The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde

142 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde upon it’ (63). This, however, is an extraordinary reading of the tale. It is hard to see how the Priest’s prejudices against the Mermaid could be considered ‘superstitious’ when the belief in Mermaids themselves is an aspect of the ‘superstitious’ mind as defined by modernity. Looking at the story from the perspective of modernity, the Priest is actually an instrument of modernisation, as he attempts to lure the mind of the congregation away from their ‘primitive’ and atavistic belief in such entities as Mermaids. Indeed, the very term ‘superstition’ is one which is being examined rather than rejected here. Moreover, the love of the Fisherman for the Mermaid is certainly not ‘hedonistic’, since there seems to be very little chance (as has been rightly pointed out by John Charles Duffy), of genital contact between them. It is the heartless Soul who functions as the hedonist and his temptation of the Fisherman with talk of the dancing girl is an appeal to the egoist rather than the true lover. Philip Cohen is much more acute when he points out that in the story ‘Wilde exposes the shortcomings of a purely erotic attachment’ (101). He posits that the story is about the overcoming of psychic fragmentation and attempts to bring together Body and Soul, Priest and Mermaid, Shore and Sea. Christopher Nassaar agrees and claims that ‘by following the road of love’ the Fisherman ‘finally manages to put an end to fragmentation within a framework of total purity’ (Into the Demon Universe 19). In a later article Nassaar elaborates on his argument that ‘in Wilde’s tale all-encompassing love – Christian love – is the one true road’ to wholeness (‘Anderson’s “The Shadow”’ 223). This notion of social and psychic fragmentation, the division of body and soul, shore and sea, is surely at the centre of the story, as is the position of the psychic Other (which the critics have identified exclusively with homosexual desire) in the modern world. There was a place where these issues were firmly united in many analyses in the mid to late nineteenth century. That place was Ireland. Ireland was undergoing what many commentators considered was a complete social division powered by a discourse concerning superstition and modernity, a language which could explain much about the rather strange and haunting story we have to deal with here. In this chapter I will outline the divisions between modernity and tradition, rationality and superstition in Victorian Ireland and argue that the Mermaid and her Fisherman-lover represent Wilde’s answer to this division. Much of this conflict in Ireland was fought within the Catholic Church and this explains the centrality of the Church to ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’. Oscar Wilde’s obvious attraction to the Catholic Church in both its ecclesiastical and its lay/popular expressions did not prevent his recognition of its often oppressive and domineering force. For if the Catholic Church and its theologies in Ireland were most often the articulation of difference, the difference that divided the colonised from the colonising, at times it appeared as if it was on a colonising rather than a synthesising mission itself. This was best seen emerging after the Famine with the attempted centralisation of the religious discourses of society in the institutional expression of the Church. Folk-Catholicism had been the most important expression of religion in Ireland since the missions of Palladius and Patrick in the fifth century. It was a fluid and osmotic religion which combined the orthodox and the heterodox and allowed belief in apparently contradictory things, fairies as well as angels, holy wells and baptismal water, healers and priests, the ballad book and the Bible, and saw these elements as complementary rather than contradictory (Ó Giolláin, ‘The Fairy Belief’ 199, 121).

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 143 Folk-Catholicism was the dominant set of beliefs and practices which determined how Irish Catholics saw the world up to the mid-nineteenth century (ibid 113). Although bishops often complained about what they called the ‘superstition’ of ordinary Irish Catholics, most priests on the ground believed the same things as their parishioners and willingly participated in many of the folkloric rituals and practices condemned by their ecclesiastical superiors. S.J. Connolly points to, for example, the warning by Bishop Sweetman of Ferns in 1771, to the priests under his charge, that none of them should ‘act the fairy doctor in any shape … [or] bless water to sprinkle sick persons, cattle, fields with’ (quoted in Priests and People 123). While formerly the accommodation between folk practices and Catholic theology had been quite a successful one, during the nineteenth century such rapprochement found itself increasingly viewed as a form of heresy to be combated as seriously as the Protestant threat. Several Roman Catholic bishops and priests began to speed up the Tridentine evolution in a more thoroughgoing fashion than had previously been possible (see McGrath on ‘evolution’ in the Irish Church). In an extremely important article, first published in 1972, Emmet Larkin argued that in the period between 1850–1875, Catholicism in Ireland underwent what he called a ‘devotional revolution’. While pre-Famine Catholicism in Ireland was relatively untouched by the reforms of the Council of Trent, in the period immediately following the Famine and especially under the leadership of Cardinal Paul Cullen, the Irish Catholic Church became both modern and a modernising force in Irish life. In the first place this involved the radical transformation of the priesthood itself. Larkin argues that letters between the Irish bishops and the Vatican demonstrate very convincingly that the quality of priests in Ireland was a matter of serious concern and many bishops complained that their priests were liable to drunkenness, disobedience, failure to carry out their duties and even active immorality (Historical Dimensions 58–62), although Larkin cautions against taking this as a completely accurate indication of the true quality of Irish priests. In the second place the ‘revolution’ involved a radical transformation in the kind of Catholicism active in the country. Church-going was, apparently, not a very frequent activity by Irish Catholics in the period leading up to the ‘devotional revolution’; indeed, Larkin estimates that only 33 per cent of the Catholic population went to Mass at all. By the end of the revolution, this would increase to well over 90 per cent (68; these figures have been subject to some debate: see Miller, ‘Mass Attendance’). Catholicism was, until the Famine, folk-Catholicism. After the Famine it was Tridentine Catholicism, a Catholicism dominated by sodalities and fraternities, by weekly attendance at Mass and by an intense and a rigidly adhered to sexual ethic. Larkin goes through a number of the key factors involved in this transformation: the ratio of priests to people was dramatically reduced (Historical Dimensions 77); the rise of an abstinence culture (ibid 70); a mission drive spread devotion to the sacraments – especially the Eucharist (which demanded attendance at Mass) and Confession (which required a stricter moral control): The new devotions were mainly of Roman origin and included the rosary, forty hours, perpetual adoration, novenas, blessed altars, Via Crucis, benediction, vespers, devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Conception, jubilees, triduums, pilgrimages, shrines, processions, and retreats. These devotional exercises, moreover, were organised

144 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde in order to communalize and regularise practice under a spiritual director and included sodalities, confraternities such as the various purgatorian societies, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and Peter’s Pence, as well as temperance and altar societies (ibid 77–8). Miraculous medals, scapulars, holy water, new prayer books, beads – a whole Tridentine arsenal was employed to change the habits of the Catholic laity and priests, and to a large manner this arsenal succeeded in persuading an entire country to change its mind. Cardinal Cullen launched a veritable war on archbishops like John MacHale of Tuam who did not agree with his version of the Church and ensured that only his personal favourites would take over bishoprics when they became vacant. Of course, the Irish were peculiarly open to such new devotional practices in the period after the Famine. As Larkin observes, the shock they had received was enough to convince many of them that God had effectively turned against them and that the cause of this may have been the kind of Catholicism they had formerly adhered to (ibid 82), a case especially convincing considering the rhetorical skills of the new Maynooth-trained priests who were pouring out into the parishes. Moreover, as an entire symbolic language was being wiped out by the new educational experiment of the National system of schooling inaugurated in 1832, the loss of the Irish language, the attack on the oral culture and the massive death toll and emigration statistics of the Famine, this meant that many people needed an alternative symbology to compensate for what they had lost and Tridentine Catholicism came to fill this gap: ‘the devotional revolution … provided the Irish with a substitute symbolic language and offered them a new cultural heritage with which they could be identified and through which they could identify with one another’, so much so that Irish and Catholic became synonymous terms (ibid 83). Larkin’s analysis has, as he notes, become the ‘new orthodoxy’ in the historical analysis of post-Famine Irish Catholicism and later work has tended to modify (usually placing the change earlier or later than he does) rather than completely challenge his thesis (ibid 5). As per Larkin’s analysis, the cultures – folk-Catholic and orthodox Catholicism – moved from a position of dialogue to one where two monologues were ranged against each other. The links between elite and popular religion became broken rather than blurred. Many things assisted this threat to the survival of folk customs and narratives in Ireland, not least the spread of literacy and the production of the newspaper, both conspicuously related to and encouraged by Church institutions. As Angela Bourke insists: in the area of popular culture in nineteenth-century Ireland ... authoritarianism was expressed in a furious opposition on the part of the institutions of Church and state to the uncentralised and unstandardised forms of knowledge and creative endeavour which still endured in rural areas’ (‘Baby and the Bathwater’ 80). Traditional forms of knowledge and patterns of storytelling, healing, horticulture, were subjected to attack in the form of a Catholic clerical assumption of the iconoclasm of the Protestant reformers. Although the distinction between orthodox theory and popular praxis had long been maintained in more high-flown works of theology emanating from ecclesiastical centres, this divide was difficult, if not impossible to sustain on the ground and absorption, osmosis and literal cross-fertilisation had often

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 145 occurred. The Famine and the devastation it caused on the Irish geographical, social and mental map meant that this theoretical opposition could now be made real by a new breed of priests that were about in the country. Oscar Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde had, in his introduction to his brilliant Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), carefully charted the dangerous slippage between liberation and oppression during this new Tridentine mission. He warned against what he portentously called the ‘Protestantising’ of the Catholic clergy (17), by which he meant their devotion to wiping out the folk customs and superstitions that had so long defined the Irish peasantry (10–11). In his opinion, this new zeal was the equivalent to, not the opposite of, the kind of anti-superstition enthusiasm displayed by the Reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Sir William made explicit a link between emigration, the Famine and the erosion of local and regional tradition. The decimation of tradition was, he argued, due to population movement and death by starvation and disease, which effectively erased the class of cottiers and small farmer that had enabled the survival of these customs. He pointed out that the ‘old forms and customs’ were ‘becoming obliterated; the festivals are unobserved; and the rustic festivities neglected or forgotten’ (14). For Sir William this was not a cause of celebration at the final arrival of the Enlightenment among the peasantry, but rather the impetus for mourning a lost culture: In this state of things, with depopulation the most terrific which any country ever experienced, on the one hand, and the spread of education, and the introduction of railroads, colleges, industrial and other educational schools, on the other, – together with the rapid decay of our Irish vernacular, in which most of our legends, romantic tales, ballads, and bardic rituals, the vestiges of Pagan rites, and the relics of fairy charms were preserved – can superstition ... continue to exist ... (10–11). The culture clash could only end in one way – the marginalisation by the new narratives of the old, the elimination of certain modes of life altogether and the designation of any remaining remnants of that life as immoral, irrational, primitive and criminal. The elimination of the lowest classes in society by both death and emigration helped to concentrate economic and subsequently political power in the hands of the middle and large farmers, a newly-powerful Catholic middle class who took advantage of this power concentration by seeking to have it expanded, arguing for property ownership through the Land League and political independence through the Home Rule Movement. Importantly, Eugene Hynes has pointed to a powerful economic reason for the speed of the devotional revolution: the prospering of a particular class of farmer in the mid-nineteenth century. This class fought hard to consolidate its position in the face of the social and economic difficulties that arose in the late century, utilising every available social instrument to ensure that land capital and social position were maintained: one way to do this was by appropriating the extreme sexual morality of the Tridentine church which policed sexual activities and prevented such disastrous occurrences as illegitimate birth and uneconomic marriage. Emmet Larkin has persuasively argued that the large farmers, farmers who held over 30 acres (Historcial Dimensions 92), who embraced both the English language and the devotional revolution, were also the ones behind the organisation of the Land War, a ‘war’ to maintain and increase the grip on land-holding so important to this

