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 through a Protestant lens. In speaking of the Catholic Church Wilde sometimes used this expression, though he did not use it as some Protestants did to identify the Catholic Church as the “Whore of Babylon.” 3 3 decision placed Wilde nearer the Catholic contagion than he may otherwise have come on his own. Since the 1830s, but apparently unbeknownst to Sir Wilde, Oxford had been the hub of Tractarian reform, referred to more familiarly as the Oxford Movement because of its close associations with the school. Many of those involved in the Oxford Movement like Newman and Manning eventually converted to Roman Catholicism, but the Movement itself originated from the Branch Theory forwarded by a group of High Church Anglicans, which conceived of Anglicanism as a type of Catholicism, only differing fundamentally in practice from orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. In Tract XC Newman compared the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church as of the Council of Trent with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the sixteenth century Church of England, finding them fundamentally compatible; from this the Tractarians inferred that Anglicanism had lost its way when, in efforts to distance itself politically from Roman Catholicism, it shed Catholic ritual practices. According to the Tractarians, these practices were, in their emotional symbolism, vital to the experience of religious faith. From this perspective, the Tractarians worked to reintroduce various old Roman Catholic rituals into Anglican worship and these efforts were largely successful: the Eucharist became more central to the Anglican service, vestments became increasingly prevalent, and the entire aesthetic of the Church of England altered in ways that acknowledged its kinship with Rome. Wilde would later say that where Catholicism appealed to him on the level of faith, Newman’s conversion appeared to have been brought about through logic, by which he perhaps meant that Newman eventually rejected the diluted Catholicism of Anglicanism for its purer forebear, because the latter church in its intact form was better designed to engender and authenticate faith. Following in 4 4 the footsteps of Newman’s conversion, famously discussed in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864-1865), a significant percentage of Oxonians was received into the Roman Catholic Church. By the time of Wilde’s attendance, Catholic conversion was so widespread among Oxford students and their mentors as to be called a “Roman fever” and Wilde himself, despite the filial censure he would inevitably incur, seems to have found himself unable to resist it. Killeen notes that by 1875 Wilde’s enthusiasm for Catholicism was conspicuous to all as Wilde “plagued his Protestant friends…with talk of Catholicism and had pictures of Newman and the Pope in his rooms” (Faiths 15). Because Catholicism was both so fashionable at Oxford and considered so subversive and because later the Decadents, largely attracted by the forms and symbol of Roman Catholicism, would convert in large numbers, many critics have concluded that Wilde’s supposed commitment was mainly a shallow or purely artistic attraction to the lavish and theatrical trappings, the forms of Catholic belief. On the other hand, Wilde himself wrote that he “suffer[d] a great deal from [his] Romish leanings, in pocket and mind,” implying that to his father’s threat of disinheritance was added an inner turmoil arising from simultaneous attraction to the religion and unspecified reservations about conversion (Complete Letters 43). Letters and recollections of Wilde’s friends show that the years between entering Oxford and his death in 1900 were marked by great spiritual conflict, with Wilde rejecting his Protestant faith but being perpetually unable to formally convert to Catholicism, alluding to his temperament as one unwilling to sacrifice itself to organized faith, however beautiful. Wilde’s spiritual crisis manifested itself in a series of episodes that have caused posterity to sometimes regard his devotion as insincere. Although, for instance, he would urge William Ward to “be touched by it, feel the awful 5 5 fascination of the [Catholic] Church, its extreme beauty and sentiment, and let every part of your nature have play and room,” Wilde’s commitment to the religion remained informal and tenuous (March 1877, Complete Letters 39). Having borrowed money from his Catholic friend David Hunter-Blair for a much- anticipated Easter trip to the Holy City in 1877, Wilde found himself readily persuaded to travel to Greece. A postcard from Wilde to his friend Reginald Harding, posted from Corfu, confirms the hastily revised itinerary: I never went to Rome at all! What a changeable fellow you must think me, but Mahaffy my old tutor carried me off to Greece with him to see Mykenae and Athens. I am awfully ashamed of myself but I could not help it and will take Rome on my way back (Complete Letters 44). A year later, in April 1878 Wilde would take a more serious step, evidently making an appointment to finally be received into the Church. Nevertheless, according to Fr. Bowden, the prospective convert failed to turn up, sending in his place a large bunch of lilies. In contrast to this youthful change of heart, Ellmann and Killeen observe, Wilde would exhaust his post-Reading Gaol years wandering Europe, obtaining blessings from the Pope on no less than seven separate occasions; he would likewise receive sacraments on his deathbed in Paris in November 1900, stopping short of fully “going over to Rome” until his death. Despite Ross’s insistence that the intensity of Wilde’s pursuit of Catholic conversion in later life was a “return to a first love” and his understanding that Wilde’s conversion was the profound culmination of a lifelong wish, a wide array of critics has been skeptical about the authenticity of this moment, with some judging that a man who described Catholicism as “the only religion to die in” could hardly have been very devout and others, given Wilde’s dubious 6 6 consciousness for the event, more cynically attributing Wilde’s purported acceptance of the sacraments as little more than the involuntary gesture of a lifelong chainsmoker. Ellmann, dismissing Wilde’s conversion as an aesthetic gesture, went so far as to state that this final conversion was equivalent to Wilde “putting a green carnation in his buttonhole” (584). Yet, Wilde’s engagement with Catholicism is not so easily dealt aside when his writing is taken into account. It is known that Wilde regularly published in Catholic magazines and Wilde’s Oxford poetry, which would form the bulk of his Poems (1881), is often concerned with Catholic themes and demonstrates considerable familiarity with Catholic tradition and issues as well as a fondness for Catholic symbolism. Many of Wilde’s Oxford poems are structured around theological or papal issues, showing the extent to which he followed Catholic politics, but in many cases the allusions to Catholicism are of a more general and straightforward nature, as in “Ave Maria Gratia Plena,” where Wilde references the Catholic prayer, and in “Rome Unvisited” where the speaker yearns to see Rome and the Pope. Nevertheless, it is perhaps in “The Grave of Keats” that the seriousness and difficulty of Wilde’s Catholic contemplations is most visible. In this poem, the speaker, evidently Wilde, visits the Protestant Cemetery where Keats is buried, using recognizable Catholic imagery in his descriptions and notably comparing Keats to Saint Sebastian. This reference in and of itself is significant because upon his release from prison Wilde integrated the saint’s name into the alias, Sebastian Melmoth, but that Wilde connects the saint with first Keats’s name and then his own also suggests that the saint’s grace in suffering provided a convenient metaphor for the life of the artist. Stephen Arata has pointed out that Wilde’s interest in religious narratives, especially those of Jesus and the 7 7 saints, originates in their applicability as metaphors to describe and justify the earthly tribulations of the individual, the outcast, and especially the artist. Drawing inspiration from Christ’s Passion, for example, in De profundis Wilde reshapes the unstructured pathos of his life into what Arata terms a “secular gospel” that tells the story of Wilde’s crucifixion as artist. Arata’s reading will be properly introduced in chapter 3, but for now it is sufficient to note that, whatever psychic benefit may have come from rewriting his life as a Life, the result of his framing is that generations of critics and casual readers have preferred to explicate Wilde biographically as a quasi-Saint Augustine figure or redeemed sinner. Because of how beloved Wilde was at the height of his popularity as well as now, if decades and layers of lipstick kisses on his grave are proof, there is a great impulse to saint Wilde as martyred homosexual and artist and a misunderstood mind. This sentiment is given form in Howard’s perception of Wilde’s fidelity to the three types of baptism conceived of by the Roman Catholic Church, from which he like John Albert before him theorizes that an overarching Catholicism informs Wilde’s life and work. By this logic, Wilde experienced baptism thrice: one of desire by virtue of his more or less lifelong wish to convert to Catholicism; another baptism of blood in the trials, imprisonment, and ostracism that haunted the last few years of his life during which his study of Catholic texts intensified; and with baptism by water occurring for him, if not at Glencree, at least through the ministrations of Friar Dunne in the time preceding his death. Such an interpretation certainly has its attractions in unifying Wilde’s existence, which even more than that of most people resists neat explication, because his personae are so manifold and apparently contradictory. As Merlin Holland has noted, Wilde is simultaneously both Anglo-Irishman and Nationalist sympathizer; a born Protestant who pursued Catholic conversion; a married 8 8 homosexual; the consummate “musician of words and painter of language who confessed to Andre Gide that writing bored him”; and Anglo-Irish and an Anglo- Irish French exile, and these are only oversimplifications that can hardly circumscribe the intersections of these various permutations (Holland 3). Undeniably, as Richard Ellmann notes, for modern readers the tale of Wilde’s rise and fall at the behest of a fickle public has something of Icarus in it, but to treat Wilde’s career in the manner of a memento mori or a saint’s Life necessarily requires both the canonization of a narrated Wilde and the acknowledgment of this frame narrative as the definitive authenticating context to which literary critics must appeal to secure the veracity of their analyses. The difficulty is that any attempt to create biographical unity ends with elision, because reliance on traditional biographical methods, as Epifanio San Juan has observed, is unsuitable to the study of Oscar Wilde and of literary production. Over a century and dozens of high-profile Wilde biographies later, we are still unable to agree on Wilde’s general character, much less the meanings of his work, and critics have at times, generating little real insight into vital questions, even gone so far as to grasp at Wilde’s fictive protagonists as reflections of the artist’s personality. Interestingly, though New Criticism has been the dominant practice of literary critics since the 1970s and though this lens is really a philosophical descendent of aestheticism, emphasizing close-reading of texts and focusing on the individual work as a unit of meaning, Wilde’s texts and especially his critical works are seldom addressed purely on the grounds of their contents, without interference of ideal, tragically flawed, or symbolic Wildes whose presence subordinates the writing. Indeed, given New Criticism’s essential kinship to the study of aesthetics, our dependence on biography to illuminate Wilde’s intentions seems both illogical 9 9 and impractical as a working methodology. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that even scholars as established and respected as Karl Beckson have operated on the understanding that Wilde has not left behind him any set of serious and lengthy meditations or any coherent aesthetic creed to deduce. Beckson’s impressions of Wilde are curiously dismissive of anything but Wilde’s geniuses for derivation and style, begging the question of why, with such prejudices against the originality or interest of Wilde’s works, he would have chosen to edit such an involved critical companion to them. Scholarly attitudes toward Wilde such as Beckson’s, though themselves sentimentally inconsistent, are all too quick to cite apparent inconsistencies or contradictions in Wilde’s aesthetics. It is owing to this perceived indecision perhaps that biographical approaches have had such disproportionate coverage in critical circles, despite that critics should really know better. In all fairness, Wilde’s inconsistencies very often appear to be discrepancies at initial and even subsequent glances, but in this thesis, I argue that the true Wilde, if there ever was such a self-contained creature, is to be found in the very fragmentation of perspective and argument that has disturbed so many of Wilde’s critics. In observation of the self-control and purposefulness of Wilde’s textual fragmentation I am preceded by both Killeen and Bruce Bashford, who have each in their own way commented on Wilde’s modification of classical models of dialectic to denote the intricate and sometimes conflicted interrelationships of ideas and truths as they are to be found in the world. In the introduction to a collection of scholarly essays Killeen argues that Wilde’s use of epigram and aphorism forms the structural basis for Wilde’s “intellectual project” of subverting Britishness by revealing the arbitrariness of its values and, by extension, its exclusion and oppression of the Irish. On the other hand, Bashford 10 10 discusses Wilde’s use of dialectic independent of any distinct political motivation, modeling instead how “Wildean dialectic” operates at a mechanical level and describing how the conversations forwarded in Wilde’s two dialogues provide clues as to why Wilde relocates synthesis from Hegel’s objectivity to the subjective imagination. In “The Critic as Artist” for instance it is suggested that in Wilde’s uses of his proprietary dialectic he creates the necessary conditions in which his readers can practice and hone the creative and spiritualizing critical ability described by Gilbert. Curiously, while Wilde’s refocusing of dialectic and his preference for epigram and aphorism have met with sparse though noteworthy critical attention, critics have been slow to discover that Wilde’s dialecticism is, if not inspired by, at least compatible with classic paradigms of Catholic learning. In July 2009, parallels between Wilde’s dialectical construction of truth and Catholic spirituality were recognized by the Roman Catholic Church when the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published an article expressing that, quite independent of explicitly Roman Catholic themes in his work, Wilde was “a man who behind a mask of amorality asked himself what was just and what was mistaken, what was true and what was false,” making him not only a great thinker but a true Catholic in spirit (Monda qtd. in Flood). Catholicism as faith exists in relation to an extensive tradition of scholarship, theological and otherwise, and I claim that in his use of “Wildean dialectic” Wilde adapts Cardinal Newman’s theory of the “original individuum,” wherein each science or branch of knowledge contributes to comprehension of divine truth, as well as St. Anselm’s dialecticism, which emphasizes the inherent divinity of human speech and cognitive acts and the importance of symbol in the development of faith. 11 11

As the discussion of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” in chapter 2 will show, though Wilde does not appear to have agreed with Newman and other theologians that there was any objective truth to be attained to, he nonetheless seems to have appreciated Newman’s and Anselm’s premise of multifaceted truth and their implication of a subjective experience of truth. As I will demonstrate Wilde rejects Ruskin’s dominant theory of aesthetic education, whereby exposure to beautiful forms would have the effect of calibrating the mind to proper reverence toward expressions of beauty, and its later incarnation as the House Beautiful, on precisely the same grounds that he quibbles with Newman and Anselm: namely, that these theories of self-culture assume that there is one acceptable understanding of beauty, a singular and monolithic truth. Wilde believed that individuals ideally were permitted to develop, like art, “along their own lines,” and for him in self-realization there was a kind of creativity and therefore divinity. However, it is necessary for subjectivity to be self-conscious and this self-consciousness must be trained. This is a conclusion that Ruskin’s other disciples also reached and recognition of this inherent need for an acculturating system ultimately brought about the House Beautiful movement during the mid-late nineteenth century. During his American tour, Wilde regularly lectured on the House Beautiful and became its most ardent publicist, but the degree to which Wilde plagiarized or rather borrowed from extant writings on his topic has made it easy for critics to overlook Wilde’s criticism of the system, which occurs implicitly in chapter 11 of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian’s treasure room, as it is described in this chapter, imitates the high- aesthetic House Beautiful interiors cultivated by nineteenth century men and women of fashion. Additionally, Dorian’s demonstrated incapacity to benefit ethically, emotionally, or spiritually from his vast collections of beautiful objects 12 12 and indeed the laxity of ethical compass that exposure to so much physical magnificence promotes, illustrates the naïveté of Ruskin’s theory and suggests that the House Beautiful, itself a dialectical system, could be improved by translation into text, because in reading, as chapter 4 describes, images can be held and manipulated in the mind in a more substantial way than physical objects, which Dorian’s case shows can only provoke vague, reflexive, and temporary emotional responses. In this thesis I contend that Wilde is able to resolve practical problems with the House Beautiful as envisioned by Ruskin and his aesthetic descendants (who incorporated Ruskin’s ideas into the more dynamic, if imperfect theory) in the form of the fairy tale. Though the fairy tale, with its presumed moralism, may seem in some ways counterintuitive to Wilde’s purposes, it proves to be an ideal framework for Wilde’s refashioning of the House Beautiful due to the seriousness of meditation implied by the genre’s usual use as a moralizing form as well as its rich literary tradition, with each tale gathering together shifting allusions to other texts and images in ways that simulate high-aesthetic collections of symbolic objects. Previously, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ann Shillinglaw argued that Wilde’s fairy tales are of merit not only as period children’s literature but as documents that clarify where and how Wilde diverges in thinking from his aesthetic forebears. Whereas Pater is concerned with what is true for the soul, and what is true to those senses that inform the soul, she interprets that Wilde is interested in questions pertaining to the individual soul and its relationship to the oft decadent, worldly surroundings in which it finds itself. In light of The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Fisherman and His Soul,” where the journey of the soul is hemmed in at all sides by the aestheticized physical world, her reading is 13 13 persuasive, but it does not specifically address the importance of literary allusion or the fantastic to Wilde’s creation of dialectical spaces in the fairy tales. Susan Jacobs has essentially acknowledged the dialecticism of Wilde’s tales in her characterization of the fantastic of fairy tale as the “place” where Wilde’s assorted interests as artist and individual—among them a marked resistance to cultural authority—converge and interact. She argues that Wilde employs elements of the fantastic in order to undermine the time-honored assumption that literature must and should teach “truths” and she describes these works in ways that roughly suggest their dialectical attitude, though she favors Todorov’s vocabulary. Jacob’s analysis echoes Jack Zipes’s observation that fairy tales employ the Uncanny to “emancipate” child readers, interfering with the civilizing process in hopes of spurring social or philosophical change. Critics have then occasionally noticed the dialectical quality of fairy tales and Wilde’s in particular, but this fundamental tendency is seldom discussed in terms of being a dialectic, Wildean or otherwise. The language and methodologies typically adopted in critical discussion of Wilde’s fairy tales generally fail to account for their kinship with Wilde’s other writings and his aesthetic philosophy. Often, too, because of their strong religious imagery Wilde’s tales have been mistaken for neo-Christian parables. This approach to the tales, while furnishing insight into Wilde’s uses of Christian imagery and forms, has caused his two collections to be regarded as disconnected from his other literary output, whereas the publication dates suggest that he was writing these tales just prior to and during the same prolific period that produced Wilde’s most famous critical and social essays and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Thus, it is all the more strange that Wilde’s tales have so seldom been understood as contributing to or expressing Wilde’s aesthetics. The tales 14 14 themselves self-consciously engage with other literary works and aesthetic issues as Ann Markey, synthesizing the numerous literary and cultural allusions embedded in Wilde’s tales, establishes. Markey describes these allusions as creating “polyphonic space” in and of the writing. Often, this thesis proposes, Wilde alludes to other art in his tales to destabilize or refine upon tradition, with the allusions serving as symbols of particular ideas or worldviews that can and must be reinterpreted through their interactions with a range of other allusions that contradict or qualify synthesis. However, it is observable that these allusions come into the text through Wilde’s uses of symbol, especially Catholic symbols, to disrupt cohesion of message. Just as Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta,” for instance, imitates the design of the Velásquez painting that inspired it, guiding the reader to systematically contemplate various elements of the composition, circling back to address the enigmatic central figure with changed perspective, the Catholic, sometimes Irish Catholic, symbolism so principal to “The Happy Prince,” “The Nightingale and the Rose” and other tales has the effect of keeping meanings perpetually in exchange and claiming for subjective interpretation the rank of truth. Catholic symbol and ritual were often adopted by the Decadents, who appreciated their layered and dialectical quality, and although Wilde’s connection to Catholicism is not necessarily decadent in type, he does appear to have been quite drawn to its symbols which, in their long tradition of theological and cultural appropriation, took on elaborate, often conflicting or dissonant meanings, making spirituality a series of successive acts of interpretation analogous to the “higher Criticism” proposed in “The Critic as Artist.” Chapter 4 of this thesis illustrates how Wilde employs Catholic imagery and allusions within his tales to spur the creation of dialectical spaces, which allow but do not definitively assert marginalized perspectives. 15 15

