculate Conception was the first Church dogma defined solely by papal authority’ (19). The Infallibility ruling followed the First Vatican Council in 1870 and this ecclesiological and theological elevation of the Pope to the position of quasi-divine arbiter of doctrine demonstrated that Mary had fulfilled the role Pius had asked her to. Rather than an expression of a confident Church, the Declaration of Infallibility is really the desperate act of an impotent male ruler seeking a divine, feminine, yet also politically castrated woman to support him in his trials. Mary served to solidify impotent hierarchical power in Catholicism. Oscar Wilde’s reading during this period indicates that he was engaged in deep thought about such matters as the relationship between the Pope and Mary, but he eventually came to reflect on these issues at greater length in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’. In an important historical archaeology of the story Horst Schroeder has linked the story to the court of King Charles II of Spain (1661–1700). The reference is important to us here because it brings us back to the interdependence of politics and theology and to the dependence by weak male figures on the Immaculate Conception that I traced in Pius IX’s dedication to Mary. If Pius IX tried to manipulate belief in the Immaculate Conception to solidify his own waning power in the nineteenth century, the seventeenth-century Spanish court of Charles II witnessed a use of the same belief to boost the authority of a corrupt body politic. The belief in the sinless conception of Mary had long been held around Europe, but in Spain it was a symbol of political loyalty. Indeed, there had been many attempts by influential Spanish families to have the Immaculate Conception declared dogmatic by the Pope and Philip IV himself had intervened in this mission on behalf of believers. This politically-led enthusiasm for the doctrine was evidence of a subtle political move to consolidate male political power. Had the doctrine been declared by the Pope in this period it would have been used in the Spanish Court to root out as disloyal those the powers behind the crown feared as a threat (Kamen, Spain 292). Political consolidation was made all the easier by the fact that during the early years of his reign Charles II was in his infancy and his mother Mariana put all her trust in her confessor, the Austrian Jesuit John Everard Nithard. Nithard had been with her ever since her marriage to Philip IV in 1649, and she was very impressed with his piety and devotion to personal sanctity. She conspired to make him Head of the Committee of Government, which was ruling in place of Charles until he came of age at 14, and she succeeded in making him Inquisitor General in September 1666 effectively uniting political and religious power in him. As Inquisitor General he could theoretically destroy political opponents by accusing them of heresy, for which a papal endorsement of the Immaculist cause would have been very useful. Even after he came to the age of majority, Charles remained politically as well as personally impotent. It was well-known that he was unable to perform sexually and that he had failed to consummate his marriage to either Marie Louise d’Orleans (Louis XIV of France’s niece) or, after her untimely death, to Maria Anna von Neuberg, sister-in-law to Emperor Leopold I. Politically he remained ineffectual throughout his reign, depending on Nithard for advice and direction. Nithard’s only rival for the power behind the throne was the king’s brother, Don John of Austria.

‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 131 They both sought for influence in the court, both basing their trust in the Immaculate Conception, declaring her to be on their side, with Charles vacillating between them (Lynch, vol. 2 229ff). The only institution to rival the aristocrats in the search for political power was the church. The aristocracy conferred court favours, while the church provided ‘advisors’ who moved through the corridors of power effecting these favours, so that premier and priest were not so much different estates as allies in power (ibid 229–30). The court of Charles II is reflected in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’. The king is a passive player in the government of his country and has virtually relinquished power to ‘his brother, Don Pedro of Aragon, whom he hated, and his confessor, the Grand Inquisitor of Granada’ (33), the fictional equivalents of the nobleman Don John, the illegitimate power-hungry son of Philip IV and the Jesuit Nithard, virtual Prime minister of his country. The Don Pedro of the story may also contain elements of a real Don Pedro, another political rival of Nithard and viceroy of Naples. His dedication to the Immaculate Conception was so strong that he ordered that all of those in universities had to take an oath to her (Kamen, Spain 292). The privileged position of the Catholic Church in Caroline Spain is reflected in the fact that, in the story, the Papal Nuncio ‘alone had the right to be seated in the King’s presence on the occasion of any public ceremonial’ (58), and that the Chamberlain is more concerned with the affairs of Mexico ‘where the Holy Office had recently been established’, than with the fact that the Dwarf has just died (63). And behind the pomp and ceremony of the court lies the power of the Inquisition with its ability to save or