146 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde class of farmers. Much of this success was motivated by a fear of renewed poverty, which stimulated their formation of secret societies, organisations for agrarian agitation and eventually fully-blown nationalist groups (ibid 96). Indeed, he argues, this class eventually went on to form the nation-forming class which campaigned for Home Rule, independence and then formed the first governing elite in the Free State (ibid 113–14). This class also supplied the personnel for the Church during this long period, so that the interests of one social class became both orthodox and hegemonic in Ireland, effectively marginalising all other voices, including the small groups of people who had managed to maintain to some degree the practices and devotions of the folk-Catholic synthesis of the pre-Famine period and who now found themselves marginalised and effectively voiceless in the new Ireland. This was, then, a shift in nationalist power, from ‘subaltern’ agrarianism to ‘statist’ elitism (Lloyd 24). Components of the folk-Catholic which were considered unacceptable to the new class – including any element of fairy belief – were marginalised. The folklorist Angela Bourke holds that fairy beliefs and other aspects of indigenous culture were excluded from the ‘acceptable discourse’ of Catholics educated in the new national school system and many aspects of folk belief came to be linked to outmoded systems of thought, ignorance, poverty and (the crucial term), ‘superstition’ (‘Baby and the Bathwater’ 84). This may have been because ‘fairy legends … [are] a marginal verbal art, subaltern discourse’ (‘Virtual Reality’ 7), and are thus considered dangerous by the newly educated Catholic elite. The dangerous elements within these previous nationalist formations – what could not be easily absorbed – came to be seen as quaint, exotic and, therefore, made safe, as ‘folklore’. The term ‘folklore’ pushes certain modes of existence into a mythopoetic space, a timeless realm where it can be sealed off and prevented from having any real effects on the present. The term ‘folklore’ designates these modes of living and thinking eccentric fetishes rather than means of cosmic interpretation. In labelling these modes aspects of folk-culture to be looked kindly on by a modernised state-nationalism, they became fixed structures of official state culture, not self-transforming methods of living beyond the remit of the state (Ó Giolláin, Locating passim). The transition from ‘superstitious’past to ‘progressive’present, from the primitive to the civilised, a transition considered moral as well as chronological, was achieved in Ireland on two levels: in the first place strong farmers simply displaced the cottiers and landless labourers; in the second place the priest became a Tridentine evangelist rather than a religious synthesiser. The theologically orthodox priest thus found a perfect ally in the socially-conservative farmer and the group that would run Ireland for the next century was formed (Inglis). Indeed, we now know that the priests of this new dispensation tended to emerge from the very same families of strong farmers who supplied the primary nation group. Sir William’s analysis of the devotional revolution’s impact on the morale of the post-Famine Ireland is devastating. He asks whether the average Irishman and woman has ‘been improved by such desecration of the landmarks of the past, objects which, independent of their natural beauty, are often the surest footprints of history? We fear not’ (11): We are now in the transition state, passing through the fiery ordeal from which it is hoped we are to arise purified from laziness and inactivity, an honest, truth-telling, hard-working,

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 147 industrious, murder-hating, business-minding, rent-paying, self-relying, well-clad, sober, cooking, healthy, thriving, peaceable, loyal, independent, Saxon-loving people; engaged all day long, and every day except Sundays … in sowing and mowing, tilling and reaping, raising flax, fattening bullocks, and salting pork, or fishing and mending our nets and lobster-pots; instead of being a poor, dependent, untruthful, idle, ignorant, dirty, slinging, sleeven, cringing, begging set … (24). The new state of Irish being, brought about by the Maynooth-trained priests and the landed Catholic farmers, was to abolish much of what Oscar Wilde found attractive about life. The man who loved the telling of lies, the creation of fictions, the work of the imagination and whose family had identified these as essential aspects of the Irish character found that these were the aspects under threat from elements within the church and state. Declan Kiberd notes that ‘the modern distrust of styles and disenchantment with language itself are both strong in Irish writing, if only because of the artists’ awareness that whenever they use English they are not writing in their own language’ (‘Resurgence of Lying’ 277). For this reason they resorted to a dependence on ‘lying’ and fable-telling. Wilde and his parents both invested in versions of reality that had little connection to realist novels and their scientific counterparts, with Wilde himself observing that the superstitions of the people of Mayo were the ‘colour element of thought and imagination’ (Letters 581). In other words, it was the devotional revolution which posed the greatest threat to the version of reality Wilde himself found most persuasive and it is no surprise that he was to turn his imaginative powers upon this process, not in a sociological survey like his father conducted, but in a more imaginative light in 1891, under the title, ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ and it is to an examination of this text that we now turn. The Catholic Priest in that text is surely a superb fictional realisation of the ‘modern’ clergy Wilde and his father had seen emerging in Ireland. When the Fisherman goes in search of a means of separating his soul from his body he asks the priest, who is suspiciously ‘reading out of the Holy Book’ (73) like some Higher Critical German theologian or an Irish Protestant Evangelical, for advice. In contrast to the priest in ‘The Star-Child,’ who is to be found out among his people, the priest in this story prefers textual analysis to pastoral action. He acts as a model for the uniform, linear historicism that became modish in the mid-nineteenth century among new recruits fresh out of Maynooth. Maynooth provided the church with a more disciplined, organised and co-ordinated body of priests than had existed before. Later we find the priest in this story praying the rosary (75), an instrument of the devotional revolution that Emmet Larkin has identified as basic to the reorganisation of Catholicism in Ireland in the century after the Famine. If folk-Catholicism concentrated on wakes, patterns, holy wells, pilgrimages, practises at least in part outside of the control of the ecclesiastical authorities, the devotional revolution refocused religious exercises back inside the ideological and institutional control of the local priest, including the regularisation of the rosary. Such devotional exercises ‘were organised in order to communalise and regularise practice under a spiritual director’. Although the rosary has a long history of devotional use in Ireland, it was only activated in a systematic manner in Ireland as part of the artillery of a cult of Marian operators dedicated to the spread of Tridentine orthodoxy and the desecration of folk belief. Out of its use

148 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde would spring sodalities and confraternities which would spread the new orthodoxy with efficiency and persuasion (ibid 77–8). True to form the Priest ‘beat[s] his breast’ (73) upon hearing the Fisherman’s request. This is a crude but effective representation of the rituals of sexual puritanism that migrated into Irish Catholicism after the seventeenth century. Although official teaching on sexuality has not changed very much in Christian history, many Irish priests received a Continental training during the penal era and much of this training was saturated in Jansenism, a form of Catholicism extremely Manichean in its attitude to the body. These same priests then returned to Ireland and after the penal laws were lifted, many of them became part of the teaching staff in Maynooth and imparted this doctrine to the next generation of priests (Connolly, Priests and People 181). ‘The love of the body is vile’, announces Wilde’s Priest, ‘and vile and evil are the pagan things God suffers to wander through His world’ (74). Far from the Priest being of a ‘medieval turn of mind’ as Rodney Shewan would have it (63), he is the epitome of Irish Catholic modernity. Although the Fisherman’s disavowal of the soul is ultimately condemned by the story as it is condemned by the Priest, his attitude to sexuality is the healthier of the two. The Priest’s fulminations against sexuality and the body are patently absurd in a text which celebrates the potential of physicality and the embodied soul, rather than crudely demarcates a boundary between the two. As both Philip Cohen and Richard Pine have pointed out, Wilde is also incorporating elements from a story contained in his mother’s collection of Ancient Legends. There, a Priest loses faith in the existence of his soul and God because he cannot touch them or see them, but is reconverted by a child: ‘I am told he denies God, and Heaven, and Hell, and even that man has a soul, because we can’t see it; but I would soon put him down’. The priest looked at him earnestly. ‘How?’ he inquired. ‘Why,’ said the child, ‘I would ask him if he believed he had life to show me his life’. ‘But he could not do that, my child,’ said the priest. ‘Life cannot be seen; we have it, but it is invisible’. ‘Then if we have life, though we cannot see it, we may also have a soul, though it is invisible’ (Ancient Legends 36). Although Wilde transfers the Priest’s arguments about the non-sensual nature of the soul to the Fisherman – ‘I cannot see it. I may not touch it’ (73) – the logic of the former story follows here: in as much as the Priest denies the Love between the Fisherman and the Mermaid, he is in effect denying the soul. The Priest is far too concerned with the purely materialistic in his puritanical obsession with bodily propriety. Instead of acting as the integrating principle in society, bringing together reason and passion, heart, soul and body, the Priest of the devotional revolution divides society and marginalises the most vulnerable. The key link the Priest makes is between the love of the body and the ‘pagan things’ left to wander the world, such as the mermaid and her people: to him they are one and the same. As produced by his discourse, they are more than simply soulless. The drama of redemption has not been enacted for their sake – ‘for them the Lord has not died’ (74). He speaks about the Mermaid and her family in much the same way as Tridentine priests spoke

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 149 of those who continued to practice folk-religion in Ireland. The crucial point here is that the Priest is offering a crude distortion of Christ’s mission on earth. The division operating in the story is not between the saved and the damned – a Calvinist obsession if there ever was one – but between the Priest (and his followers) and those pagan creatures that live beyond reach of his language. These Pagan things resist absorption by the arguments put forward by the Priest and his ilk, and so may be representative of the Famine dead, not only those who have literally gone to ground, but those who found that their folk-Catholic means of understanding the world was not acceptable anymore in the new dispensation. It is only right that these cottiers and labourers should be represented by the folkloric Mermaids, mummified in an exotic discourse. Nina Auerbach has noted that in the nineteenth-century mermaids were generally considered dangerous by male writers. She claims that the mermaid was seen as a kind of serpent and, thus, one of the causes of the Fall, a combination of Eve and the snake: no doubt she was originally intended to point up woman’s responsibility for the fall of the race, but over the years she moves beyond the garden, her hybrid form becoming the standard type of female demon, while her mixed allegiances to official Christianity, ancient legend, and modern monstrosity define woman’s anomalous position in the spiritual hierarchy (93). The Mermaid is a kind of divine yet demonic figure. Auerbach sees her as signalling the complex iconography of femininity in the nineteenth-century in general; both angel-in-the-house and devil-in-a-dress, a figure of divine response to the men who helped to construct the image of the woman as saintly but also, and for the same reason, a threat to the middle-class man who felt he was drawing further and further away from divinity as the century progressed (96). Of course, this made her a particularly useful image in figuring the colonised Other who occupied something of the same position in Victorian discourse as the middle-class woman. The mermaid is certainly a good representative of Irish Catholicism. Sir John Davies had characterised the recalcitrant Irish Catholic body as an ‘inconstant Sea-Nimph’, a metaphor he found apt for the fickleness of the Irish chieftains who illustrated the falsity of Ireland herself (11). The Irish chieftains criticised by Davies were deeply involved in religious syncretism, blurring the divisions between pagan and Christian practises and beliefs. To be Irish and Catholic meant that you believed in fairies and angels (or fairies as fallen angels), in mermaids and in priests (or in mermaids as priestly types), in folk rituals and Mass (or folk rituals as a type of the sacrament enacted within the Mass). This is an important point to remember when considering the Mermaid as her existence has led some critics to claim that Wilde substitutes ‘pagan for Christian assumptions’ in the story (Shewan 65). This simply was not the case for the folk-Catholic peasantry of the west of Ireland who saw no contradiction in believing in mermaids while also attending Mass. If the Priest and his followers are representative of that post-Emancipation class of clerics and strong farmers who appropriated ‘proto-state’ power, then the aggressively sensual Fauns and Mermaids are the cottier and landless classes left behind or even

