Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  In the meantime, he busied himself with the task of arranging a pose based on the art of elegant inversion. All the norms of his childhood were to be reversed. His father had been laughed at by society, so he would mock society first. His father had been unkempt, so he would be fastidious. From his mother he had inherited a gigantic and ungainly body, which Lady Colin Campbell compared to "a great white caterpillar"11 and which recalled all too poignantly the gorilla-like frame of the stage Irishman in Sir John Tenniel's cartoons. To disarm such critics, Wilde concealed his massive form with costly clothes and studied the art of elegant deportment. His mother had sought to reconquer Ireland, so he would surpass her by invading and conquering England. She had wished to repossess Irish folklore and the native language, but he would go one better and achieve a total mastery of English.

  "I am Irish by race", he told Edmond de Goncourt, "but the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare".12 It was not the most onerous of sentences and he admitted as much to an audience in San Francisco: "The Saxon took our lands from us and made them destitute . . . but we took their language and added new beauties to it".13 Decades later, the same diagnosis would be offered by James Joyce: "In spite of everything Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget – the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. The result is then called English literature".14

  Wilde's entire literary career constituted an ironic comment on the tendency of Victorian Englishmen to attribute to the Irish those emotions which they had repressed within themselves. His essays on Ireland question the assumption that, just because the English are one thing, the Irish must be its opposite. The man who believed that a truth in art is that whose opposite is also true was quick to point out that every good man has an element of the woman in him, just as every sensitive Irishman must have a secret Englishman within himself – and vice-versa. With his sharp intelligence, Wilde saw that the image of the stage Irishman tells far more about English fears than Irish realities, just as the "Irish joke" revealed less about Irishmen's innate foolishness than about Englishmen's persistent and poignant desire to say something funny. Wilde opted to say that something funny for them in a lifelong performance of "Englishness" which was really a parody of the very notion. The ease with which Wilde effected the transition from stage-Ireland to stage-England was his ultimate comment on the shallowness of such categories. Earnest intellectuals back in Dublin missed this element of parody and saw in Wilde's career an act of national apostasy: but he did not lack defenders. Yeats saw Wilde's snobbery not as such, but as the clever strategy of an Irishman marooned in London, whose only weapon against Anglo-Saxon prejudice was to become more English than the English themselves, thereby challenging many time-honoured myths about the Irish.15

  The costs of such a gamble, however, might be too high, entailing a massive suppression of personality. In rejecting the stage-Irish mask, Wilde took a step towards selfhood, but in exchanging it for the pose of urbane Englishman, he seemed merely to have exchanged one mask for another, and to have given rise to the suspicion that what these masks hid was no face at all – that the exponent of "personality" was fatally lacking in "character". To his mortification and intermittent delight, Wilde found that his English mask was not by any means a perfect fit. The more he suppressed his inherited personality, the more it seemed to assert itself. "The two great turning-points of my life", he wrote in De Profundis, "were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison".16 It was a revealing equation, for in bom institutions he learned what it was to be an outsider, an uninvited guest, an Irishman in England.

  To his friends in Oxford, he was not so much an Anglo-Irishman as a flashy and fastidious Paddy with "a suspicion of brogue" and "an unfamiliar turn to his phrasing". At the university's gate-lodges, he took to signing himself "Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde", filling two lines of the roll-book with the indisputable proof of his Irish identity. His flirtation with Roman Catholicism at Magdalen College was rather more serious and much more costly than that of his English peers: for an Englishman the Catholic Church evoked incense and Mariolatry, but for an Irishman it was the historic faith of an oppressed people.17 As a consequence of his devotion to the Scarlet Lady, Wilde was punished by exclusion from his half-brother's will at a time when he was sorely in need of funds. Yet he refused to deny his interest in Catholicism, which may have been enhanced by the dim recollection of having been brought as a child, at the whim of his mother, for a second baptism in the Catholic Church at Glencree. It is possible that the "desire for immediate baptism" expressed by the two leading men of his greatest play may arise from that experience: certainly, the playwright made sure to have a Dublin Passionist Father at his bedside just before he died.

  At all events, Oxford strengthened in Wilde the conviction that an Irishman only discovers himself when he goes abroad, just as it reinforced his belief that "man is least himself when he talks in his own person" but "give him a mask and he will tell you the truth".18 Years later, when Parnell was at the height of his power in 1889, Wilde wrote in celebration of his Celtic intellect which "at home . . . had but learnt the pathetic weakness of nationality, but in a strange land realized what indomitable forces nationality possesses".19 Wilde saw his own career as running parallel to that of Parnell, another urbane Irishman who surprised the English by his self-control and cold exterior. Always a separatist, Wilde poured scorn on the latest English debate on "how best to misgovern Ireland" and wrote a mocking review of one of James Anthony Froude's books on the subject.

