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Oscar Fingal O'flahertie, the Wilde Colonial Boy, Social and Political

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Oscar Fingal O'flahertie, the Wilde Colonial Boy, Social and Political INFORMATION TO USERS Ph#ognphs inâuded in thr otigiml manuscript hiw krn npmduœd xriognphically in this -y. Hiitœr quiiity 8" x 9" bbc& uid wihitr photogn9h'iprintsm8~1ilphlr(bimyphotognphrorI~~ in this wpy for m dditiarrd du- Contact UMI diracüy to oidrr. OSCAR FINGAL O'FLAHERTIE, THE WZLDE COIDNIAL BOY: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SUBVERSION IN OSCAR WILDE'S FAIRY TALES Carol AM Tattersall h thesis subnitted in conformiity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate ûepartmant of English University of Toronto @ Copyright by Carol Ann Tattersall, 199% uisitions and Acquisitions et 38' Dgrsphit Semias sewices bibliographiques The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence ailowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distri'bute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfonn, ven&e des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de micfofiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur fonnat électronique. The author retains ownershlp of the L'auteur consewe la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Abstract: Oscar Fingal O' Flahertie, The Wi lde Colonial Boy Carol Ann Tattersall, Ph. D. , 1998. Dept. of English. University of Toronto. Wilde used The H~PPY Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomearanates to scrutinize the literary, moral and political assumptions that underpinned nineteenth-century morality and pu1 itics, especially as they affected marginalized people both in Britain and in the colonies. During his Oxford years, Wilde played down his Irishness, but his abservstions and experiences during his North American lecture tour seem to have reminded him of his socialist/Irish National ist heritage, and caused him to re-examine his 1 iterary agenda in relation to English society and values. Wilde's satirical strategy develops gradually from gentle parudy ~f society's; faibles in "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose," to a serious interrogation of patriarchal and imperial practices in ''The Young King" and "The Star Child." In the later tales, he examines how bath the fairy tale and the Bible had been enlisted ta prornote values that sustained nineteenth-century English systerns of contrd. His early letters, reviews and essays dernonstrate that he recognized the power of popular fiction, especially the fairy tale, as moral propaganda. Consequently, he chose that genre to represent his revisionist ideas, and gradually devlsed more sophisticated i i rnethods to suit the complexities of the issues he was address ing. Wilde's agenda becomes more focused, and his strategiss more subtie, as he discovers the extent to whicb both fairy tales and the Bible have been used by the Establishment as controlling agents. As post-colonial writers reclairn their history clnd ldrntity through irzcic aimicry of the gerceptlons and discourse of the oppressor, Wilde, by echoing the language and content of the King James Bible, authenticates his cwn point of view and reclaims those parts of biblical teaching that have been ignored or altered ta preserve the moral and social status quo. Through the twa se.& of fairy tales, Wilde exposes the abuses of the marginalized in society by the systems of control, and the ways in which apparently innocuous chi ldren' s literature and even the Bible itself can be exploited to serve those systems . iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Critical Responses to the Fairy Tales, 1888 - 1996. ................... 1 Chapter One Pen, Power and Protest: Irish and American Influences on Wilde's Philosophy of Art ......22 Chapter Two A Person of No Importance: Wilde's Appropriation and Adaptation of Fairy Taie Conventions to Explore Society's Constructs of Abnormality AndDeviance.. ............ 82 Chapter Three The Sou1 of Man Under Imperialism: Wilde's Use of Biblical Images to Re-examine Traditional Concepts of Morality ........... ........ 170 Chapter Four Unhappy Princes, an Unselfish Dwarf and a Devoted Fisherman: Reviewed Texts and Retrieved Contexts in A House of Pomegranates. ...... ..... 235 Conclusion Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Forbidden Fruits? ..................... 307 Appendix A - Some Nineteenth-Century Caricatures of Oscar . 323 Appendix B - Exerpts from Two Nineteenth-Century Religious Tracts ........... .. ,. 