150 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde eliminated by the social and natural forces (Famine) that ravaged the country. David Miller crucially points out that while there was indeed a growth in Mass attendance through the nineteenth century, this growth was regional and tended to be confined to the east of Ireland, while places with larger numbers of small farmers and labourers remained irregular Mass goers (‘Irish Catholicism’). The Priest and the Mermaid represent the divisions in an Ireland undergoing a revolution of sensibility and ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ is the site of a battle for the heart and soul of the middle- class Catholic who would have to eventually work out where his loyalties lie. As Sir William notes, the devotional revolution had not been so completely successful that it had managed to completely wipe out traditional customs in the entire country, but he largely exempts the West and the South of Ireland from the general trend (28). Oscar Wilde is probably influenced in his setting of his narrative on the remote boundaries of the land by Ernest Renan’s observation that modernisation had driven the ancient race of the Celts into the furthest corners of the kingdom. According to Renan, the Irish were ‘an ancient race living, until our days and under our eyes, its own life in some obscure islands and peninsulas in the West’ (2–3). In ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’, the ancients no longer live even in these remote enclaves. The transformation, from the peninsulas and the islands into the sea and perhaps into death itself, has taken place by the time Wilde comes to write his story. Moreover, this reading of the Mermaid and her people as survivors of the devotional revolution is supported by other signals within the text. The blatant sexualisation of the Mermaid and her clan here references the loose morality believed to be found in the cottier and landless classes before the Famine. S.J. Connolly quotes Alex De Tocqueville’s observations that: in Ireland where there are hardly any illegitimate children and where, therefore, morals are very chaste, women take less trouble to hide themselves than in any other country in the world, and men seem to have no repugnance to showing themselves almost naked. I have seen young girls bathing in the sea at a short distance from young men (Priests and People 187). Connolly himself agrees that in pre-Famine Ireland there was ‘relatively little emphasis on reticence in sexual matters’, and that much of the Gaelic literature of this period is Rabelaisian in its humour (ibid 185–6). Indeed, an examination of traditional practices like wake games reveals a culture in which sexuality was incorporated into even the most solemn of occasions. Lady Wilde’s section of ‘wake orgies’ in Ancient Legends attests to the ‘immorality’ of many of these games carried out in the homes of the dead, but notes that ‘full details of these strange wake orgies can seldom be obtained, for the people are afraid of the priesthood, who have vehemently denounced them’ (121). There is certainly no feeling of immorality in the Mermaid herself. Her nakedness at the start of the narrative is accepted as ‘no ... monster or any thing of horror’ (67), and she is at ease with her body as much as the young women of the sea glimpsed by De Tocqueville. The ‘love of the body’ is hardly overemphasised in this section of the text. What the Fisherman falls in love with after all is not the physical charms of the Mermaid which are hardly described, but rather the opportunity she represents

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 151 for another way of life, as expressed through her beautiful and exquisite tales of the underworld. Walter Ong has pointed out that in an oral culture the spoken word must be capable of much more things than in a literate culture, as it is only the beautiful and the elaborately phrased that can be remembered. An illiterate culture must organise its knowledge in a way that makes it easier to remember, so that: in a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought patterns must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances … so that they come to mind readily (34). Such imaginative illiteracy is well-represented here by the Mermaid’s stories. She is like the surviving fairy tale form itself, and both function to ‘make the contemporary world an impossible anachronism’ (Shewan 63). It takes narrative power to seduce the Fisherman from the love of money. His old life was dominated by the needs of the marketplace, just like the lives of the rising Catholic middle class in Ireland who emerged to power on the graves of the cottier dead. The narrative sees it as vital that the Fisherman be wooed away from his old life and into a new one. He is a liminal figure, one of the professions Sir William linked to the growing modernity of Ireland, but also an ancient and respected craft in traditional Ireland. He lives on the shore-line between the two ways of life. While he lives daily with the ancient world, he must travel into the marketplace of modernity to sell his wares. His economic life is based on the commercial transaction of goods (fish) for gold. As a Fisherman in a ‘Christian’ text we expect him to be to some degree a ‘fisher of men’, but instead he emphasises the needs of his profession. The Fisherman originally wants the Mermaid to help improve his business techniques and forces her into a form of slavery for this end. He asks her to sing ‘for the fish delight to listen to the song of the Sea-folk, and so shall my nets be full’ (69). His initial desire is to possess her as an aid to generating more business. She becomes a type of primary producer to his middleman. However, in a Wilde text, the expectations of the hero are rarely the realisation of the narrative. Just as the Christian prognosis (‘be ye therefore fishers of men’) intervened when the Fisherman was simply out looking for more fish and acting out the demands of a money economy (so that instead of actually catching fish he caught a man [or Mermaid]), so again the love that he develops for the Mermaid interrupts and finally destroys his capitalist schemes. The stories the Mermaid tells him of the Sea-folk enrapture him so much that he is persuaded to give up his commercial endeavours entirely, to leave aside his nets of property and desires to give himself up for her: ‘His spear lay by his side unused, and his baskets of plaited osier were empty’ (71–2). At this key moment the Fisherman becomes completely ‘bicultural’, caught in two worlds, the capitalist world that demands that he maintain his profit-making business and the weird otherworld of the Mermaid and her family. This is represented here by his sudden physical alteration: ‘the sea-mists crept around him, and the wandering moon stained his brown limbs with silver’ (72). The silver colour that engrafts itself to him is that of the Mermaid and the sea. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin has pointed out that in such transitional phases, it is possible for people to be ‘bi-cultural’ so that they can

152 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde participate in both traditional ways of thinking and behaving while also taking a full role in modernity. Ó Giolláin does ask, however, ‘whether this kind of biculturalism can be long lasting. The evidence of diaglossia suggests that the regional dialect will eventually disappear unless it carries some sort of institutionalised national value’ (‘The Fairy Belief’ 209). The key question here is which direction the Fisherman will choose to go: will he become fully absorbed into the underworld of the Mermaid or return to money-making. If there are two ‘worlds’ in this text – the ‘real’ world of the Fisherman, the Priest, the merchants; and the ‘sea-world’ of the Mermaid and her family – that is because Catholic Ireland in the nineteenth century was sharply divided in two also, a division constructed on social grounds but that found expression in the sexual Panopticon that was built to supervise all aspects of life in the country. Courting, sexual activity and marriage were all vital activities in maintaining a family’s class position and the theological language of salvation and damnation was very useful in re-enforcing social necessity. This kind of policing had the effect of making the individual self merely a function of the wider economy. Wilde demonstrates the logical conclusion to this functionalising of human sexuality in the formation of the capitalist individual subject dismembered from both family and tradition. The Fisherman here has not even a home or family to protect and pass down, only a business. Love and sex are major threats to this social construction, as are any folkloric practices which celebrate the body and as such they must be stamped out or disabled. So, when the Fisherman actually falls in love with the Mermaid, and perversely wishes to marry her (and his desire is honourable), he is jeopardising the entire capitalist network as he could set a dangerous example to others about the dictates of love taking precedence over the demands of business. He is already being talked about in the market-place and the merchants’ desire to buy his body may be perhaps a last-ditched attempt by the representatives of capitalism to reabsorb one of their own back into the chain of capital acquisition: ‘Of what use is a man’s soul to us? It is not worth a clipped piece of silver. Sell us thy body for a slave, and we will clothe thee in sea-purple’ (76). It is not something as commercially useless as his soul that they want – by which point Wilde effectively denounces the theology of the marketplace. To enter fully into its ideology you must be prepared to discard your soul and sell your body. The real threat to both the fetishised family and the fetishised market comes from the Mermaid and not from the Church which, in its modernised form, is actually an unconscious aid to market economies. While the Priest told him that his soul was ‘worth all the gold in the world’ (74), and the merchants insisted that ‘it was not worth a clipped piece of silver’ (76), they both unite in trying to separate the Fisherman from his lover and from the language of Love itself: they are in fact crucially connected rather than divided. The Church’s teaching on sexual morality did not suddenly convince an entire generation of people to control themselves in order to ensure eternal life but reinforced a position already widely held at that stage that sexuality was a threat to property transmission. What most social commentators on Ireland saw as an unusually stringent version of chastity was really a kind of social survival in the face of an unprecedented attack from Nature herself. Catholic theology was peculiarly useful in shoring up economic necessity and, had it not

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 153 been readily available, the Irish would have had to invent it there and then. Over the passage of time this theology became naturalised and, within the class of farmer- businessman-priest, the economic motive gradually receded into the background and the theology took centre stage. ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ ideologically forms an interesting document in the apparatus of the state, as it represents the transformations in rural life necessary for a modern state to be established: it is, after all, an example of the shift from the folk to the fairy tale. Jack Zipes points out that in England the Puritan middle classes initially looked upon fairy tales with a great deal of suspicion because of their apparent link with the subversive force of folk tales of bawdy, power-threatening rustics, but later realised that fairy tales were actually the channelling of this subversive feudal power into a conservative-bourgeois justification of the new ideologies of the middle-class: The gradual recognition and acceptance of the fairy tale by the middle classes, which had heretofore condemned the genre as frivolous and pernicious, did not mean that the Puritan outlook of the bourgeoisie had undergone a radical change, however. Indeed, to a certain extent, one can talk about a ‘cooption’ of ‘the enemies of the Enlightenment’ (‘Introduction’ to Victorian Fairy Tales xvi). The bourgeoisie co-opted forms and rituals that were dangerous to them in order to eliminate their subversive power. ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ demonstrates the transformations in rural life necessary for the modern state to be established: the marginalisation of both people (cottiers/Mermaids) and (folk)practices designated as primitive and irrational by those appropriating all state power to themselves. However, and ironically, the forces of the old are still required to legitimate the new. Modernity must both destroy the past and see it as exotic and attractive; it must both celebrate pre-modern elements and make them safe. To appropriate folk-elements into fairy tales is the ultimate act of anthropology: it suggests, indeed assumes, that the fairy tale and its writer occupies a superior position to the folk tale and those it represents. However, such appropriation is dangerous for those who invest in this cultural superiority. The recourse to folk tales demonstrates that elements of the folk tale are necessary to legitimate the fairy tale. Both folklore and fairy tales are Janus-faced. Their very existence confirms a shift in the socio-religious order, a transition into the Western modernity, represented in Ireland by the new state forms of nationalism. By maintaining a relationship with the past in this way, by using it as a legitimation of the present and the future, the modernisers imply that the past is merely a supplement to the present. But, as Jacques Derrida has so presciently pointed out, supplements have a habit of refusing to be contained by the discourses that would try to mute their transgressive power. By entering into a dialectic with the past, modernisers effectively keep in play the very traditions that offer the most successful critique of the present system. In an important argument, the critic David Lloyd objects to historical analysis of what have erroneously been termed ‘proto-nationalist’ organisations (such as rural secret societies) because such analysis invariably absorbs these movements: into the historically progressive trajectory of nationalism, so that what is significant in them is the set of traits which lend themselves to national ends. Other traits, which indeed may be

154 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde incompatible with nationalism, such as modes of organisation and communication, and certain kinds of spiritualism, are relegated to the residual space of historical contingency (24). He includes in this critique the narrative modes through which secret societies spoke of themselves. Lloyd suggests that ‘the “fragmentary and episodic” form of their narratives … [may perhaps be] the sign of a possibly intrinsic resistance to totalisation’ (26), and argues that ‘the recalcitrance of such movements to state formation is bound up with modes of social organisation, symbolic and rhetorical styles, or collective ends’ (26). So if it is argued, rightly, that the modern strain of nationalism often simply regurgitates the imperial model it seeks to overthrow (an argument that revisionists are fond of producing), its constant link with non- statist movements (or Nationalisms Against The State [ibid 19–36]) rather than the statist Revisionist attack on ‘atavistic’ elements within nationalism, may well offer the best means of internal deconstruction and rehabilitation. Similarly, it may be in Catholicism’s holistic link to the pagan traditions and customs of ancient Ireland that we can find the best method of dismantling its modern oppressive tendencies, rather than in some euphemistic post-Christian society. Perhaps it is in the organic association between the fairy and the folk tale with its tradition of anti-authoritarianism and its destabilisation of hierarchy, rather than in hyper-realism, that we can find the means of reconstructing an unstable but living narrative tradition. And perhaps it is in the sprawling underclass of pre-Famine Ireland, the cottiers and the landless labourers and their links to the farming class, who eventually became the Irish commodity capitalists, rather than in a classless society, that we can find the means to create a convincingly liberating discourse. This, I suggest, is what Wilde attempts in ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’. The text is indeed a fairy tale and must not be euphemistically abstracted from this genre into the more theoretically-radical form of the oral tale. However, its position as a fairy tale is constantly interrogated by its links with the oral traditions and folk tales it incorporates. For example, the text derives from the undine myth which is present all over Europe. As has been pointed out by Cohen, Wilde would have encountered this myth primarily through his mother’s translations of Scandinavian legends in her poems ‘A Warning’, ‘Undine’ and ‘The Fisherman’. What is interesting about Lady Wilde’s attempts to reconstitute certain folk texts is that her method is much less ambivalent than her son’s. In her poems, the association between the Nymph and the Human is doomed because of the inherent differences between them. In ‘Undine’ the mermaid’s lover has abandoned her for a human love and so incurs the wrath of her curse which kills him on his wedding day: My bridegroom, nought can save thee now, Since plighted troth is broken – The fatal crown awaits thy brow, The fatal spell is spoken. Thou’rt standing by another bride, Before the holy altar – A shadowy form at thy side Will make thy strong heart falter (181).

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 155 In ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ too, the Fisherman leaves his undine bride’s side for a human girl, but unlike the bridegroom in his mother’s translation, he returns to her and they are re-united in death. This is because while Speranza has isolated the two creatures as separate races, as indeed they were in mythical terms, her son is utilising the mermaid to illustrate a dramatic displacement that has occurred within one ‘species’, the Irish Catholic. In suggesting that the Fisherman and the Mermaid can ultimately remain together Wilde is drawing on his mother’s poem ‘The Fisherman’, where, on hearing of ‘the heaven beneath the sea’, the Fisherman leaps into the ocean ‘And never again was seen’ (186–7). The Fisherman and Mermaid become so united in body and mind that physical differences merely mark the traumatic effect the narrative of modernity has upon, ironically, the landlubber. Lady Wilde claims that ‘when united to such [i.e. an undine] he [a man] necessarily divides his soul with her, for all things in nature tend towards an equalisation, and as he gives half he loses half’ (183). In her son’s version, the Mermaid insists that, in fact, the Fisherman must give his entire soul away before he joins her. This is an important and suggestive demand. The kind of soul valued by the Priest and produced by a material society, is devoid of Love: it has no heart of its own. As such it is only by discarding it that the Fisherman can ever learn of its true value. Lady Wilde claimed that the fact that the undine is devoid of a soul is unimportant once she unites with a man: Under the influence of love, a woman’s intellect, genius, energy, all the powers of her mind seem capable of infinite expansion. And just in proportion as love has need of them, do the particular qualities start into life and unimagined vigour; be it fortitude, heroism, mental energy, even physical courage, love seems to have the power to create them all ... Love gives soul to a woman, but takes it from a man (182–3). This is not a mechanical act whereby he gives her his own soul, but a magical act whereby love actually generates soul in her. The soul of men in modernity is always already corrupted and actually needs to be discarded. Only by losing his soul does the Fisherman find it. Indeed, the Soul the Fisherman does possess at the start of the story – a surprisingly material object for such a spiritualised ideal – is corrupt, and is the product of modern rationalist dualistic theologies. It can be split from the Body physically as it has already been split from it metaphysically since modernity has split the integrated personality. Rodney Shewan believes that the story condemns ‘medieval’ ways of thinking about body and soul, but, in fact, it endorses them. In much medieval theology, body and soul were inseparable. Caroline Bynum points out that to Thomas Aquinas ‘the person is his or her body, not just a soul using a body’ and she claims that the medieval reverence for the Eucharist, in which the Incarnation is affirmed as Christ becomes one with the materials of bread and wine, is a response to dualisms which try to split body and soul; ‘reverence for the host was reverence for the divine in the material’ (Fragmentation 144). In ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’, the modern Soul is not the articulation of a totalised personality but merely the expression of its failure. Indeed, Gary Schmidgall is correct to identify it with the forces of the state, when he notes that the Soul ‘is an instrument of tyranny,

156 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde an incarcerating myth, and the prime weapon of Society and the Law is imposing their morality on the young Fisherman’ (164). It is for this reason that the Sea- folk have no soul as such: soul is a process built on ‘medieval’ Love rather than metaphysics; as it grows out of relationship it cannot be simply abstracted from the body like some metaphysical entity. The Sea-folk have no ‘Soul’ as such modern doctrines of division mean nothing to them. They are those for whom what we call medieval ‘folklore’ is still a way of life – the only way of life. They are those who are considered both sexually ambiguous and sexually dangerous by the modernisers (the priest fulminates ‘I have heard them at night time, and they have sought to lure me from my beads. They tap at the window and laugh. They whisper into my ears the tale of their perilous joys ... They tempt me with temptations ...’ 75). Of course, recognising this leads us only in one direction. If illegitimate births are the most commonly utilised marker of sexual irregularity, in pre-Famine Ireland they were most common in the south and southeast, as there was a very high proportion of landless labourers and cottiers in this region. Ireland became increasingly puritanical as those who represented this bastion of sexual freedom and folkloric life, the cottier class, were virtually wiped out by the Famine and with them much of the folklore necessary to understand them. Like the Sea-folk they were damned by the growing power of Maynooth-trained priests as a threat to the moral and social strength of the country and considered damned in the next world too. The Mermaid and her clan represent the ‘deep recalcitrance of Irish economic and cultural practices to “modern” institutions and subject formation’ (Lloyd 8). In the generative power of the Mermaid, Wilde suggests that the real soul of Ireland will only be found if a reformulation of relationship occurs: if bourgeois nationalism stops ransacking the rural past for its own legitimation and enter into a real dialectical relationship with it; if the commercial classes recognise the dangers of secularisation and consider instead the totalisation of the personality in the sexual relationship between the Fisherman and the Mermaid. The text is a good example of what David Lloyd has termed the ‘non-modern’, a set of discourses that are neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘backward’, but which remain in an interstitial space in constant dialogue with these kinds of terminologies, both interrogating them and also reformulating them. The ravages of modernity have had their most debilitating effects on the Soul. Although it may seem like an Anglo-Irish mentality is hardly evident in the narrative, the behaviour of the Soul in his three-year sojourn away from the body actually incorporates certain important elements of Anglo-Irish culture of this period. The Anglo-Irish were of course the ‘souls’ of the nation as much as any Gaelicised peasantry. Aristocrat and peasant morphed into one in the overactive minds of some Revival writers. What is striking about the Soul, and is reminiscent of the Anglo-Irish gentry, is that the language of the exotic clutters his speech. As he travels to foreign lands, to the East ‘the country of the Tartars’ (90), ‘to the country of those who curse the Moon’ (91), to ‘the Tower of Apes’ (92); to the South, ‘to the city of Ashter’ (100), he describes all he meets in exotic, strange terms. He remembers meeting Gryphons, ‘wild men’ (92), a Tower of the Apes, ‘the Magdae who are born old, and grow younger and younger every year, and die when they are little children’ (92–3). The language the Soul uses to describe these cultures – childlike, apes, wild, female worshipping – was common in the English press as shorthand references to

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ 157 the Irish, but they were also appropriated by Anglo-Irish writers who were forced to adopt what Jerusha McCormack has called the language of ‘Celtic orientalism’ (104), for their English readership. Joep Leerssen has persuasively traced the way Anglo-Irish writers in the century after the passing of the Act of Union 1801 began to shape their material to suit their audience in England. Indeed, ‘the destinatory vector towards an English audience is so strong that the author no longer identifies with the country which is represented (i.e., Ireland), but becomes an intermediary, an exteriorized, detached observer’ (34). In writing ‘Irish novels’, the Anglo-Irish ended up writing anthropological travel narratives, in which their own country became the foreign and strange space that needed to be explained and for this explanation many tended to rely on the stock phrases and quaint descriptions that cluttered the English popular periodicals. The Soul in ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ is merely continuing this kind of auto-exoticism which bedevilled Irish writing for much of the century. The text is unambiguous about what the relations between all these competing factions should be, however: all these elements belong back together. The body (the automaton of the bourgeois Catholic nationalist), the Mermaid (Old Ireland, with her superstitions, the cottiers and the legends) and the soul (Anglo-Ireland, with its tendency to see Catholic Ireland in exotic terms), must all be brought together by the broken heart, the suffering of Love. The bourgeois Catholic must first bitterly confess his betrayal of Old Ireland, now ironically dead: ‘to the dead thing he made confession. Into the shells of its ears he poured the harsh wine of his tale’ (124). Mere eroticism is useless as the body without the soul is not to be trusted. After all, separated from the soul the Fisherman is allowed to become fickle and is easily persuaded to divert his attention to another attractive body: as Philip Cohen puts it, ‘body, separated from soul, fares no better than soul divorced from body’ (101). Love itself is not enough to enact reconciliation. It is only through the Love wrought in brokenness that true totalisation can be achieved: and when he knew the end was at hand he kissed with mad lips the cold lips of the Mermaid, and the heart that was in him brake. And as through the fullness of his love his heart did brake, the Soul found an entrance and entered in, and was one with him even as before (126). In this story, as Nassaar has noted, ‘it is the fisherman’s heart, not his soul, that occupies the position of highest importance … for love is seen as the supreme value and the road to redemption’ (Into the Demon Universe 14). Of course, until the heart of the devotional revolution Priest breaks also, and he is forced to come to terms with the sensuous popular religion he has denigrated, the story cannot end. The miraculous intervention of the flowers acts as a gift of reconciliation between nature and society, between popular, sensuous, folk-Catholicism and its elite, puritanical, Tridentine counterpart. The gift of the flowers from beyond the grave de- personalises the Priest and his pathetic followers and transforms them into reconcilers. It is vital that this change occurs at the moment the Priest displays the Transubstantiated Eucharist to the people, the great free gift of the Body and Blood of Christ: And when he had robed himself with his robes, and entered in and bowed himself before the altar, he saw that the altar was covered with strange flowers that never had he seen before.

