The Dandy in Earnest: Oscar Wilde's Spiritual Aestheticism
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ABSTRACT THE DANDY IN EARNEST: OSCAR WILDE’S SPIRITUAL AESTHETICISM In this thesis, I employ Bruce Bashford’s model of “Wildean dialectic” as a methodology to explore correspondences between Wilde’s critical writings, The Picture of Dorian Gray, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” and some of Wilde’s fairy tales. In doing so, I demonstrate that far from being a mere intellectual or spiritual dalliance, whatever Wilde’s personal devotion may have been, his perennial interest in Catholicism had wide-ranging implications for his developing aesthetic philosophy and his writing. Wilde’s relationship to Catholicism has commonly been viewed as a question of religious commitment and many scholars have sought to verify his deathbed conversion as though this could explicate the nature of his almost lifelong engagement with Catholicism and Catholic theology. In my analysis of Wilde’s writing I circumvent biographical study as much as possible, showing via close readings of the selected texts how Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy appears to have evolved largely through dialectical interactions with Catholic theology. In particular, I find that Wilde’s references to Catholic theology and his uses of Catholic symbol and ritual within the fairy tales enable him to develop a system of aesthetic education based in literary space and operating through the subjective synthesis of deliberately constructed dialectic spaces. Specifically, I argue that through his uses of Catholic symbol, Wilde is able to focus the subjective in ways hypothetically superior to the theorized House Beautiful, providing a possible resolution to many of the problems of that model of aesthetic education. Kristin Anne Baer May 2013 THE DANDY IN EARNEST: OSCAR WILDE’S SPIRITUAL AESTHETICISM by Kristin Anne Baer A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2013 APPROVED For the Department of English: We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree. Kristin Anne Baer Thesis Author Ruth Jenkins (Chair) English John Beynon English Lisa Weston English For the University Graduate Committee: Dean, Division of Graduate Studies AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship. Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me. Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was enabled to complete this thesis through funding I received in the form of a Graduate Research and Creative Activities Support Award in Fall 2012. Nevertheless, there are a number of other circumstances and people without which this thesis may never have been written at all. While I can hardly hope to acknowledge them all here, I would like to express my gratitude toward those who have most contributed to this project directly or indirectly. Foremost, I must thank my parents for their steady encouragement throughout the writing of this thesis and for having instilled in me the work ethic and love of learning that have allowed me to prosper in my research. I am likewise obliged to my grandmother who I credit with having unwittingly sparked my abiding interest in Wilde. Because of her, specifically because she thought to record a televised adaptation of “The Canterville Ghost” and later play it for me, Wilde has been a part of my life since childhood. My “university family” has been equally influential and supportive of my best interests. It is quite unlikely, for instance, that I would have even considered enrolling in the MA program had Dr. Chris Henson not raised the possibility in her written responses to an undergrad paper I wrote on Melville’s Benito Cereno—and I will forever be grateful to her for those words, which changed so much. Moreover, I strongly doubt that I could have seen this thesis project through to completion had it not been for my particular thesis committee: Dr. Ruth Jenkins, Dr. John Beynon, and Dr. Lisa Weston. Not only were these people instrumental in suggesting revisions, but I believe my colossal esteem for each of them drove me to produce far better work than I might otherwise have done. I am especially thankful for Dr. Jenkins’ mentorship throughout the program, her continual v v patience with my somewhat unconventional writing process, and all of those Doctor Who and BBC-related conversations casually interspersed among official office-hours business. Penultimately, I would like to thank Chuck Radke for giving me the best job any graduate student could ask for. Working as a consultant in the Graduate Writing Studio has truly been a highlight of my graduate school career. Last but not least, I really did get by with a little help from my friends and I wish to acknowledge my obligation to them. I am, of course, greatly indebted to Lisa McHarry for her thoughtful reading and suggestions, but there are many others who have supported me simply through their exceptional tolerance of my general inclination toward “asceticism” and seclusion during my thesis work. Among this group, too, I must include Harley and Tink, a couple of furry friends who have closely supervised my writing over the last several months with the feline equivalent of patience, acting as occasional bookmarkers and paperweights. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 2: ART & MORALITY ...................................................................... 17 CHAPTER 3: THE SPIRITUALIZING OF THE SENSES .................................. 49 CHAPTER 4: LIFE & LITERATURE .................................................................. 78 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................... 118 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION “I confess not to be a worshipper at the Temple of Reason. Faith is, I think, a bright lantern for the feet, though of course an exotic plant in man’s mind, and requiring continual cultivation. .” –Wilde to William Ward, July 26, 18761 In a 2006 article, H. Wendell Howard writes that even those who doubt the sincerity of Oscar Wilde’s religious commitment to Roman Catholicism—and there have been many—must acknowledge that “both his life and his death were inextricably connected to [it]” (Howard 125). An Irishman born into a protestant family of English extraction, Wilde would come to be improbably attached to the Catholic Church, its traditions and theology; difficult as it is to qualitatively define this connection, critics and biographers alike have cited evidence of a “long conversion” in the known particulars of Wilde’s life, which are liberally documented in his letters and the reminiscences of close friends like Robbie Ross and William Ward. Richard Ellmann deserves considerable credit for compiling many of these disparate documents into a coherent narrative arc of Wilde’s life, and it is also perhaps to his ambitious but flawed biography that we owe renewed scholarly interest in the Catholic Wilde. According to Ellmann, Wilde was introduced to Catholicism as a child of between four or five years old on a summer 1859 vacation to the Southern Coast of Ireland, during which Lady Jane “Speranza” Wilde reportedly began taking her 1 Complete Letters 25 2 2 two sons to Mass and arranged for Wilde and his elder brother to receive religious instruction and Catholic baptism. Wilde himself admits to remembering these events only indefinitely and the baptism, if and when it did occur, took place in an unregistered ceremony; however, such arrangements would have been consistent with Speranza’s enduring intellectual and Nationalist engagements with Catholicism as well as her own inclinations to conversion, which suggest to Jarlath Killeen that for her Protestantism was “an insufficient mythology through which to interpret reality” (Fairy Tales 13). What is known quite categorically is that whatever minor sparks of faith may have been kindled from these experiences were systematically snuffed out by Wilde’s staunchly Protestant father who, upon hearing of Speranza’s Irish project, worked to quell any further exposure to the religion. At the time Sir Wilde only declared that he did not care what his boys became so long as they were as good as their mother, but as Wilde grew to young adulthood Wilde’s Anglican family and friends became increasingly suspicious of Wilde’s imminent conversion and he was informed by his father that should he persist in his Romish nonsense and convert he would be summarily cut off and disinherited. This threat was levied in response to Wilde’s Catholic experimentation, or rather his befriending a group of Dublin Jesuits at Trinity, during which time he also attended Catholic Masses and began to incorporate Catholic images and themes into his rooms. Hearing of this horror, a seemingly ill-informed Sir Wilde arranged for his youngest son’s transfer from Trinity to Oxford hoping to forestall any further experimentation with the “Scarlet Woman,”2 though ironically this 2A derogative Victorian euphemism for the Roman Catholic Church, as perceived