The Figure of Christ in the Works of Oscar Wilde Supervisor: Dr M.T. Beatty University of Cape Town Submitted by Guy Willoughby on August 15, 1987 in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town abstract In this study I consider, by a process of close textual analysis, attention to larger symbolic registers, and comparative reference to other works of the author and his contemporaries, the thematic and structural function of the figure of Christ in the mature writings of Oscar Wilde. I have avoided references to the life of the author as far as possible in my text, partly because bio­ graphical critism, in the specific case of Oscar Wilde, has often interfered with a judicious assess­ ment of his writings--writings that inscribe, as I hope my text demonstrates, a valuable response to certain pressing ethical and aesthetic issues in a complex --------fin de siecle climate of blurred and shifting values. In my first chapter, which is devoted to The _H_a.... P..... P_Y __ P_r_i_n_c_e __ a_n_d __ o_t_h_e_r __ T_a_l_e_s ( 18 8 8 ) , I beg in by relating these stylised fictions to the arealistic poetics Wilde outlines in his critical dialogue "The Decay of Lying", in order to establish Wilde's connections with his wider intellectual milieu. I then examine the pattern of references by which the life of Jesus is presented as a compelling ethical ideal for the heroes of "The Happy Prince", "The Nightingale and the Rose", and "The Selfish Giant", each of whom discovers true selfhood by a paradoxical renunciation of selfish desire. iii Christ's life and ministry effectively become an archetypal model for self-perfection in a world of fractured individual perspectives--the world which, with a more studied complexity, is that of all the later fables in which Wilde's heroes pursue this neo-Hellenic ideal. Chapter II concerns the more pronounced Christ­ ian ethos of A House of Pomegranates (1891), Wilde's second volume of fairy-tales, and in particular the story-teller's novel assertion--through a careful recasting of traditional symbology--that the Gali­ lean's synthetic vision of the living world is, in effect, congruent with aesthetics. By tracing the patterns of imagery and allusion, I argue that Christ's Passion is the design for the young King's attempt to transform his society, according to the tenets of art; that the hero of "The Star-Child" similarly discovers himself, when his valuation of beauty is reformulated through Christ's example; and that the cumulative effect of these parables is to anticipate the forthright aesthetic reading of Christ in The Soul of Man Under Socialism and de Profundis. My third chapter consists of a detailed exami­ nation of Wilde's first major theoretical exposition of Christ in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), in which I compare his formulations with those of his secular-humanist mentors, Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, and with Wilde's preceding ideas iv on ethics, society and the individual. Wilde's human and individualistic portrait, while it connects with liberal theology in particular, and with the tendency of positivist and evolutionary thought in general, is also a considered attempt to restate the nature and conditions of personality in the terms of aesthetics, with Jesus implicitly offered as exemplar of a mode of life founded on a Romantic poetics of individual uniqueness, coherence and integrity. I consider the ways in which Wilde's hedonistic interpretation of the classical ideal prevents him, at the end of the essay, from firmly advancing a novel ethics of worldly involvement, based on aesthetic considerations of order and reconciliation, and exemplified by Jesus; rather, evolutionary theory and Hellenistic ideals are combined at the end in a rather shaky utopian speculation in which the example of Christ and his identification with suffering are outmoded. In chapter four I consider the structural and thematic paradigm that occurs in three fictive works--the dramas of Salome (1891) and La Sainte Courtisane (1893), and the prose-poem called "The Teacher of Wisdom" ( 1894 )--and argue that in each dramatic encounter of hedonist and ascetic the figure of Christ is evoked in such a way that the moral consequence of the play or prose-poem is qualified and directed. I pay particular attention to the parables of Christian imitation that each V work cumulatively inscribes, and how, by juxta­ position of character, dialogue and allusion to Jesus, a novel psychic validity is accorded to hedonistic practices, even as the ironic disjunction between the overt disciples of Christ, and the true temper of the master, is indicated; I conclude that Christ represents in each context an ethic of selfless and reconciliatory love, an ideal of personal wholeness that the protagonists qua protago­ nists cannot perceive. My fifth chapter, on de Profundis (1897), consists of an examination of Wilde's second--and definitive--statement on Jesus. I consider the writer's delineation from three points of view: intrinsically, as a cohesive statement of Christ's universal significance; contextually, as performing a rhetorical function within the work as a whole; and finally, in terms of the preceding theoretical and fictive evocations of this character. I pay close attention to the series of explicit reconcilia­ tions Wilde attempts in his disquisition, as he proposes--with reference to classical mythology, Romantic aesthetics, and his own interpretations of the Gospels--that Christ, in his vivid identifica­ tion with suffering, transforms at last the hedonism of the Greeks into a new aesthetic credo of engage­ ment. This richly evocative portrait, which combines allusions to secular humanism, Romantic art, and Gnostic mysticsm, becomes, specifically, the arche- vi type for the suffering author-as-subject within the larger scheme of the apologia, and, by extension, for the range of fabular Christlike models that precede it. In my final analysis I propose that Wilde's rhetorical assumption of Christ's vision in de Profundis is the summation of those previous fictions, and a confirmation of the significance of Jesus in a secular, and sectarian, age. My last chapter concerns the author's attempts, in The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), to give imaginative scope to the insights of de Profundis in a novel poetics--a poetics that jettisons former ambiguities in favour of a vivid and arresting topicality. I argue that, in his last and most memorable poem, Wilde powerfully advances the doc­ trine of repentance and self-revelation outlined in de Profundis, by presenting its enactment as a communal imitatio Christi that forges a new kinship; and that, in a world where criminality and virtue are mere arbitary distinctions, a mutual recognition of fallibility will bind humanity again. Wilde's final fiction--part exhortation, part allegory--seeks a composite image of suffering and reversal, an image that, like Christ's life, offers an ideal of complex integrity to those who view it. Finally, I include a brief consideration of Wilde's first imaginative presentations of Jesus in the immature Poems ( 18 81 )--presentations which, vii while not of striking imaginative or theoretical interest in themselves, nevertheless indicate by imagery and thematic function the scope of future explorations. While I draw attention to the range of Wilde's early intellectual concerns in this appendix, I pay particular attention to the writer's keen awareness, at the height of a naive post­ Paterian idyllic enthusiasm, of the urgent imperative of human incompleteness--an incompleteness that coalesces, even at this heady juncture, in the image of Christ. acknowledgments I wish to thank my supervisor, Dr. Michael Beatty of the University of Cape Town, for his erudition and sound critical sense at each stage of my research. A debt of gratitude is owed to Finuala Dowling, also of the University of Cape Town, for much help and advice during the gestation of the thesis. Furthermore, thanks are due to Lauren Moser, who typed each draft with admirable savoir­ f aire. Lastly, I would like to thank the Human Sciences Research Council, which gave me partial funding to undertake this study; and to the Edu­ cation Department of the Cape Provincial Administra­ tion, for granting me leave of absence in order to complete it. a note on the text One of the problems that faces Wilde's critics is the absence of a definitive scholarly edition of his works. The most accessible collection is J.B. Foreman's The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Intro. Vyvyan Holland (1948; rpr. London: Collins, 1966), and I have referred to this one-volume edition in respect of Salome, La Sainte Courtisane, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Robert Ross's two extensive compilations contain other valuable material excluded by Foreman, and I have used Reviews from the First Collected Edition (London: Methuen, 1908), as well as Essays and Lectures (which contains transcriptions of Wilde's early aesthetic lectures in America, 1882). I have also referred to In­ tentions, from the Second Collected Edition (London: Methuen, 1909). Happily, Oxford University Press have published two authoritative volumes of Wilde's fiction, both carefully annotated and edited by Isobel Murray; I have therefore chosen to use The Complete Shorter Fiction, the only one-volume collection of Wilde's shorter prose (Oxford: Oxford Univ.