158 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Strange were they to look at, and of curious beauty, and their beauty troubled him, and their odour was sweet in his nostrils. And he felt glad, and understood not why he was glad. And after that he opened the tabernacle, and incensed the monstrance that was in it, and shown the fair wafer to the people, and hid it again behind the veil of veils, he began to speak to the people, desiring to speak to them of the wrath of God. But … there came another word into his lips, and he spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love (127–8). The Eucharist is the most perfect reconciliation between body and soul, the sensuous and the spiritual, and has been given as a gift to all the people. In eating the Eucharist Catholics become Christ since they are eating and absorbing their saviour who gave himself up for all. The drama of the crucifixion and the resurrection, the drama of redemption, was performed for the Mermaid as well as the Priest and this is what the blossoming of the flowers is to represent. Once a gift is given it bestows an obligation on all to continue its life-affirming spirit: it must be continued, so the Priest goes out to those parts of the world he had previously denounced as lost, incorporating them back into the Great Chain of Being. Once the Priest does this, the shore which has been ‘a border between enemy territories’ becomes ‘a meeting point, a bond’ (Cohen 98, 100). The text however, ends on a precariously pessimistic note. Although the great act of holy incorporation has now occurred, ‘never again in the corner of the Fuller’s field grew flowers of any kind, but the field remained barren even as before. Nor came the sea-folk into the bay as they had been wont to do, for they went to another part of the sea’ (129). The great act of charity may well have come too late and the story might act as Wilde’s great peon to a culture he believed had been killed off by the statist capitalist spirituality he dedicated his narrative to subverting. His conclusion mirrors that pronounced by his father in Irish Popular Superstitions when he wrote that ‘the whole pantheon of Irish demigods are retiring, one by one, from the habitations of man to the distant islands where the wild waves of the Atlantic raise their foaming crests’ (16). ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’is not optimistic about the potential for the devotional revolution Church to regain its transformative links with the folk-Catholic past and provide a spiritually liberating narrative for the Irish people to believe in, to speak once more about an incarnational God rather than one caught up in a scrupulous policing of the bedroom. However, Wilde is not content to let this pessimism be the last word on the Catholic Church in A House of Pomegranates and in ‘The Star-Child’ he turns once again to the power of Catholicism to speak to the poorest of the poor and offer them a story to transfigure their suffering and make it redemptive.

Chapter Nine ‘The Star-Child’ While many critics have approached ‘The Star-Child’, it has been read fairly consistently as a moral tale with very little sophistication. Although David Monaghan has little to say about the story beyond demonstrating its dependence on generic fairy tale conventions, he does accept that it has a Christian morality at its heart. Rodney Shewan appears to dislike the tale because of the lack of moral ambiguity, and dismisses it as the ‘least unified’ and ‘least original’ of the stories in A House of Pomegranates; he is unconvinced by the ‘overtly Biblical’ structure and its ‘simple and familiar redemptive pattern’ (67), though he is pleased to note that when the Star-Child dies ‘evil returns and there is no suggestion of a second coming followed by a second imperfect messianic example’ (68). The ending of the tale is an issue that I will return to later. There have been few deviations from this pattern of interpretation. In an interesting reading Rachel Cameron posits that: The key themes of this fairy tale are the repudiation of subjugated maternity (and of a maternal body) and its happier reconciliation. The Star-Child, by returning to a primeval relation with the maternal – as productive support of his mother’s desire to reclaim her lost son – attempts to re-configure the possible social alternatives, whereby Woman may emerge within culture with her particular qualities and roles as well as her differences not only intact, but valued (‘Maternity as Countermemory’ 8). She places the story in the context of the original passing on of fairy tales by aristocratic women, a tradition ‘repressed’ by the later privileging of male authorship and ownership. In terms of Wilde’s sexuality, Gary Schmidgall claims that the narrative can ‘easily be read as a cautionary one aimed at the male narcissus or, rather, the type of the young homosexual Adonis who is quite aware of his attraction and cynically exploits his charisma’ (162). This sexual context is picked up by John Charles Duffy who speculates (rather tenuously) about the ‘pederastic nature of the Star-Child’s love for the leper’ (340). I want to concentrate on what I see as a key contrast in the story between the country and the city and elaborate on the theological implications of such a contrast in this biblical parable. The dichotomy between the idyllic potentialities of the country and the inherent corruption of the city is a recurring refrain in Wilde’s fiction, as well as in western culture as a whole (see Raymond Williams). In ‘The Star-Child’ the demarcation of the city and the country demonstrates why social action became a necessity in the nineteenth century. While the city has traditionally been read as the source of moral pollution, the country has usually been seen as a place of moral safety and regeneration. As Roger Sales notes, the ‘pastoral is an escape to another country where things are done differently as innocence and simplicity order the sunny days’

160 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (English Literature 15). Wilde largely endorses this tradition here, although he refuses to sanitise the natural world. The opening section of the story demonstrates that although heavily imbricated in salvific language, the natural environment is simultaneously under the burden of the Fall. The ground the ‘poor Woodcutters’ traverse is cold and hard (133). It is covered in ice, in cold storage awaiting the great travail. It contains creatures as benevolent as the green linnets and as dangerous as the wolf. It suffers from ‘perfectly monstrous weather’ (133), is ‘terribly cold’ (134) and yet it is pregnant with meaning. Spring is already being realised within its corpse. It is both the dead ‘old Earth … [laid] out in her white shroud’ and the new earth preparing for nuptials in her ‘bridal dress’ (133–4). It is an ambivalent environment, privileged in its binary association with the metropolitan City of Man, but trapped interstitially, harkening back to a pre-lapsarian Eden and forward to a post-parousian promise of a new garden. The product of the city, the Star-Child, is transplanted to this garden (like the serpent into Eden) and begins to corrupt village existence which contains a respect for life at its centre. The religious attitude towards life that exists in the village is a key factor in its social organisation. A reverence for life as a gift from God unites the community, a community led by the church: Often did the old priest send for him, and seek to teach him the love of living things, saying to him: ‘The fly is thy brother. Do it no harm. The wild birds that roam through the forest have their freedom. Snare them not for thy pleasure. God made the blind-worm and the mole, and each has its place. Who art thou to bring pain into God’s world? Even the cattle of the field praise Him’ (141). The priest’s attitude refers back to St. Francis of Assisi (see Boff on the radical generosity of Francis’ love for animals and his view of them as brothers and sisters of humanity), Wilde’s favourite saint, and also to Genesis and the creation story. In Genesis 2:19 the birds and beasts are formed from the same earth as humans. While God gives man the responsibility to look after the earth, this role is not intended to be one of domination but stewardship and care. The Fall infects this harmony as in disobeying God, Adam and Eve destabilise the basis of that harmony. Just as Adam is distanced from God and thrown out of Eden, he is also alienated from the natural environment and told that the earth will no longer simply yield up its fruit to him but that it will have to be tilled and that to obtain food he will have to toil and sweat. In the village of ‘The Star-Child’ the inhabitants work out their lives in relation, rather than opposition to, the natural world. The animals talk to their human partners, even the fly is a ‘brother’, and a strict dualism between man and beast is prevented. While not perfect, this village where humans, animals and plants are all part of a grand cosmic emanation of divinity arches back to the medieval concept of the neo- Platonic Great Chain-of-Being (see Grant; Foucault; Datson and Park). In medieval Catholic theology the cosmos was a vast chain of relations stretching from God in the heavens all the way down to Lucifer in hell. Mankind and the earth were situated in the centre of this chain, pulled between things spiritual and material. Man’s route for salvation was upwards towards God and the heavens; the way down led to matter and hell. In this chain everything had its own place, everything had

‘The Star-Child’ 161 its home and everyone was related. This Chain-of-Being was analogous to a great semiological system where each and every item refers to something greater than itself. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (1266) was a powerful expression of this great cosmic synthesis in which everything was a theological sign: A perfection many things share must derive from an agent which is that perfection subsistent. Now God is subsistent existence and the only such being there is … So all the other things that share existence in diverse degrees, must derive it from the one first being that exists to the full … (83–4). The cosmos was what Sallie McFague has called ‘homely’ (50), where everyone and everything had a place and a purpose. The Star-Child perversely believes that he rests atop this hierarchical chain and his egotistical arrogance is reflected in his aesthetic difference. Although ‘brought up with the children of the Woodcutter, and [though he had] sat at the same board as them, and was their playmate’ (140), his physical appearance manifests his alternative origin in the City of Man. While ‘those who dwelt in the village … were swarthy and blackhaired, he was white and delicate’ (140). His initial arrogance too is the result of his elevated origin: ‘The children of the Woodcutter, and the other children of the village, he despised, saying that they were of mean parentage, while he was noble’ (140). His disdain for the marginalised and his cruelty towards animals is designated as ‘hard[ness] of heart’ (142), a corruption that he spreads through the village by his charismatic rule over the children. They too become ‘hard of heart, even as he was’ (142). On being told that he is the son of a migrating vagrant, one of the unrespectable products of the nineteenth century industrial city (Baines), the beauty of the Star- Child fades; his origin has changed and so must his appearance. Wandering the world to find his mother, he is drawn to the city only to find that exploitation and commodity fetishism lie at its ugly heart. The first city dwellers he encounters view him as a product rather than a person and he is transformed into a function of commerce when he is sold to Mammon. The magician who buys him, symbolising the sinister new forces of black magic within the capital (with which Wilde was familiar through his connections in occult circles), sends him back into the country to ransack it of its treasures. The city folk the Star-Child meets in his desperate journey are classic representations of what Louis Wirth has famously called the ‘urban personality’. The soldiers who guard the city protect it from the rural forces that congregate around it. Commerce is the centre of city life; its virtual ebbs and flows contrast with the natural meandering of the river that runs directly outside the wall. Commerce is controlled by the operations of objective political economy; the river obeys the rulings of a natural law. While the countryside accepted the Star-Child, the city attempts to block his entrance and the soldiers ‘dropped their halberts across’ the gate (149). These officers of the law, cogs in the wheel of military justice, are conceived of only functionally, as soldiers who protect city legitimacy. They have functional mindsets too. Although the Star- Child is on a humanitarian mission they can only conceive of one reason to enter the urban enclaves: ‘What is thy business in the city?’ (149). The archaic quality of their language and the Biblical inflection of their vocabulary match that of the rural

162 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde dwellers. This betrays their origin. Originally cities were constructed around temples and places of worship and were not, primarily, places where commerce was carried out. Indeed, the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan points out that: When urbanism is traced back to its primary centres and into the distant past, we find not the marketplace or the fortress but the idea of the supernatural creation of a world. The agent is a god, a priest-king or a hero; the locus of creation is the centre of the world (151). The city was originally constructed so as to mirror a culture’s conception of the cosmos itself. Robert R. Wilson has demonstrated that even in the Bible, where Cain constructed the first metropolis, Israel is always associated with cities, or with a journey to a city, rather than with the country. The Bible ends in the New Jerusalem as well as the new Eden. This religious focus was erased as the carrying-on of commerce increased in importance and a key signifier of this can be seen during the Great Fire of London 1666. When Sir Christopher Wren was drawing up plans for the new city that would have to be constructed out of the ashes of the old, he placed the Bank of England and the East India Company at its centre, rather than St. Paul’s Cathedral. This transformation is visible in the soldiers of ‘The Star-Child’. They may carry the insignia of the age of chivalry on their shields, with their halberts and yellow banners, ‘their armour inlaid with gilt flowers, and on whose helmet[s] crouched a lion that had wings’ (150), but they are really the true products of the age of industry. There is a rupture between their position as signs and the referent that they have become; the honour and duty of the medieval knight are completely absent. The Star-Child seeks his mother here, but the soldiers have business on their minds. They sell the Star-Child for a ‘bowl of sweet wine’ (150), determining his market value for the lowest denominator. They also thrust the leper out of the city because of his threat to the economic environment. Yet, the leper too is a product of the city. His one repeated request is for a ‘piece of money’ (154) with which he can enter again into the economics of supply and demand, a desire that he places above the safety of the Star-Child who will be beaten and killed if he returns to the magician without the demanded gold. According to Louis Wirth three main factors characterise city life everywhere: a large population, densely congregated, with a diverse range of social classes and roles (191–2). Wilde’s city, with its ‘large … concourse of the people’ (158), its mixture of lepers, beggars, kings, queens, soldiers, magicians, priests, business men, high officers and the mass of the populace, and its fortification, concur with Wirth’s understanding of a conurbation. Using these three factors Wirth attempted to explain the difference between rural and urban cultures and people, between nature-based and technology- based styles of living. He argued that the combination of these factors isolates the city and its inhabitants from nature and makes nature an increasingly bizarre object to urbanites, just as the wall around Wilde’s city demarcates the place where the country ends and the city begins. There is no room for urban-villagers here; one can only enter the city if one is prepared to conduct city ‘business’, which is the heart of urban existence. The experiential difference between urban and rural life intensified during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. In the medieval period city planners often modelled the city on the Chain-of-Being, the cosmological link between every