In his studies of the tales, Killeen implies that Wilde’s tales subvert expected or socially orthodox morals, only to replace the moral with Anglo-Irish activism. Though Wilde may have had Nationalist sympathies, this is not the only context in which the tales can be read, and indeed the subversions of coherence native to the tales’ dialectic form suggest that Wilde intended synthesis of the “moral” to take place subjectively. The structuring of Wilde’s tales, I assert, is compatible and engages with Catholic traditions of dialectical learning, which privileged subjective acts of reading, often of fables. Through his fairy tales, which incorporate aesthetic conversations, Wilde is able to appeal to Catholic tradition in ways that reinvigorate aesthetic education by emphasizing the inherent spirituality of human intellectual activity and suspending synthesis of the “polyphonic spaces” or “places” he generates, requiring synthesis to occur subjectively and with self-knowledge. Through navigation of the “Wildean dialectic” of the tales, the mind is acculturated to approach beauty dialectically, creating new and more beautiful meanings that may run counter to social and religious mores and personal worldviews. Furthermore, in dislocating us from recognized meanings and lenses of interpretation, Wilde places us in the appropriate attitude to begin, Anselm might say, to comprehend divine truth. Of course, on a secular level the growth of this critical sense may have the effect of making us more accountable for our ideas and actions, and therefore more ethical because more self-aware and actualized. Without devaluing Wilde’s religious devotion to Catholicism, nor the scholarly work that takes it for granted, my aim is to offer another context, secular, apolitical and intimately linked to Wilde’s aesthetics. It has been argued that Wilde subsisted in his connection with the aesthetic movement through a series of poses that shocked and bewildered the public and inspired it to a vague but vapid 16 16 aesthetic sensibility, ultimately repackaging old ideas instead of innovating. In contrast to this common prejudice, in this thesis I intend to demonstrate how through Wilde’s theological and artistic engagement with Catholicism and the fairy tale form he was able to develop if not a theory at least a system of aesthetic education, operating through the subjective synthesis of deliberately constructed dialectic spaces. As chapter 2 of this thesis reveals, much of Wilde’s writing is structured dialectically, moving ideas around the page but suspending conclusion or moral, and Wilde’s fairy tales, in their uses of symbol, generate dialectical complexities that can only be resolved subjectively by the reader, constituting the equivalent of the House Beautiful in a literary space. A reference to Alphonsus’s fables in The Picture of Dorian Gray foreshadows the connection between Wilde’s project and Catholic traditions of learning through dialectic, most often through the image-rich texts of parable. In Wilde’s tales this debt of inspiration is signaled by the central or framing presence of Catholic image and ritual, with the Catholic elements creating textual instabilities that force readers to exercise and refine their subjectivity, developing the ability to engage with complex ideological conversations, gain awareness of personal convictions in relation to alternative avenues of thought or action, and ultimately become fully realized individuals residing in a space between utter acceptance and renunciation of ideas.

CHAPTER 2: ART & MORALITY

“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.” –“Preface,” The Picture of Dorian Gray1 “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.” –Mrs. Cheveley, An Ideal Husband2

From its initial publication in the 1890 July number of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, The Picture of Dorian Gray confounded Wilde’s readership, prompting some notable revisions during his adaptation of the narrative into a full-length novel in 1891. One of the most obvious innovations of the 1891 Ward, Lock, and Company edition was the inclusion of the now famous aphoristic “Preface,” which reads, as Barbara T. Gates so aptly describes, like “the aesthetic’s version of Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’, warn[ing] that ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’ (5) and that ‘those who read the symbol do so at their peril’ (6)” (123). Wilde felt it necessary to include such a cryptic and foreboding disclaimer in part because, judging by the tenor of the reviews, it was apparent his aim in writing the novel had been misapprehended and distorted. Specifically, Wilde objected to the tendency of readers to discuss his text in the language of conventional Victorian morality and in his first public reply to his critics he claimed, among other things, that he was “quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint” (Wilde qtd. in Raby 67). Yet, as Peter Raby has noted, the scheme of Wilde’s singular novel invites “a

1 Complete Works 519 2 Complete Works 19 18 18 certain moral inference”: the central story is that of “a beautiful young man ‘selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth’; the portrait, which is the physical representation of his soul, reflects Dorian Gray’s sins; Dorian Gray himself confesses that he has been ‘poisoned’ by a book” (Raby 67). Between the Lippincott’s and Ward, Lock and Company publications, Wilde occupied himself in spirited defense and explication of his narrative over the course of at least eight letters (four to the editors of the St. James Gazette, three to The Scots Observer and one to The Daily Chronicle) and the “Preface” to Dorian Gray, in addition to “The Critic as Artist” and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” which Lawler reminds us are much more intimately connected to the writing of Dorian Gray than they would at first appear in that they take up questions of art and morality and the claims of community moral standards on the artist (Lawler 15-16). Though considered relatively tame by today’s audiences, when Wilde’s story first appeared in Lippincott’s, the majority of the British press openly and colorfully condemned the narrative, so that by August 1890, approximately two months after initial publication, Wilde had (according to his estimation) received 216 vitriolic attacks (Frankel 4). Given the language and the vehemence of these reviews, it is little wonder that the first printing of the full- length novel, a mere 1,000 copies, took four years to sell. “Dullness and dirt are the chief features of Lippincott’s this month,” one review for The Daily Chronicle wrote, further opining that The Picture of Dorian Gray was a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents— a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction—a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be fascinating but for its effeminate 19 19

frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizings. (DC 7 qtd. in Frankel 4) Implicit in this enumeration of the author’s offenses is bewilderment and disgust concerning the content of the narrative and, indeed, Dorian’s alluded decadence left many of Wilde’s early readers nonplussed. The ending of the novel, where Dorian tears at his “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome” portrait with the very knife he used to stab Basil Hallward, dying and taking with him all of the marks of his corrupted soul previously manifested in the portrait, was especially problematic for Victorian readers, who wondered: was Dorian’s suicide condoned as a “self-extermination of evil”?; did Wilde mean to show that “conscience cannot be denied and that all people who do deny it become self-destroying monsters”?; or was it an absolution of sensation-seeking decadence as the aforementioned Daily Chronicle reviewer presumed, concluding that “Mr. Wilde's book has no real use if it be not to inculcate the ‘moral’ that when you feel yourself becoming too angelic you cannot do better than rush out and make a beast of yourself” (Gates 123; DC qtd. in Gates 123). Wilde’s response to this review, also published in The Daily Chronicle, attempted to correct such devaluations. In his letter, Wilde explained that “the real moral of the story,” was “that all excess, as well as renunciation, brings its punishment,” but this did not serve to substantially change the novel’s public reputation. Instead, the more staunchly the writer defended his creation, the more vehemently trivializing the press became, so that in some cases reviews devolved into mere satire (Wilde qtd. in Gates 124). One reviewer for Punch by the nom de plume, “Baron de Book-Worm,” for instance, offered the following tongue-in-cheek reaction to the work: 20 20

If Oscar intended an allegory, the finish is dreadfully wrong. Does he mean that, by sacrificing his earthly life, Dorian Gray atones for his infernal sins, and so purifies his soul by suicide? “Heavens! I am no preacher,” says the Baron, “and perhaps Oscar didn't mean anything at all, except to give us a sensation, to show how like Bulwer Lytton's old-world style he could make his descriptions and his dialogue, and what an easy thing it is to frighten the respectable Mrs. Grundy with a Bogie.” (Punch 25 qtd. in Gates 124) If Wilde’s Victorian readers struggled to grasp his moral, or willfully lampooned what they construed to be the moral, it is plain from the rest of his response to the Chronicle reviewer and from the kinds of revisions Wilde made to the story, that he felt he had given Dorian a much “too apparent” moral (Wilde qtd. in Raby 67). Indeed, in preparing Dorian for publication as a book, Wilde generally worked to make “the atmosphere of moral corruption” surrounding Dorian Gray increasingly “vague and indeterminate and wonderful,” and in his 1988 study of Wilde’s revisions to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Donald Lawler found evidence of Wilde’s careful reconfiguring of the message through key additions, deletions, and substitutions throughout the text, but especially in his sustained revision of the conclusion (Wilde qtd. in Raby 67). Wilde’s revisions to the conclusion, Lawler noted, were mostly simple and straightforward additions designed to more clearly indicate what Dorian’s suicide means for Dorian and for the novel and he finds evidence that the last two major revisions in particular were meant to “obviate a likely misinterpretation of the final action as one which had for its purpose the pointing of a moral” (Lawler 23). Most notably perhaps, in its 1890 incarnation Dorian Gray appealed to many Christian readers, who recognized the book as a modern Christian morality 21 21 fable, and it was from these readers that the most positive reviews of Lippincott’s Dorian originated. A review of the narrative as it then stood goes a long way to explaining why so many readers believed it to be didactic tale of corrupted innocence. In The Picture of Dorian Gray of Lippincott’s, the moral action of the story begins with the temptation and fall from grace of Dorian Gray as in the other versions, but Dorian Gray appears in some senses absolved of his own agency in his corruption in that he has been so substantially influenced by Lord Henry and the “yellow book,” so that the novel “becomes an overt lesson for all young men who dally with French decadents and the like” (Lawler 32). Despite his debaucheries, in other words, Dorian maintains a certain impetuous innocence and this alters our reading of the scene in which Dorian stabs his portrait, ultimately killing himself. In doing so, he seems motivated by genuine repentance and horror at what he has become, and this final act of renunciation, though a suicide, might even suggest to readers that there really had “been something more” in Dorian’s resolution to spare Hetty Merton than mere caprice (Dorian Gray 183). This was an ambiguity that Wilde corrected in the 1891 novel. Far from welcoming the praise of his Christian readership, Lawler conjectures Wilde saw their positive reviews as a call to specificity, noting that in the 1891 edition Wilde adds that, No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now (Dorian Gray 183). This revision is all the more pointed and momentous in that, according to Lawler, it is the single place in all three major revisions where Wilde “sacrifices implication to clarity,” and Lawler theorizes that Wilde forces Dorian’s self- realization here in order to make Dorian aware of the “true nature of his condition” 22 22 and to illustrate that repentance and a change of life are impossible for Dorian, not because he is controlled by fate, but because he is incapable of genuine alteration, thereby escaping a didactic ending (Lawler 33). Though Lawler builds a persuasive case, citing specific types and instances of revision and situating them within Wilde’s cultural and personal contexts, since 1988 many critics have found fault with Lawler’s presumption that Wilde’s main intent during revision was to eliminate material that might provoke interpretations founded on issues of morality. Most of Lawler’s critics dispute his analysis on the grounds that Michael Patrick Gillespie does, believing that while the attacks on his novella could hardly have failed to make an impression on Wilde, “assuming that his changes were introduced to forestall additional criticism presumes a kind of timidity on Wilde’s part that [Wilde’s] public response to his adversaries does not support” (Gillespie 98). Moreover, “extrapolating motives behind particular revisions, and by extension the decision not to make other changes,” as Lawler does, “can often amount to nothing more than educated guessing” (Gillespie 97- 98). Gillespie does not cite specific instances of Lawler’s “extrapolating” tendency, but his conclusion that “obscene passages…were cut because of their mawkish and sentimental writing as much for their affront to contemporary moral standards” is perhaps as good an example as any (Lawler 65). The “obscene” passages in question here are primarily references to homosexuality and scenes of homoeroticism, and despite Lawler’s relative sensitivity to the probable influence of Wilde’s sexuality on his composition of Dorian, at least in its novella form, he does not seem to have fully registered the complexity of the interactions of the private Wilde with the public Wildes, J.M. Stoddart, the press, and any number of aesthetic influences during the writing of the novel. Even if the purging of 23 23 homosexual content from the book precedes the Lippincott’s publication, as Lawler notes, this does not necessarily mean, as he goes on to judge, that Wilde chose to eliminate homosexual content mostly for artistic reasons. Lawler is not entirely alone, however, in his conviction that one of Wilde’s chief tasks in his revisions of the Lippincott’s Dorian was to diminish allusions of homosexuality in the relationship between Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray in order to emphasize Dorian’s importance to Basil as muse and thus set their relationship at a higher aesthetic plane. Raby, too, believes that Wilde omits references to a homosexual relationship between Dorian and Basil to refocus the message of the novel on aesthetic questions, with homosexuality being just one discrete condition of existence wiped from the landscape of the novel to eliminate moral reactions to explicit “sins,” as well as from broader philosophical aversion to novelistic realism. Yet Raby, unlike Lawler, is able to appreciate the impact Stoddart’s interference had, however kindly his motives may have been, on Wilde’s construction of Dorian Gray. If Raby believes that “the indeterminate nature of Dorian’s sins” ensures that, as Wilde wrote, “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray,” he is also able to acknowledge that textual ambiguity regarding Dorian’s sins “had already been assisted by J.M. Stoddart” (Wilde qtd. in Raby 67; Raby 68). Raby’s reservation on this point is justified given the variety of unauthorized changes Stoddart made to Wilde’s typescript, censoring many references to illicit or promiscuous heterosexuality, but also subduing homoerotic themes in Basil Hallward’s attachment to Dorian Gray, and erasing marks of homosexual identification in the protagonist-subject of the novel, possibly distorting some of Wilde’s intentions for the book and influencing, even coercing, later revisions. 24 24

In the face of such odds, Lawler remains confident that Stoddart’s censorship was compatible with Wilde’s vision, making the near assertion that Wilde evidently accepted Stoddart’s changes to his manuscript because Wilde’s papers and the final novel indicate that he worked extensively from the Lippincott’s text, only occasionally reverting to the text of the typescript he submitted for Stoddart’s review. This typescript, as Nicholas Frankel, has pointed out in the foreword to The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray (based on Wilde’s typescript), would have been unavailable to Wilde after its submission, so that if most of his revisions were based on the version of the story that Lippincott’s printed, it may have been because Wilde lacked a complete fair-copy of the manuscript to work from. In any case, Frankel reminds us, even with access to the typescript or its contents, Wilde would hardly have been able to reinstate his uncensored text among such a steadfastly Victorian audience. Although Lawler’s analysis has met with some skepticism here and in numerous elsewheres, it is not precisely his conclusions, but his method of reaching them that is essentially problematic. The extent and quality of Lawler’s research, as Gillespie acknowledges, can hardly be doubted, and he faithfully catalogues the sorts of revisions made, giving students of Wilde useful insights into the writer’s process and what kinds of decisions occurred at different stages in Dorian’s publication history. Gillespie writes that Lawler’s principal misstep is in approaching the manuscripts almost without reference to Wilde’s critical matrix, which constitutes an extensive body of work in and of itself. Gillespie believes that we may arrive at a more accurate measure of Wilde’s intentions for Dorian Gray and other works by “pointing to extra-textual material”—that is, Wilde’s critical writing—“to show the issues engaging Wilde’s attention while he was revising his novella into a novel” (Gillespie 98). Nevertheless, “this is not to say,” 25 25

Houston A. Baker, Jr. writes in an article of a much earlier date, “that we should read Wilde’s essays into the novel, but simply that we should read and interpret the novel within the framework of Wilde's major ideas” (350). The essays of Wilde’s Intentions (1891), especially “The Critic as Artist,” amply supply such a context. In one of his more reliable suggestions, Lawler writes that, being composed about the same time as Dorian Gray, “The Critic as Artist” is a great deal more pertinent to our reading of the final novel than at first appears and that certainly in this essay we can readily observe Wilde endeavoring to establish boundaries between art and morality, elaborating in some ways on the commentary provided in his more direct pronouncements to critics concerning the morality of his text. In its original appearance as a magazine article, “The Critic as Artist” was called “The True Function and Value of Criticism: A Dialogue,” and that the title echoes the phrasing of Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) is not incidental. Wilde’s dialogue engages substantially with Arnold’s belief, commonly held by the literalist public, that “the aim of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is” (Arnold qtd. in Danson 89). This assumes, of course, an objective, knowable Truth or moral in a piece of art and this presupposition of any such matter, Wilde contends, falsely claims for criticism an objectivity that can never belong to it. Acts of criticism are always self-referential, Wilde argues, with the critic performing, counter-intuitively, a more creative act than the artist who merely creates the canvas on which the critical imagination operates. Under these conditions, moral and immoral books definitively do not exist, because through criticism art “reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing” so that “the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in 26 26 the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it” (Complete Works 1029). “Nay, it is rather the beholder,” Wilde’s Gilbert says, who lends to the beautiful “its myriad meanings, and makes it marvelous for us…so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives…a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive” (Complete Works 1029). The “shrill clamour of criticism,” of the species Wilde encountered with respect to Dorian, then, has no basis in its relative claims of immorality or morality