  In his view, Froude on Ireland was a perfect example of all that was amiss with Britain's attitudes: "If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice, she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions". The man who complained that the modern attempt to solve the problem of slavery took the form of devising amusements to distract the slaves saw the political version of such distraction in the endless rehearsals of the Irish Question at Westminster. He closed a review of Froude's The Two Chiefs of Dunboy with a straight-faced inversion of the author's purpose: "as a record of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own wishes his book is not without value". (West Indian islanders coined the term "Froudacity" to describe Froude's lofty condescension: in The English in the West Indies [1888] he had found it impossible to think that the former slaves of the area could ever hope to run their own government.) Wilde brilliantly glossed the latest Froudacity: "there are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people". His solution was more complex and daring: to become a very Irish kind of English man, just as in Ireland his had been a rather English kind of Irish family. The truth, in life as well as in art, was that whose opposite could also be true: every great power evolved its own opposite in order to achieve itself, as Giordano Bruno had written, but from such opposition might spring reunion.

  Wilde's art, as well as his public persona, was founded on a critique of the manic Victorian urge to antithesis, an antithesis not only between all dungs English and Irish, but also between male and female, master and servant, good and evil, and so on. He inveighed against the specialization deemed essential in men fit to run an empire, and showed that no matter how manfully they tried to project qualities of softness, poetry and femininity onto their subject peoples, these repressed instincts would return to take a merry revenge. Arnold's theory had been that the Celts were doomed by a multiple selfhood, which allowed them to see so many options in a situation that they were immobilized, unlike the English specialist who might have simplified himself but who did not succumb to pitfalls which he had not the imaginatio
n to discern. Wilde knew that in such Celtic psychology was the shape of things to come.

  Wilde was the first major artist to discredit the romantic ideal of sincerity and to replace it with the darker imperative of authenticity: he saw that in being true to a single self, a sincere man may be false to half a dozen other selves.20 Those Victorians who saluted a man as having "character" were, in Wildes judgement, simply indicating the predictability of his devotion to a single self-image. The Puritan distrust of play-acting and the rise of romantic poetry had simply augmented this commitment to the ideal of a unitary self. This, along with the scope for psychological exploration provided by the novel, may have been a further reason for the failure of nineteenth-century artists before Wilde to shape a genuinely theatrical play, Shelley's The Cenci being far better as poetry than as drama. Wilde argued that these prevailing cultural tendencies also led to some very poor poems written in the first person singular: all bad poetry, he bleakly quipped, sprang from genuine feeling. In the same way, he mocked the drab black suit worn by the Victorian male – Marx called it a social hieroglyphic – as a sign of the stable, imperial self. He, on the contrary, was interested in the subversive potential of a theatricality which caused people to forget their assigned place and to assert the plasticity of social conditions. Wilde wrote from the perspective of one who sees that the only real fool is the conventionally "sincere" man who fails to see that he, too, is wearing a mask, the mask of sincerity. If all art must contain the essential criticism of its prevailing codes, for Wilde an authentic life must recognize all that is most opposed to it.

  In consequence, in The Importance of Being Earnest, each person turns out to be his own secret opposite: Algy becomes Bunbury, Jack Earnest, as in Wilde's career the Irelander turned Englander. Whatever seems like an opposite in the play materializes as a double. For example, many critics have found in it a traditional contrast between the brilliant cynicism of the town-dwellers and the tedious rectitude of the rural people; but that is not how things work out. Characters like Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism are revealed to have contained the seeds of corruption and knowingness all along, while Cecily has her most interesting (i.e., evil) inspirations in a garden (rather reminiscent of her biblical predecessor). So every dichotomy dichotomizes. Wilde's is an art of inversion and this applies to gender stereotypes above all: so the women in the play read heavy works of German philosophy and attend university courses, while the men lounge elegantly on sofas and eat dainty cucumber sandwiches.

  Far from the men engaging in the traditional discussion of the finer points of the female form, it is the women who discuss the physical appeal of the men: when Algernon proposes to Cecily, it is she who runs her fingers through his hair and asks sternly: "I hope your hair curls naturally, does it?"21 (The answer is "Yes, darling, with a little help from others".) When Algy rushes out, Cecily's instant response is: "What an impetuous boy he is! I like his hair so much". The last word on these inversions of gender roles is spoken by Gwendolen, when she praises her own father for conceding that a man's place is in the home and that public affairs may be safely entrusted to women:

  Outside the family circle, papa, I am glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.22

  It would be possible to see this cult of inversion as Wilde's private little joke about his own homosexuality, but it is much more than that: at the root of these devices is his profound scorn for the extreme Victorian division between male and female, which he saw as an unhealthy attempt to foster an excessive sense of difference between the sexes. A recent historian of clothing has remarked that if a Martian had visited Victorian England and seen the domes worn there, that Martian might have been forgiven for thinking that men and women belonged to different species.23 In the history of men's fashions over the previous four centuries, it was only in the Victorian age that men presented themselves with no trace of the "feminine". The Elizabethan gallant had been admired for his shapely legs, starched ruff and earrings; the Restoration rake for his ribbons, muff and scent; the Romantics for their nipped-in waists, exotic perfumes and hourglass shapes. Such details indicate that the androgyny of the male and female had never been fully suppressed.