‘The Star-Child’ 163 aspect of the universe, attempting to recreate the universe in miniature; during, and after, the Scientific Revolution the city planning changed and began to reflect a new understanding of man’s cosmic position and purpose. The Scientific Revolution not only destroyed the Aristotelian and Ptomleic cosmology upon which most medieval versions of creation were based, but also further disrupted man’s relationship with Nature. If medieval man tended to see Nature as an innately holy signifier of God, then industrial man saw it as evacuated of intrinsic meaning and open to man’s use and exploitation. Many, such as Robert Boyle, saw nature as comparable to a mechanical clock governed by the same laws as other machines. Man, the creator of machines, could now see himself elevated from steward to master; Nature was just another instrument (see Westfall). Of course, the Scientific Revolution not only provided the philosophical foundation for this view, especially in the arguments of René Descartes, but it provided the technology which facilitated putting this philosophy into practise. In Francis Bacon’s greatest work, the Novum Organum (1620), nature was configured as humankind’s Other which should be used (and if necessary abused) to facilitate the progressive greatness of mankind (Moltmann). The movement towards the increasing objectification of nature is reflected in ‘The Star-Child’, in the construction of the walled city which has finally locked Nature out. However, this city also ransacks the countryside. Oswald Spengler famously warned of the tendency of the city to rob the countryside of its treasures (185–6), a reading visioned by Wilde as the stealing of jewels ultimately destined for the marketplace of debasement. If the city and the country are two opposing poles of inhabited environment in the ideological content of the mind, these opposites are clearly delineated in the story. Wilde is unwilling to play down the geographical and phenomenological divisions in the way people organise their settlements. Mythologised, they are also essentialised. The ‘urban personality’is a reaction to the realities of city life. Urbanites are assaulted by both physical and intellectual stimuli every single day and this overload causes a strange homogenisation. It is remarkable, argues Wirth, that despite the fact that far more people live in cities and towns than in the countryside, and engage in a much more varied range of activities, all these people tend to behave in remarkably similar ways (191). Urbanites tend to reduce people to the jobs they perform, jobs which are already fragmented and discontinuous, and see man as a worker rather than a person. This allows the urbanite to be more dismissive of others than his rural counterpart. So, while the Woodcutter and his family respond to the begging woman as a person and answer to her needs, engaging with her soul rather than her social position, the soldiers of the city simply deny access to the leper and the Star-Child and are, moreover, certain that the Star-Child’s mother is not in the city: if she is a beggar then there is no possibility of her being admitted. City dwellers regard each other in utilitarian terms rather than as distinct individuals. When the soldiers ask the Star-Child what his ‘business’ is with the city, this could stand as a refrain for the ‘urban personality’ as described to us by Wirth. Without function, narrowly defined, the Star-Child is rendered anonymous. Wilde also offers a diagnosis of the problems with the city. The presence of the magician and the plurality of priests racing from the city’s castle suggest that it has something to do with religion. The relationship between secularisation and urban life in the nineteenth century has

164 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde been central to debate since Horace Mann’s census of 1851 revealed that the majority of urbanites did not go to church on Sunday. While Mann interpreted his findings as indicative of a falling-away from church attendance, critics have pointed out that we simply have no statistics from previous periods to compare his census with and that what information we can gather indicates a maintenance of church-going levels rather than any decline. However, while Mann was wrong about a decline in church- attendance, he was correct in detecting a change in attitudes towards religion from a previous period. Wilde does not mention the attendance at church in his narrative as the distinctive difference between the country and the city. In the village where the Star-Child grows up, the figure of the priest is vital, but not as the Sunday preacher. He meets the Star-Child ‘often’ and tries to teach him the truth of religion, but not through a pulpit sermon. The priest encounters his flock in life rather than in church. The distinctive difference between the geographies is one of religious attitude rather than religious observance. The ‘love of living things’, the praise of God, the recognition of the gift of God in life are all central to life in the village, but completely absent in the city. God is placed at the centre rather than the periphery in the village. This version of village religion is supported by the historian James Obelkevich who notes that even in the nineteenth century ‘villagers envisioned a Nature that was still alive, that had not been neutralised or de-sacralised by the Reformation or by science. It was still saturated with the traditional meanings and powers’ (307). Village religion also still contained elements of the medieval picture: Though popular religion lacked a church and had no congregation, it rested upon a moral consensus and a moral community … Not only was this a moral community, but also an economic one that embraced all who depended upon each other and upon the fortunes of agriculture. This it included animals as well as men; superstition reflected in a superficially quaint or bizarre manner their profound mutual dependence (310). Obelkevich’s description of village life in nineteenth-century Lancashire matches the village found in ‘The Star-Child’ almost exactly. The issue is not who goes to church (neither country nor city dweller does), but rather who places the commands of God first. In the village the irreligious cruelty of the Star-Child is the exception. In the city the cruelty of the soldiers is typical. There are priests in the city as well as soldiers, though they are not moral exemplars and certainly do not routinely meet their flocks, preferring instead to remain deep within the castle, complicit with temporal authorities. God is not at the centre here. Commerce and commodification is. With the introduction of the magician and the plurality of priests racing from the castle, Wilde may be suggesting that the problem with religion in the city is not that it does not exist, but that it has become just another commodity like everything else. The historian Hugh McLeod has persuasively argued in a number of books that the Victorian city was, in fact, a place of many and growing religious traditions; however, this actually demonstrates the general point about religious decline, as it confirms that the urbanist is a ‘natural’ relativist. The city dweller requires the multiple choice of religious diversity as he is simply unable to accept the truth claims of any one of them (Simmel 409–24). Within the working-class ‘the meaning of life was to be found in the everyday round; to look outside was futile and irrelevant – as well as being anti-social because it caused embarrassment to neighbours’

‘The Star-Child’ 165 (McLeod, Class and Religion 50). Confronted with a plurality of religious options as well as daily life, urbanites could not choose between them and simply relativised all truth claims. City life is existentially dangerous for modern man. The sociologist Georg Simmel has convincingly argued that individual identity is precarious in the metropolis, while relatively secure in the countryside. This is because urbanites find themselves under assault from a huge variety of stimuli and have to develop strategies to protect themselves against what some environmental psychologists call ‘overload’ since this causes psychic breakdown. One such coping strategy is an existential tunnel vision which allows the city dweller to deal with the huge numbers of people in the city in a functional rather than a personal capacity. Since cities contain such large numbers of people they have to be anonymous places or its inhabitants could simply not manage. Simmel believes that this is why the traditional institutions of the city are economic and bureaucratic, concerned only with the material expression of life. The attitude of the urbanite towards other people is based on assessing function through a formal code of behaviour rather than spontaneously and familiarly. This has very serious consequences for religion. Quite simply, the sheer amount of religious choice provided by a typical city, when combined with the overall increase in stimulation, can cause a reduced capacity in the individual’s ability to process religious theology and a kind of multiple-choice paralysis occurs. Since the city dweller tends to make choices (including religious choices) based on convenience, if a religion is to attract adherence it is forced to dilute its theology, adopt a superficial façade to accommodate those who can no longer process complex forms of reflection and view congregants as consumers rather than believers. The kind of religion offered to the urbanite is thus superficial and tends to be self-constructed (Simmel; Newbigin; for the ‘overload theory’ of city life, see Broadbent). This is the type of city life we see analysed in ‘The Star-Child’. Its spiritual emptiness comes not from the lack of priests but from their very plurality. One religion is as good as another, the evil magician is as acceptable within the city walls as the court priests but the poor, the oppressed, the leper, the orphan, are denied entry. It is religious pluralism which forces the city to become a secular space. Wilde depicts the crisis caused by this process: it leads to the disintegration of the only saving religion, village Christianity, while allowing a destructive form of belief, in the guise of the magician, into the City. The crisis the Victorian city faces in ‘The Star-Child’ is soteriological; from a Christian perspective, if Christ alone is Lord and Saviour, a pluralist approach to religious truth will in fact be a salvific problem, as worshipping the wrong god will lead to damnation. Since the Star-Child is a metaphorical Christ he must either defeat the magician or be himself defeated. Indeed, this is literalised in the narrative in the warning the magician gives his slave: ‘If today thou bringest me the piece of red gold I will set thee free, but if thou bringest it not I will surely slay thee’ (157). The struggle between the evil magician and the true redeemer is a struggle between a version of society in which many religions compete for the consumer’s attention and a version where everyone recognises the real saviour. Wilde’s stories always prise away sovereignty from the individual and atomised subject (like the Town Councillors, the Student, the Miller, The Rocket, the Infanta, the Priest) in favour of the direct sovereignty of the suffering Christ

166 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde as embodied in the Happy Prince, the Nightingale, the young King, the Dwarf, the Mermaid and here, the Star-Child. Wilde indicates that a real choice will have to be made. It is either the way of the magician or the way of Christ. The claims of the magician and the village priest are irreconcilable. This is because the central fact of Christianity is incompatible with other religious perspectives. Christianity places a crucified man at its centre and judges everything else against Him. As Saint Paul famously wrote, the centrality of the crucifixion is the most bothersome aspect of the Christian message: it is ‘unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness’ (1 Corinthians 1:23). It forces a choice to be made between the crucifier (the magician-priest) and the crucified Star-Child. There is no grey space here between the two especially since the magician will destroy the Christ child as he cannot tolerate a real competitor in the religious marketplace. However, the Star-Child’s true identity relativises everything else as he is an articulation of the Absolute (see Newbigin for a good description of the difficulties of the crucifixion for other religious claims and the problem of religious pluralism in general, especially 145–6). The City has apparently made the wrong choice in allowing the magician within its walls and in blocking the path of the Christ-child, but, given what I have said about the religious difficulties of the city itself, this is not surprising. The city dweller has chosen the powerful over the weak, the crucifier over the crucified. Wilde, on the other hand, places the crucified man at the centre of true emancipation and does not fetishise notions such as justice and liberty. After all, the soldiers at the gate of the city represent a form of justice; the magician represents a form of liberation, the democracy of religious choice. It is such claims to ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ that are relativised in the crucified Christ. The tyranny of choice has enabled the suffering of the Star-Child to be prolonged and exposes the fallenness of this secular world. In a culture where religion is simply another item for consumption (and this is what religion became in the city of the 1880s and 1890s) the seriousness of its claims about salvation and redemption is eroded. Bryan Wilson has written that the modern world produces ‘a supermarket of faiths; received, jazzed-up, home-spun, restored, imported, and exotic. But all of them co-exist only because the wider society is more secular, because they are relatively unimportant consumer items’ (80). Wilde’s story resists the repression of multiple choice by placing the crucified Christ at the centre. The Star-Child is the central factor in defining reality here and thus rejects relativism and posits a form of religious exclusivity. Wilde’s mythical city in ‘The Star Child’ and the Victorian city in general was a secular space (despite the growth of religious choice). Classically, the secularisation thesis as formed by Max Weber could see no way back from a secular world to a more religious one. Weber believed that the West was undergoing an irreversible process, linked to urbanisation, which was producing a ‘disenchanted’ view of the world. However, Wilde’s City is not without hope. To the bleak picture put forward by the secularisation theory, Wilde adds a significant ‘but … ’: he accepts the reality of the secularisation process, but the City of God is not wiped out of existence. If Babylon was a living reality, so too was a potential New Jerusalem. Augustine had famously argued that the building of the City of God took place simultaneously with the building of the city of man, so that urban space was radically ambiguous.

‘The Star-Child’ 167 It is characterised by dangerous relativism, the consumerisation of religion, the de- centring of God, the elevation of business, the commodification of man, but it is also the location for potential renewal, the construction site for the Holy City with its inhabitants of saints. This duality is central to the story here because, although the city is the environmental equivalent of the evil that men do, it is also where the Star- Child eventually rules. Its citizens welcome his entry into his gates like the crowds who welcomed Jesus on his way into Jerusalem: Thou art our Lord for whom we have been waiting, and the son of our King … It was prophesised of old that on this day should come he who was to rule over us. Therefore, let our Lord take this crown and sceptre, and be in his justice and mercy our King over us (158–9). If Wilde echoes the pessimism of the church leaders of his time, he is also hinting at the prospect of a greater future for the city. After all, while Horace Mann’s 1851 census bewailed the irreligion of the cities, he was also insistent that many of the people who lived there were what he called ‘unconscious secularists’, whose religious apathy could be overcome. As McLeod puts it, their religious disinclination was ‘strong enough to hinder their spontaneous seeking of the passive object of their dis-esteem – [but] too feeble to present effectual resistance to the inroads of aggressive Christianity invading their own doors’ (1984, 57). The inhabitants of the city in ‘The Star-Child’ have been waiting all their lives to be shaken out of their apathy, waiting for their saviour to come. When he does appear they all rush out to greet him and elevate him to the throne. Wilde’s supplement to the secularisation thesis is similar to that put forward by the sociologists Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge. They accept Weber’s theory of secularisation but claim that it is not a teleological phenomenon. Indeed, secularisation may be limited in both spatial and temporal terms, limited to specific parts of the West and also limited in historical longevity. Moreover, it can be reversed since it causes two characteristic religious responses: revival and renewal. This hope was first expressed by Augustine in his The City of God (early fifth century). Augustine believed that history was a linear sequence, beginning with Creation from nothing, finding its centre with the birth, death and resurrection of Christ and, inexorably, leading to the second coming when the Kingdom of God would become manifest. Augustine did not see Paradise as a garden: it was the City of God, a New Jerusalem. To Augustine the reaction of the religious man to the sinful tendencies of the city should not be to abandon it, but to have a paradoxical relationship with it. The religious man should remain as a resident of the city of man and try to improve it, yet he must simultaneously keep in mind that he is its most pertinent opponent because it is inherently secular. He must be, in Rowan Greer’s phrase, an ‘alien citizen’. Wilde’s story is charged with a contemplation of history in terms of Augustine’s meta-narrative of Providence. The narrative moves from the fallen Eden of the rustic idyll to the central drama of the Redemption. The advent of the Star-Child is the Christ- event, the hinge of Augustine’s view of history. His coming was ‘prophesised of old’ (159). His mysterious birth, with its portentous star, is followed by his public ministry of ‘the space of three years’ (149); his merciless crucifixion through the soldiers and the magician (the false priest), ends in a symbolic death and final resurrection:

168 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde ‘And the beggar-woman put her hand upon his head, and said to him, “Rise”, and the leper put his hand on his head, and said to him, “Rise”, also’ (160). It is important to notice that Wilde incorporates a radical Catholic theology of the co-redemption of Mary here: the Star-Child’s mother is a central element in his life mission and his ultimate rising to glory. At this Resurrection moment, the City is temporarily transformed into a holy site. The spontaneous religious renewal posited by some sociologists is equivalent to the apocalyptic reawakening of this City when the Star-Child enters it for the third time, when the ‘whole concourse of the people’, including the priests and the soldiers (the religious and secular authorities) rush to greet him and worship him. The outpouring of religious sentiment is cataclysmic, revelatory. That Wilde’s vision of the renewed city is related to classical Catholic theology is not surprising. Indeed, many commentators pointed to the Catholic communities as the only areas where the church still remained a vital source of authority in working- class districts. K.S. Inglis writes that ‘the only body of Christians who could claim a steady increase of working-class adherents were the Catholics’ (16). The success of the Catholic Church in this area was due partly to the personal charisma and devotion of its priests. Hugh McLeod insists that the Catholic Church ‘was unique among the larger religious bodies by the fact that so many of the most devout were drawn from the working-class and even from the poor’ (Class and Religion 35). Also important was the effect of Irish Catholic immigration into these districts. These Irish Catholics wished to retain a strong communal aspect to their lives and found this in the Catholic Church in which their religious and national identities could merge. Charles Booth described the Catholic poor as ‘a class apart, being as a rule devout and willing to contribute something from their earnings towards the support of their schools and the maintenance of their religion’ (401), and some religious observers placed their hopes for an urban religious renewal firmly in the growth of the Catholics. Religious change transforms the city in ‘The Star-Child’. This city is both real (the city of man, Babylon, London) and unreal (the City of God in construction, the potential New Jerusalem). It builds a shrine out of the materials of the world, while it unmakes the oppressive structures that have taken up home there. The sinful city becomes a holy site; through it Wilde refracts his religious understanding of urbanism as translated by Augustine. The city is divided: the City of Man knows that it is not but should be the City of God. Its desire for God causes a radical spilt between actuality and potentiality which can only be overcome through the grace of God in the Redemption of man. The streets, which appeared so alien to the Star-Child when arriving at the city, have the promise and eventually do become the streets of God’s grace. The soldiers, who once mocked him, now bow to him, recognising him as their Lord. The citizens welcome his entry into his gates like the crowds who welcomed Jesus on his way into Jerusalem: Thou art our Lord for whom we have been waiting, and the son of our King … It was prophesised of old that on this day should come he who was to rule over us. Therefore, let our Lord take this crown and sceptre, and be in his justice and mercy our King over us (158–9). Wilde’s solution to the central problem of the City is liturgical. At a literal level, the suffering of the Star-Child looks like the pain of one individual in the hands of the

‘The Star-Child’ 169 instruments of state power. However, the Star-Child is not simply another individual, he is a representation of Christ. The state (embodied in the soldiers and the magician) assume that in performing its liturgy of legitimate violence on him it is guaranteeing its own position. Assault on the body of the ‘dangerous’ rebel is a typical function of state violence since coercion and hegemony go closely together. Indeed, a state can only guarantee the acquiescence of its citizens if it singles out some of them for violent example. This guarantees the loyalty of the populace. The power of the state depends on both identifying and then suppressing its Other, the revolutionary. The monopolisation of violence by the state is a central feature of modern statehood, as described by Max Weber, and is completely different to the notion of power in a medieval society. There power was dispersed through various social groups the most significant of which was the church, with overlapping and sometimes conflicting claims. The modern state centralises all power in itself (this paragraph is heavily dependent on the work of Cavanaugh, especially 2–71). In his movement from the village to the city the Star-Child has effectively experienced this transition, one commented upon by one of Wilde’s favourite political theorists Peter Kropotkin, who believed that the transition from a peasant society was a problematic one: ‘Kropotkin … combined respect for a peasant mode of life with an awareness of the liberating and cultural role of the medieval cities’ (Carter, 70). As an anarchist, Wilde was aware of the nostalgia for a simpler society that characterised such political movements. Richard D. Sonn points out that: Anarchism, with its insurrectionism combined with a longing for a paradisiacal golden age, has frequently been compared to the chiliastic social-religious movements of the Middle-Ages, and there is considerable justification for believing that the anarchist’s social idealism found a religious outlet of the millennial and prophetic variety (268). The sheer power and force of the modern state in its right to inflict violence upon those with whom it disagreed is a shocking one. The state is allowed to work its ‘perverse liturgy’ (Cavanaugh 12), because its only real rival for authority is the church, and that has been radically domesticated in a modern society. The city soldiers take for granted that, since they represent the state, they effectively own the Star-Child and can do with him what they will. Indeed, they seem to believe that there are no rival claims to their power over the individual and dismiss the Star-Child’s assertion of a primary bond with his mother out of hand. This state- ownership of the individual is demonstrated by the soldiers’ ability to sell the Star- Child at their own price: ‘The foul thing [is] a slave’ of the dictates of state power (150). In order to both assert and maintain its social and political primacy it is vital for the state to subordinate all other social ties to its own claim on individual loyalty and so tends to undermine the primacy of the family: ‘Of a truth, thy mother will not be merry when she sees thee, for thou art more ill-favoured than the toad of the marsh’ (150). This state has no real rivals to contradict its arbitrary decisions about rights, and this means that the individual has no alternative means of validating his or her rights except through the state. The religious establishment could potentially offer sanctuary, but in ‘The Star-Child’ it is holed up in the palace at the discretion of the state authorities. Religion is offered a space within the modern state but this

170 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde space is evacuated of all political power or influence and psychologised as a matter of individual choice. However, due to the fact that the Star-Child is a Christ figure the state is about to find its legitimacy undermined. The sufferings of the Star-Child are vicarious ones for the sinful structures of the world. As the state performs its perverted liturgy of power upon his iconic body, he is already unconsciously perfecting an alternative liturgy to help rid the world of such oppressive power: ‘[he] taught love and loving- kindness and charity, and to the poor he gave bread, and to the naked he gave raiment, and there was peace and plenty in the land’ (161). He does not transcend the world but transforms it. He lives on the ‘outskirts’ perfecting a counter-politics of the periphery in opposition to centralised power (Cavanaugh 205). His message is good news to the poor and the naked. A ‘church’ is recreated, put together again out of the shards of the broken flesh of Christ. When the city dwellers rush to meet this new and glorified man, they perform a collective act of worship of something other than the state. In their spontaneous congregation they institute the recognition of the Messiah: ‘Thou art our lord for whom we have been waiting, and the son of our King’ (158). Whereas in the liturgy of the state the Star-Child is cut off from a community of faith and subjected to violence as an individual, in the liturgy of the Eucharist that he enacts, the community is lifted from the present world and given a foretaste of heaven (Cavanaugh 225). In attempting to destroy the Star-Child, the state unwittingly causes the direct intervention of God into secular politics and the Star-Child is elevated to kingly status. In his reign heaven and earth are reconciled, though only temporarily. ‘The Star-Child’ is concerned with liberation from sin and also from political and social oppression. Divine righteousness is revealed in the struggle of the child to free himself from original sin in a drama that visions a broken, battered and abandoned Christ- figure ascend the throne. The story articulates a theology that no longer defends the status quo, that sees the Church as more than simply the Tory party at prayer and re-routes politics entirely away from an obsession with ‘business’ towards the moral centre of the crucified Christ. The crucifixion is the centre of Wilde’s theology of liberation. Only by being broken do his figures become salvific. The Star-Child is useless before being put through pain. It is this emphasis on the salvific suffering of the Christ which marks Christianity off from other religions: the sign of disgrace is a sign of victory. The disgraceful spiritual death suffered by the Star-Child is necessary for his emergence as newly born, carrying justice and peace before him, redemption and salvation. This theology of liberation is a theology of the Cross: humiliation must come before resurrection. Wilde’s version of Jesus is scandalous when juxtaposed to the syrup of the best-selling ‘Lives of Jesus’ genre which presented a bowdlerised and sanitised version of the Gospels in which the pain and suffering of Christ was, in effect, written out and Jesus was transformed into a meek and mild Victorian liberal (Pals). To Wilde, however, the savagery of the Cross cannot be suppressed. The Easter of the risen Star-Child does not cancel the crucifixion he had to suffer in order to reach the point of coronation, but actually confirms it, not by endorsing the crimes of the crucifiers such as the magician and the soldiers (the magician is banished, the soldiers are converted), but by transforming the wickedness, indeed