(Complete Works 1011). “When the work is finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say” and reading describes nothing more than the critic’s subjectivity, “itself an art” and of all the arts “the purest form of personal expression” (Complete Works 1029, 1027). In Wilde’s view, it is such personal expression or “self-culture” that is “the true ideal of man” (Complete Works 1043). For Wilde, aesthetics and critical ability are even “higher than ethics…belong[ing] to a more spiritual sphere” and in the numerous references to soul in Gilbert’s speeches, Wilde positions art in a spiritual, though neither ethical nor moral, relation to humanity and spiritualizes subjectivity and individualism (Complete Works 1058). “To discern the beauty of a thing” may be “the finest point to which we can arrive,” but all the same, aesthetics and ethics are not as mutually exclusive for Wilde as his critical writing would suggest, and though ultimately, “The Critic as Artist,” divorces art from the claims of morality, Dorian Gray appears to demonstrate that under specific circumstances art or artistic behavior do overlap with ethical questions (Complete Works 1058). As has been previously articulated, Wilde disapproved of and distrusted Realist art and logical induction of his claims in “The Critic as Artist” posits that 27 27 this is because, in addition to foregrounding and really necessitating obvious morals, Realism fabricates an objectivity that circumscribes critical activity. Perhaps more suspect for Wilde, however, is Realism’s eschewal of “mystery” and the monolithic critical commitment to clarifying works of art that was only fortified with this vogue. In connection with his resistance to the notion of simple explication, Wilde makes a range of statements that, outside of the situation of the dialogue, appear to make little if any sense. Among other things, Wilde asserts that the “highest,” or best criticism is “that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there,” so that the critic’s charge is, as much as possible, “to see the object as in itself it really is not” (Complete Works 1058, 1030). Indeed, instead of taking pains to explain the work of art he has taken as his subject, the critic “may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, [a] mist of wonder” (Complete Works 1032). According to Gilbert in the dialogue, “nowadays we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them” and he registers concern that efforts to define works of art in objective terms, even when these analyses assist comprehension, strip art of much of its dignity and worth (Complete Works 1012). As one example, Gilbert insinuates that in exerting themselves to explicate the works of great authors, the members of the Browning Society and the authors of Mr. Walter Scott’s Great Writer’s Series mar more than they make, “explain[ing]…divinity away” in much the same way the theologians of the Broad Church party do (Complete Works 1012). Art is not always, however, ruined at the hands of critics and, for Wilde self-consciousness and emotionalism in an artist can be equally corruptive to art in dismantling tensions between the critic and his subject. Whereas “The Critic as Artist” affirms that the critic’s role is to achieve self-realization in the “creation” of new texts generated through subjective 28 28 interpretation, the artist must modulate his expression in certain ways. For one, while the artist should express himself genuinely, such expression should by no means occur in the raw, and the artist should endeavor to depict anything that is real only allusively. This in large measure accounts for Basil Hallward’s notion that he had “put too much of [himself]” into Dorian’s painting (Dorian Gray 7). In 1969, Houston A. Baker, Jr. published an analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray that took as its starting point Basil’s particular anxiety, assessing the novel as a “tragedy of the artist” in that Basil’s emotional attachment to his subject clouds his judgment as an artist, deleteriously interfering with his achievement of his own strict artist’s code. Hallward’s foremost conviction is that the artist should portray only the “abstract sense of beauty” to the world, and yet, Baker reminds us, he realizes from the outset of the novel that he has failed to live up to that conception (Dorian Gray 14). In particular, he has failed to do so in his portrait of Dorian Gray, because as Basil remarks, he has allowed his idolatry for Dorian, the physical embodiment of his ideal, to be so transparently depicted on the canvas. As will be discussed shortly, in his writing and even in this novel, Wilde concerns himself considerably with questions of influence and individual expression, but it will suffice for now to merely draw attention to the limits Basil places on the expression of the artist and how his failure to behave within these parameters results in bad art. Although Wilde for the most part avoids binary classifications, we might say that Basil’s portrait qualifies as bad, or less than ideal, art by Wilde’s standards in that it signals Basil’s self-compromise and, in light of Wilde’s critical writing, miscarriage of the artist’s responsibilities. Prior to painting the fateful portrait, Basil chose to portray Dorian in “imaginative reality,” painting him as Paris or Adonis, but never as Dorian actually looked sitting for the image and never colored by his specific feelings 29 29 toward Dorian (Baker 353). Dorian was, during this earlier period from which Basil dated his most successful work, essentially a form on which to hang a formless ideal and as such his depiction remained innocuous. Basil says that his work during this period “had been what art should be—unconscious, ideal, and remote,” and Baker believes that this in itself indicates that Basil’s later self- consciousness and over-personalization are to blame for the outcomes of Dorian’s portrait (Dorian Gray 95). He argues that rather than read Dorian as a person, a sentient character, we must distinguish that Dorian has effectively no life within the novel outside of what he aesthetically presents, which seems a valid claim given how mediated Dorian’s character often is by the perceptions of others in the novel. Dorian makes his initial appearance in the novel as a golden youth in the gaze of a painter who idealizes his physical beauty and unspoiled nature and he will later become, for Lord Henry, the “visible symbol” of the new hedonism as his youthful, unstained appearance perpetually belies the rumors of his debauchery. Beginning as the physical embodiment of a high artistic ideal, “the corruption that Dorian undergoes in his hedonistic pursuit of pleasure is the corruption of an artistic ideal” and, Baker remarks that “the fact that Dorian's corruption shows only on Hallward’s canvas emphasizes this point” ( 353). Following this logic, from a purely aesthetic point of view, Dorian’s stabbing of his portrait—and thus himself—which has generated such diverse readings, can be read as “the destruction of the corrupt ideal,” causing Hallward’s canvas to “regain its original splendor” and, therefore, its purity (Baker 353). Such destruction is the only hope for art, Wilde’s ending proposes, because Basil’s “corrupted ideal” precludes pure interactions between the portrait and its potential viewers, its critics, as defined by Wilde’s dialogue; because Basil has portrayed 30 30 his real sentiments in their real, mundane, readily deducible situation, he has in effect failed as an artist, short-circuiting the fundamental artistic-critical exchange. In a way, this robust projection of his subjectivity means that he has committed an unintentional though forceful act of influence, and this influence is not only damaging to Dorian, but also potentially so for other viewers, as the artist gestures with his reluctance to show the painting. The import of Basil’s refusal may be initially lost on the reader, written off as mere artistic caprice and, perhaps to present Basil’s conviction in a more accessible way, Wilde expands upon Basil’s concerns in the short conversation between Lord Henry and Dorian in chapter 2. In this moment of the text, Dorian is posing for Basil on the dais and he asks Lord Henry whether he has really as bad an influence on his friends as Basil says he does. To Basil’s accusation, Wotton replies that rather “there is no such thing as a good influence,” and he suggests that all influence being “immoral from the scientific point of view,” even a so-called positive influence would definitively be a bad one (Dorian Gray 19). “To influence a person,” Lord Henry says “is to give him one’s own soul,” so that the one influenced “does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions” and, therefore, “his virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed” and “he becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him” (Dorian Gray 19). Of course, Dorian will not heed this alternate warning. He allows himself to be flattered into self-dissociation by Basil and he is for this reason all the more susceptible to Lord Henry’s vision of one man “[living] his life out fully and completely… [giving] form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,” from which example “the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would 31 31 forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal,” or “to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be” (Dorian Gray 19). Whereas “the aim of life,” according to Wotton, “is self-development,” Dorian chooses to make himself a symbol not of himself, but of Wotton’s new hedonism and while Dorian’s venality depicts the corruption of artistic ideals it can also be seen an attempt by Wilde to illustrate the harm of influence (Dorian Gray 19). Though it is usually unwise, especially with Wilde, to assume one-to- one identifications of authors with their creations, Wilde’s critical writings, especially “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” bear out the notion that at least Wotton’s ideas about influence are the same as Wilde’s. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry says that “to realize one's nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for” and yet, people have forgotten this “highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self…Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked” (Dorian Gray 19). By Wilde’s assessment, influence is damaging to individuals in that it constricts development of Personality, which Wilde regarded as the highest aim of any human life and this lethality is enlarged upon more overtly in “Soul of Man,” where Wilde famously declares that, in veneration of human integrity, “Be thyself” shall be written over the portal of the new world, his Utopia (Complete Works 1085). This work, often criticized for its idealism, illustrates the depth and form of Wilde’s concern with influence and its cousin authority. Authority, like influence, can only degrade both the user and the recipient. Indeed, good can only come from the exercise of authority when that control is “violently, grossly, and cruelly used,” because in that case “the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill [authority]” is brought out in people (Complete Works 1087). In language echoing 32 32 that used by Lord Henry to Dorian, Wilde explains that, conversely, benevolent authority is yet more common and more malign to the individual. Authority when exercised with apparent kindness is “dreadfully demoralizing” in that people are made “less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them,” so that they “go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment” (Complete Works 1087). Rebellion, for Wilde, was the ideal state of the humanity, but individualism was not simply a matter of repulsing oppression or distinguishing oneself from the social group. Individualism, the development of Personality, need not be violent and is ideally a rebellion of the mind. If Wilde distrusted morality, it was because it dislocated the individual from autonomous thought, forcing him to have recourse to the judgments of others; in the case of entrenched social mores, ethical relationships between situation and prescribed social response could no longer be clearly adjudicated except through appeals to conventionality. The traditionalism implicit in common morality delimited human experience and, worse still, permitted people to avoid full knowledge of or responsibility for themselves. “The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud,” Gilbert argues, is a sign of “our imperfect development,” not our civilization, and self-denial and self-sacrifice are “simply… method[s] by which a man arrests his progress” (Complete Works 1024). Ironically, in their uninhibited self-expression and self-knowledge Wilde places sinners and criminals even above martyrs. “Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not anyone,” but Wilde condones sin in that it at least 33 33

“increases the experience of the race…through its intensified assertion of individualism…sav[ing] us from monotony of type” (Complete Works 1024, 1023). Morality, from Wilde’s perspective, relies on arbitrary and impermanent classification no more reliable or true than critical interpretation, whereas transgression brings about both spiritual and intellectual development and discovery. Without sin, without individualism, the world would be “colourless” and Gilbert puts forth the view that “even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of an individual, than a sense of right and wrong” (Complete Works 1058). According to his credo, “Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible,” but “Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change,” and are thus of a more elevated importance than ethics, which just assure that the possibility of civilization remains (Complete Works 1058). Hilary Fraser has suggested the significance of Darwinian thought to Wilde’s aesthetics and the influence of evolutionary theory is readily palpable in these lines as well as the general preoccupation of Wilde’s works with variation of experience and expression. The individual cannot evolve without experimentation and so, to develop a self- conscious subjectivity and hence fulfill his humanity, the critic must “realize himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways…ever be[ingl curious of new sensations and fresh points of view,” because it is “through constant change, and through constant change alone,” that he will find his “true unity” (Complete Works 1048). He will not be even “the slave of his own opinions,” because “the essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth” (Complete Works 1048). Unfortunately, Wilde observes, while “we teach people to remember. We never teach them how to grow” and it has rarely occurred to us to educate by 34 34

“develop[ing] in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment” (Complete Works 1055). There is ample evidence, however, in his assorted writings, that Wilde himself attempted to supply a working system of aesthetic education that would “develop that real love of beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education” and its most immediately recognizable feature is the simultaneous presence and absence of authorial voice that reaffirms the subjectivity of reading (Complete Works 1049). For example, in “The Truth of Masks,” first published 1885 and rereleased in Intentions (1891), in mischievous experimentation on his audience, Wilde writes that he does not “agree with everything that [he has] said in this essay. There is much with which [he] entirely disagree[s]” (Complete Works 1078). According to Wilde, “the essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything,” but there is of course more afoot here than flippancy (Complete Works 1078). Wilde begins with the conventional modes of an academic treatise only to try his audience’s patience by breaking both the form and the tone of the piece, effectively flouting the fourth wall and directly addressing his readers to seed doubt of the truth of what he has written. This move is at least as significant as it is amusing: Wilde’s disavowal of his own thesis reveals the work to be just as much a prank on his readers as an invitation to them, offering no definite conclusions in order to encourage individual readers to supply their own. Such suspension of conclusion or moral is in keeping with what Bruce Bashford has described as a broader “dialectical” tendency in Wilde’s writing. Before presenting Bashford’s conclusions, it will probably be helpful to consider the general movements of Wilde’s two dialogues, beginning with “The Decay of Lying” (1889), which builds upon Wilde’s structural experimentation in “The Truth of Masks” (1885). The musings of this dialogue also lay the 35 35 groundwork for “The Critic as Artist” (1891), “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Additionally, the original publication of “The Decay of Lying” (January 1889 issue of The Nineteenth Century), positions the dialogue as a critical source for The Picture of Dorian Gray in that it is almost certainly a product of the same time frame and the same frame of mind as the 1890 novelette. Although there are significant thematic overlaps between “Decay” and Wilde’s novel, with the dialogue engaging with many of the same problems of art and the natural as well as the relationship between art and morality as Dorian does, it is the form of the work itself and the reactions that structure engenders that provide the most dynamic sketch of Wilde’s attitude toward the latter question, which was apparently of perennial interest to Wilde. In “Decay,” Wilde generates a dramatic situation—really a kind of Socratic dialogue of a tone similar to that which Ernest and Gilbert conduct in “The Critic as Artist”—in which two characters, Cyril and Vivian, engage with the contemporary Realist movement in literature and art and, more particularly, Plato’s exclusion of poetry from his ideal State for its celebration of illusion or “lying.” This dialogue is principally impelled by Vivian’s recitation of his article, “The Decay of Lying: A Protest,” which very emphatically objects to Victorian culture’s privileging of realism as artistic method and aesthetic ideal in nineteenth- century art. The first of Vivian’s four “doctrines of the new aesthetics” asserts that though an artist may lie, his dishonesty is not immoral. “Art never expresses anything but itself,” Vivian explains, “it has an independent life… develop[ing] purely on its own lines,” and, as Wilde may be implying, any immorality ascribed to art arises from the development in an artist of “a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling” (Complete Works 991, 973). Truth-telling, or Realism, is 36 36 unhealthy because, in taking inspiration from the life or environment of the artist, mere illustration causes both the imagination of the artist and the viewer to atrophy. The truths of art, and thus life which imitates it, Vivian holds, must be constituted in the subjective imagination, and so art is an enterprise that defies normative, rational, Kantian measurements of truth: “as a method, realism is a complete failure,” for “the moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything,” and hence art’s “true decadence,” its decay, is in its conventional tendency to realistic representation (Complete Works 979, 978). “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things,” as Vivian’s final doctrine goes, “is the proper aim of art” (Complete Works 992). All art is meant to do, of course, is to supply “beautiful forms,” through which we may realize “the self- conscious aim of Life…to find expression,” so that, as expressed in Wilde’s “Preface” to Dorian Gray, external moral judgments are not applicable to art (Complete Works 992). Vivian’s philosophy does not ultimately oppose the existence of truths, Megan Becker-Leckrone points out, but his “final revelation” instead prompts us to reevaluate how we define beauty and truth in art. If art’s truth is expressive and interpretive as Vivian stresses, this also means it is manifold and dialectical. However, though for Wilde there is no “simple truth,” there is a Keatsian “complex beauty,” which, entropic as it is, is still more true (Complete Works 978). Readers who seek a didactic and comprehensive espousal of Wilde’s aesthetic code in “Decay” must accept disappointment. While in effect seeding his aesthetics within the public mind, Wilde was also quite, “determined to put [his] new views on art, and particularly on the relations of art and history, in a form [the public] could not understand,” in order to prevent his audience from reflexively 37 37 rejecting, accepting, or otherwise vulgarizing his views, as he observed they did with, “any artistic idea that one gives them” (Wilde qtd. in Buckler 314). It is probably not incidental that Cyril and Vivian are also the names of Wilde’s sons, aged three and two at the time of the dialogue’s writing, Ann Varty observes. Vivian, who shares the name of Wilde’s youngest son, leads the dialogue with the “uninhibited confidence of one who has not learned to be cowed by received wisdom” and, Cyril, his more passive respondent ultimately succumbs to, or perhaps retreats from, his arguments (Varty 59). On the other hand, Cyril, sharing the name of Wilde’s oldest son, very much plays the straight man, serving as the spokesman for relatively conventional perspectives on art, taking positions, expressing shock in response to Vivian’s bald statements, prompting further explanation of Vivian’s meaning, alternately chiding, resisting, and conceding his philosophy, but ultimately capitulating to it. Throughout the dialogue, indeed, Cyril often seems little more than a sounding board for Vivian’s thought and Vivian’s voice is foregrounded to such an extent that it is customary and reasonable to equate Vivian’s principles with Wilde’s. In still another way, what Buckler thinks of as Vivian’s “gamesmanship,” his graceful play of ideas, and his ability to “prove anything,” undeniably refract his author, but it is clear that wit, beyond its compatibility with his by-all-accounts exuberant nature, had some philosophical basis for Wilde aside from his self- indulgent “multiplication” of his personality (Buckler 316). Danson has persuasively described what he calls “Wildean paradox,” whereby, in much of Wilde’s writing, “the ironized new meanings…are only realizable in relation to their old meanings, which the paradox, for its subversive purpose, keeps in circulation,” and Buckler interprets the exchanges between Vivian and Cyril through Danson’s lens (Danson 150). By Buckler’s account, 38 38

Cyril’s interjections are critical, because they keep “old meanings” in circulation, and that without Cyril’s presence in the text, Wilde’s intellectual project would be defeated. Cyril is indispensible to the construction of Wilde’s paradox. Numerous others, including Hilda Schiff, Megan Becker-Leckrone, Bruce Bashford, and Jarlath Killeen have supported Danson’s and Buckler’s detection of a purposeful dialecticism in Wilde’s writing, though they have not always discussed this tendency in a mutual vocabulary. Becker-Leckrone discusses at length how Wilde adopts the dialogue form to explore “the paradoxical, equivocal valence of ‘truth’ and ‘lies’” as these concepts, which Wilde destabilizes, relate to life and art (par. 16). For Hilda Schiff, whereas Wilde does use his essay to “expose the outworn and to his mind mistaken attitudes which still clung about the Romantic idea of nature, both in general and in relation to the arts in particular; and to construct a set of values” that substitute civilization and the subjectivity of one’s experience of art for “the inspiration which the famous vernal wood was no longer profitably providing,” Wilde’s “Decay” encapsulates a “larger discussion that both articulates aestheticism’s central argument and situates it in long history of discourse on mimesis” (86). This discourse is, of course, that of how ideas and art are produced and perceived and it is part and parcel of Wilde’s “deeply ingrained dialectical habit of mind” (Schiff 101). However, Bashford’s analysis, building from this same premise, stands apart in its ability to delineate the specific mechanisms of Wilde’s dialecticism—how Wilde is thinking—in ways that create a workable interpretive framework for Wilde’s ideas. Wilde’s partiality for the dialectic is generally undisputed by critics and it is, in essence, difficult to ignore while reading Wilde. Even his plays, read carefully, turn out to be far more than exercises in characterization or dramatic 39 39 effect—everything, with Wilde, is a matter of ideas and discriminating perspective. Nonetheless, it is one thing to observe dialectical patterns of argumentation and quite another to comprehend their purpose and operation. Mostly, of course, as Schiff, Becker-Leckrone, and Bashford have realized, Wilde’s dialectic mode is meant unsettle social mores and accepted wisdom, encouraging independent thought, but this outcome does not reflexively divulge its mechanism. Wilde does not just, as Arthur Symons felt, “constantly [say] the opposite of sensible opinions” to “[prove] to us that opposites can often be equally true,” though this is unquestionably part of what he does and a few scholars following in Symons’s footsteps have agreed with his assessment of Wilde as a Hegelian dialectician (Symons qtd. in Bashford 114). Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfland, as Bashford shows, are able to establish beyond doubt from various sources that Wilde was familiar with Hegel’s ideas, and they and Bashford are in agreement that Wallace’s exegesis of Hegel’s dialecticism influenced Wilde’s critical method. Wilde copied passages spanning almost the whole text of Wallace’s Prolegomena to Hegel and it is likely, Bashford says, that Wilde would have come across Wallace’s model of Hegel’s “Dialektik,” which assumes the incompleteness of opposing perspectives, believing this can only be reconciled when the “negative and positive are assimilated to each other” (Wallace qtd. in Bashford 115). To overgeneralize this system, for Hegel it is in the contradictions between perspectives that the truth of a paradox is constituted, insofar as there can be one, and it is this tension that is Wilde’s favored perch. There are definitely nods to Hegel in Wilde’s assertion in “The Truth of Masks” (1885) that “A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true” and his belief that it is only through art- criticism that we can realize Hegel's system of contraries. Yet, Bashford accepts 40 40

Wilde’s Hegelian classification with some reservation. Bashford acknowledges Wilde’s observable play of oppositions in the dialogues and in “The Truth of Masks” (1885), where he blatantly accesses Hegel by placing his essay in obstruction of itself, but he also recognizes that Wilde makes important and habitual departures from Hegel’s method of synthesis. Hegelian dialectics tend to move from thesis, to antithesis; for the most part Wilde adopts “the motor of an Hegelian dialectical method,” but his uses of this dialectic method do not result in the comprehensive perspective Hegel visualizes (Bashford 116). Wilde remains quasi-Hegelian in that his dialogues pit apparent contraries against one another, but Bashford notes that Wilde’s dialectics have “an exploratory quality about [them]” that Hegel’s approach does not share (118). Wilde’s dialectics do not follow Hegel’s linear three-step process, for one, and apart from setting obvious contraries against one another, Wilde often synthetically separates interrelated concepts in order to bring them back together in a new or different alignment. Bashford cites as just one instance of this strategy Vivian’s defense of the paradox that life imitates art. Wilde capitalizes on the apparent irony of Vivian’s statement and the bemused and skeptical reaction this irony induces to unground the opposing perspectives. While a reader raises an eyebrow or even laughs at Wilde’s inversion of the maxim that art imitates life, he must also realize the arbitrariness of such folk wisdom, which is seemingly made manifest in the simple transposition of subject and object. Proceeding from this disruption, Vivian reconnects life and art by redefining life as an expressive process that takes shape in art. Life imitates art, because “scientifically speaking, the basis of life - the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it - is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained” (Complete Works 985). 41 41

Wilde’s penchant for disassembly has effects not just on the outcome of discussions of concepts and realities, but also Wilde’s premises in mediating these dialogues. Appropriately, perhaps, “The Critic as Artist” contains the most emphatic discourse on the merits of the dialogue and hints that it aids in developing the “fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection” native to art and so essential to creation and critical thought (Complete Works 1011). “By [dialogue’s] means [the artist] can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood,” these fancies and moods being authenticated and expressed in the reader’s subjectivity (Complete Works 1046). Art does not have a moral, ethical, or emotional significance, except what we bring to it: “the statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change” because the arts “know little of life” and “the secrets of life and death,” which fall to humanity (Complete Works 1026). Art is but amorphously fertile and only given shape through mind. While the creative and the critical would be deemed separate spheres of activity by some, Wilde’s Gilbert sees no such natural antithesis and holds that any purported division “is entirely arbitrary” (Complete Works 1020). For an actual division to exist, a static truth or propriety must be presumed and Wilde’s dialectics avoid unilateral, formal declarations of this kind. Rather, Wilde envisions dialogue and dialectic as means to “exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things gaining…all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely” (Complete Works 1046). Writing of Browning, Wilde remarks via Gilbert that though he was unable to answer the problems he posed in his writing, 42 42 he “could at least put problems forth,” and Wilde implies that the artist can and should do no more than this (Complete Works 1013). Comparably, Wilde reveals in a letter regarding “The Decay of Lying,” his own investment in the “fanciful form” of the dialogue arises from its capacity to “put forward” some truths, “or perhaps some great half truths,” through contrast with their other halves (Wilde qtd. in Bashford 118). A “half truth” in this scenario isn’t a half untruth; it is simply a portion of a more complete and complex truth and an individual’s access to a more authentic truth entails willingness to grapple with nuances and even dwell in uncertainty. Interestingly, much of Montague Brown’s explication of St. Thomas of Aquinas’s “method” corresponds to the privileging of dialectic within Wilde’s aesthetics. For Aquinas, as for Wilde, “the inability to formulate perfectly how two truths are one in reality [was] no grounds for denying either truth” and Brown summarizes that it was on this basis that St. Thomas chose to “keep all truth” (69). Of particular interest is the degree to which Brown’s description of Aquinas’ philosophy parallels critical discussions of Wilde’s dialectical sensibility and some of the language Wilde uses in his writing. Comparable to Wilde, it appears that Aquinas did not regard the “static achievement of knowledge” as a virtue, implying instead the desirability of a “higher viewpoint which can allow for what is true on both sides” (Brown 69). Like Gilbert, Aquinas shows that the objective of a thinker when faced with contradiction or inconsistency should be not to simplify but to deepen the mystery or confusion where possible, “for the meaning of reality lies ultimately in the mystery of deepening meaning,” and it is in such an attitude that the thinker can begin to discover truths about man’s relation to God and the universe (Brown 69). 43 43

Like Aquinas, far from being troubled by any instabilities in perspective, Wilde celebrates “those felicitous afterthoughts” and tangents suddenly suggested in the course of the main discussion “that give fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance” (Complete Works 1046). Hegel would perhaps disagree, but in “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert cites such indeterminateness of destination as the principal attraction of the dialogue form, and this is in keeping with Wilde’s subjective perspective that there is “no free-standing subject,” including the author, whose “independent contours” could—or should—dictate the course of investigation (Bashford 122). Although the degree to which an author identifies with his characters would be difficult, if not impossible to say, the at least attritional success of these two leading partners suggests that their perspectives were probably somewhat more palatable to Wilde than those of their interlocutors. Yet, while Wilde allows Vivian and Gilbert to lead their respective dialogues and as such it appears that they serve as vessels for Wilde’s argumentation, Wilde seems to place less importance on what they think than how they think. Wilde’s most successful thinkers, those who lead, are those who retain a significant degree of mental flexibility, or what Wilde would term an “Oxford temper,” which allows them to adapt their arguments to address any objection or qualification that may enter into the conversation. In this regard, Wilde’s leaders take modified part in the Platonic tradition, wherein the dialectician speaks with another in a spontaneous manner, improvising his speeches to whatever answers he is given and allowing whatever issues are raised to dictate the scope of the argument. “The Critic as Artist” proposes that criticism should be unmitigated by outside views or contexts and elevates subjectivity to a position superior to attempted objectivity. The objective stance assumes a reachable, unilateral truth, 44 44 deducible from combining and cross-referencing “facts,” but for Wilde the reading mind is ideally left to negotiate the synthesis between presented half-truths and his subjective intelligence retains full sway, so that any conclusion at which he arrives has not been an act of inference, but is the product of subjectivity. Though Bashford concentrates his analysis on the dialogues and how Wilde uses the dialectical to create conditions for subjective reasoning and expression, Killeen makes some related observations about Wilde’s recurrent use of aphorism and accentuates the ideological component of such stylistic choice, elaborating on the meanings of this dialectical mechanism for Wilde’s culture(s). Because of his reputation as an epigrammatist, it has been argued that Wilde lacked either talent, or energy, or both, to write novels, and that he lived in the great era of novels and failed to produce copious volumes has supplied grounds for some unflattering comparisons. Yet, Killeen makes a persuasive case that Wilde’s preference for the short, aphoristic utterance does not originate from Wilde’s limitations as an artist so much as his rejection of the Realist mode and its promotion of British “progress” and, thus, hegemony through narratives of civilization and reform. For Killeen, the distinction between constructions of time in Realist novels and epigrams is revelatory of the subversion inherent in Wilde’s aphorisms. Whereas Realist novels work on a time that is progressive and developmental, describing the evolution of man to a state of culture, aphorisms and especially collections of aphorisms are dislocated from this linear time. “Aphorisms,” Killeen writes, “effectively refuse to play the game of evolution and progress” and function to implicitly deny the progressive model, which usually assigned the Celt to the infantile phase of man’s evolution, making the various cultures of the British Isles, especially the Irish, inferior to the Anglo-Saxon Brit (“Introduction” 9). Essentially, the aphorism is a volatile force because it resists assimilation into 45 45 dominant forms, presenting an inoffensive exterior but containing other associations. For Killeen, this nature of the form reflects the condition of the post- colonial Irish, who had been forced to subordinate their traditions and customs to major British religious and cultural orthodoxies. Killeen’s perennial interest, of course, is in how Anglo-Irish Wilde reclaims his heritage through writerly subversions, but even outside of this context, Killeen’s analysis makes a number of shrewd observations that accord Wilde’s fixation with aphorism a well-merited critical due. Killeen observes that Wilde’s propensity to “arbitrarily” shift lines from one character to another between manuscripts and even between works suggests that he was less interested in plot and characterization than he was individual lines and dialogue exchanges. Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small have noted Wilde’s reliance on simple plots and basic character types, but given an epigrammatic structural scheme, these features are not so much weaknesses of the text as purposeful elements of its design. Echoing Bashford, Killeen claims that in contrast to writers like George Eliot who are interested in character-consistency, Wilde regards his characters as beside the point of his writing and they are mainly useful to him as vehicles for dialogue. Complexities of plot and psychological realism are secondary concerns as well, because aphorism exists outside of chronological arrangement or specific context. Aphorisms are on their own potentially undermining of accepted truisms, but aphorism collections, Wilde’s two collections perhaps more than others, create “problems of hierarchy,” problematizing the relative value of ideas and how these values are determined (“Introduction” 10). Many Victorian aphorism compilations attempted to counteract disturbing formlessness through chronological ordering or thematic grouping, but neither “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over- Educated” (1894) nor “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” 46 46

(1894), display any such organizational logic, and these collections are the more anomalous in that they are both disorganized and wholly made up of the work of a single author. As the sole author, Wilde would have had exerted control over organization and content, so that the amorphousness of these collections was avoidable. In this regard, if the author does not place his quips in any identifiable order, it seems a very studied disarray, indeed. Killeen interprets the disorganization as deliberate and probably intended to augment the subversive possibilities of the aphorism. What rudimentary organization there is in these works occurs at the thematic level and these themes tend to resist the ideological implications of Realist prose. Across his aphorisms, for example, Wilde rails against the attributes of the utilitarian “nowadays” when there is “so little useless information,” warning that this “age of seriousness” will bring not “enlightenment,” as promised, but “dullness” (Complete Works 1203, 1205). He also rejects the moral religion of humanity that, in Killeen’s words, the Realists “siphoned from the ruins of Christianity,” deeming this stance the opposite of moral progress (“Introduction” 11). In place of the moralizing tracts of the evangelicals and the Realists, and the quantifiable knowledge of the Utilitarians and Taylorists, Wilde adopts the aphorism, and by extension, his overarching dialectical style to promote a person- centered ethics, subjectively accessed and therefore more real. “Useful information,” facts, can be taught and these allow us to understand, measure, and control the world up to a point, but “nothing that is worth knowing can ever be taught” and from this the insinuation is that there are some truths that must be arrived at or experienced independently to be known (Complete Works 1203). 47 47

Thus, Wilde seldom preaches, but he also dissuades his readers from assigning moral judgments. To cite morality, after all, is to admit and accept the authority of external forces over one’s own decision-making or beliefs, and Wilde considered the development of one’s subjectivity or Personality as critical to his integrity as a human being. To be fully human, a man first needs the capacity to judge for himself and, therefore, to take responsibility for the ideas he accepts and the actions he takes. A developed Personality, a fully realized subjectivity, is invulnerable to the ravages of influence, so that questions of morality and immorality are effectively nullified: problems with conduct may have consequences for the soul, but they arise from one’s inability to resist influence or subvert authority where authority impinges on Self. This incapacity is Dorian’s fatal flaw. When Wilde tells us then in his aphoristic “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all,” the glibness of the utterance reinforces the inappropriateness of talking about literature or art, ideally an unmapped symbol, as belonging to some defined category (Dorian Gray 3). Additionally, in composing his “Preface” of a string of paired, contradictory aphorisms, Wilde places the burden of interpretation and culpability for that perspective with the reader. In doing so, Wilde reconfigures Plato’s dialectics so that the reader is drawn into the exchange and he is forced to engage more contemplatively with the ideas presented than if a single thesis had been advanced. The next chapter will show that Wilde saw the development of the subjective sense as the beginning of a kind of spirituality running parallel to orthodox religiosity, but compatible with it. It is not incidental that Gilbert equates the contemplative life, “that life that has for its aim not doing but merely, but becoming,” with the life of the gods, who sit 48 48

“either brooding over their own perfection” or “watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragi-comedy of the world they have made” (Complete Works 1041- 42). We, too, Gilbert goes on to say, might live like them, “set[ting] ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford,” and it is the nature and the fostering of these emotions that will form the subject of chapter 4 (Complete Works 1041-42). In advance of this discussion, it is necessary to investigate overlaps between aesthetic and spiritual issues in Wilde’s writing that reveal the influence of Wilde’s understandings of Christ and Catholic theology on Wilde’s dialectical aestheticism. In the following chapter, I will demonstrate how Wilde’s synthesis of aestheticism and Catholic theology via “Wildean dialecticism” presents an aestheticism spiritualized through the perfection of Personality.

CHAPTER 3: THE SPIRITUALIZING OF THE SENSES

“Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” –Gilbert, “The Critic as Artist”1

The previous chapter resituates The Picture of Dorian Gray in the context of Wilde’s response to critics concerning morality, responsibility, and the relationship between critic and artist. Doing so demonstrates a consistency of meditation on these subjects that is all too seldom accorded Wilde. Too frequently, critics misunderstanding his views have misconstrued him as less than serious: Intentions is undervalued or overlooked; his celebrity is overemphasized; his structural succinctness and relatively limited output is cited as evidence of his minor status. Still more often, scholars have described apparent contradictions in Wilde’s treatment of aesthetic matters as indecision, and this judgment is abetted by Wilde’s affinity for witticism, which belies his sobriety of purpose. Wilde, it is true, promotes fragmentation of ideas through a “Wildean dialecticism,” as Bashford terms it, which disrupts consensus-thinking and actively resists didactic interpretation, but while “for a conventional critic, such inconsistency could be disastrous, ” Danson notes that Wilde, “rejecting the idea

1 Complete Works 1027 50 50 of a unified and self-possessed subjectivity, claims inconsistency as a virtue” so that his critical work “succeeds or fails less as philosophy than as performance, which is its own proof” (91-92). By this, what Danson is not so obviously suggesting is that Wilde’s arguments share certain formal features and mechanisms even if they do not easily cohere in other ways. Bashford and Killeen elaborate on the forms Wilde’s argumentative performances take, agreeing that Wilde’s habitual dialectical construction is persuasive evidence in and of itself that any gaps or contradictions within or between Wilde’s various discussions are deliberate. Killeen does not explicitly call Wilde’s mode “dialectical,” but his discussion of Wilde’s uses of aphorism concludes, as Bashford’s inquiry into Wilde’s use of modified Hegelian dialogue does, that the polyphony generated by such forms has the effect of not only deconstructing social truisms, but also confounding attempts to discern a coherent message, so that readers are placed as interlocutors in the rhetorical situation, forced to contribute intellectual capital and, in so doing, perform “the highest Criticism.” The success of Wilde’s “intellectual projects,” in Killeen’s analysis, hinges on uncertainty and contradiction. This interpretation is certainly in line with Wilde’s anxieties about the overwhelmingly destructive force of authority and influence on the human mind and soul. Indeed, Wilde’s epigram in his “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of The Young” (1894) that “a truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it” has been frequently cited but less commonly seen as the undeveloped utterance of a perfectly serious premise: that, in effect, truth is not a matter of factual proofs and that to base one’s convictions solely on empirical evidence, persuasive didacticism, or the concurrence of others is to surrender one’s subjectivity, one’s Personality, and, therefore, one’s judgment (Complete Works 1205). 51 51

