Text only
University of Aberdeen Takes you to the main page for this section

JISS Book Reviews

The Importance of not being Over-Earnest
Isobel Murray (University of Aberdeen)
A review of
Alexandra Warwick, Oscar Wilde (Northcote/British Council: Tavistock, 2007), ISBN 978-0-7463-1139-4, x+102pp.
printer friendly version (pdf)

There are already too many books on Oscar Wilde. To earn appreciation, a new author must have a new vision, take account of the expected audience, and trim the new volume to any scale imposed by a book series. The series in question here is ‘Writers and Their Work’, the modern incarnation of the old creamy British Council booklets. The size is much increased, but still notably small, so this prior limitation needs to be borne in mind. I am unclear on the intended purpose of the series, and on its intended audience. Is it for undergraduates and other students, stimulating interest and critical reading, perhaps the only book the busy student might consult? Or is it to engage the other experts in the field, and add to the scholarly and critical debates, with the hoped-for sales to hard-pressed libraries?

This volume seems to try to combine these purposes, with mixed effect. It treats Wilde intelligently in its brief compass, but I find the author’s necessary choices of subject matter mystifying, and hardly helpful to our hypothetical student. Alexandra Warwick’s thesis, briefly, is that Wilde is thought of as very modern, but in fact he is a rather reactionary late Victorian writer. This places her in a rather invidious position: it is too easy to make this a charge, rather than an analysis, and it might help to account for a certain lack of enthusiasm the reader might detect. She devotes her three chapters to ‘Making the Self’. ‘Self and Society’ and ‘Sexuality and the Self’. These variously cover his education at Oxford, the years of his public success, and the events surrounding his trials and imprisonment.

Thus Chapter One pays great attention to the Oxford notebooks, and goes on to trace the authors named in his critical dialogues. The main object seems to be to pin down influences, mostly from men or books encountered at Oxford. Ms Warwick revisits the old Ruskin and Pater  territory dutifully, and takes the question of influence very seriously, although space dictates she states rather than demonstrates her argument. She gravely imposes coherence on his thought. But it is a very narrow view. Although she rightly describes Wilde as favouring constant change, - ‘What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?’ – she allows of none.

There is no mention here of the French writers he so much admired, and was to imitate; no Baudelaire, no Flaubert, no Gautier, no Gide. There is not even Huysmans, whose A Rebours has so often been claimed as Dorian Gray’s poisonous book. Wilde went to the French theatre of Dumas fils and Sardou for the models for his comedies, and there were more books in French than in English at his bankruptcy sale.

It has been demonstrated over the years that Wilde picked up, echoed and ran with ideas from any source that struck him: he adopted the wisdom of the Chinese Taoist Sage Chuang Tzu, which he read at unusual length in 1890, and frequently echoed thereafter. He devoured some essays of the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay ‘Self-Reliance’ is particularly important: Wilde’s ‘Individualism’ and Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’ are very close. Wilde visited Emerson in America, as Ms Warwick acknowledges, but with no mention of his writing, and Emerson’s Essays were on the very first list of books that Wilde asked for when prison conditions were eased. The virtually forgotten Edward Heron-Allen was a friend, and godfather to one of Wilde’s sons. He inspired the palmistry plot of ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, and a year before the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, he published a novel about a very beautiful young man who commits suicide, entitled Ashes of the Future: A Study of Mere Human Nature: The Suicide of Sylvester Gray.

So my dissatisfaction with this chapter is twofold. If we are talking influence, I feel we need to come to terms with the ways Wilde’s mind worked in general, and we must not be too narrow: Wilde reacted allusively and creatively to the writers who appealed to him, from any period and any cultural context, and he did not seem to suffer any anxiety of influence at all (see my Introduction to Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (Oxford, 2000)). But further to that, I cannot see that trying to place Wilde in a history of thought is an appropriate or immediately helpful approach to his writing in the compass of a short book.

Ms Warwick’s second chapter again seems to me to take on too much in the space. Again she attempts to cover social criticism, ideas on society and class relations, Irishness, marriage and the place of women, in twenty-four pages. Again she is forced to state claims, on the whole, without the space to defend her readings. Here she wants to ‘look at some aspects of Wilde’s drama in the context of the philosophical ideas’. But we are rarely related to the actual texts. There is no mention of the difficulty long experienced by audiences and readers over the more and less successful elements of the comedies, what Auden uncharitably described as ‘their best and most original elements – the epigrams and comic nonsense’ and their ‘melodramatic operatic plots’. Remember ‘Child of my shame, be still the child of my shame!’ ?

By this time some treatment of Wilde’s dandy figures is surely overdue. How can we discuss the comedies without looking at his wit?    If this book were indeed intended for students, or beginners, I think that might have been a happier place to start. Wilde is still internationally celebrated as a wit and comic genius, and there is almost no recognition of this primary aspect here. There is no consideration of irony, epigram, dialogue form or dandyism. There is no mention of Wilde’s rage against cliché and misuse of language, and the fixed unthinking prejudices that regularly lurk behind them. This is surely central to the writer and his work?

return to JISS book reviews listing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arts and Humanities Research Council

The AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies >>

 

News and Events