‘The Star-Child’ 171 transfiguring it, demonstrating its meaning in the cosmic scheme (the Star-Child becomes compassionate and the bringer of justice and peace). It may have looked initially as if the Star-Child was suffering arbitrarily, but the denouement of the story reveals the salvific meaning behind his pain. In other words, the Easter of the Star-Child’s reign can only be reached if Good Friday is first endured. Due to his crucifixion, the Star-Child will rule with justice and love: ‘Much justice and mercy did he show to all ... [and] taught love and loving-kindness and charity, and to the poor he gave bread, and to the naked he gave raiment, and there was peace and plenty in the land’ (161). He helps in particular the abandoned, the irreligious, the poverty stricken. The end of the story is, in fact, completely consonant with this. After all, after the Christ-event the oppressive powers of the world re-gained control and what is waited for is the apocalypse. It initially seems shocking that, after all his struggles, the Star- Child should rule only for a short time and that the reforms he enacted withered away: ‘ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly’ (161). However, Wilde directly took the end of his story from the conclusion to George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie (1882), which also concerns the defeat by children of cruel city dwellers and perverse priests. After their defeat of the powers of darkness, Curdie and the Princess reign wisely and well for many years: As long as they lived Gwyntystorm was a better city and good people grew in it. But they had no children and when they died the people chose a king. And the new king went mining and mining in the rock under the city and grew more and more eager after the gold and paid less and less heed to his people. Rapidly they sank towards their old wickedness (219). The novel ends with the city collapsing after the king has mined so much underneath it that the earth cannot support its foundations. The city of man crumbles. Wilde resists destroying his mythical city, but the redemption of society must await the next coming of the Christ-child. Turning to a conclusion to this study, the didactic nature of the tales told by Wilde should by now be clear. They operate within a matrix of instruction and guidance. However, not all instruction is as blatant as Wyatt’s hymns. After all, the Catholic Church teaches primarily through symbols and concepts, through tapping in to what David Tracy called the ‘analogical imagination’, where instruction operates as a painstaking gift of the Holy Spirit. Wilde didn’t write down to children – he challenged them. As queer theorists are looking for the signs of Wilde’s sexuality in quasi-heterosexual texts like The Importance of Being Earnest, we have to realise that another culture saturated in the concept of the secret symbol in the nineteenth century was Catholicism. It had centuries of practice in hiding from the moral and intellectual policemen of conventional English society, and of emerging only through the aesthetic, remaining the ultimate counter-cultural body for rebellious artists to rest in and seek intellectual refuge. So many writers and intellectuals returned to it again and again after finding themselves dissatisfied with the craving for objective fact in the Protestant tradition. In other words, sexual and religious secrets reinforced each other, and readings of Wilde’s fairy tales need not pose an unambiguous choice

172 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde between the sexually transgressive and the religiously conservative. Catholicism was both, in nineteenth century England as was folk-Catholicism in nineteenth century Ireland, figuring spiritual and sexual heresy to the dominant modes of thought in both countries. Moreover, we need not worry that Wilde’s arcane symbolism and covert gestures towards both of spheres of secrecy alienated his audience or made the tales extraordinarily difficult to decipher: these stories have, after all, become part of the discourse of childhood.

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Index Aesop 82 The Secret Doctrine 135 Allingham Booth, Charles 34 ‘The Fairies’ 137 Life and Labour 23–4, 168 Anderson, Hans Christian 13, 14, 29 Bourke, Angela 16–17, 144, 146 Boyle, Robert 163 Eventyr, fortale for born 4 Bradshaw, Brendan 119 ‘The Ugly Duckling’ 125 Bramley, Reverend H.R. 126–7 Anselm 53 Briggs, Asa 22 Anthony, Susan B. 128 Bristow, Joseph 114–15 Aquinas, Thomas 155 Brooke, Charlotte Summa Theologiae 161 Arnold, Matthew 6, 45 Reliques of Irish poetry 5 ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ 86 Brown, Julia Prewitt 2 Athenaeum 14 Buckan, Elspeth 132 Auerbach, Nina 134, 149 Bull, Philip 65, 67 Augustine 25, 94, 166–7 Bunting, Edward City of God 93, 167 Confessions 93 General Collection 5 Burke, T.H. 89 Babbitt, Natalie 10 Butler, H.M. 118 Bacon, Francis Butt, Isaac 93 Novum Organum 163 Land Tenure in Ireland 72 Bainbridge, William Sims 167 Bynum, Caroline Walker 48, 51, 53, 155 Balfour, Edith 32 Ballantyne, R.M. Cameron, Rachel 108, 159 Campbell, George The Coral Island 114–15 Barlow, William, Bishop of Rochester 100 The Irish Land 68 Bartlett, Neil 107 Campbell, Lady Colin 51 Basham, Diana 135 Catherine of Siena 48 Bashford, Bruce 2 Catholicism 5, 33, 36–7, 38–9, 42, 43–4, Baum, L. Frank 15 Beerbohm, Max 10 47, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 74, 78, 81, Beirne, Margaret 55 110, 112, 113, 121, 122, 123, Beirne, Mary 55 125–6, 138–9, 160–61, 171–2 Bernard of Clairvaux 53 Anglo-Catholicism 36, 93, 107–8, 112, Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 48 113, 119, 126–7, 135 as childish 31–2 The Ecstasy 48 in England 24, 28, 31–2, 34–5, 98–104, Best, Geoffrey 114 107–8, 110, 111–14, 119, 126–31, Bettelheim, Bruno 16 168, 172 folk 5–6, 12, 15, 16, 17, 33, 58, 74–7, The Uses of Enchantment 4 78, 103, 104, 126, 142–58, 172 Bew, Paul 72 Cavendish, Lord Frederick 89 Bickersteths 31 Cawches, Elizabeth 101 Blavatsky, Madame Helena 135–6 Chalmers, Reverend W. 51

190 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Charles I 101–2 Donnelly, J.S. 71 Charles II 102 Dowling, Linda 2, 93 Dublin Review 38 of Spain 130–32, Dublin University Magazine 57, 93 Chaucer, Geoffrey Duffy, Charles Gavin 87 Duffy, John Charles 17, 21, 41, 48, 61, 93, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ 82 Chrysostom, John 53 107, 125, 141, 142, 159 Clarendon Commission 112 Dusinberre, Juliet 13 Clarke, Elizabeth 52 Coakley, Davis 28 Eagleton, Terry 86–7 Cohen, Philip 22, 25, 41, 81, 82, 86, 97, Echeverria, Loreto 129 Echeverria, Nicholas Perry 129 108, 148, 154, 157 Edgeworth, Maria Colley, Linda 101, 103–4, 112–13 Combe, Dr. Andrew 110–11 Ennui 65–6 Connolly S.J. 144, 150 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 65, 66, 67–8 Coupe, Laurence 12–13 Edwards, Owen Dudley 63, 81, 83, 93, Cressy, David 98, 103 Croker, Thomas Crofton 5–6 97–8, 119 Eliade, Mircea 16, 42, 125–6 Fairy Legends and Traditions 5 Eliot, George Researches in the South 5 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Lord 117 Middlemarch 110 Cullen, Cardinal Paul 143, 144 Elizabeth I 101, 102 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler 135–6 Ellmann, Richard 21, 42, 125–6 Curtis L.P. 82 Engelhardt, Carol Marie 53 Engels, Friedrich 14 D’Orleans, Marie Louise 130, 132 Daly, Mary 58, 128 The Origin of the Family 134 Danson, Lawrence 2 Eucharist 36–7, 54, 100, 143, 155, 157–8, 170 Dante Alighieri 42 Evangelical Magazine 32 Darwin, Charles 28, 110 Evans, E. Estyn 76–7 Evans, Mary 132 The Origin of Species 82 Davies, Sir John 149 Fawkes, Guido 98–9 Davis, Thomas 87 Ferguson, Samuel 57 Davitt, Michael 56, 81 Fielden, Kenneth 27 Finbery, Leslie 54 The Fall of Feudalism 89 Flaxmer, Sarah 132 De La Fontaine, Jean 82 Foster, Roy 12 De Tocqueville, Alex 150 Foxe, John Defenders 69 Derrida, Jacques 153 Book of Martyrs 101 Descartes, René 82, 163 Francis of Assisi 160 DeVere, Aubrey Fraser, Antonia 99, 100, 101–2 Fraser, James ‘The Little Black Rose’ 57 Devotional revolution 5–6, 142–58 The Golden Bough 103 Dickens, Charles Freemasons 11 The Old Curiosity Shop 137 Gagnier, Regenia 9 Dijkstra, Bram 132 Gertrude the Great 53 Dillon, John 70 Gidé, André 7 Disraeli, Benjamin 29, 114, 117 Gladstone, William 9–10, 69, 72, 73, 118 Dollimore, Jonathan 2 Don John of Austria 130–31, 136 Vatican Decrees 113

Index 191 Graham, Sir Peter 91 Jowett, Benjamin 93 Graves, Robert Joyce, James The White Goddess 134 Dubliners 16 Gray, Peter 84 Julian of Norwich 53 Greer, Rowan 167 Gregory of Palmas 53 Kennedy, Paul 116–17, 118 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 7 Kensit, John 112 Kersley, G.H. 10 ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ 69 Kiberd, Declan 9, 16, 32, 147 Kinder-und Hausmarchën 4 Kimberly, John Wodehouse, First earl of 118 ‘The Skillful Huntsman’ 69 Kinealy, Christine 84–5, 92 Griswold, Jerome 25, 35–6, 37 Kingsley, Charles 111, 113 Guy, Josephine M. Knowles, James 20 Oscar Wilde’s Profession 43 Knox, John 23 Kohl, Norbert 108, 141 Hadewijch of Brabant 48 Kotzin, Michael 61 Haggard, H. Rider Kropotkin, Peter 169 She 134 Labouchere, Henry 70 Haliburton, R.G. 137 Lacan, Jacques 116 Hammington, Maurice 130 Land League 56–7, 68, 69, 71, 81, 145 Hanson, Ellis 17, 107–8, 141 Larkin, Emmett 143–4, 145–6, 147 Harcourt, Frieda 117 Lecky, W.E.H. Hardiman, James 57 Hardy, Thomas History of Rationalism 28 Leaders of Public Opinion 64 The Return of the Native 102–3 Lee, Ann 132 Harper’s Weekly 82 Leerssen, Joep 69, 157 Harrington, Timothy 70 Lees, Lynn Hollen 31 Hilliard, David 113 Leo XIII 56, 74 Holland, Vyvyan 10, 24, 61, 102 Leopold I 130 Home Rule 69–70, 109, 117–18, 145, 146 Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin 9 Hope, Howell Hodgkins 62 Leto, Pomponio Hopkins, Gerard Manley 45 The Vatican Council 126 Hoppen, Theodor 68 Lewis, C.S. 10 Hutchinson, Thomas 43 Liddon, Henry 126 Hyam, Ronald 126 Lloyd, David 153–4, 156 Hyde, Douglas 109 Lloyd, Otho 102 Hyde, H. Montgomery 102 London City Mission Magazine 31 Hynes, Eugene 145 Louis XIV 130 Lucas, John 114 Ineffablis Deus 128 Lukardis of Oberweimar 51 Inglis, K.S. 168 Lurie, Alison 13 Irenaeus 54 Luther, Martin 51 Irish Church Missions 31 Lyell, Charles 28 Irish Minstrelsy 57 Lyons, F.S.L. 56 Isabella of Spain 101 McCormack, Jerusha 7, 12, 13–14, 61, 110, 157 James I 98, 99–100, 101 MacDonald, George 10, 15 James II 102 Jardine, David The Princess and Curdie 171 Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot 103