to destroy depending on its interpretation of theological orthodoxy (for the role of the Inquisition in Spanish society, see Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition). In the case of both Pius IX and Charles II, weak men seek symbolically powerful women to preserve their political lives. It is for this reason that the most striking image in the story is of the ‘embalmed’ body of the King’s wife, Queen of Spain, which was: still lying on its tapestried bier in the black marble chapel of the Palace, just as the monks had borne her in on that windy March day nearly twelve years before. Once every month the King, wrapped in a dark cloak and with a muffled lantern in his hand, went in and knelt by her side, calling out, “Mi reina! Mi reina!” and sometimes … he would clutch at the pale jewelled hands in a wild agony of grief, and try to wake by his mad kisses the cold painted face (34). Horst Schroeder points out that while this seems extravagant, Wilde is here merely elaborating on an anecdote told of Charles II which claimed that, just before his death: when he was physically and mentally already completely exhausted, [he] fled from the capital and sought refuge in the cloistered Escurial where he descended into the Pantheon, ordered the royal coffins to be opened and then contemplated long and earnestly the remains of his first wife which, it is said, bore few traces of dissolution and exhibited a countenance scarcely less blooming than when alive (290–91). From her pure remains – immaculately preserved – he hoped to gain strength and solace. That Charles was known to be sexually impotent meant that his wife had remained a virgin throughout their short marriage. Both sexually pure and beyond human corruption, the King’s dead wife symbolises the desperation of weak men

132 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde for substitutionary power. Wilde here exploits the common confusion around the Immaculate Conception which connects it directly to the miraculous conception of Jesus by Mary without sexual intercourse. This virginal Mary sanctifies the virginal men (the King, Charles II, Pius IX) and absolves them from the judgements of secular history. The imagery is a powerful rendering of the way in which weak and pathetic men draw power from the Virginal figure they have embalmed, pure and inviolate, in infallible doctrines designed to give them political and religious strength. The Infanta herself is another type of the Virgin, one of Bram Dijkstra’s ‘idols of perversity’: she seeks and gains approval from men; she demands worship rather than power; she casually destroys the Dwarf. She is not a New Woman, but a picture of a very old one: Eve. Wilde’s story suggests that the angel-in-the-house (the virgin on the bed and on the throne) is the same as the ‘Occult Mother’ overseas (Basham 178). He conjoins the two images in a frightening collusion. In the story the Infanta is celebrating her twelfth birthday and is on the verge of womanhood (Shewan 56). She is normally ‘allowed to play with children of her own rank, so she always had to play alone’ (32) and is, thus, a perverse version of the Blessed Virgin Mary who was often envisioned as being ‘alone of all her sex’ (Warner, Alone). Indeed, the story takes place in May (traditionally Mary’s month) and the party for the Infanta incorporates a much older ritual dedicated to Mary: The solemn minuet, too, performed by the dancing boys from the church of the Nuestra Señora Del Pilar, was charming. The Infanta had never before seen this wonderful ceremony which takes place every year at May-time in front of the high altar of the Virgin, and in her honour … So she had known only by hearsay of ‘Our Lady’s Dance’, as it is called, and it certainly was a beautiful sight (41–2). Instead of paying homage to Mary, however, when the dancers finished they ‘doffed their great plumed hats to the Infanta, and she acknowledged their reverence with much courtesy’ (42). The Infanta, in other words, has taken the place of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin. Both the dead Queen, the symbolic Virgin Mary (also a literal Virgin as her real life counterpart Marie Louise D’Orleans never had her marriage to Charles II consummated since he was sexually impotent) and the future Queen, the Virgin Infanta, are adored by a male court that wants to manipulate them for politically expedient purposes. Hence the Infanta is enamoured of both Don Pedro and the Grand Inquisitor who came ‘out on the terrace, and paid her nice compliments’ (38). The historical context adds greatly to an understanding of this aspect of the tale. In reality, the impotent Charles had no children: his first wife Marie Louise d’Orleans died without ever giving birth. The immaculate condition of the corpse of the King’s dead wife confirms her virginal condition in life as well as in death. The historical facts suggest that we should read the Infanta in this story as the result of a virgin birth. This would make her a Jesa Christa, a female Christ (see Heine 137). The image of a female Messiah was not an unusual one in eighteenth and nineteenth century society and Alex Owen points to Ann Lee, Mary Evans, Elspeth Buchan, Sarah Flaxmer and Joanna Southcott, all leaders of a breakaway Shaker church who declared themselves in some way divine and such female divinity was also a theme in some Owenite groups in the 1830s (The Darkened Room 12–13).

‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 133 In a blasphemous inversion of the Trinity, Wilde’s story interprets the virgin birth of the Christ as the result of an impotent Father, which ends, not in the birth of the saviour of the world, but in the pawn of the world, a puppet in the hands of political and religious demagogues. The Spanish court in the story is a blasphemous reversal of the Holy Family. Like the marriage of Joseph and Mary, the union of the king and queen of Spain is accompanied by a massacre; however, in the latter case the ‘nearly three hundred heretics … delivered over to the secular arm to be burned’ died in order to celebrate the match rather than in an attempt to persecute the two parties (35). Instead of the last being first, in the court of the Infanta ‘those with the longest names [went] first’ (38). The result is an inversion of the kingdom of God as preached by Christ. The issue here is the centrality of Mary in the theology of the state, or more accurately, the creation of a type of female goddess to compensate for the inadequacy of the male deity and his human equivalents in Church and State. Whereas the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in Marian apparitions, these usually happened to children and the dispossessed in poor and depressed parts of Europe. Here however, Mary operates at the behest of the powerful and the wealthy. At the margins Mary was seen as a champion of the oppressed; in the centre she is used as a tool of oppression. Mariolatry, the worship of Mary (and her human equivalents, like the dead Queen and the Infanta) was one means whereby the christological orientation of the Marian dogmas became occluded and the sole focus remained on a wholly transcendent, and therefore politically ineffective, female figure. This is important because the nineteenth-century veneration of Mary coincided with an increased interest in goddess worship as a whole, and this contaminated the Church’s approach to Mary (for an introduction to this issue of the goddess see Raphael). While some heretical groups believed in a female Messiah, very many more began to invest spiritually and psychologically in versions of goddess worship. The worship of a goddess is strictly condemned in the Bible as an aspect of the debauched rituals of the Canaanites. In 1 Kings 14:23–24 we read that in the reign of Solomon’s son Rehoboam, the Judeans ‘built for themselves high places, and pillars, and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree’. Rehoboam is only one of many kings who is condemned for failing to crush the heretical worship of the goddess Ashera. Those like King Asa of Judah (1 Kings 15:11–13), his son Jehoshaphat, and the great reformer King Josiah (2 Kings 23:4ff) are praised for attempting to do away with the cult. The message of the prophet Jeremiah was in opposition to goddess worship. Most historians of Marianism accept that the focus on Mary in Catholic theology is, in part, powered by the same desires which supported goddess worship in the prehistoric past and to some Mary is simply a goddess in Christian drag. Protestant critics of Marianism often claim that in the hands of Catholics, Mary becomes another version of goddesses such as Epona, Freya, Herth, Mokosh and Brigit. They have a point. In Ireland, for example, the goddess Brigit functioned as a Virgin Mother, lawmaker and a Saint and the natives were apparently unwilling to give up their adoration of her easily. Slowly, Mary was substituted for Brigit and in the seventh century Pope Sergius ordered that the days of the Celtic calendar on which Brigit was worshipped were to be given over to the adoration of Mary (Condren 55).

134 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde The revival in goddess worship in the nineteenth century coincided with the rise in devotion to the Virgin Mary. It is no coincidence that the same century (circa 1850–1950) which witnessed a multitude of apparitions of Mary and the declaration of both the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, also saw the publication of Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family (1884), declaring a belief in a pre-patriarchal matriarchate, Robert Graves’ hyperbolic The White Goddess (1948) and such stories as H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), in which a woman instantiates the divine. Much of this goddess obsession is to be explained as motivated by a fear of the increasing political and social mobilisation of women and also the collapse of faith in traditional bastions of male power such as the Church. Nina Auerbach claims that the demonic woman so pervasive in Victorian iconography acts ‘in defiance of three cherished Victorian institutions: the family, the patriarchal state, and God the Father’, and helps to create a new religion (1). In ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ Wilde appears rightly suspicious of these moves. The rise of the Infanta, the worship of her mother the dead Queen, goddess worship and the celebration of the Jesa Christa, are all motivated purely by ideologically-driven men and lead to the erasure of the Christological dimension of Marian theology, a worship that brings one through the image of ‘God the Father’ through ‘God the Mother’ to the totalised person of Christ who is traditionally configured as both male and female. Even Mother Nature, another version of the goddess, is a debased entity in this story, as artificial a creation as the embalmed Queen. The garden, so transformative in other Wilde texts, continues the decay of the court so that it ‘symbolically (and would have been architecturally) a continuation of the palace’ (Shewan 56). After all, goddess worship would also lead to the exaltation of the feminine element in the natural world, with Mother Nature eventually demanding as much devotion as the traditional God the Father. With the feminine principle in the ascendant, robbed of its liberating powers through embalming and virginalising, Mother Nature is also purified and stripped of any real agency. Nature is simply a horrific continuation of the Infanta and nearly all of the creatures in the garden are as nasty and brutish as those in the court. The flowers hate the Dwarf and ‘were quite indignant when they saw him capering up and down the walks’ and denounce him as ‘too ugly to be allowed to play in any place where we are’ (47). The Spanish landscape lacks the Christ figure, the moment of reconciliation between the masculine and feminine element. After all, even if the official doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was used to prop up a corrupt male power, theologically speaking it was not so much a means of elevating the mother over the son, as an attempt to reveal the power of the sacrifice of Christ to transform the fallen nature of humanity, including the disfiguring gender roles handed out at the Fall. It is precisely this transformation, whereby humans are ‘neither male nor female but one in Christ’ which has been evacuated in the tale. The sheer malevolence of the Infanta has to be registered in order to understand the narrative. Her delight at the brutal ‘killing’ of the hobbyhorse in her honour (‘he plunged his wooden sword into the neck of the animal with such violence that the head came right off’, 40), is simply a foretaste to her amusement on finding the Dwarf in the throes of existential pain:

‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 135 At that moment the Infanta herself came in with her companions through the open window, and when they saw the ugly little dwarf lying on the ground and beating the floor with his clenched hands, in the most fantastic and exaggerated manner, they went off into shouts of happy laughter (62–3). She is not concerned about his death, only disappointed that he can provide no more amusement for her. Her cruelty infects all the women in the court and makes them into grotesque versions of female power: ‘Even the Duchess … a thin, hard-featured woman with a yellow ruff, did not look as bad-tempered as usual, and something like a chill smile flitted across her wrinkled face and twitched her thin bloodless lips’ (38–9). There is something of an occult malevolence to such images and this echoes another Victorian text wary of the demonic power of women. In George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872), the most sinister and frightening figure is not the king of the Goblins, despite his plans to kidnap and rape the Princess, but his wife whose final assault on the hero Curdie resembles Freud’s description of the vagina dentata: after she emerges from the maw of the earth, ‘Her face streaming with blood, and her eyes flashing green lightning through it, she came on with her mouth open and her teeth grinning like a tiger’s ...’ (216). Goddess worship in the nineteenth century also expressed a deep fear as well as an attraction for powerful women and, as Diana Basham has demonstrated, the goddess was often an occult rather than a comforting figure, residing in the far-reaches of the world, in frightening landscapes on the Continent, in Africa, or in South America, rather than at home in England (179). On the Catholic Continent, such as in Spain, where the Pope held sway, his mistress Mary could hold the reigns of power in a way that Queen Victoria never could, as the all-male parliament kept her in check. One of the most reviled and notorious figures in this goddess movement, and one who seemed to confirm the occult powers and origins of feminine power, was Madame Helena Petrova Blavatsky, a Ukranian Theosophist-spiritualist founder of the Theosophical Society in England. Her major work, The Secret Doctrine was published in 1888 contemporaneous with ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ and it is a baffling history of the spiritual evolution of humanity as well as a compendium of all kinds of Gnostic beliefs. As I have pointed out in the Introduction, Wilde was involved in these theosophical and Gnostic circles and it is very likely that he was well aware of the ideas being propagated by the likes of Blavatsky. Much of this book is taken up with a discussion of goddess figures and, especially with, the maternal power exercised by these figures. She focuses on exotic female deities like Egypt’s Isis and China’s Kwan-Yin and argues that the Virgin Mary is merely a weak version of the original Nature Goddess: The great (female) producer, genitrix of the Sun, who is the first born, and who is not begotten, but only brought forth, and hence is the fruit of an immaculate mother (399). Blavatsky believed that she was herself a contemporary incarnation of the feminine divine and offered herself as an alternative to the Virgin Mary, an occult competitor to a castrated male creation. Men may have flocked to such figures, but their worship of the divine feminine did not necessarily have positive implications for real women in political and social terms. As Elizabeth Butler Cullingford has cogently argued, the pre-Raphaelite depiction of women as Lilith and Pandora found a point of contact

136 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde in Blavatsky’s notion of the occult and dark feminine (34–6). She argues that when these images are encrypted into the writings of men they become a ruse to persuade women that it is better to be worshiped than enfranchised, an extrapolation of textual power to hide the absence of real power (34). The Occult Mother, Lilith, Pandora, and also the Infanta and her embalmed mother, may all be powerful images and figures but they are also sinister, and frightening, representatives of evil rather than promises of hope (for more on such images of feminine evil, see Dijkstra). In ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, Wilde is clearly critical of the contemporary investment in female Messiahs and goddesses and the narrative is profoundly worried about the manipulation of these images by either male or female figures. His focus on the Virgin in the coffin diagnoses the pathology of a highly gender- differentiated economy. Here it is the impotency of the male principle under the King which has led to the necessary elevation of such pure specimens of femininity as the virginal dead Queen and the evil Infanta. Similarly, it was the crisis of masculinity in Victorian England that led to the more fantastic emphases on pure femininity, such as the angel-in-the-house and the demon-in-the-heavens, to reconstitute masculine imperatives. The worship of the goddess has, for Wilde, clearly not led to women regaining political or theological potency, but actually confirmed their exclusion from real power. After all, it is the Grand Inquisitor and the King’s brother who really hold the reins of power in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, not the women they supposedly worship, whether it be the Virgin Mary or the Infanta. Similarly, it is Pius who is bolstered by the declaration of the Immaculate Conception, not Mary herself. Wilde demonstrates that such emphases on gender differentiation leads to social corruption, and allows for the rise of unscrupulous men, like Don John of Austria and Father Nithard; like Don Pedro and the Grand Inquisitor in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’; and like Pius IX in the Church, whose aim is devotion to the distorted Goddess and complete social and intellectual authority over the people. While the King (God the Father) is a mere compromised figurehead, the true Christ – in the figure of the Dwarf, appropriately denigrated in size – is destroyed because only he has the ability to transform through subversive laughter. And it is to the figure of the Dwarf that we now turn, as he is the true solution to the problems posed by the narrative. The presence of the Dwarf explains why Wilde was so attracted to Valesquez’s Las Meninas (1656). The painting is, after all, about the distortion of the gaze and the subversion of perspective. While the theoretically important figures in the painting are the King and Queen, the viewer’s perspective is (like the readers of ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’) drawn to the Infanta at the centre of the canvas. However, the dwarfs surrounding the Infanta are in fact far more interesting than she is and it was after them that the painting was named (Foucault, ‘Introduction’). It is interesting that Madame Blavatsky claimed that Christianity was a ‘dwarfed’ version of the original religion of the goddess (Basham, 201), as it is in a Dwarf that Wilde reconstitutes the true Christian reconciliation of male and female principles in Christ. If Blavatsky believed that redemption cannot be found in dwarfish religion, so in the nineteenth century dwarves were considered figures of damnation rather than salvation and were automatically linked with a host of other malicious horizontally challenged creatures, including demons and goblins. Dwarfs were extremely popular in Victorian England, not simply as carnival exhibits and

‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 137 stage attractions (General Tom Thumb being, perhaps, the most famous dwarf of the day), but as literary characters and writers as diverse as Charles Dickens (Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop [1840–1841]), Christina Rossetti (‘Goblin Market’ [1862]) and William Allingham (‘The Fairies’ [1883]), all depicted them as dangerous and evil, all body and no soul. As Carole G. Silver puts it, ‘dwarfs … inhabited a borderland between the natural and the supernatural, and had always been perceived as “freaks” or “others”’ (117), but after the discovery of Pygmy tribes in central Africa in the 1870s, dwarfs came to symbolise not merely malevolent otherness, but also evil foreignness. Dwarfs were considered to be representatives of the beginnings of the human race by some, remnants of an unevolved origin, or even an entirely separate species which formed the basis for races like the Eskimos, the Aztecs and, indeed, the Irish. In The Testimony of Tradition (1890), folklorist-cum-ethnographer David MacRitchie put forward what came to be called a ‘pygmy theory’ of racial origins. MacRitchie innovatively brought together archaeology, folklore, history and philology to posit that there was once a race of dwarflike non-Aryans in the British Isles, evidence of which could be found in Celtic myths which related stories of Picts and fairies and the Sidhe. This race had co-existed with the Saxons and lived in fairy mounds and underground forts such as those in the Boyne Valley in County Meath. Some thinkers extrapolated from MacRitchie’s argument and claimed that the Irish, among others, were remnants of these original races and that this was proof that that the Irish were less evolved than the Saxons (Silver 47–9, 138). Dwarfs were labelled ‘freaks of nature’, not simply because of their link with the malevolent supernatural, but also because of their association with racial difference; they were, perhaps, evolutionary drop-outs, atavistic survivals from a race thought to have died out because of natural selection and whose continued existence was a threat to the integrity of human being itself: This newly created paradigm of monstrosity suggested the monstrousness of alien and simian races, while dwarf ‘otherness’ was no longer seen primarily as individual abnormality or deformity but as a metonymy for the savage and animal nature of people who were not white (ibid 129). Silver points out that R.G. Haliburton argued in the early 1890s that the ‘negroid’ features of the Irish could be explained by positing that they were in fact descended from the pygmies of the Moroccan Akkas (138), a theory that was debated widely in Victorian society and one that Wilde could hardly have been ignorant of. His own father had been labelled a dwarf by some of the more vicious members of the Ascendancy in Dublin, a label that highlighted the racial as well as personal debauchery Sir William Wilde was thought to represent. In her pamphlet of 1863 designed to destroy his name Sir William’s patient Mary Travers called him ‘Dr. Quilp’. Given the personal and national connection with dwarfs, it is understandable that Wilde wanted to counter the prevalent association between dwarfs and evil. And the Dwarf is vital to contemplate in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, as he represents the divine in the story. It is crucial to note that he is compared to the Nightingale, a representative of Christ in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’: ‘Why, even the nightingale herself, who sang so sweetly in the orange groves at night that

138 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde sometimes the Moon leaned down to listen, was not much to look at’ (49). The Dwarf is also a type of Christ and appeals to many of the medieval images I have highlighted in previous sections of this book. In his study of the medieval grotesque, Deformed Discourse, David Williams demonstrates how, in medieval theology, the ‘deformed’ functioned as a vehicle for spiritual and philosophical inquiry. The bizarre was seen as a means to explore the mystery of the divine through a negative theology that avoided the kind of idolatry found in the representation of the Infanta and the Virgin Queen. The more deformed the sign, the less likely anyone was to confuse it with what it represented and it served as a shorthand reminder of the limits of positive theology in approaching the divine reality. When trying to comprehend the Godhead itself, only a wholly purified mind, freed from the mundane accidents of everyday reality and the commonplace anthropomorphic attempts to classify the Trinity, could even come close to an understanding: After this process of affirming and negating, the mind, encountering a reality beyond affirmation and negation, a reality which is-not, finally knows God as paradox: the One who is source of the many, beyond being yet cause of being, present everywhere in the world while totally transcendent. The most suitable representation of such a being is likewise that which is-not, achieved, according to Pseudo-Dionysius, by resorting to the most inordinate, absurd, and monstrous images (David Williams 4). The deformity of the Dwarf performs a critique of the mummification of the divine found in the worship of the God-Mother in the embalmed Virgin Queen and the heartless virgin princess. The narrative’s focus on the Dwarf links Catholic negative theology with Protestant iconoclasm and suggests some means of bridging the theological gap. Whereas the kind of iconoclasm found in the Protestant critique of Mariology often collapsed into a semiological pessimism (ibid, 26), a conviction that the divine could never be represented by the sign system, Catholic trust in the principle of analogy, whereby some comparisons between human and divine states are considered apt and useful, overcomes the cognitive gap (Tracy). This is concretely represented by the superfluity of the Dwarf’s presence, his oneness with nature yet his simultaneous transcendence of it. The Dwarf finally breaks down the binaries that constrict even the best critics on Wilde and feminism itself. In him Wilde can insist that ‘affirmation and negation are not opposites in the Dionysian world because that world is not conceived in binary terms. All contraries and the hierarchies built upon them are resolved …’ (David Williams, 33). The Dwarf’s play represents the carnivalesque erupting the certainties of a Catholic court that has lost its way; he is the only real member of a party that places more value in the artificial than anything still breathing (as represented by the Grand Inquisitor’s resentment of the capacity of ‘things made simply out of wood and coloured wax, and worked mechanically by wires … [to be] so unhappy and meet with such terrible misfortunes’, 40). Thus the story gives us a positive theology – the virgins – and a negative – the Dwarf – and offers a resolution in their collision, creating a relationship between the terms. This is similar to the process undergone in medieval theology when it used the grotesque as a means for approaching the divine. David Williams demonstrates how for many medieval theologians, but especially for Pseudo- Dionysius, ‘once the mind has travelled the apparently opposite roads of affirmation

‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 139 and negation, it perceives that the one is the other, and both can be left behind in favour of a “meta-understanding” that dissolves method, opposition, and discourse’ (34). In the grotesque medieval theologians saw a signifier of the man who had renounced his power (and implicitly his masculinity), to become a submissive servant for the salvation of the world: Christ was both saving male and nurturing female and the neutered monster was an apt representative of this totalising nature. The Dwarf appears to revive this transformative divinity in the story. In offering the Dwarf as the alternative to the omnipotent or impotent Father, and the occult Mother, Wilde is in fact transcending approaches that either subordinate or elevate the feminine principle: he is recognising the problems inherent in any analogical assumption of God as male or female. Of course, tragically, the union of genders in the Dwarf cannot survive in the poisonous atmosphere that is the Spanish court and he dies of a broken heart. The Catholic Church too is implicitly critiqued for its inability to break out of the masculine power-play it has bought in to and move towards becoming a more transformative institution in the modern world. If in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ Wilde highlights the problems the international Church is to face in the coming century of suffrage agitation and social upheaval, in ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ he turns to more local problems in the Irish Church.

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Chapter Eight ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’is generally considered to be Wilde’s most obscure fairy tale. Isobel Murray describes it as his ‘most ambitious and complex working out of the conflicts of spirit and flesh, beauty and goodness, earth and heaven’ (15), while Peter Raby agrees it ‘is in some ways the most substantial, complex and significant’ of the fairy tales, with clear affinities with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) (63). Many critics have argued that at least some of this complexity is due to the story’s engagement with discourses of sexual transgression. Ellis Hanson has traced the references to codes of the homosexual subculture in the narrative and claims, for example, that Satan looks like a typical Dandy. The story describes a man ‘dressed in a suit of black velvet, cut in the Spanish fashion. His face was strangely pale, but his lips were like a proud red flower. He seemed weary, and he was leaning back toying in a listless manner with the pommel of his dagger’ (83). According to Hanson, ‘the fine clothes, listless manner, delicate hands, pale face, and drooping eyelids are all part of an iconography of the homosexual decadent’ (248). This reading is supported by John Charles Duffy who also argues that the presence of Satan in the tale is a clear signifier of homosocial desire. He recognises that ‘associating homosexual desire with Satan and a witches’ Sabbath would seem to serve the ideological interests of the Victorian mainstream’, but claims that Wilde does not allow this to happen as he presents Satan in a sympathetic way, so that ‘Wilde humanises the diabolic … so as to mitigate the reader’s rejection of it’ (343). This I find rather tenuous because the language of sin is central to understanding the tale. Duffy also reads the relationship between the Fisherman and the Mermaid as homosexually significant, given the strangeness of the Mermaid and her clear lack of a vagina. The Priest, typical of Victorians, fulminates against the relationship between the two as outside the boundaries of normality, but ‘in the tale’s conclusion … this forbidden, unnatural love is approved by God’ (342). Gary Schmidgall agrees and argues that ‘it is not stretching credulity, I think, to imagine the story’s Sea-folk as representative of homosexuals’ (163), although he tends to reduce the tale to a mere banality: ‘What is the “gay moral” of the story? ... that one must sail under one’s true colours: to follow one’s true love’ (165). Even Norbert Kohl, usually a conservative reader, sees in the Mermaid a signal of forbidden desires, ‘the “deviance” of the homosexual’ (60). What these critics have certainly identified in the tale is the division between the forbidden and the acceptable, the dangerous and the safe, a difference signified by the existence of two worlds, the mainland where the Priest and the marketplace traders live, and the Sea, where the Mermaid and her family live, with the Fisherman who lives on the shore, caught between them. Rodney Shewan believes that this is a battle between ‘the hedonistic impulse, posited as innocent [represented by the Mermaid], and the established cultural beliefs and superstitions [represented by the Priest] which trespass