Given Wilde’s sentiments about rationalism, at face value it seems ironic that Pater once described Wilde as the man who most embodied the fulfillment of Arnold’s work. While Wilde and Arnold both showed clear preference for the dialectic form, they appear to have employed it in distinct ways and for vastly different purposes. Arnoldian and Wildean dialectic are in one regard kindred. Similar to Wilde, Arnold “distinguishes and polarizes…only to urge that [opposites] should be united” and he can arrive organically at complicated syntheses that initially seem fraught with irreconcilable contradiction, but it is the service of the subjective in such schemes that reveals the estrangement of the two dialectical spirits. Though it is an obvious component of Arnold’s synthesis, the subjective mind is largely ignored or rather suppressed within Arnold’s philosophy, due to his belief of its fallibility and tendency to obscure objective truth. Arnold’s and Wilde’s critical theories originate from disparate though not unfriendly climes, with Wilde claiming for the highest realization of humanity a subjective, spiritualized dominion of Criticism, whereas Arnold defined criticism as “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (Arnold qtd. in Fraser 161). Fraser suggests that Arnold was ultimately unable to achieve the objectivity he so desired, because he failed to account for the subjective realm of experience and his entire critical model is, hence, supremely subjective in its non-apprehension of subjective perception. On the other hand, Wildean dialectic, in its practically solipsistic jurisdiction, where objectivity does not enter into the question of truth, provides perhaps a more satisfactory inversion of Arnold’s dialecticism: the dialectic is its own test and the arbitrariness of subjective synthesis less arbitrary yet than Arnold’s “best” knowledge and thought. It is more attractive too, perhaps, in its ability to show “the relation of the visible arts to the external world, and the 52 52 relation of fiction to fact,” discovering “the connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos” within a subjective framework that at once liberates and spiritualizes the individual, accessing at times, but generally bypassing religion in the traditional sense and religious morality in preference of a cultivated subjectivity more spiritual than religion (Complete Works 1018). In his appreciation of the importance of subjective sense to aesthetics, Wilde is preceded by Ruskin, of course, and this chapter will show that in rating the subjective so highly Wilde’s aesthetics very much intersect in spirit though not in letter with the Ruskin of the 1840s. Nevertheless, it is probably more integral to comprehension of either Wilde or Ruskin to recognize that they are just two contributors to the Victorian “proliferation of religio-aesthetic theories designed to reconcile the claims of Christianity and beauty, morality and art” (Fraser 1). Simple reckoning of the widespread preoccupation of painters with religious themes, the “quantities of religious novels and poetry” that were written, and the religious emotionalism of Gothic-Revivalist architecture is testament to the Victorians’ “all-pervasive, deliberate, and rather self-conscious concern with the relationship between religious and aesthetic experience” (Fraser 2). In the analogies they drew between religious and aesthetic experience, Fraser points out that the Victorians were at perhaps their most traditional in that from history immemorial humans have perceived “natural affinities” between the “language of myth and symbol” in religious and aesthetic contexts, with these two branches of human knowledge being united in “common endeavor to express and embody non-material ideal truths in a physical form” (Fraser 2). The Tractarians, in fact, held that in significant portion, religious faith was affirmed through aesthetic forms, and from this perspective they, like the decadent aesthetes, saw in the 53 53

Catholic Church a glorious fusion of the aesthetic and the spiritual that at once appealed to the claims of humanity and divinity. In fact, Newman uses language very similar to that the decadents used to speak of the beauty of the Church and their attraction to it, writing that “poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to fly to and repose upon; the Church itself is the most sacred and venerable of poets” (Newman qtd. in Fraser 10). However, secular poetry and the Church are never contraries. Although he was anxious that the quasi-religious experience of poetry would usurp religion, for instance, Keble observed that there had rarely been a religious revival without a poetic precursor, and Fraser interprets that Newman believed it was “unnatural to deny the interdependence of religion and culture,” especially in the Roman Church, which has inherited both sacred and profane learning…has perpetuated and dispensed the traditions of Moses and David in the supernatural order, and of Homer and Aristotle in the natural. To separate these distinct teachings, human and divine, which meet in Rome, is…to rebuild the Jewish Temple and to plant anew the groves of Academus. (Newman qtd. in Fraser 25) In theology, the academic and religious faith were blended, and each theologian in some measure developed theories of how the external world and secular knowledge related to faith of the individual and the divine, so that in essence Catholic theology and was Romantic and more Romantic still in its frequent celebration of the arts as vehicles for spiritual revelation. Newman appears to have regarded music, for example, as an extension of the Church’s symbolic presentation of divinity, believing it to be “in [its] expression of ideas greater and more profound than any in the visible world, “an expression of “Him whom 54 54

Catholicism manifests,” and it is implied that God speaks through the “ecstatic meaning” the musician produces (Newman qtd. in Fraser 27). Wilde appears to be engaging with this passage when he writes of the “music of the mystical prose” that is his highest criticism, and in speaking of criticism rather than faith or religion, he simultaneously spiritualizes criticism and subordinates religion (Complete Works 1029). Earlier he puts it into Gilbert’s mouth to say that “after playing Chopin, [he feels] as if [he] had been weeping over sins that [he] had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not [his] own” (Complete Works 1011). For Wilde, the “purification and spiritualizing of the nature” occurred through the experience of “passions of pity and awe,” and these experiences were only possible when they were spontaneous and authentic to the individual (Complete Works 1018). Although Wilde’s interest in the individual at first appears to threaten the hold of religious faith, his dialectics never directly oppose Christian religion though they may deconstruct orthodoxy and Protestantism. Wilde’s apprehension of the humanist supremacy of the individual, for instance, echoes forth from the life of Jesus and nineteenth century conversations about that Life and Christ become central to Wilde’s model of subjective individuality and noble humanity. In various places, Wilde pities and derides those whose “passions are a quotation,” placing the individual and the sinner nearer Christ and God than the virtuous Christian jealous of his or her reputation or salvation. For Wilde it is the musician, the interpreter of the music, and not the music that is an expression of divinity and however badly he plays, provided he plays with Algernon Montcrieff’s “wonderful expression,” the more Christlike and the more perfected he becomes. Stephen Arata’s analysis of the importance of Wilde’s humanization of Christ as Romantic artist and the sublimity of his Christ’s Passion for Wilde’s 55 55 aesthetics and expression will be introduced later in this chapter to elaborate on the nature of spirituality in Wilde’s aesthetics. Wilde’s deliberations on criticism and Personality are embedded in and can best be understood within a spiritual matrix, and this chapter will illustrate, in dialectical interaction with Roman Catholic theology. While Wilde was likely influenced by a variety of theological sources, this section of the thesis confines itself to discussion of Newman’s particular contributions to Wilde’s evolving methods. Though the second part of Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” delineates the liberating and spiritualizing benefits that accrue to the individual who practices Wilde’s “highest Criticism,” and though this is his best-known articulation of this philosophy, the spiritual content of his theory is dramatized even more fully in the lesser-known “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” a work ostensibly concerning “the onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the “Love that dare not speak its name,” but which likewise integrates late-Victorian theological debates, realizing a spiritual component within even avowedly secular art and criticism, and classifying spirituality as a species of artistic production in its reliance on interpretation. As with most of Wilde’s writing, in “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” plot is ancillary to dialogue and the play of ideology, so that action is mainly of a psychological and conversational sort. Wilde himself remarked this propensity, saying in reference to his 1890 version of Dorian that he was “afraid” his writing was “rather like [his] own life—all conversation and no action” (Wilde qtd. in Raby 67). All the same, if “[his] people sit in chairs and chatter” as he so self- effacingly states, they rarely chatter idly and the protracted triangular exchange of Portrait is especially dynamic, spanning months and years, and entering into then- current conversations about the historical Jesus and the knowability of God, 56 56

Biblical authenticity, Oxonian Platonism and Cardinal Newman’s philosophy of belief (Wilde qtd. in Raby 67). Compared with the intricacy of its associations, the plot of this work, insofar as there is one, is extraordinarily simple. The story revolves around the attempts of three men to explicate Shakespeare’s dedication of many of his sonnets to one Mr. W.H., their hypotheses about the identity of W.H. and his relationship to Shakespeare, and the acts of interpretation and proof that activate such hypotheses. We enter the narrative through the eyes and ears of an unnamed narrator listening to his friend, Erskine relate the story of Cyril Graham’s campaign to convince him of the theory that W.H. was no other than the boy actor Willie Hughes, a member of Shakespeare’s troop. Graham, Erskine remembers, was unequivocally convinced of the truth of his hypothesis, despite its circumstantiality, but Erskine was unable to accept Graham’s truth in the absence of empirical proof and Erskine’s rejection in the end prompted Graham to supply what he regarded as equivalent to two proofs of his own. First, Graham commissioned a portrait of Mr. W.H. based on what he imagined W.H. would have looked like, hoping that the felicitous turning up of W.H.’s likeness would persuade Erskine to credulity. Erksine tells the narrator that following Erskine’s eventual discovery of the forgery and a heated argument with Graham over this deception, Graham committed suicide to “prove” his belief. The narrator, against Erskine’s counsel, becomes fascinated by Graham’s theory and his investigation of the dead man’s theory dominates the remainder of the narrative. However, two months later, having written a voluminous letter to Erskine explaining his reasons for supporting Graham’s hypothesis of W.H.’s identity, the narrator loses faith in the very idea he has labored to corroborate, writing that in synthesizing the evidence he had also “given away [his] capacity 57 57 for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets” (Complete Works 1196). Though the narrator’s infatuation with the theory ends with his dedicated scholarship, the narrator’s written argument contains sufficient empirical proof to finally convince Erskine of the Willie Hughes conjecture, so that on his own deathbed he composes a letter urging the narrator to rededicate himself to the Hughes theory. We are then left with the narrator pondering his ability to believe in this interpretation of the sonnets. Wilde’s narrator’s belief in Willie Hughes is dismantled by proof, not because proof or lack of proof invalidates the theory, but because proof intrudes upon subjective interpretation of art and, in the cultural milieu of this work, matters of religion and faith. Killeen believes that Wilde's novella is structured such that it pits against each other two major approaches to language, sexuality, and reality in Victorian England: scientific empiricism and faith. The importance Erskine places on research and quantifiable evidence makes him representative of empiricist thought, Killeen claims. In order to even begin to believe Graham’s theory, Erskine requires “some independent evidence about the existence of this young actor,” so he is for some months possessed with the task of “plac[ing] beyond the reach of doubt or cavil” the existence and identity of Willie Hughes, seeking even the most fleeting allusions to Willie Hughes in London church registers, the Record Office, the Lord Chamberlain’s papers, among other likely sources, and Graham describes Erskine’s obsessive authentication as a “philistine tone of mind,” this identification linking scientific positivism with questions of faith (Complete Works 1158). What validates the theory for Cyril, by contrast, is “its spiritual completeness,” Killeen writes, and this interpretation is supported by Erskine’s recollection that Graham’s “firm and flawless…faith in the whole thing” depended “not so much on demonstrable proof or formal evidence, but on a kind 58 58 of spiritual and artistic sense” (Wilde qtd. in Killeen, Faiths 57). This elusive “sense” is immune to the arguments of empirical fact, explaining Graham’s insistence that the fact of the forgery “did not in the slightest degree invalidate the truth of the theory” (Wilde qtd. in Killeen, Faiths 57). Ultimately, both Cyril Graham and Erskine come to contend that Willie Hughes really existed, believing in Willie Hughes on the grounds that, while it is impossible to certify his true identity or even his existence, he is a compelling explanation for the sonnets. On the other hand, the two men arrive at this conclusion in vastly different ways. Erskine, the empiricist, has simply modified his initial hypothesis in the face of new evidence, so that he comes to Cyril’s irrational conclusion by rational means. Cyril’s belief originates from his personal relationship with Willie Hughes, or as Killeen qualifies, “the extent to which Willie Hughes has a relationship with him”; Willie Hughes is a “presence” to Graham, in a similar way that later he will become one to the narrator (Killeen, Faiths 57). Cyril “knows Willie Hughes…no mere accidents of history discount this personal relationship,” and his reliance on a personal relationship to mediate the truthfulness of W.H.’s existence not only aligns him with Wilde’s idea of ideal judgment (internal and subjective rather than externally-oriented) but also emphasizes that his is a language of faith, which does not demand Erskine’s verifications and does not acknowledge them to be proofs. However, Erskine’s and Cyril’s interactions are not so much defined by crude divisions between scientific and theological language as they are evocative of a curious cross-pollination between scientific and theological discourses that, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century, ultimately generated a spiritual crisis for English protestants and spurred developments in Catholic theology. Erskine’s approach in particular, Killeen demonstrates, obliquely recalls 59 59

Higher Criticism, a movement that endeavored to prove the rationality of Protestant Christianity by empirically validating the Scriptures and in that way invalidating Catholic practice. Protestant theologians in particular distrusted the Catholic Church’s refusal to provide vernacular translations of the Bible and firmly believed that if Catholics were permitted to read the Bible in translation they would completely reject the teachings of Catholicism, having access to the reason “written by God in the hearts of all men,” even Catholics (Chillingworth qtd. in Killeen, Faiths 46). However, many Protestants acknowledged that if they were to openly attack Catholic rationality on these grounds, the authenticity of the Scriptures would also need to be duly determined. Protestants, believing in plenary inspiration, did not doubt that the scriptures were God’s Word, but they would still need to establish their truth in order to prove the rationality of their perspective and, thus, demonstrate where Catholicism constituted a divergence from reason. In the end, though, Higher Criticism did more to dismantle the faith of Protestants than that of Catholics. The ironic result of the Higher Critics’ zealous subjection of the books of the Bible to scientific examination was that the Protestant conviction in plenary inspiration was destabilized. Works like Charles Hennell’s Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), Francis Newman’s The Hebrew Monarchy (1847) and W.R. Grieg’s The Creed of Christendom (1851), applied rigorous rationalism to the interpretation of Scripture, disputing the purported dates and authorships of both Testaments and doubting many of the miracles. Thomas Arnold worked to historicize the Bible in his Essay on the Right Interpretation and Understanding of Scripture (1831) and Two Sermons on the Interpretation of Prophecy (1839), citing passages he considered impossible to square with received history. More secularly, researchers in the fledgling study of geology had discovered rocks much earlier in date than 60 60 accepted biblical chronology would allow and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) advanced the already growing evidence against a literal reading of the Book of Genesis in particular. Though Wilde’s text at first seems only secular in theme, Killeen believes that “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” is connected to this and other theological discussions through the language characters adopt in discussing W.H., correlating him with Christ and nineteenth century conversations about the personality of Christ. Hughes is referred to as “the incarnation of the Idea in a beautiful and living form,” Killeen notes, and he is the “very incarnation of Shakespeare’s dreams” (Wilde qtd. in Faiths 57-58). This could simply be commentary on the artist and his craft, except that Shakespeare will become, by pointed allusion, God, linking the aesthetic and the spiritual: Shakespeare is the man who said “I am that I am,” echoing God’s declaration in Exodus 3:14 that “I Am Who Am” and, just as Christians argue that Christ is the embodiment of the Bible as a whole, Wilde’s characters see W.H. as the embodiment of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The three men of the narrative, too, become a community of believers, a sort of informal church concentrated upon Shakespeare, Willie Hughes, and the sonnets and bound by homosocial friendship. The degree to which the triangulation between Cyril, Erskine, and the anonymous narrator is maintained through intellectual exchange is in itself, Killeen observes, suggestive of the Oxonian Platonists, who practiced a cult of male homosocial intellectualism that combined Hellenic and Christian traditions. The movement was inspired in its later more formal incarnations by the classical scholar and Anglican preacher, Professor Benjamin Jowett who endeavored to reconstitute the Protestant faith in