326 Oscar Fingal OFFlahertie: The Wilde Colonial Boy Introduction The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Wilde's first collection of short stories, was published in the spring of 1888. By 1910 the book had gone into its seventh printing, and has enjoyed commercial success ever since. Not even Wilde's public disgrace and imprisonment had much effect on the popularity of his first volume of fairy tales, and over the years the stories have been translated into numerous languages, have been adapted for the stage and have even appeared as animated films. The same is not true, however, of the second collection, A House of Pomegranates, which was published in the autumn of 1891. Perhaps the rash of negative reviews appearing at regular intervals in the press between November 1891 and February 1892 was part of the reason why the enthusiastic readers of the first collection showed so little interest in the second. While The Happy Prince had delighted the critics with its lively simplicity, A House of Pomegranates displeased th= with the "ultra- aestheticism of the pictures" and its "rather 'fleshly' stylew (Pal1 Mal1 Gazette. London. 30th Nov, 1891) , By 1912 its first edition had still aot sold out Although each volume when first appeared did, for quite different reasons, excite public and journalistic interest, neither book has ever elicited much scholarly response. Even in the recent surge of critical activity associated with Wilde and his work little attention has been given to the fairy tales. Indeed, the fairy tale label may in part explain why they arouse so little academic curiosity compared to the rest of Wilde's writing: more than two thirds of the critical work on the tales deals with them exclusively in the context of folk literature or of childrenws literature. Of course, the stories, especially in the first collection, do undeniably belong to the category of children's literature, but as Wilde himself pointed out in response to both friendly and unfriendly reviews of the tales, he intended them as much more than mere diversions for young readers. In June 1888 in a note to G.H. Kersley, a friend and poet, Wilde remarks : [The stories in The Happy Prince] are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into a fanciful form: meant partly for children and partly for . those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness. [Theyl are an attempt to mirror modern life in a form remote from reality -- to deal with modern problems in a mode that is ideal and not imitative: 1 hope you will like them: they are, of course, slight and fanciful, and written, not for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty! (Letters 219) Clearly Wilde's agenda in writing the tales was more complicated than might at first appear. Not only does he daim a wider potential audience than merely children, but he also admits to using the fairy-tale form quite consciously to deal with "modern problems." Three years later, with the publication of A House of Pomegranates, he is even more adamant about his literary intentions. To the editor of the Pal1 Mal1 Gazette he writes : [Your reviewer] starts by asking an extremely silly question, and that is, whether or not 1 have written this book for the purpose of giving pleasure to the British child. Having expressed grave doubts on this subject, a subject on which 1 cannot conceive any fairly-educated person having any doubts at all, he proceeds, apparently quite seriously to make the extremely limited vocabulary at the disposa1 of the British child the standard by which the prose of an artist is to be judged! Now in building this House of Pomegranates 1 had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public .... (Letters 302) If we accept the comments Wilde makes about his tales in his letters, then, it seems insufficient to treat them simply as literature aimed at children, especially when we also consider the opinions about the relationship between life and art that he expresses in essays written at the same period. Wilde saw literature as "the perfect expression of life" (1890, AC- 350), and not merely as a representation of nature and mundane human existence. He believed that art must transform the ordinary, must offer to its audience something beyond even what in Nature is considered beautiful: Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions (1890, AC- 319). Wilde seemed to feel that his fairy tales fulfilled the expectations for art that he outlines in his essays, and even those critics who have analyzed them mainly as childrents literature, demonstrate an awareness of some of the social and literary dimensions of the stories. The earliest reviews of The Happy Prince, which appeared (unsigned) on 1 Sept, 1888, in the Athenaeum, and on 20 Oct 5 in The Saturday Review, refer to "a piquant touch of contemporary satireu (Athenaeum XXII 286) and "bittemess" mixed with a "sensation of the humorousm (Saturday Review LW1 472).
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