  Wilde always liked to create manly women and womanly men, as a challenge to the stratified thinking of his day. He had seen in his mother a woman who could edit journals and organize political campaigns in an age when women had no right to vote; and it was from her that he inherited his lifelong commitment to feminism. "Why should there be one law for men, and another for women?" asks Jack of Miss Prism near the end of Earnest.24 if the double standard is right for men, then it is right also for women; and if it is wrong for women, then it is wrong also for men. Wilde demonstrates that the gender-antitheses of the age were almost meaningless: in the play, it is the women who are businesslike in making shrewd calculations about the attractions of a proposed marriage, while it is the men who are sentimental, breathless and impractical.

  By rejecting such antithetical thinking, Wilde was also repudiating the philosophy of determinism, that bleak late-nineteenth-century belief that lives are pre-ordained by the circumstances of birth, background and upbringing, a conviction shared by a surprising range of the age's thinkers.25 The extreme sects of Protestantism had long believed in the notion of the elect and the damned, but radical critics such as Marx and Freud evolved secular versions of the theory, viewing the person as primarily the effect of childhood training and social conditioning. For these figures, environmental factors often overwhelmed the initiatives of the individual, a view summed up in the Marxian claim that consciousness did not determine social being but that social being determined consciousness. To Wilde, who believed in the radical autonomy of the self, this was hateful stuff. He saw the self as an artwork, to be made and remade: for him, it was society that was the dreary imposition. "The real life is the life we do not lead",26 i.e., the one lived in pure imagination and in acts of playful dissent which deliver us from the earnestness of duty and destiny.

  The Importance of Being Earnest challenges ideas of manifest destiny by the strategy of depicting characters reduced to automatons by their blind faith in the pre-ordained. Gwendolen idiotically accepts Jack in the mistaken belief that he is Earnest: "The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Earnest, I knew I was destined to love you".27 The whole plot machinery creaks with an intentional over-obviousness: Jack, for instance, says that the two girls will only call one another sister after they have called each other many worse things as well, and this is exactly what happens. The women, perhaps because they seem to have been more exposed to Victorian education than the men, show a touching faith in determinism: ever since Cecily heard of her wicked uncle, she talked of nothing else. Her faith, however, takes on a radical form, as she finds in it the courage to reject the tedious, all-female regime of Miss Prism and to bring her animus to full consciousness in the ideal Earnest with whom she conducts a wholly imaginary affair before Algy's actual arrival. In doing this, she was already rejecting the notion of an antithesis between herself and others, because she had already recognized the existence of that antithesis in herself. Just before meeting her wicked uncle, she denies the idea of a black-and-white world: "I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am afraid he will look just like everyone else".28 Wilde insists that men and women know themselves in all their aspects and that they cease to repress in themselves whatever they find unflattering or painful. In abandoning this practice, people would also end the determinist tyranny which led them to impute all despised qualities to subject peoples. Anglo-Saxonist theory, as we have seen, insisted that the Irish were gushing and dirty by inexorable inheritance, and as unable to change any of that as they were unable to alter the colour of th
eir eyes.29 But Wilde showed otherwise.

  The Wildean moment is that at which all polar oppositions are transcended. "One of the facts of physiology", he told the actress Marie Prescott, "is the desire of any very intensified emotion to be relieved by some emotion that is its opposite".30 The trivial comedy turns out, upon inspection, to have a serious point; the audience itself is acting each night and must be congratulated or castigated for its performance; and the world will be an imitation of the play's Utopia, rather than the play imitating an existing reality. That Utopia is a place built out of those moments when all hierarchies are reversed as a prelude to revolution: so the butler begins the play with subversive witticisms which excel those of his master, and the master thereafter goes in search of his half-suppressed double.

  The psychologist Otto Rank has argued that the Double, being a handy device for the off-loading of all that embarrasses, may epitomize one's noble soul or one's base guilts, or indeed both at the same rime.31 Which is to say that the Double is a close relation of the Englishman's Celtic Other. Many characters in literature have sought to murder their double in order to do away with guilt (as England had tried to annihilate Irish culture), but have then found that it is not so easily repressed, since it may also contain man's Utopian self (those redemptive qualities found by Arnold in Ireland). Bunbury is Algy's double, embodying in a single fiction all that is most creative and most corrupt in his creator. Bunbury is the shadow which symbolizes Algy's need for immortality, for an influential soul that survives death; and, at the same time, Bunbury is that ignoble being to whom the irresponsible Algy transfers all responsibility for his more questionable deeds. The service which the Irish performed for the English, Bunbury discharges for his creator: he epitomizes his master's need for a human likeness on the planet and, simultaneously, his desire to retain his own difference. Hence the play is one long debate about whether or not to do away with Bunbury. Lady Bracknell's complaints sound suspiciously like English claims that the Irish kept on changing their question: