The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde

42 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Ignoring the central problem of the tale is not really a solution to the unease left in the reader. Interpreting the meaning of the Nightingale’s dramatic self-sacrifice is clearly central to understanding the story. Rodney Shewan points out that she should be read within a Romantic discourse as the story posits an ‘opposition of romantic commitment through passionate action to the relative safety of philosophic contemplation’ (43), although the ending appears unable to decide which of the two modes of being is the more attractive. In a closely-argued study Guy Willoughby has taken up this issue and put forward the most persuasive interpretation of the tale. He points out that, far from being stripped of Christian imagery as many other critics have claimed, the self-immolation of the Nightingale on the rose-tree’s thorn should clearly be read as a version of the crucifixion of Christ and he argues that Wilde is directly engaging in a larger project here. Willoughby sees Wilde’s use of the figure of Christ in this story as indicative of a larger trope in his work in which religious language and imagery are translated into aesthetics. The Christ figure (the Nightingale), in Willoughby’s reading, does not perfect his/her love through an atoning sacrifice bringing universal salvation, but through the creation of a perfect work of art by self-sacrifice for artistic integrity and authenticity: ‘Wilde’s story of the Nightingale is an allegory for the all-consuming love and commitment required of Christ’s most notable imitator, the artist’ (‘The Marvellous Rose’ 110). This interpretation co-incides with that of Wilde’s best biographer, Richard Ellmann, who traces Wilde’s early shift from a theological interest in Catholic doctrine to his later secularisation of these doctrines in a vision of ‘the dead world coming to life through art rather than through religion’ (63–4). In other words, Wilde starts off with Christian imagery but ends firmly in the artistic rather than the religious world. This analysis places Wilde’s text next to Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863), which renders Christ a beautiful, fascinating, powerful and attractive, but ultimately secular figure. In Willoughby’s reading, Wilde’s Christian imagery is merely a typology for the world of art and religious meanings are transformed into secular and artistic ones. In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, the Romantic artist – the Nightingale – gives her life for her creation but her magnum opus is rejected by a philistine world. Willoughby traces this reduction throughout the story, up-rooting the Christian references and dissolving them into artistic metaphors. The rose evokes Dante’s paradise, the place of moral transformation, and is ‘a potent image for the transformation of experience of which art … is capable’ (‘The Marvellous Rose’ 110); the imagery of the crucifixion suggested in the death of the Nightingale is ‘a resonant symbol for the Christlike totality of sacrifice which art requires of its practitioners’ (ibid 111). Wilde calls Christ to mind continuously just to replace him with the artist; religious symbolism is used as an instrument to dwell at length on the abandonment of self that the artist must undergo. Crucially this solves the problem left by the Nightingale’s apparently pointless sacrifice. It reflects ‘Wilde’s profound pessimism about the real capacity of an audience to “learn” in a didactic sense, from art’ (ibid 114). This public ignorance does not affect the validity of the bird’s sacrifice because she has, after all, produced a ‘beautiful creation which embodies the perfection’ of artistic self-sacrifice (ibid 115). Wilde’s story is pessimistic about the ability of the world to ever understand the work of the supreme artist, but nevertheless the artist must be willing to sacrifice all – even the validation of the world – if he is to be true to his art.

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 43 The ‘moral’ of the story is one that, at least according to Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, runs completely counter to Wilde’s own artistic practices. In their study of Oscar Wilde’s Profession they argue that Wilde was in fact far from disdaining the aesthetic and intellectual interests of his audience and, to a degree, tailored his entire writing career to exploit public opinion and capitalise on its fashions and prejudices. Indeed, they consider ideological readings of Wilde as wide of the mark as they fail to take full account of his commercial rather than his ethical or political interests. The Nightingale would, then, be the artistic opposite to Wilde, and this clear division could perhaps explain the pessimistic outcome to the tale. Her mistake was that she failed to understand her audience and stayed true to abstract ideals of love rather than the more practical schemes of money-making that Wilde himself was dedicated to. However, such a reading of the tale as warning against ideals in artistic creation simply fails to account for the power accorded to the Nightingale’s song in the story, and it is, after all, the Student and the Professor’s daughter who are the ‘villains’ of the piece. Wilde was clear that the story was a more complex one than it appeared on the surface. After its publication, his acquaintance Thomas Hutchinson wrote to him claiming that the Student of ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’was a worthy representative of great love. Wilde wrote back, gently refuting and correcting this reading: I am afraid that I don’t think as much of the young Student as you do. He seems to me a rather shallow young man, and almost as bad as the girl he thinks he loves. The nightingale is the true lover, if there is one. She, at least, is Romance, and the Student and the young girl are, like most of us, unworthy of Romance … I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the tale, for in writing it I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets, and many answers (Letters 354). This letter makes it clear that, in terms of artistic intentionality, Wilde was far from cynical concerning the motivation of the Nightingale and that the issue for any interpretation of the story is an understanding of how precisely the Nightingale functions. The ‘secrets’ the story holds can only be revealed through placing the tale in the many traditions whose imagery it invokes. This chapter argues that placing the story within the tradition of Nightingale literature highlights Christian imagery in the tale that problematises any attempt to merely dissolve such imagery into a purely Romantic and therefore secular discourse. In particular, Wilde invokes a long tradition which linked the Nightingale to the iconography of the Virgin Mary, a crucial figure in Roman Catholic theology and in nineteenth-century debates about the position of women in religious language more generally. The Blessed Virgin Mary posed a series of problems for an increasingly materialistic Victorian society which so intensively separated body and soul, women and men, the medieval and the modern. In Catholic theology Mary was the virginal and immaculate bearer of the incarnate Christ who would later be assumed body and soul into heaven. Moreover, in popular Catholicism she was also the co-redemptrix, a purely human woman who was centrally involved in the economy of salvation. Marianism is a fully embodied theology, a theology of the maternal and the feminine, and posed a serious problem for the patriarchal disciplines of Protestant theology and

44 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde politics. It was Marian theology which many English Protestants found so offensive in Roman Catholicism, an offensiveness further highlighted by the surge in Marian apparitions and pilgrimages in Continental Europe and Ireland in the nineteenth century, a surge which emphasised the essentially foreign nature of Catholicism for many English men. Towards the end of this chapter I will argue that Wilde’s story activates many of these ‘foreign’, Irish elements in stark opposition to the Marianophobic culture of England. That a story whose central character is a Nightingale follows directly ‘The Happy Prince’ which has a Swallow as a key figure, signals the importance of the myth of Philomela to Wilde’s imagination. The Greek myth of Philomela is centrally concerned with sexual politics and violence, concerns which have a direct bearing on ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’. The myth has, of course, many different versions, but essentially tells of the marriage of Tereus, king of Thrace, to Procne, daughter of the king of Athens. Procne and her sister Philomela love each other deeply, and, after the birth of her son Itys, Procne sends Tereus to bring her sister to Thrace to share her joy. Tereus unfortunately finds Philomela’s beauty overpowering and, on the way back from Athens he takes her to a wood where he rapes her, and, after cutting out her tongue to ensure she could not reveal what had happened to anyone, he locks her up in a hut in the forest. He then returns to Thrace, and tells his wife that Philomela had died. Deprived of the power of speech, Philomela weaves her story into a tapestry which she sends to Procne who correctly understands the message, frees her sister, and plots revenge. Together they kill Itys, cook him and give him to his father in a meal. When he learns he had just eaten his son, Tereus becomes enraged and determines to dismember his wife and sister-in-law with an axe. Zeus intervenes at this point and transforms all three into birds: Tereus becomes a hoopoe, Philomela becomes a nightingale, and Procne a swallow (in some versions Philomela becomes a swallow and Procne a nightingale; for a slightly different version, see Graves 165-6). This myth hovers over ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and Wilde’s inflection of the tale of Philomela the Nightingale needs to be understood. Whereas in the mythological sources of his story, Philomela is saved from dismemberment by metamorphosis into a nightingale, a form in which she can sing forever, in Wilde’s tale the initial rape of Philomela is repeated, not simply in the Nightingale’s self- immolation on the thorn – a recapitulation of the initial rape scene which initiates the tragic mythic history – but also in the treatment meted out to her rose when it is rejected by both the Student and the Professor’s daughter. Wilde’s story appears to repeat rather than interrupt the cycle of violence inscribed in the ‘original’ stories. If the raped and violated Philomela finds a voice through the weaving of her tapestry by which she makes public her violation, and also through the songs she sings while a nightingale, Wilde’s Nightingale ‘weaves’ a beautiful rose in a painful and self- inflicted sacrifice for Love while singing a beautiful song, but both song and rose (tapestry) are ignored and misunderstood by the world. Whereas in the original myth Procne can read her sister’s tapestry perfectly, the Student has no appreciation of the Nightingale’s song: he complains that ‘She has form ... that cannot be denied to her; but has she got feeling? I am afraid not. In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity’ (193). The Professor’s daughter is also blind to the intensity of the Nightingale’s sacrifice and she dismisses the rose as inferior to a gift

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 45 of gaudy jewellery. Wilde does not save Philomela from dismemberment – as Zeus does – but rather has her ‘dismember’ herself. Traditionally the nightingale sings on the margins of the civilised world in the woods and forests surrounding the city. This marginality is especially emphasised in Ovid’s version of the myth as he associates both Procne and Philomela with the rites of Dionysius, the god of disorder and fertility rather than logic, rationality and philosophy. In Wilde’s story too the civilised world is closely linked to rationality and logic. The Student is a devotee of Logic and, at the story’s end, dismisses Love because it is ‘a silly thing … [and] not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything’ (197). However, unlike the myths he is echoing, Wilde never allows the marginality of the Nightingale and her world to have any real impact on the civilised world it tries to speak to and transform, the world of the University, of reason, of practicality. In the ancient myths the violation of Philomela is perpetually remembered in the song the nightingale will sing forever; in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ Philomela is not only forced to re-enact her rape but her voice, the memory of that initial violation, is finally cut off by her death in what seems like a useless sacrifice. The violated woman is violated once again, and there is no way in which this violation can be commemorated. Her art is thrown out onto the road and run over by a carriage wheel, as if the modern world has no place either for myth and beauty or for the voice of protest and commemoration. If at first it appears that the idealistic love of which the Nightingale sings will disrupt the logical, ordered and materialistic world where the Student and the Professor’s daughter live, this hope is destroyed by the conclusion where the logic of exclusion is reinforced. While the civilised world is indeed being criticised by the irrational voice of the pastoral margins, it is the civilised world which eventually triumphs and apparently silences the voice of the Nightingale forever: ‘[Love] is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics’ (197–8). This reversal of the ‘original’outcome of the myth, Wilde’s apparent intensification of the violation of Philomela, would seem to confirm the misogyny that many commentators see running through his work in general (seeVictoriaWhite on this).While the Nightingale is no femme fatale like Salome – although the Professor’s daughter does conform to a number of sexual stereotypes concerning fallen women – she is instead presented as a foolish figure sacrificing herself for an ideal and a person simply unworthy of her life. This reading would fit in with Jeni Williams’ argument that male Victorian writers did tend to infuse the Philomela myth with a distinctly masculinist ideology when they used it, and that writers like Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin ‘repeat the violation the myth inscribes’ by using the nightingale as a signifier of weak poetic sentimentality – the sentimentality of the woman poet – rather than of masculine power (158). However, in depicting the sacrifice as foolishness Wilde may perhaps be out to puncture the belief that women should sacrifice themselves for men, and thus undermine the Victorian ideal of woman as the ‘angel-in-the-house’, revealing it as a waste of potential. Importantly, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ is influenced by more than just the Greek and Ovidian versions of the Philomela myth. Philomela went on to play a very interesting role in the development of early Christian literature in the period still known – somewhat ridiculously – as the ‘Dark Ages’. Wilde encountered Latin

46 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde literature in all three educational institutions he attended, Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University, so his knowledge of it would have been extensive. For the early Christian Latin poets, the nightingale signified, not just violated femininity, but the violation Christ underwent for the salvation of the sinful world. These texts highlighted a powerful trope in much spiritual writing in this period where Christ was configured in distinctly feminine terms, as a mother or sister to his sinful human children (Bynum, Jesus as Mother). Moreover, in these poems, the song of the Nightingale is explicitly associated with poetry itself so that Christ becomes an appropriate analogue for the artist, the creator. This was not so that the religious significance of Christ’s saving work could be simply translated into secular or aesthetic terms, but rather that the artist and poetic creativity could be seen as partaking in the divine plan. As Jeni Williams puts in, ‘Latin poems on the nightingale in which the birdsong draws the Christian soul to appreciate both Creator and creation’ strongly impacted on later developments of the trope (34). This Christian transformation of the Philomela myth would explain the clear references to the crucifixion in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, and Wilde’s association of the Nightingale with Christ who was willing to sacrifice himself for a beautiful idea the world was clearly not ready for. Classical Christian uses of the Philomela myth associated the transformed Philomela, not only with the margins, the pastoral, poetry, but also with the artistic Word of God, Christ. So, in early Christian literature the nightingale is associated with both poetry and the Christ. However, contrary to Guy Willoughby’s assertion that Wilde’s story translates religious into aesthetic imagery, these Christian nightingale poems show it is perfectly possible to hold the religious and the poetic in metaphoric relation rather than opposition. In these poems Christ is indeed an artist, but he is also the Son of God: the one role does not cancel out the other (Jeni Williams, 34–74). This can clearly be seen, for example, in a nightingale poem by Paulinus of Nola (353–451 AD) which self-consciously associates the voice of the poet and the nightingale with the Incarnate Word of God: Paulinus asks God to ‘Look favourably, source of the word, the word that is God, and make me tuneful, with a sweet voice, just like [the nightingale] the bird of spring’ (printed in Jeni Williams 241). Paulinus wishes to be transformed into the performing nightingale, which he presents as nature’s equivalence of the divine Word, Christ. Poetry, nature and divinity all merge in a hymn of inspiration articulated by the Nightingale-poet who is sanctified in the process. It is these qualities that are present in Wilde’s appropriation of the Nightingale trope also, for when she sings she sings of ‘the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb’ (195). The song produced by the dying Nightingale brings the human and divine world together. For Wilde, the voice of the Nightingale is the voice of pure emotion rather than reason, ‘for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty’ (192). Likewise, much Christian nightingale poetry was composed in the period of European history during which reason and philosophy appeared to have been rejected in favour of direct experience of the divine through an embodied emotionality (Jeni Williams 253). Reason and logic can find no place for the song of the Nightingale which represents an incarnational, embodied reaction to God rather than an intellectual one. The Nightingale is interested in making the

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 47 Word flesh; the Student is caught up in a far more philosophical approach to divinity and studies the classical texts of metaphysics rather than poetry. For the Student, Love ‘is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true’ (197). Metaphysics was effectively put on hold in the early Middle Ages (Jeni Williams 43) and Wilde unsurprisingly denigrates it in this story where it is ironically considered ‘useful’ by the Student. Appreciation of the nightingales’ song in Classical Catholic poetry rested on the ability of the listener to emotionally respond to her voice through which the human and divine worlds were brought into closer communication: Your voice, my nightingale, uproots the seeds of sorrow; Its silken tones can soothe a troubled mood. … Glory and blessing and praise to Christ our Saviour Who grants his servants pleasures such as these (Anonymous, tenth century, in Adcock 19). Instead of the abstract interests of philosophy, medieval religion turned to representations of embodiment and incarnation, a physical theology. In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ the Student who is concerned with the sciences of logic and metaphysics is uninterested in the embodied sacrificial form of the Nightingale. In that he surprisingly sees metaphysics as a ‘practical’ science, and dismisses love for its ‘impracticality’, he can be seen to combine the philosophical faults of both Ancient Greece and Benthamite Victorian England. The Student is caught up in a purely formal analysis of the Nightingale’s song and fails to understand it true import. His misreading of the power of her song serves not only as a condemnation of his interpretive abilities, but also places in doubt analyses of the tale which fail to fully register the transcendental force of what is happening. In the context of nightingale literature, the authenticity of the Nightingale’s hymn comes from its divine origin and its connection to the all-consuming, self-sacrificing love of God as seen in the crucifixion of Christ. The Student should ideally be like Paulinus and wish to transform himself through raising his voice to the unmediated Word issuing from the Divinity, but instead of privileging the spoken Word he turns instead to the arts of men in metaphysical philosophy. ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ reaches its poetic apotheosis in the death song of the Nightingale, not the Student’s banal and secular interpretation of it. Her song is so powerful that Greek and Roman mythology is transformed and translated into Christian terms, so powerful that: the white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams’ (195–6). Rather than point us towards secular art, the Christian imagery of the story images us back into the Nightingale’s Christian heritage: art brings us Christward. Medieval nightingale literature, just like Wilde’s Nightingale story, is intensely focused on the bodily suffering of the Christ. In the eleventh century, Franciscans

48 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde concentrated on the suffering body of Christ as an appropriate image for mediation and prayer, a focus reclaimed by Wilde in his close attention to the physical suffering endured by the Nightingale throughout her long night of crucifixion: All night long she sang with her breast against the thorn … All night long she sang, and the thorn went deeper and deeper into her breast, and her life-blood ebbed away from her … So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb (194–5). The tone and imagery of this passage matches that composed by eleventh century Franciscans in their meditations on the passion of Christ. Caroline Walker Bynum has traced the increasing emphasis on the physicality and the bodily suffering of Christ through the Middle Ages as a means to achieve religious ecstasy. Female mystics in particular believed that in focusing on Christ’s suffering, and in suffering themselves, they could become one with their saviour. This was not an attack on physicality, or a depreciation of the body, but in fact an assertion of the importance of the body to worship: horrible pain, twisting of the body, bleeding … were not an effort to destroy the body, not a punishment of physicality, not primarily an effort to shear away a source of lust … [but instead were] imitatio Christi, an effort to plumb the depths of Christ’s humanity’ (Fragmentation 131). The Christian appropriation of the trope of the nightingale required an opening of the Philomela myth to a new set of associations and a new set of artistic possibilities, specifically the translation of the violation of Philomela into a reference to the Passion of Christ. Often these relationships were not overtly signalled in the poems but rather suggested through references to the singing Nightingale suffering a dark night of religious ambiguity before the dawn approached – a reference to the resurrection of Christ. The ‘crucifixion’ of the Nightingale in such poems as John Pecham’s Philomela (d. 1292), and the women poets of the German béguinages (Hadewijch of Brabant and Mechthild of Magdeberg) is as erotic as it is holy, and Wilde’s probable familiarity with such poems explains the highly sensuous evocation of death in the piercing of the Nightingale in his tale. What Duffy has read as a ‘sex-act’ does indeed occur at this moment of the story, as the Nightingale is pierced by the thorn, but this sex-act is equivalent to the mystical ravishings of medieval female saints like Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) and Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) as captured by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in The Ecstasy (1645–1652), rather than the more prosaic sexual couplings of either men and women in nineteenth-century England. This is a profoundly holy sex that dramatises the sexual power of God to enrapture his human lovers. Teresa of Ávila described this holy ravishment in profoundly erotic language: An angel in bodily form, such as I am not in the habit of seeing except very rarely … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 49 love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease … (quoted in Warner, Alone of All Her Sex 299–300). Theologically speaking, while the incarnation signalled an attempt by God to bridge the gap between fallen humanity and transcendence, the reconciliation was only complete when God, as Christ, took upon Himself the sins of the world and offered Himself as a sacrifice to atone for those sins, in a total and universal fashion, an atonement figured in the renunciation of the Nightingale of life for love of others. Although many different models of the atonement can be found in Christian theology, it has commonly been seen as a form of sacrifice (Dillistone). In the New Testament the sinfully- contaminated world is purified by the blood of the sacrificial victim (Christ), who gives his own life for the salvation of many. St. Paul wrote that God set Jesus ‘to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sons which have passed’ (Romans 3: 25). This sacrificial version of the atonement – the need for Christ’s blood to be shed – explains why the blood of the Nightingale is so crucial: the Nightingale must spill her blood in order that love be perfected. As the Rose-tree tells the Nightingale, ‘if you want a red rose … you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart’s-blood’ (191). Christian incarnation and atonement rather than simply artistic sacrifice are central to the form and meaning of ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’. Wilde’s story tries to answer the question of what happens once this perfected love has come into being. One possible reading of the shocking end of the story is as an indication that the Nightingale – and by implication, Christ – has so radically misunderstood her audience that her sacrifice is useless. The Student, after all, not only fails to connect with the Nightingale at a spiritual level, but he rejects the red rose as a symbol of grace. The Student is not enough of a poet to emulate the Nightingale in imaginative terms, and this is a danger built into the entire mission of Christ. The diseased community is free to accept or reject salvation: in this case the world (the Student and the Professor’s daughter) responds by dismissing the salvation it has been offered and throwing it onto the scrapheap of history. In the nightingale poems of the Middle Ages, the gift of atonement was gladly accepted by the listeners of the Nightingale’s song. In Sedulius’ Carmen Paschale (Easter Sunday) (fl. 848–874 CE), for example, after the dark night, the rising sun of Christ resurrection – signalled by the singing nightingale – is welcomed by the gathered congregation coming together to celebrate new life: ‘all night long/ Darkling the nightingale her descant told/And now inside church doors the happy folk/The Alleluia chant a hundredfold’ (quoted in Jeni Williams 243). In distinct contrast, the tentative spring begun in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, the growth of the new rose, is cut depressingly short by the rejection by humanity of God’s gift. The extraordinary appearance of the red rose is considered by the Student, not as evidence of the miraculous workings of Nature, but as ‘a wonderful piece of luck!’ (196). Enslavement to the metaphysics of Reason by the Student renders him unable to understand the gift of transformation offered by God. The Nightingale and Christ have sacrificed their lives for a people that simply do not deserve such acts of

50 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde charity. Why they have rejected it is a central concern and this is where another key factor in the story needs to be taken into account. The presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the image of the rose-tree has not been noticed by any previous critic, but her presence signifies that not only is this story concerned with the economy of salvation, but also that it is tapping into one of the most divisive issues in nineteenth-century theology in England. In this story the barren red-rose-tree which eventually produces the single and beautiful rose, is symbolic of the Virgin Queen of heaven. Mary has a traditional association with roses and has been imaged in the Rosary: In the rosary, the use of incantatory prayers blended with the medieval symbolism of the rose, until the beads themselves were seen as chaplets to crown the Queen of Heaven, as garlands for the rose without thorns (Ecclesiasticus 24:14), the rose of Sharon (Song of Solomon 2:1), the rose of Jericho, the rose in which the Word became flesh, as Dante wrote, which flowers at the centre of the arrayed petals of the mystic rose in the empyrean (Warner, Alone 307). The Nightingale-Christ cannot bring the depth of her love into existence without the assistance of the rose-tree. Her desire to bring transformative grace into the world requires his help. This assistance follows precisely the pattern found in the story in the Gospel of Luke of Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary of Nazareth: The angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee … behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call him Jesus … Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not man? (Luke 1: 26–34). This pattern is repeated in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’. The message must be first announced to the tree (‘Give me a red rose … and I will sing you my sweetest song’ 190), but put into doubt because the tree is a virgin. Although his brothers the white rose-tree and the yellow rose-tree are both productive, the red rose-tree’s branches are bare though fecund. His potential roses are superlative but ‘the winter has chilled my veins, and the frost has nipped my buds, and the storm has broken my branches, and I shall have no roses at all this year’ (191). The tree whose fruit will be the most sensuous does not produce by normal methods of pollination. He will only generate through listening to the song of the Nightingale and claiming her life-blood and then will only yield one rose for the world. The notion of conception through the ear, conception by listening, has been central to depictions of the Annunciation from early in Christian history. Indeed, as Ruth Vanita points out, ‘[Mary’s] intercourse and conception are intellectual because she hears’ (22), a conception that is also a sexual transgression since it preserved Mary’s hymen intact (see Graef, vol. 1 117–18). Only one child is to be produced (‘One red rose is all I want’ 191), to which the tree finally gives his fiat. The blossoming of the rose is a literary equivalent to the gestation and birth of a child, as is clear from the blood imagery of the text: the rose gestates through the mingling of its parent’s blood in much the same way as

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 51 a mother and child share the same blood while the child is in the womb: ‘And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart’ (195). The appearance of the Virgin in a nightingale story is not an innovation on Wilde’s part as medieval nightingale literature often invoked the iconography of the Virgin Mary. Likewise, while Franciscan monks focused intensely on the Passion in their meditations, they did not only emphasise the blood of Christ but, as Jeni Williams has pointed out, widened the frame to include the tears of the Virgin Mary, until their meditations became saturated in bodily fluid. While Christ’s blood flows freely due to the attacks by the world on his physical body, she who enabled the Incarnation of Word as Flesh metaphorically feels the sword pierce her own heart too (Luke 2: 35). This physical suffering was transformed into a mystical transcendence by medieval saints whose experience of being ‘slain in the spirit’ intensified their self identification with both Christ and His Mother. Caroline Walker Bynum tells the story of the female mystic Lukardis of Oberweimar (d. 1309), who reused to eat food with her family and instead claimed to be fed by Jesus and his Mother who brought her food and drink. On one occasion when she was very weak, Lukardis was brought to a church where she had a vision of Mary who proceeded to feed her with her breasts. Another time Jesus appeared to her as a young man and blew into her mouth which transported her as if drunk (Holy Feast 131–2). Sexual ecstasy, pain and religious fervour and transformation are all linked together in these experiences. The appearance of the poem of religious ecstasy in the Middle Ages made this trope central to Western literary history and crucial to understanding the pains borne by the Nightingale in Wilde’s tale. That the rose is eventually crushed by a cartwheel signifies the doubling of the Passion: both Christ and his Mother endure pains for the sake of the world’s salvation. The Nightingale and the Rose, like their theological counterparts Christ and the Virgin, enact similar roles as ‘co-redeemers’. The mere involvement of Mary in the redemptive process marks Wilde’s tale as a Catholic, rather than simply Christian, interpretation. Marian theology was a crucial mark of division between a Catholic and a Protestant interpretation of the economy of salvation. Ruth Vanita quotes the Rev. W. Chalmers who, in an anti-Maynooth meeting in 1845 attacked the Catholic Church because of its ‘idolatrous’ worship of the Virgin and claimed to know of a case where a statue of the Virgin was used to torture ‘heretics’ by the Inquisition (16). The Reformers were very clear in what they thought about the dangers of putting Mary close to the centre of Christian theology. ‘It is better’, Luther insisted in his Sermon on the Nativity of Christ, ‘to give too little to her than to the grace of God. Indeed, one can never give her too little since she is created out of nothing like all other creatures’ (Graef vol. 2, 9). This position was re-articulated in even more forceful language in Article 32 of the Thirty Nine Articles (1563) which prohibited ‘the invocation of Saints … [as] a fond thing vainly invented and … repugnant to the Word of God’ (ibid 16). Protestant antagonism towards Marian devotion was heightened during the nineteenth century, the ‘golden age’ of Marian devotion, when the Catholic Church formally declared the Immaculate Conception an infallible doctrine in 1854 (see Pope). Throughout the century, reports of Marian apparitions came in

52 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde from around Europe, including from La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), Pontmain (1871), Knock (1879) (see Zimdars-Swartz; Laurentin). The doctrinal elevation of Mary during the nineteenth century is a crucial instance of the popular overcoming the official: John Shinners has shown clearly that historically the officials of the institutional Church have been much more reluctant to embrace Marian claims than the laity. Mariolatry is very largely a popular phenomenon rather than one driven by the ecclesiastical elite (180). Wilde’s Marian imagery, its humble nature and its association with the margins of society, its pastoral location, away from the centres of learning in the Student’s study, the Professor’s university, or the Prince’s ball, indicates this is a world of the folk- Catholic imagination. In dialectical opposition to the un-adorned rose-(Mary)-bush, is the Professor’s daughter, who rejects the offer of the red rose because it will not go with her dress. She has substituted for it some real jewels, ‘and everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers’ (197). In addition, she remarks that the Student is useless to her because he hasn’t got any silver buckles on his shoes ‘as the Chamberlain’s nephew has’ (197). Christianity has traditionally disapproved of any overt interest by women in bodily ornamentation and warned that it stemmed from sin not grace. Jewellery was always associated with Eve and not Mary. Isaiah complained about women interested in: the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs … the earrings, the rings, and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pens, the glasses and the fine linen (3:19–23). These biblical warnings were echoed by early church fathers such as Tertullian who claimed that if Eve had known about jewels she would had wanted them (see Norris 75–7, 171–2). As daughter of the Professor, the girl in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ is a powerful representation of the desire for knowledge allied with a profound commitment to materialism. The virgin rose-tree is contrasted with the virgin daughter of knowledge-seeking; Catholicism’s new Eve is mirrored by the old Eve of Protestantism. Wilde’s attraction to the Virgin Mary can in part be explained by his sexual marginality. Ruth Vanita has documented the historical interest in the Virgin by groups who did not conform to the dominant hetero-normative character of Western society. She claims that Mary’s status as ever-virgin ‘can make her … a figure of female autonomy and power’ (28–29), and points out that whereas Protestantism promoted marriage, Catholicism’s emphasis on holy virginity offered a means to escape a patriarchal system for those who (for sexual as well as other reasons) wished a greater level of freedom: ‘Mary, flying in the face of biology and heterosexual normativity, is the exemplary figure for the odd lives of male and female saints who chose same-sex community over marriage’ (8). For many devoted female Christians, Mary offered a model of survival in a hostile male environment. Historians Elisabeth Clark and Rosemary Radford Ruether have each argued that many women used the virginal status of Mary as a reason for avoiding becoming subject to the authority of a husband and the burden of childbirth and childrearing and also a way to gain a limited amount of power within the Church.

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 53 In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ Wilde exploits the positive and proto-feminist potential within Marianism to confer power and attraction on his virginal rose-(Mary)- bush. The old Adam and Eve, the Student and the Professor’s daughter, present a sharply dichotomised view of the world as strictly divided into separate spheres: male and female; man and animal; culture and nature. Their devotion to rationalism rather than emotion is demonstrative of a typically Protestant commitment to dialectical thinking (Tracy). As Carol Marie Engelhardt has shown, ‘the vast majority of those who publicly detailed their protests against the Virgin Mary’s expanded role were men whose comments reflected their culture’s idealisation of men as rational and self-controlled’, and firmly dedicated to the ideology of the separate spheres (44–5). The new Adam and new Eve, the Nightingale and Rose-tree, representing the Catholic belief in Mary’s role in the economy of salvation, possess a fully embodied and integrated vision of the world in which genders are crossed, animals can speak, divinity is fully visible: the female Nightingale is the Christ, the male rose-tree is the Virgin Mary; culture and nature are infused in a natural religion. Wilde here invokes a conception of the divinity in both male and female terms, which has a long theological history, though one which found greater articulation within Catholicism than Protestantism. God is Father and Mother in many biblical passages. Speaking to the prophet Isaiah, God compares himself to a mother and asks, ‘Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb’ (Isaiah 49: 15; see Trible; Schneiders). In identifying Jesus with Sophia/Wisdom, the New Testament also provided a potent image for the femininity of Christ (Griffiths). Irenaeus, John Chrysostom and Gregory of Palmas are only the most significant early Church Fathers to invoke God and Christ as female and maternal (see Leech 356). In the Middle Ages figures like Julian of Norwich and Bernard of Clairvaux developed theologies which meditated on the concept of Jesus as Mother (see Bynum, Jesus as Mother 115–118). Indeed, the medieval period as a whole witnessed an increase in the use of human analogies to describe the relationship between God and the world, especially when explaining the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Atonement, a tendency that ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ harks back to. Caroline Walker Bynum has demonstrated how maternity in particular became a favoured comparison to make in describing the love of God for humankind, and she extrapolates three main characteristics of the mother-child relationship that were considered particularly useful in making this comparison, all of which also appear in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, and all of which place the mother-child relationship in a paradigm of liberation. In the Middle Ages many theologians and religious thinkers, including Anselm, Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvaux, Gertrude the Great and Mechtild of Hackeborn, claimed that God generates humankind in a way comparable to the generation of the child by the mother. Similarly, just as Jesus sacrificed himself for us, so too the mother must sacrifice herself, in the pains of labour, when bringing forth her child. God loves and cares for his children with a love comparable to that of a mother for her children. Moreover, this human-divine maternity also extended to the biological processes which bound together the mother and child. In medieval medical and religious theory breast milk was believed to be processed blood. This meant that milk and blood were synonymous in the relationship between the mother and child,

54 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde the mother nurtured her child with her blood as much as her milk. Christ’s shedding of blood on the Cross and his offering of his blood to his church in the sacrament of the Eucharist was considered demonstrative of Christ’s maternal connection to his believers, so much so that Irenaeus refers to feeding from the ‘mother’s breasts of Christ’. The more the medieval Church focused on the idea of a loving tender God who became flesh and sacrificed himself for us, the greater the emphasis on the relationship between a mother and her child as a model for that between God and Man became (I am heavily dependent here on Bynum, Jesus as Mother 131–6). This religious thinking is clearly echoed in Wilde’s emphasis on blood connection between the Nightingale and the rose-tree and also the maternal imagery of birth surrounding the generation of the beautiful rose: all night long she sang, and the thorn went deeper and deeper into her breast, and her life- blood ebbed away from her. She sang first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl … the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and louder and louder grew her song, for she sang of the birth of passion in the soul of a man and a maid. And a delicate flush of pink came into the leaves of the rose, like the flush in the face of the bridgegroom when he kisses the lips of the bride. But the thorn had not yet reached her heart, so the rose’s heart remained white, for only a Nightingale’s heart’s blood can crimson the heart of a rose … So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain … (194–5). The merging of the two sexes in the divine Christ and his human mother is reflected in the Nightingale and the Rose-tree, whose life-blood together give physicality and animation to the natural image of the rose. Wilde was, no doubt, also influenced in this radical version of an androgynous God by some of his Victorian contemporaries who also saw God in both masculine and feminine terms. In 1854 Henry C. Wright expounded that ‘He is feminine as well as masculine. It is true and natural to pray to the God-Mother as the God-Father’ (24). Wilde offers an androgynous or bi-sexual economy of salvation to a gender divided world. Bi-sexuality has a long history, as Marjorie Garber has ably demonstrated and its radical indeterminism in terms of identity, and its transgression of normative gender roles, has long made it attractive for those who could not conform to the dominant models offered to them by mainstream society (70). Bi-sexual fluidity has had a particularly important role in religious cultures where it has often been very highly regarded as Leslie Feinberg has shown. Wilde’s transgressive and religious impulses meet in the figure of the Nightingale and the rose-bush: a female Christ (Nightingale) and a masculine rose-Mary-bush. Androgyny allows for the harmonisation of male and female elements within the psyche, and in projecting an androgynous notion of divinity, Wilde opens the possibility of a psychic fusion of genders in opposition to the intensely separated spheres of men and women in Victorian England (see Nelson for this). However, the rejection of the rose by the Student and the Professor’s daughter demonstrates, not that this sacrifice was mistaken, but that a Protestant theology will

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 55 always reject this offer as involving too much emphasis on the female, especially in the irrational form of a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Protestantism rejects the rose because its only significant female is Eve, the bringer of sin. It refuses to accept the total gift of a theology of Mary because it locates her with the Continent, the colonies, and the Catholic. And it is to the colonial implications of Wilde’s tale that I now turn. At just after 7.00pm, on 21 August 1879, an incident began in a small village in the West of Ireland that was to have a major impact on the consciousness of the Irish nation and the configuring of Ireland in religious cartography. Mary McLoughlin, one of the villagers of Knock, County Mayo, was on her way to visit her friend Margaret Beirne, when she spotted a bright light and what she thought were three statues at the gable end of her local church. Although surprised that they had been left out in the rain, she took little notice of them until she was returning with Margaret Beirne’s 16 year old daughter, Mary. On closer inspection, the statues turned out to be apparitions of the Virgin Mary, St Joseph, St John the Evangelist and the Lamb of God on an altar, floating several feet away from the gable wall and two feet off the ground. Mary Beirne went to alert the village and in all over 20 people witnessed the vision, although only 14 were eventually called at the official church investigation. The villagers did not inform the rest of the world of the momentous event until the next day, but it became global news shortly after that. Quickly too, an interpretation of the vision became widespread among those who gave it any credence (Rynne). I have demonstrated that Marianism and Romanism were synonymous in the Protestant imagination, but this was especially so in the English Protestant imagination. Gender dichotomy was developed to a high degree in the theology of relation between Protestantism and Catholicism and, with the proliferation of Marian apparitions in the nineteenth century the Virgin Mary became a point of contact between theology and empire. When the Times, after the conversion of the Marquis of Ripon in 1874, noted that ‘to become a Roman Catholic and to remain a thorough Englishman are – it cannot be disguised – almost incompatible conditions’, it suggested a link between worship of the Virgin (the most criticised aspect of Catholicism in the English press after Papism), and the ‘foreign’ condition, a sharp division between the feminised religion of Mary and the muscular Christianity of God the Father Almighty (quoted in Vanita 15).1 Even a Catholic convert like John Henry Newman was uncomfortable with Marian devotion. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) he accepts that Marian enthusiasm may be suitable to Latin countries but not England: Such devotional manifestations in honour of our Lady had been my great crux as regards Catholicism; I say frankly, I do not fully enter into them now; I trust I do not love her the less, because I cannot enter into them … they are suitable for Italy, but they are not suitable for England (244). In their study of pilgrimage in Christian cultures, Victor and Edith Turner focus on the increase in importance of Marian pilgrimage in the nineteenth century. They claim that throughout this century Mary came to be seen by the Catholic masses who went on these pilgrimages as ‘an autonomous figure’ rather than simply a representative 1 I am grateful to Vanita’s valuable book which directed me to a vast literature to the relations between Marianism, Catholicism, sexuality and national politics.

56 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde of Christ, a figure who ‘takes initiatives on behalf of mankind, often intervening in the midst of the economic and political crises characteristic of industrialised mass society’ (150). The Marian apparitions began to nudge the universal church towards the ‘option for the poor’ that has been the chief characteristic of the church’s social policy since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 (Dorr). Mary especially appealed to those marginalised or who suffered in any way. Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz claims that the notion of the ‘Victim Soul’ is central to Marian devotion. This is an image that sees Mary suffering for the sins of the world, but which can then be easily extended to incorporate the individual devotee so that they too are seen as participating in the redemption of sin (266–7). Such imagery serves to legitimate individual Marian devotees who see themselves as bearing the pain of the sinful structures and actions of the wider community or, in places where colonialism has been the dominant narrative, worshippers of Mary see themselves as simultaneously vindicated and violating, vindicated in their resistance to the sins of the colonial power and violating these structures of coercion and hegemony. In the popular imagination Mary was the paradigm of mercy. Nineteenth-century devotees of Marian apparitions understood intercession as ‘a dramatic interaction between God, who in the person of the Father and the Son represents the divine law, and the Virgin, who represents divine mercy’ (ibid 247). When she appears in countries in an oppressive colonial relationship, she is often appropriated as a symbol of the desire for an independent existence. This may explain why Wilde, an Irish emigrant in London, was increasingly attracted to both Christ and Mary as appropriate models for his own struggles against a heterosexist and patriarchal empire and why critics who refuse to take his investment in Christian imagery seriously will continue to misread his work. Richard Rodriguez has also shown how such imagery and devotion can be useful in establishing national cohesion, and points out how the Virgin of Guadalupe has become the ‘unofficial, the private flag’ of Mexico (16). Asimilar form of national assimilation began in Ireland after the Knock apparition. There had been extensive crop failure in Mayo in 1877 and 1878 and in 1879 the first phases in what came to be termed the ‘Land War’ began to take shape. This ‘war’ was the result of a prolonged period of negotiation between representatives of the dominant strands of Irish colonial resistance: land agitation, physical force aggression and constitutional campaigning, as embodied in the complex relationship between Michael Davitt, John Devoy and Charles Stewart Parnell. By 1879 it was clear that some form of land organisation was necessary. Ireland was at the time in the middle of another agricultural crisis. Due to competition from America around 14 million pounds of value had been lost to the main Irish crops (Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine 164-5). F.S.L. Lyons claims that the extent of the depression was ‘unprecedented in scale since 1847 [the height of the Great Famine] … [and was] accompanied, especially in the West of Ireland, by actual starvation’ (ibid, 165). The desperate situation galvanised the main players in the new drama of co-operation and on 16 August 1879, the ‘new departure’ came into force with the foundation of the Mayo Land League. This came just five days before the apparition. News of agrarian agitation and the vision at Knock began to emerge from Ireland together. It seemed that the Blessed Virgin had chosen to appear to those who were suffering

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 57 the extremes of agrarian distress and who were also beginning to protest against that distress in a politically overt form. The agitation and the apparition solidified into one movement: the iconography of the Virgin became emblematic of the struggle being wrought by the Land League; the Lady of Knock became the Queen of Ireland, the divine representative of Hibernia, numinous envoy of Catholic nationalism against the colonial administration in London. The Virgin was a peculiarly appropriate figure to merge with the already pervasive allegory of Ireland as Woman. As I have already pointed out, from the Middle Ages a rose or a rose-tree has been integral to symbolic representations of Mary. However, if the rose had been symbolic of the Virgin Mary since the Middle Ages, ‘Rosaleen’ or the ‘little black rose’ had become a standard allegorical representation of Ireland since at least the middle of the nineteenth-century. James Clarence Mangan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen’ was published in the Nation in May 1846. He portrays it as a translation from an Irish original which ‘purports to be an allegorical address from Hugh [i.e., Red Hugh O’ Donnell – a sixteenth century Irish rebel] to Ireland, on the subject of his love and struggles for her, and his resolve to raise her again to the glorious position she held as a nation, before the irruption of the Saxon and Norman spoilers’ (Mangan 450–51). This representation was echoed in a similar translation by Samuel Ferguson in the Dublin University Magazine in 1834, another by James Hardiman in Irish Minstrelsy in 1831 and Aubrey de Vere’s 1861 lyric ‘The Little Black Rose’: The Little Black Rose shall be red at last, What made it black but the March wind dry, And the tear of the widow that fell on it fast; It shall redden the hills when June is nigh (quoted in Bessai 81). What the black rose needs to turn red is blood sacrifice. The image of Ireland as a rose was grafted on to an ancient tradition of representing Ireland as a woman demanding a blood sacrifice to transform her from old black hag to young blood-red queen, a tradition brilliantly represented in W.B. Yeats’ play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) (Cathleen is another name for the allegorised image of Ireland as Woman; see Dalton; MacCana; Ni Bhrolchain; O’ Brien; Innes 26–7). The Catholicism which had become important to this tradition during the development of the aisling (dream poem) in the Jacobite period was particularly appropriate for the Knock apparition, and consolidated the notion that this sacrifice was related to a more-than-physical economy of salvation. Máire Cruise O’ Brien claims that ‘it was to become increasingly difficult to distinguish between Church and Nation in the folk mind’ (36). Wilde’s story ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ is clearly influenced by such Irish traditions, traditions he was well aware of through his reading of the poets of the nineteenth-century Irish nationalist organisation of which his mother was a member, the Young Irelanders. They published their work in a newspaper, the Nation and Wilde lectured on these and other Irish writers when he was touring America in his 1882 lecture ‘The Irish Poets of 1848’. Indeed, he had met Aubrey de Vere in his parent’s home in Merrion Square and been introduced to the poetry of Irish nationalism by his fiercely republican mother. The main trope of ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ involves the transformation of a barren rose tree, the representative

58 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde of cruel winter, into the life-producing tree of grace, a transformation brought about through the quality of the sacrifice performed by the Nightingale. The pure heart of the Nightingale must be pierced and the blood drain into the tree to produce ‘the reddest rose in all the world’ (197). Wilde is directly investing here in the typology reproduced by the poets of the Nation. This is even more crucial since, as I have shown, Wilde is also using the imagery of the Virgin Mary here and so taps into the new use of the Virgin as the Queen of Ireland. Thus we can be clear about one thing. More than any other writer dealing with the trope of Woman as Nation, Wilde theologises the imagery. He utilises the triple associations Rose-Virgin-Ireland extremely effectively. The aspirational culmination of Mother Ireland and Mother Church, which received its most effective articulation in the Knock apparition, is realised completely in Wilde’s story. The Nightingale sacrifices herself so that her blood can be the transfusion that her church-country requires to come into bloom though in the midst of a winter of desperation and crop failure. If the typology I have posited is correct, and the world of the Student is the rational world of Protestantism while the natural efflorescence occupied by the Nightingale represents folk-Catholicism, then the Christ-like sacrifice offered by the Nightingale is so that the full-blooded and beautiful rose, the blossom of Catholic Ireland, can be given to the Protestant neighbours, the haughty and aloof Britannia/Professor’s daughter, obsessed with the assimilation of wealth rather than the spiritual riches offered by the Nightingale. The sacrifice of the Nightingale becomes, not a literal one, not the actual shedding of warrior blood, but a theological one, a spiritual abandonment of the people, a New religious Departure. While the rest of the country viewed the apparition at Knock as the divine blessing on a new political venture, Wilde’s story suggests that such an interpretation is misapplied. The silence of the Virgin of Knock is understood as a spiritual transcendence rather than a political statement. The call is to an investment in the religious, in the symbolic, rather than actual political action. Nationalism, the valorisation of the rose-Ireland, here represents a theological force emanating from the symbols of the people. This theological nationalism is ultimately life-affirming because of its investment in Marian Catholicism. After all, Catholicism, especially in the doctrines concerning Mary, offers a glorified material existence in a totalised personality. Wilde’s imagery suggests that at least part of the problem with Protestant theology is that it lacks a sufficient theology of the feminine. In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ Christ is a female bird while the Virgin Mary is a male rose-tree, suggesting that Catholicism may be a means to gynandry and androgyny. Wilde’s fusion of genders in an embodied theology of nationalism suggests that he had gone beyond God the Father long before Mary Daly. Depending entirely on male appropriation, especially in its scientific obsession with reason and empiricism, the Protestant world of the Student collapses into textual literalness: the last thing he does in the story is return to his study to read. The crude material existence of the Student and the Professor’s daughter leaves them stranded in the Victorian crisis of faith engendered by the patriarchal empirical fanaticism of university faculties and Higher Critical theologies. The sumptuous Catholicism of pre- Tridentine Connaught relies on a glorified material world which finds its epitome in the New Adam and New Eve of the Nightingale and the rose-tree, both beyond biological determinism. Such a realisation complicates its assimilation of the Woman-as-Nation

‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ 59 allegory. Its rose is male but has female blood running through his veins; Cathleen ni Houlihan becomes an integrated mediatrix between two cultures: male/female; England/ Ireland; Protestant/Catholic; Nightingale/Student, caught in a perpetual hyphen. With ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’Wilde moves into a deeply symbolic landscape where natural elements indicate profound theological and national histories, and the cosmic struggle between fertility and death takes on an Irish inflection. Fertility of the earth is to become an even more central element in ‘The Selfish Giant’ where the stakes are raised even higher and concern ultimate possession of the land of Ireland itself.

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Chapter Three ‘The Selfish Giant’ ‘The Selfish Giant’ is, perhaps, Wilde’s best-known, and most-loved, fairy tale and it was also his own personal favourite. Jerusha McCormack believes that Wilde ‘inscribed’ into it what paternity meant for him (105). His son Vyvyan records that when his father read this story aloud he used to cry: ‘Cyril once asked him why he had tears in his eyes when he told us the story of “The Selfish Giant”, and he replied that really beautiful things always made him cry’ (53–4). It is not clear whether Wilde is referring here to the beauty of the idea of Christian sacrifice at the centre of the tale, a sacrifice which picks up on the Nightingale’s death in the previous story, or simply to the beauty of his reworking of the Christ myth, but there is clearly something personal involved for him here. George Bernard Shaw later claimed that Wilde was probably a sufferer from gigantism and that he had inherited this affliction from his mother, Speranza who was also ‘unnaturally’ huge: ‘I have always maintained that Oscar was a giant in the pathological sense, and that this explains a good deal of his weakness’ (334). Wilde was considered not simply large but oversized and badly proportioned, with Lady Colin Campbell famously referring to him as a ‘great white caterpillar’ (quoted in Shaw 334). There may have been many rumours at the time that a man so ‘unnatural’ looking would be ‘unnatural’ in other ways as well. Although six feet three inches (Ellmann 26) is not particularly enormous many observers felt that there was something ‘not quite normal about his bigness’ (Shaw 334), and if Wilde was aware of such rumours ‘The Selfish Giant’ could be read, from one angle, as his response. Wilde’s height, and the sexual unease which surrounded it, have led to readings of ‘The Selfish Giant’ as an obvious self-portrait, an attempt by Wilde to redeem himself from the charge of having neglected his own children in favour of selfish bodily desires. The link between Wilde and the Giant has allowed the story to be seen as a good example of Wilde’s capacity for doublespeak. Michael Kotzin reads the story as Wilde’s search for forgiveness for the way he allowed his transgressive desires to lead to his absence from the family home in Tite Street, but notes the tale’s irony in that the means of forgiveness, the boy Jesus kissing the Giant, is through ‘pedarastic’ love, the very desire which caused Wilde’s problem in the first place. In the selfless love of the Giant and the child (Wilde and Robert Ross), Wilde achieves redemption, not through a renunciation of same-sex desire but by a channelling of that desire through less egocentric paths. Here ‘Wilde wants to eat his cake and have it too. The giant’s act of expiation … resembles the very “sin” that Wilde would want to be forgiven for committing’ (309). John Charles Duffy agrees that the story documents an ‘obvious case of pedaristic love’ where ‘heterosexual love is notably absent … [and] replaced by a form of male love’ (339). Wilde seeks both forgiveness

62 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde and justification through his moral tale in which Jesus leads him to a version of Greek same-sex passion that is magically legitimated by Christianity. Care needs to be taken when putting forward an interpretation of the story as a moral examination of sexual desire, and not merely because Wilde has been (mistakenly) accused of paedophilia by some, an accusation which could be supported by an interpretation of this story which stresses carnal desire against self- renunciation. However, it is indeed the pedaristic context which absolves Wilde of such an intention. Even granting the sexual element to the tale, which I am not unwilling to do, presumably the prior selfishness of the Giant is based on a version of sexuality which is ego-based rather than altruistic so that the legitimate version of the love between an older and a younger man at the end of the tale has as its goal not just sexual satiation (as was the case with many of Wilde’s later relationships with rent boys), but instead the search for a higher truth, goodness, mercy and kindness, a view of male relations Wilde absorbed from Plato (see Dowling). After all, the most sanctified same-sex relationships in Ancient Greece were intellectual and spiritual rather than sexual. Bruce Thornton argues that sexual activity only had a minor role to play in Ancient Greek boy-love: the “Technology” of boy-love, then, requires a delicate balancing act between acknowledging the power of homosexual eros without corrupting the boy who is its object, turning him into the dreaded kinaidos [passive male] … Because the beloved wants to impress his lover, he is ashamed of any behaviour not noble and admirable (196–7). The philosophic basis of the sexual element of the story emphasises that children require cherishing and not abuse, love and not authority. This is an adult-child relationship which is compatible with the Christian accent in which the story is couched. As Kotzin notes, this is ‘a Christian parable’in which ‘the Christian meaning is quite explicit’ (305). If the Giant is at least partly based on Wilde himself, Guy Willoughby points out that he is also drawn after the manner of Saint Christopher ‘who unwittingly took Jesus on his own shoulders’ (Art and Christhood 22). The story is about a conversion to a form of selfless Christianity in which the Giant discovers ‘a mode of love that is founded on a deeper sacrifice’ (ibid 23). For some readers this Christian context represents something of an intellectual and literary cop-out for Wilde, with Howell Hodgkins Hope complaining that the story relies ‘upon moralistic cures and utopian endings: the selfish giant’s everblooming garden or an ineffable Paradise’ (41). Hope complains of the overuse of the sentimental, arguing that its heightened rhetoric and elevated language merely hides both Wilde’s and his century’s horror at the ageing process. The Giant is the adult Wilde, ugly and ungainly, and also the collective view of adulthood in a period which valorised youth like never before. Youth is both attractive and untouchable as once grown up no one can ever enter childhood: Wilde addresses his century’s, and his own, adult fears – of judgement, which he no longer quite believes in, of aging, ugliness and death, which he fears but heaps over with beautiful words (45).

‘The Selfish Giant’ 63 These readings are quite compatible with each other and together give a satisfactory sense of completeness to the tale. ‘The Selfish Giant’ can thus be seen as a compelling cultural attempt by the Victorians to seek forgiveness for their bad treatment of children – a highly understandable desire for a century coming to grips with child labour, poverty and prostitution – and also their efforts to rectify child neglect through philanthropic intervention, as visioned in the Giant magnanimously breaking down the wall and allowing the children access to the pleasures he had forbidden them. The Victorians hope that they will be rewarded for this magnanimity by being given access to a realm that had suddenly been fetishised to a large extent, the realm of childhood, since in dying the Giant is brought into a Paradise in which he can ‘play’ all day (also pointed out by Hope 44). Simultaneously, Wilde too is forgiven for any exploitation of young men through self-interested sexuality and allowed to rechannel this desire into a culturally acceptable and religiously justified form in the altruistic Socratic version of boy love in which bodily satisfaction is subordinated to spiritual growth and intellectual stimulation. This explains both the attraction of the story for generations of readers (as it implies that they too will be forgiven for their neglectful ways) and why it is to be rejected as morally naive and socially simplistic. The Giant is an appropriate figure to represent such adult worries and desires. Marina Warner argues that giants and ogres are all cultural versions of the terrible Father, pointing out that ‘Greek myths about Kronos’ attempts against his offspring, fairy tales about giants lusting for human flesh – preferably young and tender – define crimes against the duties and dues of paternity’ (No Go the Bogeyman 145). Wilde’s neglect of his own children, alongside his desire for young men, could indeed be read as analogous to Kronos’ consumption of his progeny and psychoanalytically- oriented critics could have a field-day with the fact that: ogres not only are large adult humans but have a remarkable affinity with children … The monsters of popular dread, with their unbridled appetite, insatiable tyranny, unappeasable desire for gratification, are just like … babies, big babies … The ogre contains a concealed portrait of an infant (ibid 145–6). Such connections help us to pathologise the Victorians and make Wilde a representative figure for them. Owen Dudley Edwards has helpfully complicated these readings by suggesting a different context in which the tale may begin to make sense. Looking at ‘The Selfish Giant’ from an Irish angle transforms its politics, and also begins to absolve Wilde from mere psychological pathology in relation to both his culture and his household. Edwards notes that the Irish nationalist leader Patrick Pearse ‘rewrote’ ‘The Selfish Giant’ in Irish as ‘Íosagán’ (1906). The attraction of the story for a political-radical like Pearse suggests that submerged or allegorical elements of the original narrative have implications for Irish issues. It is likely, in other words, that Pearse saw more in the story than subsequent critics of Wilde have. For Edwards it indicates that we should recognise ‘the Giant as owner of the Big House with the little children as peasants and, presumably, Catholics’ (‘Impressions’ 59). It is this recontextualising of the story in the Ireland of the 1880s that I want to elaborate on

64 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde in this chapter and hopefully deepen its social and literary significance by reading it against the land struggle that was taking place there. The problem at the heart of the story is the clash between two radically different conceptions of land and ownership and such a clash was basic to the land struggle in late nineteenth-century Ireland. The Giant confidently asserts his legal ownership of the Garden. ‘My own garden is my own garden … anyone can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself’ (202), he insists after discovering the invasion of the children into his territory. The notice-board he erects affirms this proprietorial version of the land in loud capitals: ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’ (202). The play of the children in the Garden at the start of the story was a piece of stolen time; other than the Giant and invited guests all are now to be seen as interlopers and challengers to the absolute demands of property-ownership held by the landlord. Property is a sacred object to the Giant, not the land in which such property is manifested. That is to say, the Giant is interested in the garden as his property, because he owns it, and not in the garden itself as a piece of sacred space, which is why he builds a ‘high wall’ (202) all around it and upholds the notion of trespassing, a completely alien notion to the children who had been playing here day after day until he arrived back. The Giant’s attitude to ownership was a common one by the standard of landlordism in nineteenth-century Ireland. Basically, most landlords believed that their ‘ownership’ granted them absolute rights over the land so that they could do with it what they wished: ‘my own garden is my own garden’ (202). The landlord had the right to sell, or lease, or hold on to his property, or indeed do anything with it, without consultation with others, even tenants. The idea of ownership without communal responsibility was a relatively new intellectual development and appears to have emerged due to the development of a particular kind of capitalist attitude in England. The historian Harold Perkin points out that previously, ‘the old society was based firmly on the twin principles of property and patronage. One’s place in that society was wholly determined by the amount and kind of one’s own property … or that of one’s relations and friends’ (38). Traditionally, absolute property right was combined with the principle of paternalism whereby the moral economy had to be respected. The landlord was a paternalist, as well as a property owner, and he would exercise ‘absolute’ rights and responsibility in tandem. The paternalist model of landlordism entailed seeing the tenant as a quasi-child who needed to be cared for and protected as well as disciplined. The paternalist model of landlord-tenant relationship was carried over to Ireland after the Elizabethan and Cromwellian dispossessions. Paternalism was reflected by the manner in which the Ascendancy treated (or were supposed to treat) their Catholic tenants: providing food and drink on festival days, bonfires and patterns and allowing the peasantry to partake of the left-overs after a feast. In his Leaders of Public Opinion (1861), W.E.H. Lecky writes that ‘the Irish landlords were, I imagine, on the whole very popular, and the rude, good-humoured despotism which they wielded was cordially accepted’ (quoted in Eagleton 59). It is certainly true to say that in the periods when relative peace between tenant and landlord existed in Ireland, the moral economy worked at its most efficient. The tenant-children looked to their landlord- father to protect their rights as well as demand rent; the shock experienced by the

‘The Selfish Giant’ 65 children on their eviction from the garden by their Giant-father is indicative of their surprise at the destruction of the paternalist model itself: ‘“What are you doing here?” he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away’ (202). The paternalist ideology of landownership was brought to an end slowly by what Philip Bull has called ‘the laissez-faire revolution of the late eighteenth century’ whereby land was transformed into a cost-effective machine for the purpose of production. In an increasingly capitalist economy the paternalist view was seen as not only inefficient but possibly disastrous for the economy. A paternalism which bound the landlord and the tenant in ties of loyalty, generosity and subservience, in a kind of benign if still ultimately insidious hegemony, was replaced by a loyalty to the market and to absolute notions of efficiency and production (Perkin 52). The success of the economy was to be the sole criterion by which property ownership was to be judged from now on and no sentimentalist attachment to generations of tenants was to stand in the way of a landlord who needed to evict a tenant farmer who was simply not up to capitalist scratch (Bull 11). The language of paternalist familialism was replaced with the language of the efficient factory system, even on the land, and this meant that rather than a caring father the landlord could easily be transformed into an unsympathetic Giant who would consume his former children-tenants if necessary. In Ireland, many nascent capitalists wished to combine this new system with paternalism to exploit the benefits of both. For example, Richard Lovell Edgeworth recognised that since the divisions between the landlord and tenant in Ireland were so great, simply jettisoning the paternalist system would create more problems than it would solve. The Irish Catholic tenant farmer did not have the same level of pre- existing loyalty to his landlord that the English Protestant tenant had and Edgeworth maintained that efficiency had to be married to stern benevolence. This hybrid model can best be seen in operation not only on the Edgeworthstown estate in County Longford during Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s ascendancy there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but is also represented by Mr. McLeod’s stewardship of his land and tenants in Maria Edgeworth’s novel Ennui (1809). In chapter ten of that novel, McLeod brings the hero Lord Glenthorn to survey his estate in which he appears to have created a little Eden: In an unfavourable situation, with all nature, vegetable and animal, against him, he had actually created a paradise amid the wilds. There was nothing wonderful in any thing I saw around me; but there was such an air of neatness and comfort … that I almost thought myself in England (215). Glenthorn is surprised at the admixture of industry and benevolent loyalty and asks McLeod to explain how it was all brought about. McLeod explains that he became a firm but kind father-figure to his tenant-children: We took time, and had patience. We began by setting them the example of some very slight improvements, and then, lured on by the sight of success, they could make similar trials themselves. My wife and I went among them, and talked to them in their cottages, and took an interest in their concerns, and did not want to have everything our own way; and when they saw that they began to consider which way was best; and so by degrees

66 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde we led where we could not have driven … We could not expect to do much with the old, whose habits were fixed; but we tried to give the young children better notions (215). Here the language of father-landlord/child-tenant is foregrounded. Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth may have dreamed that Irish landlords would marry patronage and capitalism together and create an Irish society based on mutuality and economic efficiency; some historians of nineteenth-century Ireland also appear to hold that this marriage was possible and had it occurred would have meant that the land wars of the late nineteenth century could have been avoided. W.E. Vaughan speculates that the landlords could have ‘pose[d] as conservatives in rural society, and … shelter[ed] tenants from the disruptions of a market economy. They should have appeared as champions of old-world values; they should have appealed to old ties and old ways’ (Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland 223). Though a noble-enough dream, I find this highly unlikely for several reasons. In Ireland, the paternalist language of the land was always a problematic one. The Irish understanding of the rights and responsibilities of land ownership was never as clear-cut as that expressed in English legislative and political economy and was much more likely to be regional in basis, improvisory, traditional, coded, even unconscious (Bull 6). Although paternalism certainly operated to some degree, and historians are perfectly right to emphasise that for the most part landlords and tenants got along fine and to point out that most tenants were loyal to their landlords in a feudal sense, there were always difficulties beneath the calm surface. The main difference was, of course, that whereas in England landlord and tenant were bound together by ethnicity and religion, in Ireland there was always a pronounced cleavage between the Catholic ‘Gaelic’ tenant and his Protestant ‘English’ landlord, a cleavage increased by the charges of absenteeism. Religion strongly marked the gap between tenant and landlord in Ireland (ibid 6–7). If religion was one problem in allowing paternalism to flourish unproblematically, absenteeism was another, as Richard Lovell Edgeworth recognised in his insistence that landlords return to their estates and take on the running of them personally. Although many historians have rightly argued that absenteeism was not a major factor in the economic performance of the land in Ireland (Vaughan; Solow) they are wrong in using economics to measure the importance of this issue. If a model of paternalism is to operate properly the landlord has to be present and seen to honour his duties as articulated by the system. Leaving these things to an agent – no matter how benign that agent is (a matter of some debate among historians) – weakens whatever loyalty the child-tenant will feel towards his landlord-father. This is surely the main reason that absenteeism is condemned by literary text after literary text in this period, not because the novelists are ignorant of the economic facts but because many writers were intellectually committed to the use of paternalism as an instrument of subduing peasant insurgency in Ireland and absentee landlordism was inimical to this goal. The Giant in this story has been absent for seven years, visiting his friend the Cornish ogre (201) and his ‘children’ tenants have not had the chance to associate him with the loyalty due according to the paternalist system. These children-tenants cannot possibly be dedicated to a father-figure they have never seen. That he arrives, having himself jettisoned paternalism, and simply evicts them was always going to

‘The Selfish Giant’ 67 exacerbate the problem. If he sees the land as his own to do with as he likes, then he runs directly into a completely incompatible interpretation of land rights. His child- tenants simply do not accept the absolute nature of his ownership. Historically speaking, the Irish view of the land was not easily adjusted to accept economically rationalist views. Many tenant farmers still operated the Rundale system of agriculture. Because Rundale farming was an apparently chaotic system which involved common use of uncultivated land it appeared a challenge, both to absolute versions of property and to capitalist efficiency, and was considered unacceptable (Bull 14). While it may be going too far to suggest that in the communal sharing of the garden by the children in ‘The Selfish Giant’, Wilde is referencing the Rundale system, it seems perfectly logical that a writer committed in political ways to a more equitable attitude to property, as evidenced by ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, should be critical of absolute ownership as expressed by the Giant and more sympathetic to the fluid ownership found in Rundale and practised by tenant farmers in the West. His image of an Eden before the appearance of the prohibitive landlord Giant reflects that projected in some of the more utopian dreams of nationalist commentators on the land system in Ireland before the Conquest: It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. ‘How happy we are here!’ they cried to each other (201). That many Irish tenant farmers continued to operate the Rundale system well into the late nineteenth century is indicative of the difference between landlord and tenant views of Irish land in general. What Philip Bull has called the ‘indigenous model’ (11) of landlord-tenant relationships imaged the landlords as representatives of an illegitimate force which had stolen the land through conquest, believed the tenant to be the rightful owner and occupier of the land, but which was willing to tolerate the interloper-landlord on a pragmatic basis as long as that landlord made himself as little trouble as possible (by being a good paternalist, generous, easy-going, affable). For the tenants, their landlords were usurpers who had, at best, to be endured (ibid 9–10). Although siege mentality is normally a condition ascribed to Ulster Unionists, a paranoid obsession with proprietorial notions of state and nation was pervasive in late nineteenth century British politics, especially when focused on Ireland, a paranoia clearly visible in the Giant’s construction of a ‘high wall’ all round his garden, indicative of his fear of the children. Of course, the gap between Giant and children is made even greater by the fact that the Giant has not come back to insist on the rights and duties of the paternalist system, but to impose the new capitalist version of the land as his absolute property, and his view of the tenant-children as instruments rather than representatives of tradition. Thus he can evict them if it suits him and will appeal to no system other than the fact that he is the rightful legal owner. The Giant is not even a bad paternalist, he has jettisoned the language of paternity for one of property. If Richard Lovell Edgeworth believed that applying the paternalist model to the Catholic tenant farmers by a present and counted landlord

68 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde would deflect any animosity the tenant might feel towards his landlord, and also make the land profitable for all concerned, the jettisoning of the paternalist model simply brings to the boil tensions always present in the Irish system. To those who formulated rational political economy in relation to the management of the land these theories had universal application. To Irish tenant farmers, however, who were expected to bear the brunt of this ideological change in land management, this was an alien English system, imposed on them by an increasingly unacceptable presence on the land, their so-called ‘landlords’ who were easily transformed into monsters in the imaginations of these tenant farmers (Bull 8). So, in the replacement of the paternalist with the capitalist-rationalist system the ethnic, religious and ultimately ideological divisions between landlords and tenants were exacerbated. Given these ideological (and perhaps even metaphysical) tensions between the land as viewed by landlords and tenants, there was always going to be a showdown at some historical point. From the economist’s point of view ‘good’ landlords were those who interfered in the way their tenants worked the land and made them conform to a capitalist version of how it should be done; ‘bad’ landlords were those who simply carried on with old paternalist system regardless. This is precisely the opposite of how the tenant world viewed the landlord. In The Irish Land (1869), the commentator George Campbell claimed that: Those who argue that there is no room for compromise, because the landlords having everything – that is, absolute and unconditional property in the soil – have no occasion for compromise, and the tenants having no rights have no basis or compromise, take the very narrowest and the most English-lawyer view of the question. It is hardly possible to approach the subject without first realising this – viz. that in Ireland a landlord is not a landlord, and a tenant is not a tenant – in the English sense … (quoted in Bull 50). Since tenants took the view that the landlords should never have even been in Ireland in the first place, their relationships with them were always going to be largely play- acting to an extent until a need for open revolt occurred. There was certainly plenty of theatricality when it came to obeisance to the landlord – hat tipping, your honouring, and such. Theodor Hoppen points out, however, that ‘daylight sycophants often became moonlight marauders’ (136). This is precisely the worry which motivates the Giant’s construction of the wall around his property, which is a comic attempt to keep himself safe as much as to protect his property: the school-attending children may not rebel during the day, but what will happen once night falls? As landlords and the Ascendancy class in general became alienated from the culture of their tenants (Connolly, ‘Ag Déanamh’), the tenuous tenant-loyalty became stretched. When the land system became an onerous one for the tenant farmers agrarian violence and the formation of rural secret societies increased and, once the paternalist landlord changed into a capitalist pain-in-the-neck, mass movements like the Land League arose to take care of business. The more the landlords were pressured to change the farming practices on their estates to make them efficient, and the more they pressured their tenants to accept these changes, the more the tenants began to compose strategies of defence and protection of the traditional rights. For this reason, the Giant, who has abolished all systems of paternalism which were protective of him and which kept the children fairly content, is now open to extreme

‘The Selfish Giant’ 69 danger. In his eviction of the children he may have laid down nothing but trouble for himself. The children are gathering outside his walls and perhaps talking sedition: The poor children now had nowhere to play. They tried hard to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside. ‘How happy we were there’, they said to each other (202). Notions of dispossession have had a strong role in Irish history and, by activating them, the Giant is simply laying the ground for trouble in his future. The children pacing the walls will, after all, eventually become impatient and determine ways to re- enter a place they consider rightfully theirs anyway. As Joep Leerssen speculates: the notion of ousted folk living at the fringes of society provides … an imaginative link between fairy fashions and the Ascendancy’s attitudes vis-à-vis the peasantry … the aboriginal Irish, having once wrested the land from the Tuatha Dé Danann, are in their turn being driven out, leaving trouble and strife behind in their passing (167). How long will it be before the children plan to scale the walls and launch an attack? We all know what happens to Giants in traditional fairy tales. Any reader of fairy tales like ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, or ‘The Skilful Huntsman’ (both by the Brothers Grimm), knows that they have their heads cut off. Marina Warner explains that traditionally in the fairy tale, ‘Ogres are fated to be outwitted by tricks played on them by heroes much smaller than themselves. They prey on children, but the pint-sized … or the small and cunning … challenges and defeats them’ (No Go the Bogeyman 312). In eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland, when tenant farmers became fed up with their landlord and the way he approached the land issue, they behaved in precisely the way children in fairy tales react to Giants and ogres: they committed violence upon them, although the difference between real life and the fairy tale was that such violence tended to be carried out by groups. These groups were often secretive and hermetic ones, such as the Whiteboys, the Peep O’ Day Boys, the Ribbonmen, the TerryAlts, the Defenders, but sometimes they were nationally-based organisations such as the Land League which led the agitation for tenant rights in the early 1880s. Criminality and Irish nationalism were firmly linked in the English mind by this time anyway. The Times articles on ‘Parnellism and Crime’ had already begun to appear as early as March 1887, just a year before the publication of The Happy Prince and other tales. These articles claimed that the leader of Irish nationalist opinion, Charles Stewart Parnell, was secretly wedded to violence as a means of succeeding in his political mission to get a Home Rule parliament for Ireland. Of course, whereas the secret societies all sought to police the moral economy and reinforce it when they believed it was breaking down, the Land League ultimately aimed at transforming land relations completely. The Land League had been long dissolved by the time Wilde came to write ‘The Selfish Giant’, having been disbanded by its leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1882 after William Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act, which effectively granted tenant farmers the famous three Fs (fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale). Parnell wished to

70 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde concentrate on the issue of Home Rule, the establishment of a parliament in Dublin to look after Irish affairs though within the British Empire. When Parnell switched his attention to the issue of Home Rule the land question itself did not disappear and the inspiration to write ‘The Selfish Giant’ may have come from another round of land agitation known as the ‘Plan of Campaign’, which was taking place in the late 1880s. In 1885 a fall in agricultural prices affected farmer livelihood dramatically and laid the basis for this new round of agrarian agitation. Since Parnell was relatively uninterested in organising another agrarian campaign, leadership of the Plan fell to some of Parnell’s Home Rule colleagues, including William O’ Brien, John Dillon and Timothy Harrington. The Plan of Campaign was first issued as a manifesto in the United Irishman in October 1886. It involved tenants on an estate working together, making a representation to the landlord that the rent was too high, offering to pay a fair rent and, if he refused to accept this, paying the rent to the trustees of the plan who would use it to provide housing for those tenants evicted by their landlords. Boycotting was used very powerfully throughout the duration of the Plan, the manifesto which launched the campaign declaring that ‘the farms thus unjustly evicted will be left severely alone, and everyone who aids the evictors shunned’ (Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine 182). In one sense the tenants were making an appeal to a paternalist system, in that they were asking that the landlord, as a ‘good father’, take into account the return his tenants were getting for their agricultural products when demanding rent. In many cases, the tenants met with a good rationalist response: the survival of the individual farmer was not the concern of the landlord, only the production of the agreed rent. Although evictions were not very high – about 1,400 at any one time (ibid 182) – they caught the interest of the public and were widely publicised. One of the important points about the Plan of Campaign was that, for a brief period, including that during which Wilde composed his tale, it allowed Charles Stewart Parnell to be eclipsed in the public mind as leader of the nationalist cause, an eclipse that Wilde would have seen as potentially disastrous given his hero-worship of Parnell. Indeed, Parnell’s refusal to involve himself in the movement may be reflected in the story by the Giant. Parnell, after all, was himself a very tall landlord often depicted in the British Press as a giant or an ogre fermenting peasant agitation (indeed, the adjective ‘tall’ seems to have invaded every contemporary description of Parnell’s appearance, see Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell 40–41, 57, 97–8, 121–22). Here Wilde may be giving him a coded warning that Parnell has not yet fully understood the mindset of the people he believes he is leading. Parnell was actually given the label of selfishness by many at the time, and in his obituary for Parnell in the Times in October 1891, Henry Labouchere noted that ‘a selfish man Parnell certainly was, but he was good-naturedly selfish. If anyone stood in his way, he would sacrifice him without a moment’s hesitation’ (Bew 10). Parnell’s aloofness, generated by the fact that he was a privileged member of Irish society, a position he shared with Wilde, also gave the impression of psychological distance not unlike a man with a thick and high wall around him. Numerous biographers have pondered his inscrutability and remarked how closed a personality he was. The self-portrait many critics have seen in the Selfish Giant is not negated by this point as Wilde too was a large and ungainly Protestant landlord who may be critiquing his

‘The Selfish Giant’ 71 own failure to fully understand the peasant-children he attempted to represent in his work. Wilde’s father had a small holding of thirteen acres of land around Lough Fee on a lease of 150 years (1853), as well as three acres of lake itself, along with ownership of four houses in Bray built in 1861. When Sir William died he left the land around Lough Fee, which had fourteen tenants, to his son Willie, although the rents were to be paid to Lady Wilde for the remainder of her life. Oscar was left the four houses in Bray and the fishing cottage of Illaunroe in County Mayo, all of which he rented out. Evictions by the landlords during the Plan of Campaign, and emotional distance by the nationalist landlord-leaders like Parnell and Wilde, may allow tension to build up as the tenant-children pace the outside walls of the Big House and contemplate ways of instituting real justice. The children only get back into the garden through a hole in the wall which has suddenly and suspiciously appeared. Neither those involved in the Land League not the Plan Campaign were averse to bursting their way through the walls of landlords who had the audacity to evict tenants in as presumptuous a fashion as the Giant has evicted the local children here. The run of bad seasons that inflict the Giant (landlord) mimics the run of bad seasons that prefigured and forced the Irish farmers into the violent actions in the West that established both the Land League and the Plan of Campaign, and in ‘The Selfish Giant’, it is only after this extended winter has plagued the land that the children break in to transform everything. In linking eviction to the failure of the seasons, Wilde may be invoking the memory of the kinds of evictions which had occurred during the Famine, when some landlords had taken advantage of the crisis to make their estates more economically viable than they had been previously, usually through evictions of the smaller farmers (children) and consolidation of farms. J.S. Donnelly’s analysis of the eviction figures has demonstrated that thousands of tenants were put out on to the road by their landlords (‘Landlords and Tenants’ 13–26), just as the Giant turns his children-tenants out on to the road where they cannot play: ‘The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it’ (202). Spiritual liberation is central to Wilde’s transformative politics, a transformation which would see those from the margins attain power and change the empire from within. At the heart of this story is the image of the Giant refusing to allow children (historically representative of colonial peoples), to play in ‘his’ garden, an attitude indicative of the paranoid obsession with property in late nineteenth-century British politics, especially when focused on Ireland. The Giant’s sojourn with a Cornish ogre, another regional landscape without any chance of self-rule, has not left him with a more magnanimous attitude to his property. Although legally justified the assertion of ownership by the Giant is destructive of both himself and the land he lays claim to. Although the children in ‘The Selfish Giant’ submit to the rule of English law (they spend most of the day in school), their play in the garden offers a counter-discourse to the regimented schoolyard. In a domesticated version of the Plan of Campaign, they wish to own the garden themselves. Such subversive thinking suited neither the Irish landlords or the respectable classes of England to whom property was a sacred concept. Transfer of ownership was not an option many had been eager to consider until the Land League forced the issue onto the political agenda, and such ideas about property transfer refused to go away and were resurrected by the Plan of Campaign and placed back on the political

72 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde agenda. Coercion was certainly one way to handle this new politics: one coercion bill after the other passed through the Houses of Parliament in an effort to deal with continued breaches of this sacred version of ownership, the notorious acts for the ‘protection of persons and property’ demonstrating the importance of the notion that an Englishman’s home is his castle and that if an Englishman should find his way to Ireland then the same rule applied. The Giant here lives, of course, in a castle, has walled it round, and has issued a general warning against anyone invading his land, acting almost as a representative of the knee-jerk reaction of the English parliament to threats from alternative versions of the state. However, while tough language was being thrown around, another discourse was emerging from within the heart of power as expressed through William Gladstone’s two Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, which legislated for transfer of ownership. With these acts Gladstone knew he was challenging versions of national and personal property that had been sacrosanct. Wilde’s story goes even further. Here the Giant decides to accept the tenant-children’s version of property and simply gives his property away: ‘“It is your garden now, little children”, said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall’ (206). In an act of radical generosity, the Giant simply renounces ownership of the land altogether and renders it to the child-like Irish. When Gladstone began his land reform he indirectly influenced the future development of Irish nationalism itself, a development with far-reaching consequences. It suddenly dawned on many that if it is right and proper that a tenant own the land he works, then surely the Irish people should control the country in which they lived. ‘The Selfish Giant’ suggests that through an act of impulsive magnanimity England should simply render to the Irish what belongs to the Irish already, for the mutual benefit of both. Isaac Butt, in his pamphlet Land Tenure in Ireland: A Plea for the Celtic Race (1866) had already argued that the landlord right to evict arbitrarily should be taken from him; Wilde pushes this notion in persuading his landlord to give up his lands to the Irish completely. Wilde’s refusal to have the Giant-landlord killed demonstrates that his politics had much in common with the social conservatism of other Irish Protestant nationalists like Charles Stewart Parnell, W.B. Yeats and Standish O’ Grady, all of whom wished to preserve the landlord class as a benevolent ruling order for the future. In The Crisis in Ireland (1882), O’Grady stated: ‘I most ardently desire the preservation of that class, noblest and best on Irish soil, to be, and to be felt and known to be, the highest moral element, the light, the ornament, and the conscience’ (49–50). O’Grady wanted the landlords to be tied to their feudal underlings by the bonds of patronage and benevolent love, but to lead these underlings to a mutually beneficial future. Likewise, as Paul Bew has pointed out, it was one of Charles Stewart Parnell’s ultimate political goals to find a way to reconcile the Protestant landlord class to which he belonged with the Catholic tenant class, primarily in order that Protestant aristocrats could take their rightful place as leaders of the Irish nation. The land friction needed to be solved as it was a roadblock to this. ‘The Selfish Giant’ suggests another way to solve this fractious division, the most insidious one in Irish history. The landlord must selflessly give away his land; for this he will be rewarded with a privileged position – after all, the Giant is not forced to vacate his castle after he relinquishes control of his estate to the tenant-children.

‘The Selfish Giant’ 73 The land itself is on the side of the tenants, and is prepared to rebel against the initial methodology employed by the Giant. There is a sense here that Nature herself will wreck a horrific vengeance on the capitalist landlord: Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and white birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still Winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost … (202–203). Behind the imagery of perpetual Winter that haunts these pages is the history of crop failure and climate disaster that had haunted nineteenth-century Ireland itself. It is certainly true that the effects of this natural disaster were felt most keenly by the native tenant farmers (in the shape of bodies starved and bodies missing through emigration), but history needs to record that the end of the landlord class came about because of the Famine also, both by the bankruptcy that was inflicted on the more incompetent of them, but also the turning of the political and economic tide against them (Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Nineteenth-Century Ireland passim). If the Giant will continue to enforce his arbitrary laws of property demarcation, then Nature will engage in a moral demonstration against such putative actions. What the interloping landlord will run is a fallen landscape whose fertility is withheld as a prefiguring of a post-apocalyptic earth. The apocalypse will be bloody, of course, and what prevents the spilling of blood here, what prevents the children doing what children in a fairy-tale usually do – cutting off the Giant’s head – is the intervention of Christ. The Giant is saved from death by the sudden appearance of Christ himself in his Garden. It is only the vision of the boy unable to climb the tree that prevents the Giant rushing out to dispatch those who have invaded. The vision of the Christ-child causes an instant conversion: ‘“I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground for ever and ever”’ (205). Violence against the Giant is not the only thing that has been prevented. Gladstone had himself used the metaphor of the axe and the tree when he laid out his political vision of Ireland. The tree was ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, to which anachronistic institution he proposed bringing an axe to bear. Ireland’s problems were ‘the many branches of one trunk, and that trunk is the tree of what is called the Protestant Ascendancy’ (quoted in Boyce 154). It is this depopulation of the metaphorical Garden, the complete destruction of the Protestant Ascendancy, which is avoided. The trees do not require cutting down, but simply conversion. When all the trees in the Giant’s garden contain a child Winter transforms into Spring: ‘The trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children’s heads’ (204–205). Wilde exploits Gladstone’s metaphor to suggest how the conversion of Protestant Ireland should come about. The coming of Christ is linked to the coming of Spring: Jesus is sublimated into the rhythms of nature and the run of the seasons. In order to avoid his own destruction, the

74 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Giant-landlord must embrace wholeheartedly the spiritual values of the people he is to lead (folk-Catholicism). The Giant must convert to the natural religion of his children-tenants for the story to find its resolution. This explains the intense focus on both the rhythms of nature and the Christ child at the centre of the story, and also why the Giant is covered with white blossoms when he is discovered dead at the conclusion: ‘when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms’ (208). The Giant has been incorporated into Nature here. Wilde would have experienced such an explicit linking of Christian theology to the rhythms of Nature in the rituals of folk-Catholicism in Mayo. The English state understood how crucial Catholicism was to the sense of righteousness felt by the agitating tenants and tried to circumscribe that righteousness during the Plan of Campaign by involving the Catholic Church on its side. The government appealed directly to the Vatican to get the Plan denounced at the highest levels of the Church. After an investigation by a Monsignor Persico, a Vatican emissary, in 1887, Leo XIII issued a ‘rescript’ in 1888 both condemning the Plan and boycotting itself as a general strategy. However, in appealing to the full rigours of institutional Catholicism, the English state had failed to realise that authority for most in Ireland still resided at a local and ritual level in the rites of the folk rather than the ecclesiastical church and in the local priest rather than a remote Vatican prelate. Despite this warning from the Vatican many Irish Catholic priests continued to be involved in the Plan, many indeed suggesting that the issue was outside the jurisdiction of the Pope (see Geary; Larkin, Plan of Campaign). If the Church’s official line was opposition to tenant activism, unofficially the Catholic response was more complex, especially if folk-Catholicism is included in our analysis. ‘The Selfish Giant’ assures the reader that political and military conflict can be averted, and violence diverted into another more symbolic language, but only through the submission of the Protestant Ascendancy to an imaginative transformation as embodied in the mythic rites of folk-Catholicism. Folk-Catholicism imaginatively drew together the ancient reverence for the earth with a transcendent desire for God. This explains the centrality of the land to ‘The Selfish Giant’. Mircea Eliade argues that the Earth is ‘the foundation of every expression of existence’ and is basic to many great religious beliefs and rituals (Patterns 242, 240). Mythically speaking, it is not surprising to find that Wilde links childhood and Nature so closely in his tale since the earth was always particularly associated with children and was conceived as ‘the protectress of children … That is why we so often find “earth cradles”: tiny babies were put to sleep or rest in ditches, in direct contact with the earth …’ (ibid 249). Likewise, trees were basic to both primitive religion and Irish folk- Catholicism. The tree was often seen as the symbol of life itself, the fount of immortality and also the centre of the world, and ‘the inexhaustible source of cosmic fertility’ (ibid 280), which would explain why keeping children out of the tree’s branches interrupts the fertility of life itself. In her poem ‘The Mystic Tree’, Lady Wilde configured the tree as the bridge between earth and heaven, man and the divine:

‘The Selfish Giant’ 75 Round the giant stem, all rugged, rude, and mossy, Roses twine, And the young flowers veil it with their glossy Hues divine. The leaves rustle thickly, many-formed, So green and bright; The branches spread out broadly to be warmed In Heaven’s light. Now curve they down, all drooping, to the meadows And cool springs; Now upwards on the blue air fling their shadows, Like seraphs wings (145). The Garden of Eden is, of course, the prototype of the utopian Garden in ‘The Selfish Giant’. By eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge Adam and Eve, God’s children, were exiled from the Garden by their angry Father, who is evoked in this story as the Giant. God ejected Adam from the Garden to prevent him from eating the fruit of the Tree of Life which would allow him to remain young forever; here it is the God-Giant who grows old while the children remain children, never growing up. In ‘The Selfish Giant’ there is a heterodox suggestion that in banishing His children from the Garden God punished Himself and the earth turned against Him, and that only through the sacrifice of Christ could He too be saved and allowed to once again enter Paradise. God, in this myth, is both the provider of the Garden and also the cause of banishment – he is God and Satan, Father and serpent in one. This pattern of banishment, immortality and monstrosity (serpent, Giant) is very common and can be found in the mythology of Egypt and the Babylonians as well as in Genesis and links ‘The Selfish Giant’ with great mythical traditions as well as local variations found in Ireland. The combat with the serpent-monster-God-Giant is a rite of initiation which must be gone through if the child-man is to prove himself worthy of immortality. Adam, of course, lost the battle; Christ, however, won, not through killing the Giant but through offering himself to death on the Cross, which is a transmuted Tree of Life. Since the Tree of Life is the basic example of all vegetative redemptive paths, it is not surprising that the Cross on which the Saviour of the world was hung was seen as made from the bark of the Tree of Life. As Eliade points out, Christian iconography often depicted the Cross as the Tree of Life so that ‘the blood of Christ, crucified at the centre of the Earth, on the very spot where Adam was created and buried, falls upon “the skull of Adam”, and this, redeeming him from his sin, baptizes the father of mankind’ (293).1 Just as God Himself places His Son Jesus on the Tree to be horrifically crucified, so the Giant lifts the child-Jesus into his Tree of Life/Cross on which He is crucified for the salvation of the world: ‘Nay! ... but these are the wounds of Love’ (208). 1 The legends about the Tree of Life becoming the basis for the wood of the Cross can be found in the apocryphal Apocalypse of Moses and Gospel of Nicodemus and the Life of Adam and Eve.

76 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde The Christian imagery here is profoundly influenced by the folk patterns found by Wilde in the West of Ireland. That the seasons themselves change and the trees weaken and die along with the other flora of the Garden is a sure indication of this. Folk rituals were often directed at ensuring that trees and other vegetation would reappear after the long Winter of death in the Spring awakening and such rituals linked the survival of the human community with the regeneration of vegetation, a belief which was surely reinforced after the devastation of the Famine which proved the interdependency of humans and vegetation. Eliade points out that ‘A great many rituals of vegetation imply the idea that the whole of mankind is regenerated by an active participation in the resurrection of the plant world’ (309–10). These rituals were particularly evident in the rites of May held throughout the British Isles, and were recorded by both Lady Wilde and Sir William in their studies, in which the regeneration of plant life, the regeneration of human existence and the regeneration of the agricultural year all take place together. Of course, the close link between sexuality, vegetation and regeneration would also explain the sexual potency of ‘The Selfish Giant’. Critical focus on the story has, up to now, argued that the sexual imagery in the narrative is due to Wilde’s homosexuality; however, sexuality and fertility were inherent in the vegetation rituals referenced. Human and vegetable fertility went hand in hand in rural Ireland and in traditional religion; damage to one meant problems in the other. So, for example, it was not uncommon in traditional agricultural-based communities for couples to be encouraged to make love in the newly blossoming field to encourage the harvest. In ‘The Selfish Giant’, the children gain immortality by dedicating themselves to the communion of humans and vegetation; the Giant endangers himself by excluding children from his own personal Eden. However, by the end the Giant too has become part of the cycle of vegetation rites that, in the West of Ireland, were intimately linked to, not opposed to, the Christian calendar. As Eliade stresses, such rituals express the notion that ‘the plant world embodies (or signifies, or shares in) the reality of which life is made, which creates untiringly, which is ever reborn in an innumerable variety of forms, and is never worn out’ (Patterns 354). The Giant, the ‘hero’ of this story, is himself ‘turned into’ a plant at the end when he is found covered by blossoms as vegetation reclaims him. The power of these rituals can be seen in the sheer amount of customs and traditions associated with May in Ireland, especially the custom of the May Baby. Flowers, plants, herbs, all played a part in May rituals and they were all linked to the struggle for survival and fertility. The parades of the ‘May Baby’, as E. Estyn Evans has written, ‘link the festival with the fertility of the family as well as the fields’ (273). The community dressed a woman up with flowers and ribbons and, as the ‘May Baby’, she was paraded into the village where she was thought to promote fruitfulness, especially by women who had failed to give birth at this point. In Ireland the trees which were particularly associated with these traditions were small trees and shrubs such as the rowan, elderberry and whitethorn. Evans suggests that: these plants first became common in the prehistoric landscape as weeds of cultivation following forest clearance by early cultivators. Thus they would have become symbols of

‘The Selfish Giant’ 77 the farming year, their white blossoms a sign of spring and the end of killing frosts, their red berries a token of the fulfilment of harvest and the promise of new life (297). White blossoms fill the air at the end of ‘The Selfish Giant’ and demonstrate the connection between Wilde’s fairy tale imagination and the imagination of the people he knew in the West of Ireland. Again and again in their studies, Wilde’s parents return to these fertility rites and beliefs, and chart the imaginative union between men, women and Nature in Irish custom. Lady Wilde was very aware of the centrality of trees and ritual in folklore of the west, and noted that ‘the oldest worship of the world was of the sun and moon, of trees, wells, and the serpent which gave wisdom. Trees were the symbol of knowledge, and the dance around the May bush is part of the ancient ophite ritual’ (Ancient Legends 103). In this observation she was merely supporting the claims of her husband who protested: Do not our spirits attune with the seasons – springing and expanding with the early autumn, but folding up within us as the bleak November blast, cold and cheerless, burst upon us? Does not the heart gush, the eye brighten, the step become elastic, as we inhale the exhilarating spring breeze in our early country excursions; and again become languid as we seek the summer shade, or bask in the calm repose of autumn? (32). Sir William believed that the Irish were merely continuing a tradition of Nature worship that could be found all over the ancient world and but only kept alive in remote outposts of the prehistoric imagination like Connaught. He felt certain that many Irish customs were directly related to ‘the Roman Florialia, or feast of Flora, the goddess of fruits and flowers, which was celebrated of old with great festivity’ (36). This celebration of natural and mythic fertility is continued in the fact that the 12 trees in the story are peach trees, since in Roman mythology the peach was the fruit of Venus and some mystical scientists like Albertus Magnus thought that peaches were aphrodisiacs. These mythical associations indicate a potential solution to the political problems raised by the narrative. The debate over ownership of the Giant’s Castle can be dissolved once a ritual of self-sacrifice has occurred, not the murders in the Phoenix Park, nor the decapitation of the landlord, but a spiritual sacrifice equivalent to that performed by Jesus on the Cross and to those commemorated in the vegetative rituals of folk-Catholicism in the West of Ireland. The injustice and horror of the crucifixion is well caught in the reaction of the Giant on seeing the injured child: ‘And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, “Who hath dared to wound thee?” for on the palms of the child’s hand were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet’ (208). Of course, the horror is deepened when one believes that this is not simply the grisly execution of a criminal but in fact God Incarnate (see Miles 3), and the crucifixion relativises all claims of the Giant and his real-life landlord counterparts to absolute property ownership even in the face of mass starvation and death. The image of the crucified victor was a powerful motivator of those who would eventually come to plan the Easter Rising of 1916, like Patrick Pearse who was clearly influenced by ‘The Selfish Giant’. This is because it implies that those who are currently holding the reins of power may yet be

78 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde overthrown, just as ‘one of the many implications of [the resurrection] … has been that in the West no regime can declare itself to be above review’ (Miles 4). That at the end the Giant is found covered with the white blossoms of the trees suggests his death incorporates him, and the English nation he represents, back into a scheme of creation amenable to a peaceful Ireland. It is small wonder that Wilde himself was provoked to tears by this story as it represents the reconciliation of Irish Catholicism to the Ascendancy he himself emerged from and also suggests the basis of a propitious relationship with England. By playing on notions of dispossession, Wilde can create a utopia where all is eventually well: ‘And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, “You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise”’ (208). Ironically, Wilde himself was not so inclined towards such magnanimous gestures as the Selfish Giant: after the death of his father Wilde became a landlord, one who resorted to frequent complaints about the failure of his tenants to cough up their rents and one who never considered releasing himself from the responsibilities of property by simply giving up his ‘rights’. If Wilde’s fairy-tale solution to the Irish Question appears either simplistic or utopian, it must be remembered that the English philosopher John Stuart Mill had himself proposed just such an account as a means of finding an answer to the difficulties between the two countries. In looking at Irish affairs in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill warned that ‘it is very shallow, even in pure economics, to take no account of the influence of imagination’, and suggested that ‘there is a virtue in “for ever” beyond the longest term of years; even if the term is long enough to include children’ – appealing to the principle of perpetuity in tenant occupancy of land, a solution that most English commentators and politicians were reluctant to put into effect (202). Wilde’s fairy tale unites mythical, religious and political energies to propose the possibility of a ‘happy ever after’ ending to generations of conflict. ‘The Selfish Giant’ represents a triumph of hope as well as story. Undercutting colonial versions of the land in favour of redemptive fertility rituals and folk-Catholic belief systems should have had a profound impact on relationships between Ireland and England as far as Wilde was concerned. He had inherited a conviction from his parents that England would never treat Ireland with any amount of fairness, a conviction shaped during the worst disaster faced within the British Isles in the nineteenth century: the Famine. In ‘The Devoted Friend’ he turned his destructive scrutiny on that moment.

Chapter Four ‘The Devoted Friend’ This has not been the easiest story in The Happy Prince and other tales to interpret. Indeed, of all the tales in the two collections this is the one which has been the least illuminated by the critical commentary that does exist. The main problem with most analyses of the narrative lies in the critical response to the framing story of the Water-rat, the Green Linnet and the Duck and the reactions of these characters to the story of Hans and the Miller. When the Water-rat objects to the Green Linnet’s lack of appreciation for the Miller’s actions he is told, ‘I am afraid you don’t quite see the moral of the story’. This causes a severe retort: ‘The what?’ screamed the Water-rat. ‘The moral.’ ‘Do you mean to say that the story has a moral?’ ‘Certainly’, said the Linnet. ‘Well, really’, said the Water-rat, in a very angry manner, ‘I think you should have told me that before you began. If you had done so, I certainly would not have listened to you; in fact, I should have said “Pooh”, like the critic. However, I can say it now’; so he shouted out ‘Pooh’ at the top of his voice, gave a whisk with his tail, and went back into his hole. … ‘I am rather afraid that I have annoyed him.’ Answered the Linnet. ‘The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral.’ ‘Ah! that is always a very dangerous thing to do’, said the Duck. And I quite agree with her (230–31). The critical interpretation of this final scene has been, quite frankly, baffling. Those who have remarked upon it appear to feel that the reaction of the Water-rat was both just and entirely the point (indeed, perhaps, the ‘moral’) of the story. Ian Small, in his notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Wilde’s Complete Short Fiction glosses this part of the story with the comment that ‘the Victorian preoccupation with the moral purpose of literature was a constant butt of Wilde’s humour’ (269), and references the famous line from the ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’ (167). Wilde, the Water-rat and the Speaker of Dorian Gray’s ‘Preface’ all merge into one in such a gloss. Rodney Shewan has gone even further than this. He argues that of all the stories in the two collections, the only one with a moral is ‘The Devoted Friend’, ‘which admonishes its readers’ never to tell a story with a moral’ (38). He believes that the Water-rat ‘reinforces the ambiguity of the story’s title, and proves the folly of anyone taking seriously the genre of the “story with a moral”’ (47). Both these responses seem to me to be a strange reversal of the actual purpose of the tale and they depend entirely, of course, on a priori interpretations of Wilde’s other work being invoked for support. Indeed, the reaction to this tale may be symptomatic

80 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde of the degree to which many critics have taken to heart the contemporary version of Wilde as the amoral aesthete – which is most surprising from Ian Small who has worked hard in many different places to counter the prevailing ‘mythology’ of Wilde (see Recent Research). In this event critics appear to be in the strange position of supporting the Water-rat’s reaction to the story of Hans and the Miller, of shouting ‘Pooh’ authoritatively but completely fatuously. The narrator’s intervention (and, I think it is safe to say, Wilde’s intervention), warns the reader that it is ‘dangerous’ to tell stories with morals but surely does not counsel against it for that reason. After all, ‘dangerous’ was a description often applied to Wilde’s works by the Victorian press and if morals are dangerous perhaps we should not be surprised to find that Wilde frequently resorts to them in his fiction. Indeed, the Linnet has adopted the mode of instruction Wilde used consistently throughout his writing career: allegory. His famous response to those who attacked Dorian Gray for its immorality was to point out that everyone sees their own sins in Dorian’s actions thus implying, like the Linnet, that the story was ‘applicable’ to its readers if they chose to see it in a proper manner. What we find in Wilde is not the Evangelical preaching he would have observed in his clerical uncles, but a more subtle form of moral instruction which relies on the effect of patterns and images on the readers rather than straight- forward didacticism. The satire of ‘The Devoted Friend’ is directed against those, like the Water- rat, who cannot stomach their faults being pointed out to them in literature, but also against the critical opinion that moral tales are passé or not quite the thing for an avant-garde artist like Wilde. Wilde’s difficulty with the Puritan obsession with stories with morals was always that the morals Puritans wished to promote were not those he agreed with and that the methodology employed in the literature approved by the Victorian moral majority was somewhat lacking in artistic subtlety. The morals middle class writers built their work upon were generally reinforcements of their own cultural hegemony and were directed against the marginalised and the poor. Trygve Tholfsen notes that ‘woven into’ Victorian ‘cultural patterns were roles derived from a social structure in which the middle-class were dominant’ (156), and articulations of this culture, including literature, tended to support this dominance. It is precisely to undermine such a safe and socially conservative morality that Wilde co-opts the forms used to diffuse ‘consensus values’ (such as fairy tales) and has written a story with a moral, a moral which highlights the discrepancy between the bourgeois rhetoric of friendship and philanthropy and the actual practice of it by those same rhetoricians. Telling a ‘moral tale’ which destabilises the roles of the traditional cultural, moral and social gatekeepers could indeed be ‘dangerous’, though this would also be precisely the reason someone like Wilde would do it. Those targeted by such morality would react like the Water-rat and cry ‘foul’, but the message would have been released into the marketplace of ideas all the same. The interpretation I will put forward in this chapter is precisely in opposition to the claims of some critics that this tale is an attack on moral tales: instead, I see it as a refusal to accept the moral terms through which bourgeois society operates and an assertion that rhetoric and action should match each other. In other words, it is precisely a story with a very dangerous moral and one which insists on putting itself forward despite the reaction it feels certain it will evoke. The clear moral purpose of

‘The Devoted Friend’ 81 ‘The Devoted Friend’ has not been ignored by all critics. Gary Schmidgall has noted the power of Wilde’s attack on the Miller, who ‘by sheer force of rhetoric, manages to disguise total selfishness as altruism and generosity – a characteristic Oscarian stab at philanthropists’ (150). Philanthropy as a philosophical position is highlighted as a tendency to postpone, defer, or out-flank the demands of the Christian call to action against poverty and social injustice; there is nothing wrong with wanting to do good for others but talking about loving your neighbour is not a substitute for helping him when he is starving to death. People like Hans are dying while egoists like the Miller are being praised for their altruism. Philip Cohen, too, notes the relatively simple message behind the story: ‘the ostensible moral is that one should live according to the rule of friendship, or Christian sacrificial love, rather than selfishness’, though he suggests that a rather more complex meaning emerges at the end of the tale, that ‘noble ideals do not correspond to the facts of experience’ (92). This reading suggests that Hans earned the punishment dished out to him by the Miller. Hans has come in for a great deal of criticism from commentators who are uncomfortable with his naive belief in the Miller’s ultimate benignity. Cohen calls him ‘stupid’ and ‘thoroughly deserving of his fate’ (92), while Shewan opines that his devotion to the Miller is clearly ‘stupid and pointless’ (47). Both the main characters in the Green Linnet’s tale – the horrifically selfish Miller and the bizarrely compliant and almost masochistic Hans – are the target of the story’s criticism. This seems to me to be exactly right. Little Hans deserves our sympathy, but only to a limited degree, and a large part of the power of the story is its anger at his ridiculous passivity as well as hatred for the Miller. The Green Linnet wishes to alert the Water-rat to the violence and ignorance coded into the version of friendship he has been spouting up and down the river, but the Linnet also wants to remind the young readers of the tale that meek submission to such grown-up abuse and failure to recognise it for what it is, is as unacceptable as the abuse itself. Blame for what happened to Hans ultimately lies at the door of the Miller, but Hans was also culpable in his inability to appreciate the vacuum at the heart of the Miller’s devotion to friendship. However, there is more to this attack on passivity and cruelty than an attempt to get Victorian children to carefully scrutinise the rhetoric of their parents and social betters. The story is, after all, related by the Green Linnet and as Owen Dudley Edwards has pointed out, ‘Green Linnet’ was a code name for both Daniel O’Connell, the Irish campaigner for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Act of Union in the early nineteenth-century and Michael Davitt, one of the leaders of the Irish Land League in the 1880s, an organisation which campaigned for tenants’ rights (‘Impressions’60). A figure bearing the allegorical name of great leaders of nationalist Ireland tells a story of the betrayal and abuse of a weak and passive worker of the land by his powerful ‘neighbour’, abuse which eventually results in both starvation and death. The allegorical nature of the story is highlighted by the Green Linnet very early in the narrative when he tells the Water-rat that while the story of the Devoted Friend is not ‘about’ him, ‘it is applicable’ to him (213). Rarely has the issue of allegory been so loudly signposted. That animals should tell an allegorical story about Ireland seems appropriate also. After all, nationalist Ireland was used to being depicted in the English press as animalistic and bestial, especially after the

82 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde ideas behind Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) began to filter to the wider public. L.P. Curtis has traced the use of bestial and simian imagery to describe Irish nationalist activity in the nineteenth century. For example, in a cartoon in Puck in November 1880, a dancing Irishman holding a knife and surrounded by opened barrels and boxes of food, as well as an empty bottle of ‘drugs’, is depicted with the features of an orangutan and chimpanzee (Apes and Angels 66–7). Indeed, Wilde himself had been depicted as a typical Irish ape in, for example, Harper’s Weekly in January 1882 as ‘The Aesthetic Monkey’ and in the Washington Post as the ‘Wilde Man of Borneo’ (for some astute comments on these images, see Marez 266–74). In the story of Irish colonisation, the Irish were always animals being tamed by English civilisation so that political history had become simply a version of the typical children’s story which had always involved a paradigm of humans telling stories about animals in which animals are anthropomorphised in a very casual way. Wilde repudiated this model. Philip Cohen notes that in ‘The Devoted Friend’, Wilde perversely reverses this model and has ‘animals imparting moral lessons through a tale in which all of the characters are human beings’ (92). Wilde’s ironic reversal makes an incisive political point. After all, if the English are fond of telling themselves stories about the Irish as brutish and primitive animals, here ‘Irish’ animals will tell a tale in which the English adult behaves in a thoroughly bestial fashion. Children’s literature has long been capable of resisting trends found in the ‘adult’ world, and the persistence of talking and thinking animals is one example of this tendency. Beast fables such as those found in the fables of Æsop, Jean de La Fontaine, and even Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, had fallen into some disrepute following the Enlightenment (Sales, Fairy Tales 78–81), especially after the mechanistic universe of the scientific and industrial revolutions began to gain an intellectual foothold. Most considered animals simply as instruments to be used by human beings and even robotic at times. In his important history of the relations between Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas points out that the philosopher René Descartes believed that animals were simply machines, and other thinkers went so far as to declare that animals were incapable of pain: the cry of a beaten dog was no more evidence of the brute’s suffering than the was the sound of an organ proof that the instrument felt pain when struck. Animal howls and writhings were merely external reflexes, unconnected with any inner sensation (33). Since animals had such a bad reputation in intellectual circles depicting natives as just slightly more sophisticated versions of irrational beasts made colonisation much easier to defend. However, in children’s literature evidence of an older view persisted and animals continued to be considered worthy of comparison with humans. Indeed, since children themselves were often considered little more than human-shaped animals it is no surprise that an intrinsic sympathy between the two should have developed. The Irish, as I have already pointed out, had to suffer the colonial indignity of being compared to both children and animals and here, as so often in his fairy tales, Wilde uses this association and turns it to his advantage. This is yet another reason why a body of literature directed towards children was

‘The Devoted Friend’ 83 so attractive to him. As Roger Sales has pointed out, fairy tales in which the talking animal appeared: understands adults as people who can see only “the light of common day”, and in many stories we find a relation between a child and an animal that adults cannot understand, or have, or wish to have, because custom lies on them with a weight (99). In Wilde, children, animals and the Irish, finally talk back to the English adults who have usurped the power of representation. While it is true that the fact that the Irish were often figured as animalistic in English discourse does not really demonstrate conclusively that Wilde’s use of talking animals is a reference to Ireland, the colonial context does, I think, help to explain why Wilde was attracted to traditions which ‘empowered’figures usually marginalised in official-speak (such as children, animals, immigrants). I am not proposing here some quasi-scientific equation (animals=Irish) but rather trying to fill in a more complicated picture of Wilde’s interests and origins that helps to explain why he wrote what he wrote. Owen Dudley Edwards argues that the story told by the Green Linnet (who we can now see as an allegory of Irish nationalism), about Hans and the Miller, is concerned with the kind of political economic logic applied to the starving poor during the Great Irish Famine (‘Impressions’ 60). The Miller is determined to hold back the supply of food to the needy Hans because it would induce both idleness and envy. ‘When people are in trouble’, the Miller tells his wife, ‘they should be left alone and not bothered by visitors’ (215) and he later warns Hans that ‘idleness is a great sin’ and a great temptation (224). To earn the broken wheelbarrow the Miller reluctantly gives him, Hans must work himself literally to death. Such bizarre applications of the logic of lassiez faire were not unknown to those who had lived through nineteenth-century Irish history. Behind much of the reluctance of English governments to supply more food to the starving Irish during the Great Famine was the conviction that charity created a multitude of sins. Prime Minister Lord John Russell complained that: the great difficulty … respecting Ireland is one which … lies deep in the breasts of the British people. It is this – we have granted, lent, subscribed, worked, visited, clothed the Irish; millions of pounds worth of money, years of debate, etc. – the only return is calumny and rebellion – let us not grant, clothe etc. etc. any more and see what they will do (quoted in Kinealy, Death-Dealing 71). Russell’s point is that English generosity had stifled Irish industry and that perhaps indulgence had been mistaken for friendship by the English people. What Russell wanted to implement was a political version of ‘tough love’: stop feeding the starving in order to make the starving feed themselves. After all, as the Miller points out, ‘Flour is one thing, and friendship is another’ (216). To simply provide food without demanding something in return was to encourage indolence: ‘Upon my word,’ said the Miller, ‘you are very lazy. Really, considering that I am going to give you my wheelbarrow, I think you might work harder … I certainly don’t like any of my friends to be idle or sluggish. You must not mind my speaking quite plainly to you. Of course, I should not dream of doing so if I were not your friend’ (223–4).

84 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde In his speech to the House of Commons in February 1847 Robert Peel used the same language of friendship and generosity as the Miller when he argued: ‘Let us be liberal – let us be just to Ireland; but depend on it that we shall be incumbering that country and paralysing her exertions, if we teach her to rely too much on Government assistance’ (quoted in Gray 161). This almost matches the Miller’s fear that Hans will become dependent upon him should he provide him with too much assistance. He tells his wife and son that ‘if Hans came here, he might ask me to let him have some flour on credit, and that I could not do’ (216). As Peter Gray points out, of course, ‘pure laissez-faire was never the classical prescription for Ireland’ (10), and the government did interfere in the marketplace at many times throughout the nineteenth century, though usually in the most unhelpful ways. For example, a system of public work schemes was put in place when the state established a Board of Works in 1831 to deal with the provision and administration of such schemes when necessary and these schemes were most active during the Famine itself. Following the ideas articulated by the likes of Russell, the state decided that relief should be dependent on work. However, when ‘gifts’ of grain and other foodstuffs were given to Irishmen and women in the provision of relief through public works the results were grotesque. Relief works were instituted by the government of Robert Peel in 1845 and were stopped and started a number of times during the next two years. The work was under-paid so as to discourage the poor from availing of it and persuade them to use their own industry to get themselves out of the mess their dependence on the potato had left them in. For those who did some work under these schemes, the conditions were appalling. Twelve hour days, six days a week, starting at 6am. As the historian Christine Kinealy argues: There were a number of accusations that the workforce was lazy but this may have been the result of an inadequate and innutritious diet. Without their usual potato diet … workers developed a number of dietary-deficiency diseases including scurvy, marasmus (which made even children appear old and wizened) … (Death-Dealing 74–5). There is something obscene in describing overworked, underpaid, disease-ridden, starving men as lazy. In 1844 Nassau Senior also blamed Irish indolence for much of the difficulty Ireland faced, though he did temper this judgement with the acceptance that much of the apparent laziness of the Irish agricultural worker was due to the fact that as a tenant farmer he was usually working for someone else and thus, ‘working for a distant object … puts off to next year what need not necessarily be done this year’ (quoted in Gray 41). The same could be said of Little Hans who never gets around to performing the necessary tasks on his own garden as he is too busy working for the Miller’s needs. Wilde reproduces the political accusation that the starving are lazy in the Miller who, after forcing Hans to work for him from morning till night, is surprised to find him less than enthusiastic about getting out of bed for another day of labour: ‘you are very lazy. Really, considering that I am going to give you my wheelbarrow, I think you might work harder’ (223–4). The Miller is going to pay Hans for his work with a wheelbarrow, but the barrow never arrives; similarly the government promised to pay its public workers for their labour on relief schemes, but many reported that the money never came. As Kinealy notes, ‘payments for the works were also frequently

‘The Devoted Friend’ 85 delayed’ (Death-Dealing 73) and one Quaker in Mayo in 1847 reported coming across a band of ‘walking skeletons’ on a public work scheme who had not been paid for three weeks and were now on the verge of death. What amazed him was the fact that despite this mistreatment they were perfectly passive and disinclined to rise up in anger against their employer-saviours (ibid 74). Like Hans, they simply accepted their lot and got on with the work of the day. The mortality rate for those involved in public relief schemes was very high. The workers complained of pains in their joints and stomach cramps and many were in fact diagnosed with dysentery (Kinealy, Great Irish Famine 41). Likewise, the nature of the tasks assigned to Hans are particularly difficult given his physical condition: [Hans] trudged off with the big sack on his shoulders. It was a very hot day, and the road was terribly dusty, and before Hans had reached the sixth milestone he was so tired that he had to sit down and rest. However, he went on bravely, and at last he reached the market (223). These tasks are meant to be onerous given the Miller’s particular ideological leanings. Hans must learn how hard it is necessary to work to deserve the barrow the Miller has promised him. Indeed, the Miller is always reminding him how much more value the barrow has in comparison to the work Hans provides: ‘Of course, the wheelbarrow is worth far more than the plank, but true friendship never notices things like that’ (220–21). Public relief schemes were supposed to be particularly tiring, tedious and time-consuming so as to discourage any dependence by the Irish peasant on the state for the money provided (Kinealy, Great Irish Famine 39). Ironically, given the difficulty of the jobs required by the relief schemes, many still seemed to think that English policy was making the Irish even lazier than before. The Times in March 1847 claimed that government help had made the Irish people into a gang of layabouts: ‘Deep, indeed, has the canker eaten; not into the core of a precarious and suspected root – but into the very hearts of the people, corrupting them with a fatal lethargy’ (quoted in Gray 260). The relationship between the Miller and Hans, like that between England and Ireland, was typically described in terms of a ‘devoted friendship’, but it was really an abusive relationship where one party exploited the other. The most disturbing thing about his relationship with Hans is not actually the extent to which the Miller will go in order to squeeze every last ounce of work out of the starving flower-grower, but rather the eagerness with which Hans takes to being exploited, mimicking the slaves Wilde mentions in ‘The Soul of Man’ who preferred slavery to freedom because they had nice masters. Wilde claims that the Abolitionists were responsible for the destruction of slavery in America, and ‘from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the salves found themselves free … many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things’ (Collins’ Complete Works 1177). It may be going too far to say that Hans is practically in love with his abuser, but his dedication to his slave- owner is deeply unsettling: Little Hans was very much distressed at times, as he was afraid his flowers would think that he had forgotten them, but he consoled himself by the reflection that the Miller was

86 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde his best friend. “Besides”, he used to say, “he is going to give me his wheelbarrow, and that is an act of pure generosity” (226–7). The worst kind of exploiter is one who, like the Miller, has somehow gotten hold of a discourse of love and devotion, a discourse which distracts the attention of the exploited slave with promises of friendship with the abuser. Indeed, Philip Cohen points out that ‘the noble ideal’ of friendship ‘seems to exist in the story as a means by which the rich conspire to exploit the poor’ (92). Likewise, nineteenth-century imperialism also depended heavily on a rhetoric of friendship and love in order to justify exploitation. The feminisation of the colonised Irishman in this period, and the centrality of the trope of female Ireland’s marriage to male England, bolstered and naturalised these power relations. If the relationship between the islands could be imagined as comparable to that between a husband and wife, all kinds of abuse could rationally be justified given the legal position of women within marriage. Friendship between a greater and a lesser man was also a useful model in justifying what would otherwise be recognised as naked exploitation. The husband loved his wife, the friend loved his protégé and his concern for her safety justified all kinds of abusive behaviour. Likewise, the gendered imperial discourse of power created a theoretical hierarchy where the colonial power was figured as highly and normatively masculine, aggressively progressive: technically masterful, sophisticated in philosophical terms, rationally civilised. The conquered or colonised were therefore figured as concomitantly female: passive, backward, emotional. This morally justified colonialism, as effeminate, irrational creatures could not be expected to run their own country. The gendering of Irish men as either feminine or effeminate was common enough in the nineteenth century, probably most famously in Matthew Arnold’s lectures ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ (1867). When a colony is persistently gendered female by the colonising power, the colonised subjects have very few choices open to them. One choice is to accept and to celebrate this gendering: to acknowledge that the Irish are effeminate and to consider this a positive rather than a negative construction. The ‘Celtic Twilight’ school of poetry could be said to embody such a reaction, particularly as represented in the early lyric poetry of W.B. Yeats. Yeats believed that configuring the supposed gender difference between Ireland and England as epitomising the spiritual distance between the two countries actually provided a language by which to argue for Ireland’s independence from (and superiority to) England. In an era when the woman was considered as a morally pure, spiritually enlightened angel, articulating a view of Ireland which accentuated her moral and spiritual superiority to her colonial master could help create a sense of nationhood and distinctiveness in the Irish themselves (Cullingford passim). Hans is such a figure, a spiritually sensitive and aesthetically aware gentle creature who deserves to be left alone by the Miller. Hans is dedicated to beauty in the cultivation of his garden and ‘in all the country-side there was no garden so lovely as his … there were always beautiful things to look at, and pleasant flowers to smell’ (213–14). Friendship and social relations have been destroyed in the associations between Ireland and England, Hans and the Miller. However, the colonial context has also served to destroy the relationship between the Irish and the natural world. Terry Eagleton is right to note that in Ireland, ‘even at its most

‘The Devoted Friend’ 87 aesthetic, Nature is envisioned as a source of income rather than a simple pleasure. Indeed, Nature in Ireland would often seem more a working environment than an object to be contemplated’ (5). Likewise, poor Hans loves the flowers in his garden, but he desperately needs them to bring to the marketplace and cannot simply gaze on as Wilde would a lily. Hans has, moreover, failed to translate his spiritual purity and aesthetic sympathy into a rhetorical defence against the power of the Miller. He is an extreme version of the effeminate poets of the Celtic Revival but he seriously lacks their ability to use this effeminacy to achieve independence. Little Hans becomes and remains little hands. Other Irish thinkers were not very pleased with the version of masculinity that appeared to have been accepted by writers and poets such as Yeats. The chauvinist nationalist D.P. Moran was one such figure who railed (perhaps hysterically) against effeminacy in Irish men. In The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905) he lamented: On all sides one sees only too much evidence that the people are secretly content to be a conquered race, though they have not the courage to admit it. Even the pride that frequently dignifies failure is not there. There is nothing masculine in the character; and when men do fall in line with the green banners overhead, and shout themselves hoarse, is it not rather a feminine screech (6). However, there were earlier examples of a discomfort with passive suffering as a model for redemption. During the Famine, for example, many had been frustrated and irritated by the failure of Irish men to, in effect, stand up to the English and demand either better treatment or outright independence. Among those who were profoundly uncomfortable with a passive Irish masculinity was Jane Francesca Elgee who, as ‘Speranza’, penned many poems and articles calling for an ultra-masculine and aggressive response to the spectre of Famine and disease. Wilde’s mother had entered Irish nationalist life by adopting a male pseudonym, ‘John Fanshawe Ellis’, when writing to Charles Gavin Duffy, the editor of the Young Ireland newspaper the Nation in 1846. Her intense nationalism during the 1840s was driven by the sight of Irish bodies dying of starvation and the romantic patriotism of Thomas Davis’ verse. Her answer to Ireland’s immiseration was rebellion; her solution to Ireland’s effeminacy was virile masculinity. Her poetry did celebrate the dead, but not those like Hans who died of starvation and stupidity, but those who had perished while fighting the enemy in a spectacular display of male dignity. For example, her poem ‘The Brothers’ commemorated the execution of the two brothers John and Henry Sheares who had fought for the United Irelanders during the 1798 rebellion. It was published in the Nation in March 1847 and in the poem the masculinity of the two brothers stands in unspoken judgement of the weakness of the present generation: Two youths, two noble youths, stand prisoners at the bar – You can see them through the gloom – In the pride of life and manhood’s beauty, there they are Awaiting their death doom (1). The shadows of impending death cannot dim the power of the masculinity displayed on the faces of the two men bound together in homosocial fraternity. In another poem,

88 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde ‘The Enigma’, first published as ‘The Challenge to Ireland’ in the Nation in July 1848, Speranza depicts an Irish nation composed of slaves (like Hans perhaps), who have worked themselves to death in the service of their imperial master, England, and asks what has happened to Irish masculinity that it should be so content with such mindless servitude: What! are there no MEN in your Fatherland, To confront the tyrant’s stormy glare, With a scorn as deep as the wrongs ye bear. With defiance as fierce as the oaths they sware, With vengeance as wild as the cries of despair, That rise from your suffering Fatherland? Are there no swords in your Fatherland, To smite down the proud, insulting foe, With the strength of despair give blow for blow, Till the blood of the baffled murderers flow On the trampled soil of your outraged land? Are your right arms weak in that land of slaves, That ye stand by your murdered brothers’ graves, Yet tremble like coward and crouching knaves, To strike for Freedom and Fatherland? Oh! had ye faith in your Fatherland, In God, your Cause, and your own Right hand, Ye would go forth as saints to the holy fight, Go in the strength of Eternal right, Go in the conquering Godhead’s might – And save or AVENGE your Fatherland! (9–10). The Speaker desperately searches Ireland for men with the qualities of defiant pride and manly strength (see Howe for this issue). If Little Hans is typical of Irish masculinity in the fín-de-sieclé, of course, the answer to the Speaker’s series of questions is that there are indeed no men left in Ireland and all have been replaced by masochistic victims. In the issue of the Nation following the publication of ‘The Challenge to Ireland’, Speranza had ‘Jacta Alea Est’ printed in which she anonymously called for an armed rebellion against the English forces in Ireland. The article claimed that the unacceptable behaviour of the English during the Famine, their failure to provide proper relief, had actually been useful inasmuch as their acts: have taken away the last miserable pretext for passive submission. She has justified us before the world, and ennobled the timid, humble supplication of a degraded, insulted people, into the proud demand or independence by a resolved, prepared, and fearless Nation. Now, indeed, were the men of Ireland cowards if this moment for retribution, combat, and victory, were to pass by unemployed. It finds them slaves …

‘The Devoted Friend’ 89 … is there any man amongst us who wishes to take one further step on the base path of sufferance and slavery? ... No! a man so infamous cannot tread the earth … (197–8). Alas, such an infamous man does walk the earth, his name being Little Hans. Of course, the moment for rebellion did indeed pass Irish men by. The Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 was nothing more than an inglorious scrap in a vegetable patch and went down as the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch. Irish men had proven themselves more like Little Hans than Celtic heroes. Speranza was disgusted at the Irish response to the rebellion insisting that ‘in Sicily or in Belgium [the leaders] would have been successful’ (Melville, 47). Only in Ireland, she feared, could masculinity fail so disastrously. Speranza was not the only public figure to condemn the apparent passivity of Irish men during the catastrophe. In The Fall of Feudalism (1904) Michael Davitt, referenced here as the Green Linnet, complained of ‘the wholesale cowardice of the men who saw food leave the country in shiploads … and who “bravely paid their rent” before dying themselves’ (48). In ‘The Devoted Friend’, Wilde seems to be echoing the frustration of his mother and Davitt at the preparedness of the Irish to suffer all manner of indignity rather than protest in the form of manly valour. I am aware that this image of Oscar Wilde as attracted to versions of ultramasculine action is at odds with the Wilde we have come to know – the Wilde who holds the figure of the androgynous Dandy as a model for men and women – but ‘The Devoted Friend’ simply finds no worth in the ambivalence of gender elsewhere praised. We should remember that Wilde himself was not in any simple way a pacifist and was, at best, ambiguous about blood sacrifice. If in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ the necessity of actual bloodshed seems to be annulled by the death of the Christ-Nightingale, in his public pronouncements Wilde did not always endorse an end of such sacrifice in service to a greater cause. While in America in May 1883 he was asked to respond to the horrific murder in the Phoenix Park of the Chief Secretary to Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under Secretary T.H. Burke, by a militant republican group called the Invincibles. Wilde distanced himself from extremism in declaring that ‘When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her’, but qualified this distancing with the comment: ‘We forget how much England is to blame. She is reaping the fruit of seven centuries of injustice’ (Ellmann 186). When confronted with implacable and unmoveable oppression, rebellion may be the only manly response. After all, John Mitchel had, in his Jail Journal (1854), admitted that war was a terrible thing but insisted that enduring oppression and famine was worse: even as [Ireland] was, depopulated, starved, cowed and corrupted, it seemed better that she should attempt resistance, however heavy the odds against success, than lie prostrate and moaning as she was. Better that men should perish by the bayonets of the enemy than by their laws (xlix–xlxx). Better to rise up and destroy the kind of philanthropy represented by the Miller than passively endure it until death. For Speranza, the Famine was such a demonstration of the dangers of the connection to England that the only possible response by the Irish male could be to rebel. Little Hans too is being deprived of food by the irrepressible stupidity of the Miller. The Miller’s

90 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde belief that when someone is in trouble it is best to ignore them resembles the policy of laissez-faire followed by the English government throughout the Famine. He solemnly tells his wife that ‘there is no good in my going to see little Hans as long as the snow lasts … for when people are in trouble they should be left alone, and not be bothered by visitors’ (215). His son thoughtfully points out that Hans could benefit from the Miller’s wealth and offers to give him ‘half my porridge, and show him my white rabbits’ (216), but his father will have none of this. What was needed in Ireland, of course, were the kind of food riots that were seen in Revolutionary France; since it is bread the starving poor need, to get it they need to go to the Miller and his ilk and simply demand it. During periods of starvation in Ireland it was not unusual for the peasantry to grab and steal meal and crops. For example, in Ballina, Co. Mayo in 1817 a group of peasants grabbed many cartloads of meal which was being sent to Sligo so as to prevent food leaving their county when the people were facing such shortages (Ó Ciosáin 106). Speranza urged her readers to take such a political risk by taking the millers down and demanding bread. In her poem ‘France in ’93’ she prophecies a rising of the crowd demanding food from their ‘masters’, particularly bread: Hark! the onward heavy tread – Hark! the voices rude – ’Tis the famished cry for Bread From an armed multitude. They come! They come! Not with weak submission’s hum. Bloody trophy they have won, Ghastly glares it in the sun – Gory head on lifted pike, Ha! they weep not now, but strike (75). Alas, little Hans will never make such a gesture. Horrifically, starving Hans actually carries a sack of flour to the market for the Miller instead of confiscating it for his own use, and those who watch him suffer and eventually die allow the Miller to continue to claim that he was Hans’ best friend and be chief mourner at his funeral. At the funeral the Miller: walked at the head of the procession in a long black cloak, and every now and then he wiped his eyes with a big pocket-handkerchief … “[Hans’ death is] a great loss to me at any rate … why, I had as good as given him my wheelbarrow, and now I really don’t know what to do with it (229–30). The Miller’s rhetoric after Hans’ death is not unusual: it is depressingly similar to some of the things said by English politicians during the slow and sad death of Ireland during the Famine. Indeed, many institutions declared that far too much kindness had been demonstrated, with the Times arguing in February 1849 that a ‘fresh grant of 50,000l. to Ireland has almost broken the back of English benevolence’ and complained of ‘the total absence not merely of gratitude … but of the barest “receipt” for all these favours’ (quoted in Gray 313).

‘The Devoted Friend’ 91 If God appears to be absent from ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, his failure to materialise in ‘The Devoted Friend’ and save poor Hans from a pathetic death is even more striking, but placing the story in the context of the Irish Famine helps to explain this apparent absence. Too often famine and starvation in Ireland had been read as the judgement of God rather than the fault of men. Charles Trevelyan, Chief Secretary to Ireland during the period of most of the Famine, was dedicated to a providential reading of the Famine, announcing in his study The Irish Crisis (1848), that the potato blight was inflicted by God to institute a social revolution in a backward country. In his now infamous words: ‘Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil’ (1). Famine was divine punishment for national and individual sins, the sins of economic inefficiency and the absence of agricultural reform. The typical response of English politicians was that the Famine was an act of God, a means by which the Almighty could sort out Ireland’s agricultural ineptitude (epitomised by a high dependence on one crop) and make it increasingly modern and economical. The Famine was a divine cure for a human problem. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary to Ireland under Robert Peel’s government, noted in a letter to the prime minister in 1845 that: It is awful to observe how the Almighty humbles the pride of nations. The sword, the pestilence, and famine are the instruments of his displeasure; the canker-worm and the locust are his armies; he gives the word: a single crop is blighted; and we see a nation prostrate, stretching out its hands or bread (quoted Gray 99). The Miller too thinks that Hans is in danger of getting ideas above his station and cites this as the reason he never brings Hans to his house. If Hans saw all the good things that the Miller had, ‘he might get envious, and envy is a most terrible thing, and would spoil anybody’s nature. I certainly will not allow Hans’ nature to be spoiled’ (216). The Miller seems to think that a good bout of starvation will keep Hans’ nature where it should be. Due to this kind of thinking, the Miller cannot see how the death of Hans has anything to do with him and puts it down to the mysterious workings of fate and chance, despite the fact that he sent Hans out into the cold and snow without a lantern. The Young Irelander John Mitchel, venomously rejected such supernatural readings of the deaths of hundreds of thousands during the Famine, not because he rejected God but because he believed he knew who the real culprits were. In an article in the Nation in 1846 entitled ‘English Rule’ he vigorously defended God against the imaginations of the political economists: The Irish people [know] that ‘hungry ruin has them in the wind’ – and they ascribe it, unanimously, not so much to the wrath of Heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England … their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see the harpy-claw of England in their dish … (quoted in Melville, 32). That ‘unanimously’ needs to be qualified, as plenty of Irish men and women apparently also viewed the Famine as the wrath of God (see Ó Ciosáin 104), but Wilde beautifully reproduces Mitchel’s image of the ‘harpy-claw’ of England stealing food from the mouths of famished children in the pattern of robbery carried