Scripture via his reading of Plato’s Republic, which linked Plato’s projected realm 61 61 of truth, or Reality, existing beyond human perception with reality as constructed by the Word of God. While Platonism was a decidedly Protestant movement, Jowett’s Anglican premises share a significant overlap with Cardinal Newman’s theology. Wilde uses Cyril Graham to tease out this tension. Like Jowett, Newman believed in human access to a stable and knowable universe, but he firmly believed that this was an intuitive access. Newman would reject Erskine’s preferred mode of inference on the basis of his concept of “certitude,” or true belief, whereby the truth of an impression was determined by “a specific feeling …discriminating it from other states, intellectual and moral”; for Newman this experience “of satisfaction and self-congratulation, of intellectual security” results from “a sense of success, attainment, possession, finality, as regards the matter which has been in question” (Newman qtd. in Ablow 176). In Ablow’s view, Cyril is unmistakably intended as an exemplification of such certitude. Like Newman's faith in God, Ablow notes, Cyril's “spiritual and artistic sense” of Willie Hughes’ existence is absolute. For Newman as well as his representative, Cyril, “assent is in its nature absolute and unconditional,” illuminating much of Cyril’s behavior and why the sonnets in the end become secondary to his conception of Hughes. His idea of Hughes may have initially derived from his readings of the sonnets, but it in no way depends on them and because of this partition, Cyril’s faith remains unchanged in the face of Erskine’s skepticism and throughout his research with Erskine. In contrast to the empiricist Protestants with their dedication to “reasonable Christianity,” the faith of Catholics, for whom belief was implicit and not reliant on external proof, was largely unscathed by the Higher Criticism. Cardinal Newman, indeed, believed that the spiritual backlash of Higher Criticism confirmed the unsuitability of locating faith in empirical inference and the “all- 62 62 corroding, all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect” (Newman qtd. in Killeen, Faiths 59). According to Newman, Protestants had not destroyed their faith in God through their findings, but through a methodology inherently incompatible with faith. Because “reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man…[has a] tendency…towards a simple unbelief,” religion could only be preserved through faith in the Church and the concept of papal infallibility, which brought reason back under the remit of God (Newman qtd. in Killeen, Faiths 59). Reason and faith did not have to corrode one another, Newman argued, but one had to in some measure trade reason for faith in order to gain knowledge and access to divine revelation. While empirical inference typically precedes assent to truths eternal or otherwise, Newman claimed that in cases of certitude, inference did not affect the nature of the assent, which in itself was unconditional. Hence, Ablow points out, the scholarly search for W.H. can probably be better understood as an attempt by Cyril to communicate his belief to Erskine. Founded as it is in his sensation, Cyril’s belief in Willie Hughes cannot be transmitted to others; however, Cyril can at least attempt to persuade his friend of the circumstantial probability of Hughes’s existence and his relationship to Shakespeare by supplying Erskine with the evidence he requires. Ablow and Wilde emphasize that the shape Cyril’s defense takes in no way influences or reflects upon the intensity of Cyril’s belief, but instead is adjusted to accommodate Erskine, the nonbeliever. Newman, like Cyril, did not exactly condemn inference as a means to belief, but he believed it a highly inefficient and imprecise means of reasoning in matters of faith; nonetheless, where certitude did not exist, as with Erskine, Newman believed that inference sometimes provided a useful stopgap to true belief. When Erskine’s disbelief is confirmed by the lack of sufficient evidence of Willie Hughes, Cyril manufactures proof that he believes 63 63 will be more than adequate to vanquish Erskine’s incredulity, commissioning a painting of Hughes in what from Cyril’s perspective is a legitimate and only marginally dishonest course of action. Cyril’s forgery more intimately associates him with Newman, Ablow writes, in that Charles Kingsley famously accused Newman of promoting the use of lies to convert nonbelievers to the one true faith. Reflecting Newman’s apparent belief that conversion justified whatever means had produced it, when Erskine confronts Cyril with his crime, Cyril is largely unapologetic, only sorry that the forgery, which had been done “simply as a concession to [Erskine],” had failed to bring Erskine to belief (Complete Works 1160). For Cyril, the forgery is not a dishonest act, because he himself is convinced of the belief the portrait is meant to substantiate: he believes in Hughes even without an extant portrait, and he knows by his “sense” that his belief is true, so the portrait is merely a superficial enticement to believe what for Cyril is a matter of certitude. When the forged portrait predictably fails to convince, in another allusion to Newman, this time the Cardinal’s belief that martyrdom functions as evidence of the “keenness and energy” of one’s assent, Cyril commits suicide (Newman qtd. in Ablow 177). Cyril, of course, believes that in laying down his life for the Hughes theory, he is giving Erskine decisive proof of its truth, Cyril’s certitude proceeding from his vision of the absolute truth of Willie Hughes. Martyrdom, is in essence considered by Newman and his avatar, to be a means of more tangibly and reliably signifying the magnitude of one’s belief and the truth of that belief, but as the narrator’s response to Cyril’s act shows, we are unable to verify suicide as evidence of belief. Suicide undoubtedly appears to be a rather drastic contingency, leading the narrator to infer that Cyril’s martyrdom reveals a creeping doubt and that he kills himself just as much to assure himself of the 64 64 power of the theory as he does to authenticate it to Erskine. “No man dies for what he knows to be true,” the narrator reasons; “Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true,” and all Cyril's death ultimately tells the narrator, as Ablow so succinctly puts it, “is that he sought to promote his belief, not that it had any purchase on the world” (Complete Works 1201; Ablow 178). The idea that “a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it,” in light of Cyril’s theatrical and, depending on perspective, desperate rhetoric, suggests Erskine’s empiricism seems the more reasonable approach to the Hughes problem (Complete Works 1161). Initially the narrator is unquestionably persuaded that the theory can be proven empirically, and he is even able to produce so extensive and complete an account of the theory that several of the narrative’s first readers thought Wilde’s narrative frame extraneous. Wilde’s narrator does not unearth any conclusive evidence of Hughes, but through his close readings of the sonnets, histories of romantic male friendships from the time of the Greeks to the nineteenth century and the changing position of boy actors on the Elizabethan stage, he is able to convince Erskine of the purported histories of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and Willie Hughes. The narrator never finds any conclusive evidence of Willie Hughes's existence, but he shares all the evidence he has been able to collect with Erskine. In the end, however, it is not the evidence cited but the fact that the narrator bolsters his argument through formal study that makes Erskine more amenable to the theory. Even though Erskine admits the theory will probably never be proven, he is able to assent to it when it is clothed in empiricism, showing that unlike Cyril’s belief, Erskine’s is not only subject to external influence but dependent on it. Once converted to Cyril’s belief, Erskine in due course asserts, like Cyril, an 65 65 intention to kill himself “for Willie Hughes’ sake,” but his martyrdom remains incomplete, by Newman’s logic (Complete Works 1198). Erskine dies of consumption, not suicide, and he was evidently fully aware that he would die of the disease when he composed the suicide note, suggesting that his belief was never real. Whether Erskine would have followed through on his declaration or not remains indefinite, but the narrative suggests that as the idea did not come to him through any interior “sense” of its truth, he likely would not have sacrificed himself for it; even so, death makes his belief inscrutable. Erskine’s implied insincerity, however, does not make his conversion any more suspect for Wilde than Cyril’s unassailable faith. Although Killeen claims that Wilde’s novella “attacks the creeping hegemony of Protestant reason and science,” Ablow believes that the novella’s supposed empiricist, Erskine manages a workable inversion of his initial method that constructs a faith of an inconclusive and dialectical species (Faiths 58). While the narrative palpably privileges rhetorics of faith over those of scientific method with regard to spiritual and aesthetic difficulties, Erskine’s certitude originates from his uncertainty, his incomplete persuasion. A truth in art, as in religion, is for Erskine that of which the opposite may also be true. While the nonexistence of concrete evidence of Hughes obliterates the narrator’s faith, this acknowledged dearth is precisely why Erskine is ultimately willing to embrace Cyril’s theory. Erskine is actually spurred to further acts of interpretation by the narrator’s unsatisfying letter, specifically interpretations that contest the narrator’s newly minted incredulity, consciously converting matters of absence into those of presence. For example, Erskine reasons that whereas “it is quite true that [Willie Hughes’s] name does not occur in the list given in the first folio,” this “is rather a proof in favour of the existence of Willie Hughes than against it,” because “[t]here is no reason at all why Willie 66 66

Hughes should not have gone upon the stage under an assumed name,” toying perhaps with Keble’s refutation of the Protestant notion of “Real Presence,” which implied a “real absence” (Complete Works 1198; Fraser 39). The phrasing of Erskine’s counterargument, the why not so characteristic of Wilde’s dialectical habit as concerns ideas, suggests that Wilde is deliberately introducing the dialectical mode to subvert recognized models of truth and this instability extends to theology’s precepts. Ablow construes that Erskine is principally fascinated with Cyril’s W.H. because he, whether taken to be Shakespeare’s muse and lover or as a Christ symbol, is an insoluble problem: W.H.’s existence and the properties of that existence can never be proven, but neither can W.H. be summarily written off as a mere fiction, because it is also impossible to demonstrate his nonexistence. Erskine’s belief is contingent on the theory’s indeterminacy and this “certitude” in uncertainty activates Wilde’s dialectics, proposing that truth is not singular or just one way or another but multiple, existing in the spaces between utter acceptance and complete rejection of an idea. Truth cannot be reached by synthesizing the poles of argument, as Hegel would hold, and the goal of the subjective, inductive synthesis that does occur does not, and is not meant to result in Arnold’s objectivity. In fact, though Wilde at first seems to agree with Newman’s idea that we get a specific sense that something is true, Ablow believes that the ending of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” works to negate Newman’s belief that there is just one truth that we can feel genuine assent toward and that we all, of essence, experience it in the same manner. Erskine’s conversion experience as the narrative documents it, certainly appears to differ considerably from Cyril’s, and his faith is renewed and strengthened with lack of evidence; perhaps because the theory is inaccessible by factual proof and relies entirely on a subjective faith unfounded in any widely acknowledged truth, he is the more willing to believe in 67 67 the likelihood of the theory being true. What is more, the mystery surrounding Erskine’s death inspires the narrator to conjecture, enabling the narrator to reach another still better relation to the theory, which is that he is forced through these introspections to exercise his highest critical faculties, bringing him in contact, Wilde might say, with the divine. It is perhaps telling that Wilde terms his criticism “the highest Criticism,” which places it above and necessarily in opposition to the protestant “Higher Criticism,” while retaining its spiritual reference. The only faith that is compatible with Wilde’s individualism is that which is voluntary and reflexive and which does not pretend to an all-encompassing truth—in other words, self-conscious subjectivity. If we read Wilde’s Mr. W.H. as Shakespeare’s purported lover as well as a Christ figure, as Killeen and Ablow suggest that we ought to, then the work in which Cyril, Erskine, and the narrator participate is of a dual nature, linking aesthetic and spiritual issues. Such linkage occurs elsewhere in Wilde’s writing, for instance “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” where in Christ’s “supreme individualism,” the life of Christ is for Wilde an allegory of the artist, and in De profundis, where Wilde identifies Christ with the artistic, describing His entire life as “the most wonderful of poems” and saying that wherever great art is—and by his definition this was Romantic art—“there, somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ” (Complete Works 924, 928). As a range of scholars from Joyce to the present have observed, Wilde appears to have been largely attracted to Jesus’s life because of the peerless “sublimity of tragic effect” it presented (Complete Works 924). This same set of voices have also been disturbed that Wilde’s interest in Christ ends so perceptibly in “identification with” Christ, signifying to them Wildean narcissism and self-pity (Arata 263). 68 68

Arata does not wholly disagree with this reading, but he qualifies his acceptance. Wilde does not, he claims, succumb to fatuousness in his drawing of parallels—and, truly, he does not quite compare his life to Jesus’s in a favorable light. In contrast to the sublimity of Christ’s story, Wilde writes, his has been “hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style” and this very absence of form, according to Arata, “threatens to deprive [Wilde’s] narrative of meaning” (Arata 263). In context of Wilde’s prison letters, which regularly express the worry that because it cannot be given meaningful form, his suffering will prove to have been pointless, Arata interprets Wilde’s references to Christ’s last days in his own as being motivated by a desire to bring about the death of pain through form2 (Arata 263). With the outcome of the indecency trials and Wilde’s prison term, he had fallen out of society and he suspected quite accurately in a letter to Robbie Ross that when he returned to the world it would be as “a revenant3, as the French say,” because “horrible as are the dead when they rise from their tombs, the living who come out from tombs are more horrible still” (November 1896, Complete Letters 669). Arata regards Wilde’s long epistle to Douglas as a sustained effort on the part of Wilde to “write his own secular gospel” that “like the New Testament. . . strives to translate the all-too human passion of a particular exemplary individual into a textual event,” so that Wilde can symbolically attain to crucifixion (Arata 264). Despite his general distrust of biographers, Arata’s analysis suggests that Wilde would have been in some measure pleased with the various crucifixions to

2 In “The Critic as Artist” (1890) Gilbert says that “Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.” 3 Revenant: a visible ghost or animated corpse believed to return from the grave to terrorize the living. 69 69 which he has been posthumously subjected by zealous would-be Boswells. Fundamentally, Wilde finds it necessary to transform the textlessness of his existence into a text, so that his disappointments and any personal weaknesses cohere into a tragedy. If he can reframe his autobiography as that of a man who thumbed his nose at society and was soundly punished by it for his effrontery, his actions are bound by his fall into a narrative whole and his actions and their consequences are given meaning retroactively, just as the crucifixion “confers meaning” on Christ’s actions and suffering (Arata 264). Wilde believed that in giving his suffering form “there [might] come into [his] art… no less than into [his] life” a “unity of passion,” which would displace “appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed,” so that Wilde’s identification with the Man of Sorrows has as much to do with renovating his life narrative as it does his experience of life as an artist (January-March 1897, Complete Letters 755-56). In Jesus’s suffering, Wilde saw the predicament of the Romantic artist presented and in this articulation Christ became not only the “ideal Personality,” but in this a representation of the artist in his relation to the world. Wilde’s Jesus is an artist, a “self-created artwork” rather than a person or a god; if he is the “supreme individualist,” Wilde’s emphasis is mostly the process of his becoming and the divinity of that development (Arata 265). Outside of De profundis, this emphasis is probably most clearly enunciated in “The Happy Prince,” which tells the story of an unlikely bond between a sentient statue and a talking bird. Within this eponymous tale, the Happy Prince himself evokes the image of Christ on the cross on Calgary Hill, sacrificing himself to alleviate the suffering and need of others, and the swallow’s favored perch on the statue’s shoulder has Christian symbolism as well. According to Shannon Marie Shannon, Wilde employs the swallow in his story in its archetypal 70 70 role of the human soul striving toward the spiritual redemption that Christ offers. From a Christian perspective, perched on the Happy Prince’s shoulder, the swallow is brought in closer proximity to the heavens and to God and his relationship with the statue, whereby at the Prince’s behest he distributes the statue’s jewels and gold to the poor, is a kind of discipleship. Nevertheless, Wilde underscores that the Christ the Swallow gratifies with his assistance and whose generosity he grows to emulate is a very human Christ. The inset memoriam of the “Palace of Sans-Souci” describes how the Happy Prince lived “when [he] was alive and had a human heart” (Complete Works 286). In the Palace of Sans-Souci, well befitting its name, “sorrow [was] not allowed to enter” and the Prince spent his days playing in the garden, never caring to ask what lay beyond the “lofty wall” around the garden, because “everything about [him] was so beautiful” (Complete Works 286). Wilde has the Prince share his memories of Sans-Souci with the Swallow by way of clarification and confession. Through the Prince’s recollection of former thoughtless bliss, his position on high is transformed from an incidental or honorific condition to a grave penance for a life sans-souci: “now that [he is] dead they have set [him] up…so high that [he] can see all the ugliness and all the misery of [his] city” (Complete Works 286). In life he had been rich, shallow and unconscious of the suffering outside his palace walls, so he theorizes that his atonement must be to look out upon the poor in his afterlife as a gilded, bejeweled statue; at any rate, “though [his] heart is made of lead yet [he] cannot choose but weep” (Complete Works 286). A mere mortal to begin with, the Prince is arguably more human after his conversion into a statue and his meeting with the individualist Swallow, who shuns migration patterns, risking his life for love and empathy of his free will. Taking into account Wilde’s humanizing of Christ through the concept of Personality, and the corresponding 71 71 quasi-divinity of individualism, we might say that the Happy Prince’s “Christlike” character is not a quality intrinsic to him, but one that has been developed. Readings of this tale as a more or less orthodox Christ narrative have their footing, of course. Christ’s giving of self is common currency among Christian denominations, and in the Prince’s donations, there are specific allusions to transubstantiation: the jewels and gold that the Prince gives to the urban poor presumably are sold or otherwise used to buy food or other means of physically and spiritually nourishing the body (i.e., fire wood), echoing the Catholic Eucharist, which is ingested as a means of symbolically joining with Christ. In distributing the statue’s wealth, the Swallow receives an aesthetic education seemingly patterned after Ruskin’s model of aesthetic education in Modern Painters, where Ruskin sets forth a theory of how humankind might rise to greater perfection through cultivation of theoria, or the development of aesthesis “[inclusive of] man’s moral and religious consciousness” (Fraser 115). Ruskin’s Theoretic Faculty concerns itself with “that area between the operation of the eye and of the mind,” which Ruskin defined as “moral,” but George P. Landow has claimed actually encompassed broader cognition (Fraser 116). Ruskin, Landow explains, wrote and lived within a tradition of “emotionalist moral philosoph[y]” in which “moral” really meant both “ethical” and “refer[ed] to all mental processes” (Landow qtd. in Fraser 116). This Theoretic Faculty works on the concepts of Vital and Typical Beauty, whereby aesthetic appreciation is transformed from dissipation to a moral, even religious exercise. In Ruskin’s model, Vital Beauty expresses the spirit, energy, and fulfillment of Christian faith in God, while Typical Beauty expresses the nature of God as it is innately manifest in the articles and creation of this world. 72 72

Ruskin referred to apprehension of the divine in Beauty as “seeing.” Seeing is not an act in itself, but a capacity for perception that must be nurtured: individuals must be taught how to see, beyond the physiological, through exposure to what is aesthetically harmonious, and with such sustained experiences individuals internalize a sense of sympathy with the beautiful and can grow to emulate that which is beautiful. Wilde invests his statue with an innate spirituality through its analogy to Christ: it exists as potentially Christianizing art simply through its great aesthetic beauty, according to Ruskin’s principles, but it is also dynamically sentient, acting on its perceptions by proxy, with positive effect to society. However, the ending of the tale does not unequivocally rejoice the self- sacrifice of the Prince and the Swallow. Although God consecrates the body of the dead bird and the Statue’s leaden heart, broken by the noble death of his feathered friend, what is well for religious morality is not necessarily well for the individual and in perverting or denying the individual, which Wilde sees as potentially Christlike, morality perverts faith and makes it enslavement. Ruskin wished for humanity and the artist in particular to “escape the prison of his own subjectivity” and conceptualization of autonomous art defined by specific formal qualities served for him as a check to deluding self-indulgence in art and criticism (Fraser 122). Yet, for Wilde, subjectivity is all: it is an inalienable governor of experience and truth, and within the tale there is little question that the swallow dies through self-sacrifice that is definitively against nature. When the bird freely falls in and out of love with the Reed, indulging a whimsical passion, he is unscathed despite, perhaps because of, his renunciation of accepted migration, but when he commits himself at the expense of his life to the service of morality and social welfare, just as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” warns, he is withered. 73 73

Observing Wilde’s aversion to a common construction of morality, most scholars situate Ruskin’s and Wilde’s ideas in opposition to each other. Certainly, Ruskin’s views were outwardly more conservative and his arguments tended toward a much more didactic mode than Wilde’s, but Wilde seems to have mainly eschewed his style rather than his ideas, which as will shortly be seen he did not quite devalue. Whereas the oral tradition of Ruskin the Pre-Raphaelite gives us an Oxford don obsessed with the moral dimensions of art, Landow reminds us that Ruskin’s importance to the development of the aesthetic movement in England has traditionally been overlooked, because so many of his near contemporaries undervalued and misconstrued his notions. Landow writes that the aesthetes were predominantly disposed to quibble with Ruskin on the grounds of his “moralizing,” which in fact only amounts to a reiterated petition that the arts have political and social relevance (“Ruskin and the Aesthetic Movement” par. 1). Ruskin actually rejected didacticism in art: although Ruskin felt that the visual arts especially, in their capacity to communicate fact, feeling, and belief, had a profound influence on the lives of men, it did not follow from this that artists should overtly moralize in their works. While Ruskin ascribed “to the artist the responsibility of a preacher,” he forbade him to preach, believing that when individuals are bettered by works of art, it is only with “general acceptance…so constant and subtle that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only find by slow mining for it” (Ruskin qtd. in “The Use and Moral Value of Art” par. 19). Aesthetes were often characterized by paradoxical acceptance of Ruskin, appropriating the thought, while abjuring the earnestness in which it was phrased, and Wilde was certainly no exception to this rule. Channeling Ruskin, Wilde 74 74 writes that “there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above them, separate from the reason and of nobler import” and that this is expressed as a “temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty,” but Wilde’s beauty-sense is, unlike Ruskin’s, “separate from the soul and of equal value—a sense that leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely” (Complete Works 1049). More broadly, Wilde’s aesthetic sense in its prevailing subjectivity detects and is able to negotiate “the various impressions that beauty gives us” and on a footing more solid than Arnold’s, Ruskin’s, and Pater’s purported objectivities, because it acknowledges its contradiction and because paradox is material to its operation (Complete Works 1049). In principle, Wilde’s aforementioned dialecticism is intended to engender Ruskin’s “slow mining” of truth in a more secular, but no less spiritual, context, and the relationship between Ruskin’s theory and Wilde’s architecture of contemplative spaces will be further discussed in chapter 4. Moreover, many of Wilde's most outrageous statements about art and nature are at core Ruskinian, Landow observes, especially his rejection of simple mimesis in art, criticism of Realist novelists, his interest in architecture, and in the ways in which art teaches us to see, but Wilde’s packaging of these ideas differs so greatly from Ruskin’s style that we do not readily see the tracery. The idea of seeing and the processes by which such seeing might occur came to be of paramount importance to Ruskin’s aesthetics and Wilde’s interest in aesthetic education is greatly informed by Ruskin’s concept, but Wilde’s fairy tale, “The Nightingale and the Rose” registers another essential limitation of the theory for Wilde. The tale opens with a young Student lamenting that “in all [his] garden there is no red rose” to give the girl who “said that she would dance with [him] if [he] brought her red roses” (Complete Works 292). The Nightingale overhears the 75 75

Student and believing him to be “the true lover,” suffering the love the Nightingale sings of, she decides she will help the Student (Complete Works 292). She tours the garden, soliciting after a red rose, but all of the trees, save one, are unable to produce the sought-after flower. At last it is discovered that the rose-tree growing beneath the Student’s window can produce roses “as red as the feet of the dove, and redder than the great fans of coral that wave and wave in the ocean-cavern,” but it will have no roses to give this year because “winter has chilled [its] veins, and the frost has nipped [its] buds, and the storm has broken [its] branches” (Complete Works 293). This rose-tree, nonetheless, proposes a strange alchemy whereby the rose can be “[built] out of [the Nightingale’s] music by moonlight, and stain[ed]…with [the Nightingale’s] own heart’s-blood” (Complete Works 293). “You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine,” the rose-tree explains, and this is what the Nightingale does, piercing her own breast with the rose’s thorn as she sings until all of her blood has been transfused to color the bloom and she dies without having seen the costly rose (Complete Works 293). She was willing to give her life, because she believed that the Student was a student of love and Beauty and would understand her sacrifice, but the Student’s response to this act illustrates how vain her martyrdom at the altar of Love has been. When the Student presents his red rose to the girl, she refuses his tribute on the grounds that it “will not go with [her] dress…and, besides, the Chamberlain’s nephew has sent [her] some real jewels, and everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers” and the Student’s reaction is to angrily throw the rose into the gutter, return to his study of metaphysics, and cease to believe in true love (Complete Works 296). 76 76

The Student is blissfully unaware of the true, grim cost of his red rose, but still worse Wilde might say he is unable or unwilling to imagine it. His training has been of a scientific and philosophical bent, and occupies a rationalist position very similar to Erskine’s at the beginning of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” Briefly swept away by his passions, the Student takes his disappointment as an assurance that Love is “a silly thing…not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true…” (Complete Works 296). Ruskin’s seeing assumes that exposure to the beautiful will teach us to see and perform the beautiful and it assumes that all are equally susceptible to the same kinds of beauty in the same ways, but Wilde’s Student seems a partial proof against this generalization. Admittedly, Ruskin believes that the improving effects take time to accrue, with repeated exposure strengthening one’s sense for beauty, but if his garden is to be believed, the Student has been surrounded by beauty and yet has been incapable of seeing it. Hearing the Nightingale sing, he “listen(s)…but [can] not understand what the Nightingale [is] saying to him, for and he only [knows] the things that are written down in books” and he can only take inventory of what his garden lacks, not its cumulative beauties (Complete Works 294). Obviously, the Student has had no formal aesthetic education, but Wilde appears to suggest by the girl’s speeches to the Student that what passes for aesthetic knowledge is an undesirable attainment. Despite her keen appreciation for color, the girl is not equipped to appraise the flower’s actual worth, and this is because her aesthetics is circumscribed by social prescription and market values. In her protest that the flower will clash with her dress, one can hear a fashion magazine speaking, or the coquetry of a young woman who has been advised to refuse the advances of a non-moneyed youth; in both cases dubious influence has 77 77 interfered with subjective exercise. In rating diamonds of more worth than the rose, however, the influence of middle-class commercialism on her aesthetic wisdom becomes even more recognizable. To truly have received an aesthetic education is to have developed a capacity for untrammeled impression and this can only occur in an environment insulated from influence as far as possible. Ruskin’s disciples would adapt his vision of brain and soul-building through contact with good art to form the cult of interior décor popularly known then and now as the House Beautiful, but Ruskin’s good art, as we have seen, is not Wilde’s ideal of art. Wilde preferred ideal forms, unmapped symbols, and the vague but “beautiful patterns of the artist’s brain” to the social and political relevance favored by Ruskin, which indicates a measure of intruding influence or implicit allusion. The next chapter will illustrate how Wilde is able to metamorphose seeing and the House Beautiful into a workable model, and how this adaptation is only possible with the translation of aesthetic education from physical spaces to the metaphysical spaces of literature and the fairy tale in particular.

CHAPTER 4: LIFE & LITERATURE

“in the subjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow, with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other, and passions that war against themselves” –Gilbert, “The Critic as Artist”1

In his dialogue, Wilde praises the Greeks for engaging on equally dialectical terms with the aesthetic and “questions of religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education,” with the critical spirit engendering a subjectively-oriented unity between these categories (Complete Works 1016). For Wilde, of course, human existence itself was organically and ideally dialectical. We “are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent,” so that “the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety,” resisting “false ideals,” which, instead of serving as ideal forms for the critical mind to contemplate, oppress the developing personality through arbitrary strictures that negate subjective experience of the world (Complete Works 1045, 1016). To combat the violence to the individual implicit in moralism without himself devolving into prurient codification of truth, Wilde developed a hermeneutic system, combining the most salient arguments and questions of his nearest forebears. From Arnold as we have seen he took the general mechanism of his lens, and specifically he is able to use dialectic to reconcile Ruskin’s and

1 Complete Works 1040 79 79

Pater’s respective formalisms, striking a balance between Ruskin’s emotionalist Christian concept of the autonomous beauty in art and Pater’s emphasis on how formal qualities of a work of art appeal to individual sympathy so that beauty is anything but definite or autonomous. Essentially, Wilde’s ideas both derive from and reorganize Ruskin’s and Pater’s mechanisms of aesthetic appreciation, and, by redefining subjective interpretation and experience as spiritual and above ethics, Wilde’s dialectic theorizes and constitutes a constructive flux of meaning designed to make of the human mind “a fine instrument” to cope with the intricate problems of reality (Complete Works 1055). Although critics have interested themselves in analyses of Wilde’s uses of dialogue as form, relatively few of them have recognized and addressed how qualitatively dialectical many of his non-dialogue works are in configuration. The kinship between dialectic and dialogue is so direct that in speaking of the plays critics by implication acknowledge their dialecticism and, indeed, Wilde’s characters often seem to operate within the text simply as signifiers for worldviews or ideas and dialogues between characters are generally propelled by philosophical exchange rather than psychological or conversational realism. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” and The Picture of Dorian Gray despite their novelistic pretensions take their structure from conversations between the major players and often the only action in Wilde’s writing is ideational. In “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” for instance, what there is of a plot revolves around the attempts of three men to negotiate problems of truth and faith, and Wilde considered Dorian an essay on art criticism, presumably because each of the main personalities in the novel represents a distinct aesthetic perspective and because the narrative itself so overtly pits romance against realism. 80 80

These two works are intriguing as well in that they do not inhabit a single genre, but multiple ones, and this holds consequences for interpretation. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” perhaps best known for its connection to Wilde’s trial where it was invoked as evidence, is at the very least part fable, part literary criticism and part philosophical treatise, but it also integrates epistolary and memoir writing. This hybridity has often been either ignored, the content of the narrative claiming greater scholarly interest, or has been seen as clumsiness on the part of the author, creating unnecessary dissonances within the writing. Similar comments have been made of Dorian Gray, which has been alternately assigned the status of novel, aesthetic criticism, romance, parable, and gothic tale. Nils Clausson believes that the hybridity of the novel’s form, as it is perceived, is deleterious to “Wilde’s attempt to tell a subversive story of dissidence and transgression leading to self-development and liberation,” but in the context of Wilde’s dialecticism the novel appears not so much a “flawed work, riven by generic dissonances” as a work that explores relationships between aesthetic and ethical issues through opposition of perspectives and a general heteroglossia (Clausson 363). Macrocosmically, the “generic dissonance” of form certainly does destabilize the linearity of narrative: parables, for instance, are meant to proceed linearly toward a defined message and, where contradictory perspectives or symbols exist, impose Hegelian synthesis, absorbing the dialectic into an undeviating progression. In Dorian Gray, however, dialectical interactions between the parable and the Gothic structures cause the narrative as a whole to splinter into myriad subsidiary dialectical relationships between symbols and ideas. Clausson’s analysis largely takes this fragmentation to be a divisive or destructive attribute, but still some have appreciated the novel’s unresolved 81 81 disjunctions. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, favorably described the “knotted, convoluted, brilliantly enigmatic” quality of the novel as one of its greatest charms (Oates 422-23). Clausson’s analysis, despite its flirtations with the dialectic, occasionally reflects on the evident purposefulness of the oppositions he identifies; however, he fails to see the deliberate convolution as part of Wilde’s project. Clausson apprehends that the dual genre form is necessary because “Wilde needed a plot that could combine self-development with transgression, the latter being a necessary precondition of the former,” and he is even able to connect transgressive elements of the novel to “Wilde’s own antiauthoritarian ideas expressed in his essays at this time” (Clausson 354). Yet, despite his obvious familiarity with Wilde’s ideas, his analysis effectively ignores the subversive nature of formal and symbolic opposition. Clausson argues that the hybrid genre of the narrative disrupts interpretation, pitting the expectations of one genre (ie. the parable) against another (ie. the gothic) within the reader’s mind. Genres fundamentally imply specific modalities of reading, so when the structure of a work is shared between two or multiple genres the act of reading is explicitly thematized, and the narrative becomes more about construction of meaning than message or content. Wilde’s refusal to select one mode of reading, a single genre, has a destabilizing effect both inside and outside of the text. Bereft of coherent rules, the world of Dorian Gray becomes unstable and suggests fragility of order in the reader’s external world: with so many definitions and mores in flux within the text, might social and philosophical coding also be arbitrary in the real world? For Wilde, it is by asking such questions and coming to answers that are definitively one’s own that individuals begin to realize human potential which, to borrow a term from Hopkins, is to “Selve.” 82 82

This individualism can only occur through a certain amount of ingrained willfulness, and in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde expresses that “disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history… is man’s original virtue,” because “it is through disobedience that progress has been made” (Complete Works 1081). For Wilde, the most genuine and effective method of disobedience was thought and Wildean dialectic, locating synthesis in the subjectivity of the individual, is a form that encourages subversion of social and ideological norms, permitting a coded rebellion through valences of symbol and language. This thesis has already revisited Killeen’s assertion that Wilde’s preference for aphorism, a dialectical form in its own right, stems from Wilde’s desire to subvert English dominance through contradiction of mores in language, but in the case of Wilde’s fairy tales and Salomé—the principal subject matter of this chapter—dialectic serves to more directly stimulate the critical faculty, begetting the self-conscious subjectivity that is essential to nonconformity: not only is Wildean dialectic subversive in and of itself, but it seeds rebellion by encouraging individuals to be conscious of their relations to the world and to articulate and freely revise these connections at the symbolic level. Fundamentally, Wildean dialectic forces subjective synthesis of presented ideas or symbols, so that it is an exercise in the spiritualizing “highest Criticism” elaborated at length by Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist.” This project of self- improvement through dialectic also overlaps and yet runs somewhat counter to the Victorian vogue of the House Beautiful, with which it shares an interest in the vagaries of symbol and the importance of aestheticizing the processes of thought and belief. The House Beautiful, in theory, was predicated on the assumption that the material elements of a household could exert influence on the psychological wellbeing and development of a house’s inhabitants. As Maureen Moran ably 83 83 shows, this cult of domestic beauty was given credentials by mid-late Victorian psychology and a craze for evolutionary study within the scientific community. Much of this scholarly work held with Ruskin’s notion of the improving influence of certain kinds of art and it was theorized that the right aesthetic environment was indispensable to the proper intellectual, ethical, and emotional development of a child or youth and the preservation of an adult mind against vice or stagnation. Numerous aesthetes experimented with this hypothesis, writing bildungsroman of aesthetic self-culture. Probably the most famous trials of the House Beautiful in literature occur in the early chapters of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the physical interiors of the home or familiar environment correlate intimately with the protagonists’ emotional, intellectual and moral development. Unfortunately, though a rich tradition of critical theory and literary experiment on the subject exists, the House Beautiful, such as it was called, has come down to us in the poor connotation of “Liberty gowns, and shoddy insecure furniture” so that the underlying philosophical structure of this school of décor as well as Wilde’s ideological and artistic relation to it are often forgotten or misapprehended (O’Sullivan qtd. in Anderson 42). It is ubiquitous now to associate Wilde with extravagant or gaudy tastes and Wilde helped posterity to this linkage with some of his more elaborate décor schemes, which made an impression on acquaintances and friends, who in turn committed these scenes to the written page. Wilde’s college friends described his old wainscoted rooms at Magdalen as being “quite the show ones of the college, and of the university too,” containing plenty of “blue china…supposed by connoisseurs to be very valuable and fine” (Hamilton qtd. in Anderson 27). Drawing from a variety of sources, Ellmann extends upon Hamilton’s version, describing these rooms as being “filled 84 84 with exquisite objects, not only blue china but Tanagra statuettes brought back from Greece, Greek rugs…photographs of his favorite paintings, and his famous easel sporting its unfinished painting” (Ellmann qtd. in Anderson 29). In significant proportion, Wilde’s college and bachelor rooms adhere strictly to the aesthetic dogma of the House Beautiful, which mixed the old with the new, the exotic with the familiar, and heavily featured sunflowers, lilies, peacock feathers, and blue china, in addition to Japanese fans and parasols, Morris wallpapers, and “the so-called ‘Queen Anne’ style of architecture, which encompassed eighteenth century classicism” (Anderson 37). At its worst, the House Beautiful manifested itself in rooms such as the ones Vincent O’Sullivan describes, “full of horrible bric-a-brac, false antiques, flimsy cane chairs, some kind of vegetation in ‘aesthetic-blue’ pots, and silk window curtains, pale green” (O’Sullivan qtd. in Anderson 42). It is plain from the focus of O’Sullivan’s recollection that he considered Wilde to blame for loosing such ugliness upon England. Though he admitted that “perhaps Wilde himself would have thought that room hideous,” O’Sullivan was nonetheless disgusted at the apparent “result of [Wilde’s] crusade”—probably a reference to his lecture tour and critical writings regarding the House Beautiful—which was that “solid British families” felt compelled to “put out of doors the beautiful heavy furniture and curtains so comfortable and so secure…And to make their houses look like tennis clubs on the Italian Riviera” (O’Sullivan qtd. in Anderson 42). O’Sullivan’s righteous indignation against Wilde here reveals the extent to which Wilde came to stand in the public imagination as chief exponent of the House Beautiful. This appears to have been by design. Anne Anderson observes Wilde’s self-conscious propagandizing, with Wilde first setting himself up as a man of culture in collecting his blue china, and later orchestrating his American 85 85 lecture tour, during which he predominantly lectured on the House Beautiful, to make a name for himself as a professor of aesthetics. The House Beautiful, Anderson notes, was in full swing as an institution by the time Wilde made his contributions to it. The loosely assembled aesthetic movement was already two decades old and the importance of a beautiful house to the development of the intellect and the spirit had already been pronounced by William Morris, who counted a beautiful home as the most desirable aesthetic achievement. Likewise, Morris, Eastlake, Grant Allen, Mrs. Mary Eliza Haweis and Mrs. Jane Ellen Panton had each written works that aimed to instruct homeowners and especially housewives in matters of taste and the language of Beauty, and theirs were merely a sampling of the industry of home décor self-help tracts on the market. In his lectures on the House Beautiful, Wilde borrowed substantially from these popular manuals and treatises, so that little of the advice offered was original to Wilde. Nevertheless, if he borrowed egregiously that borrowing was at least remarkably encyclopedic. Wilde’s House Beautiful lecture, in its various renditions, makes clear enough allusion Clarence Cooke’s 1878 House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks, but there is record that Wilde at least consulted Rev. William J. Loftie’s A Plea for Art in the House (1877) and Haweis’s Art of Dress (1879) as well, and Anderson estimates that Wilde probably read much more than this, “acquiring the overall philosophy from his Oxford mentors,” and the minutiae from the likes of such established authorities as Grant Allen, Haweis, Panton, daughter of William Powell Frith and Mrs. Lucy Orrinsmith, sister of Charles and Kate Faulkner, two of Morris’s associates (Anderson 38). The influence of Charles Locke Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste (1868) and the ideas of Charles G. Leland, whom Wilde greatly admired, are also traceable, Anderson shows. 86 86

However, Wilde’s borrowings from such popular writers in his lectures on the House Beautiful and related aesthetic themes are intriguing in that they are not so much plagiarisms as Wildean syntheses and reversals. Indeed, though his earliest décor choices appear openly patterned after the educated tastes promoted by manuals, his House Beautiful lecture advocates the beauty and elegance of simplicity, and in this there are “elements of pure Ruskin” that recover the House Beautiful’s earlier contexts (Holland qtd. in Anderson 43). Merlin Holland has remarked that “The House Beautiful,” originally titled “Interior and Exterior House Decoration” and later “Art Decoration! Being the Practical Application of the Esthetic Theory to Everyday Home Life and Art Ornamentation,” reads “in places like a Conran manifesto from the 1970s, advocating plain rather than heavy cut glass, the simple beauty of natural wood and if you cannot afford the finest and most expensive in Persian rugs, put down elegant rush matting” (Holland qtd. in Anderson 43). Although disposed to eclecticism and pursuit of beautiful objects, Wilde appears to have realized the distractive power of things, ultimately preferring a more minimalist environment consisting of only those objects most likely to aid or permit mental or creative focus. Douglas Sladen remembered Wilde at one time banishing “all the decorations from his rooms, except a single blue vase of the true aesthetic type, which contained a “Patience” lily and Yeats would write later of Wilde’s scarlet and white dining room decorated with carefully chosen and judiciously placed statuettes (Sladen qtd. in Anderson 32). Within the House Beautiful, decor was essentially regarded as a font of symbol, with beautiful ideas being encased in beautiful objects which, in combination with other beautiful things, constituted a lovely visual-psychological mosaic that generated still more beautiful patterns of thought. In other words, objects existed within the space in 87 87 symbolic relation to thought, but there was a fine line between objects aiding thought and objects overwhelming and paralyzing the critical faculty. In chapter 11 of his novel where Dorian’s “new religion” and his choice mélange of treasures are reckoned, Wilde acknowledges symbolic richness of objects, but also the diminishing return of intricate arrangements of objects, collected for the sake of collecting. Knowing “that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal” and seeing “that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life,” Dorian works to discover the true relations of sensory experience to human life (Dorian Gray 111). He wondered “what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination” and he sought to develop “a real psychology of perfumes,” estimating “the several influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen- laden flowers; of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul” (Dorian Gray 111). In such attention to the influence of the sensory, Dorian in effect accepts the premises of the House Beautiful. Indeed, Wilde’s itemization of Dorian’s collection anchors Dorian even more firmly within that tradition. His finery reads like an index of aesthetic vogues, with Dorian “[seeking] to accumulate a wide array of artifacts from contrasting cultures and historical periods, rare gems, and the most exquisite specimens” of textile and embroidered work (Dorian Gray 116). His textile collection is especially indicative of the cosmopolitan logic of compilation so central to the House Beautiful. Here he gathers together: 88 88

the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the East as “woven air,” and “running water,” and “evening dew”; strange figured cloths from Java; elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with fleurs-de-lis, birds and images; veils of lacis worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish velvets; Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas, with their green-toned golds and their marvelously plumaged birds. (Dorian Gray 116) Dorian has certainly built an environment rife with emblem, and in one sense the studied contradictions of his collection appear to fulfill the productive eclecticism proposed by the House Beautiful. However, the reader is told that “these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne” and by using the aesthetic as diversion Dorian negates its potential cultivating power (Dorian Gray 117). Thus, Ruskin’s assumption of a universal receptivity to the spiritualizing effects of art is revealed to be a weakness of his theory. Like the Student of Wilde’s fairy tale, Dorian can only apprehend art in a material way and, for all of his aesthetic taste, he can only really fully grasp the physical spectacle of the objects he accumulates. It is true that “in the mystic offices to which [the Catholic vestments and ceremonial accoutrements] were put, there was something that quickened his imagination,” but Dorian is finally unable to synthesize the symbols that he collects in his treasure room into any system of belief or action and so the “new 89 89 religion” he proposes, incorporating elements of aesthetics, music, and Catholicism, is stillborn (Dorian Gray 117). Dorian at times feels moved by the sight of his treasures, but the eclecticism of his collection and the apparent assortment of its organization demonstrates if not a primitive and insincere attraction to physical beauty, at least a characteristic entropy, and the symbols implicit in the collection in their multitude serve to distract rather than focus or improve the mind and the spirit. Initially similarly enamored of the spectacle created by eclectic arrangements of ornamental things, with time Wilde would refine his domestic expression, paying closer regard to the self-contained symbolism of objects and capitalizing on the symbolic content of these material things to prompt and concentrate creative and intellectual energies. Such selectivity was core to the philosophy if not always the application of the House Beautiful. As an aesthetic system, it “visually readjust[ed] priorities…project[ing] interest in the inner, creative self by appealing to feelings and perceptions normally associated with artistic expression” and it reinforced and concentrated introspective activity through minimalism and purposeful arrangement (Moran 292). As just one illustration, moving his bachelor’s quarters in Salisbury Street, he and his friend Frank Miles would translate the studio ambiance of his college rooms to the new space, setting off Poynter’s portrait of the beloved Lillie Langtry in a yellow dress with “carefully assembled bibelots and souvenirs of travel,” which included the blue-and-white china, Tanagra figures, Greek rugs and hangings and Damascus tiles, drawings by Blake and Burne-Jones” (Gere qtd. in Anderson 30). The portrait of Lillie Langtry replaced the enigmatic unfinished canvas of his student rooms, but this substitution did not change the significance of the canvas’s presence for Wilde’s creative existence. 90 90

Wilde’s sketches of his travels enclosed in letters home show that he was not without some artistic talent, at least as an illustrator, but his explanation of the canvas is interesting in its positioning of the act of painting as means of synthesizing thought, with the canvas cathartically collecting the “passion too intense to be expressed in the simplicity of language” within “the veiling medium of color” and serving as intermediary between raw feeling, from which Wilde held all bad poetry sprung, and his abstract ideal art (Wilde qtd. in Ellmann 84). On one level, too, the canvas was partly artistic affectation, with Wilde intermittently hinting that he might turn painter, but given that Wilde retained the easel, paraphernalia of the artist’s studio, long after having decided upon a career as writer and critic, it seems likelier that the easeled canvas, painted or unpainted, stood as a general symbol of artistic dynamism. Similar to Wilde’s anxiety in De profundis that the agnostic is a man without symbols to authenticate or define his faith, Wilde may have felt that the ambience of an artist’s studio lent legitimacy to his writing process, making visible the feeling and creative process so interiorized in a writer. Even when Wilde gave up painting, exchanging the dramatic unfinished canvas for a portrait of the beautiful Lillie, he did not sacrifice this symbolic quality, but rather heightened it, Lillie being for Wilde and so many male aesthetes an incarnate image of beauty. Wilde’s aestheticized studio is precisely productive for him because the symbols contained therein have personalized significance, but despite the scope of his sensory experiences Dorian fails to sufficiently nurture his subjective sense, or Personality as is perhaps the more apt term. Dorian’s fatal susceptibility to influence was touched on earlier in this analysis, but this vulnerability ends in Dorian’s inability to develop a sense of self outside of his embodiment of Lord Henry’s aesthetic creed. Because he is unable to develop Personality, he is 91 91 powerless to place his surroundings in symbolic relation to himself and use the physicality of the House Beautiful as a dialectical intellectual space for self- perfection. However, this only seems to account for some of Dorian’s incapacity to subjectively engage. Another part of Dorian’s difficulty, Wilde might agree, is that the dialectic mode functions very inefficiently in visual media. We may respond very strongly to an image, a set of images, or collage, but our response originates from a general if intense feeling that is judgment unconscious of its reactivity and this, by implication, begs the question whether the House Beautiful is a viable model of aesthetic education. Ruskin was very clear that responses should be purely subjective, the result of contemplation and not the influence or didactic preaching on the part of the artist or any authority, and yet this very formlessness threatens to paralyze the transaction between artist, art or symbol, and receptor. Where Dorian’s case undermines the House Beautiful though, it also signifies that inadequacies might be remedied through its translation into text. Rather than that Dorian is incapable of negotiating symbol, it is more accurate to say that he cannot synthesize symbols very well in their original physical orientation. When image is converted into text, as in the wonderful stories he discovers about his jewels, Dorian’s ability to regard the gems as potentially symbolic objects is enhanced. Additionally, the stories to which Wilde exposes Dorian seem deliberately chosen to reinforce Wilde’s associations of critical activity with spiritual development. Whereas many of the stories are taken from the folk wisdom of alchemist Pierre de Boniface, who claimed among other things that “the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent…The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour” and from the writings of Leonardus Camillus, Wilde makes pointed 92 92 allusion to Petrus Alphonsi, Philostratus, and Democritus, and these references clarify Wilde’s remaking of the House Beautiful within the experiential domains of literature (Dorian Gray 113). Although Philostratus is not the first of these three names to be mentioned, his allusion frames the other two references and is most connected to the House Beautiful discussion in that he was a sophist and the sophists emphasized the teaching of arête, meaning “excellence” or “virtue,” through the use of tools of logic and rhetoric. One of the most common tools was dialectic, which Wilde modified to encompass his critical theory, so that when Philostratus tells us of “a gem in the brain of the dragon,” and claims that “by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe” the monster can be “thrown into a magical sleep and slain,” the inference is that this is to be taken as allegory, as myth with instructive purpose (Dorian Gray 113). The reference to Democritus’s aspilates that “kept the wearer from any danger by fire” initially seems not only out of place but out of character, given the philosopher’s general association with scientific and specifically “atomist” perspective, but this incongruency in itself generates a dialectic (Dorian Gray 113). By the same token, if “atom” is substituted for “symbol,” the philosophy of the atomists effectively squares with the models of symbol forwarded by decadence and symbolism: “symbols” have always been, and always will be, in motion and there are an infinite number of “symbols,” and kinds of “symbols,” which differ in shape and magnitude. Yet, it is Wilde’s inclusion of Alphonsus, commonly known as Petrus Alphonsi, through reference to his “serpent…with eyes of real jacinth,” that provides the most insight into Wilde’s reconstruction of the House Beautiful (Dorian Gray 113). Alphonsus was a Catholic theologian of the twelfth century and in its original incarnation, this golden snake inhabits a fable featured in his 93 93

Disciplina Clericalis, which was a collection of oriental tales of moralizing character, translated from Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit and designed for the edification of clergymen and frequently used by them in their discourses. As such, the jacinth-eyed serpent links the importance of reading in Wilde’s text to a broader tradition of Catholic reading and Newman’s and Anselm’s notions of the contributions of reading to the development of “real being,” which led to faith. According to Newman, all that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact, and this of course resolves itself into an indefinite number of particular facts, which as being portions of a whole, have countless relations of every kind, one towards another. Knowledge is the apprehension of these facts, whether in themselves, or in their mutual positions and bearings. (Newman qtd. in Cataldo 146) Although, as was clarified in chapter 3, Wilde rejects Newman’s acceptance of a singular “highest” truth, they at least agree that truth in the world is fragmentary and often manifests through contradictions. Ultimately, the knowledge of faith is compatible with secular knowledge because each science or branch of knowledge is contributes to comprehension of the “original individuum.” Accumulation of knowledge occurred most frequently through reading, so that wide reading, even of secular texts, placed the reader closer to whole truth. Anselm’s paradigm of Christian learning through acknowledgement of use of dialectic, however, more explicitly elaborates on the relations of the worldly to the divine in ways that correlate his exemplum meditandi with the theoretical model of the House Beautiful. 94 94

Whereas the House Beautiful emphasizes the spiritualizing effects of things, for Anselm God speaks locutio rerum, through the things of the physical world, which he theorizes to be more or less perfect images of God’s Word in that they are brought about through the Word. Human speech, according to Anselm, is caused by and depends upon the things of the world, but he believes that in the logical and dialectical realities of our ordinary ways of speaking about these things there lies hidden a distant reflection of the divine and in this there is for him the hope that we might, through acts of speech and writing, discover an imprint of the divine. By this reasoning, Anselm thought it “legitimate and even desirable to forgo the analysis of the traditional authoritative texts—including Scripture—in favor of fresh analysis of simpler, more colloquial forms of discourse” (Staley 212). Indeed, Catholicism has a long history of meta-Scriptural dialectical investigations of faith, primarily through use of symbol and dialectic. In early religion, symbolical, narrative, and aesthetic elements were principal and this inheritance comes down to us in diluted form in the teaching of Jesus through the parables, which are considered as vital as his discourses. Parables are also present among the liturgies and in the Collect for the feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, Cataldo notes, the entire ceremony of the feast and texts which explain it make up one great parable. The use of parable, itself a dialectic—if not Wildean dialectic—form absorbed Anselm to such a degree that in his Monologion he attempted to develop an extensive working theory of how such images aided in the development of faith. A survey of the dialectical composition of the tales in both The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates suggests that Wilde uses his fairy tales to pursue Anselm’s objective in the secular realm of aesthetics. In a sense, of course, the considerations are still spiritual, because for Wilde critical, 95 95 and by implication creative, thought brings us nearer the Gods. In this, Wilde’s perspective complements Anselm’s, though Wilde’s negotiations of truths tend to center on the relations of art and life. This relatively consistent focus is one shared by Wilde’s other works and an indissoluble question posed by aesthetic philosophy and the Victorian House Beautiful as an institution, so that Wilde’s tales should be regarded as possible insights into Wilde’s aestheticism. However, in general critics have largely “erased” the fairy tales from their accounts of Wilde, with Lawrence Danson, Julia Prewitt Brown, Bruce Bashford, Alan Sinfield, Linda Dowling, Jeffrey Nunokawa. Jonathan Dollimore and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, some of Wilde’s more distinguished critics focusing Wilde’s canonized works at the expense of the earlier tales. Killeen points out the oddity of this elision given that Wilde’s two collections of fairy tales were written synchronously with both The Picture of Dorian Gray and Intentions and “at the height of Wilde’s creative powers,” suggesting a link between the construction of the tales and Wilde’s developing aestheticism (Fairy Tales 2). A small but substantial contingent of critics have sensed the importance of these singular works, though their analyses are usually framed by particular biographical approaches that concentrate either on Wilde’s sexuality, his spirituality, or his Irishness or political sympathy with the Irish. Given Wilde’s scholarly interest in Hellenic culture and no doubt his homosexuality, Naomi Wood’s analysis envisions Wilde as an evangelizing pederast, with his fairy tales “seducing” young readers. Elizabeth Goodenough identifies the tales as contributing to Victorian speculations about the divinity of Christ, recognizing as Killeen does Wilde’s substantial engagement with these conversations, and Maureen O’Connor and Killeen believe that Wilde’s two fairy tales contribute to a tradition of subversive Anglo-Irish literature, Wilde choosing the fairy tale form 96 96 for its subversive qualities. Killeen, for example, assesses that Wilde’s use of symbol in the tales “resonate[s] with Irish and folk Catholic meanings,” reclaiming the value of Irish identity and traditions (Fairy Tales 12). On the other hand, the subversive quality of Wilde’s tales has rarely been addressed in close readings of Wilde’s texts that do not vitiate themselves in Wilde’s biography. Ann Markey’s analysis of the tales probably comes closest to this criterion in its investigation of the ways in which Wilde “draws on, parodies and transforms narrative structures as diverse as the oral folktale, the French conte, and Victorian ghost and detective stories,” and “prob[es] and collaps[es]…oppositions, including surface and depth, selflessness and selfishness, sin and redemption, to show that one element always reflects and depends on the other” (Markey 71). Throughout, Markey’s account of hybridity and irresolution in the endings of the tales indicates an agreement with Bashford’s description of “Wildean dialectic.” Like “The Critic as Artist” and “The Decay of Lying,” the tales set up ideas in opposition to one another, emphasizing difference to create distance such that these halves or multiple elements can be reintegrated in new configurations within the subjective imagination. Despite such encoded variability, however, it is not unusual for readers to relate to the tales as “conservative” and explicitly Christian parables and where readings reject the presence of traditional morals, they typically supply or allude to subversive ones, as with Killeen’s reading of “The Happy Prince,” which he sees as a Wildean attack on imperialist treatment of the Irish. Still other perspectives claim that Wilde substitutes aestheticism for morality. Justin T. Jones’s study of “morality’s ugly implications in Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales,” is characteristic of this scholarship in its recognition of Wilde’s rejection of morality as a category and its inability to describe what, for Wilde, replaces morality. According to Jones’s 97 97 model, the claims of the moral are never constructive in Wilde’s fairy universes and when Wilde’s characters meet with a moral they must either wholly reject it, revise their aesthetic such that Christ’s image is the source of beauty, or “die as a result of their moral knowledge,” because “once Wilde subjects one of his fairy tale characters to moral correction, that character is in danger of losing his otherworldly beauty or his love of beauty for its own sake and thus his integrity” (Jones 885). From Wilde’s correspondence with one of his readers, Thomas Hutchinson, it appears, he had no such integrity in mind when he created the characters that Jones would preserve from the clutches of the moral. Hutchinson had written to Wilde extolling the Student of “The Nightingale and the Rose,” and while it is palpable from Wilde’s response that this was a reading that he had not meant to promote, Wilde also does not cast himself as sole arbiter of the tale’s meaning. In his reply to Hutchinson, Wilde wrote that the Student of his tale seemed to him a rather shallow young man. And almost as bad as the girl he thinks he loves. The nightingale is the true lover, if there is one. She, at least, is Romance, and the Student and the girl are, like most of us, unworthy of Romance. (Wilde qtd. in Markey 104) However, Wilde’s own interpretation of these characters did not for him preclude the viability of other understandings, even Hutchinson’s peculiar partiality for the Student. Wilde explained that that, on the contrary, he “like[d] to fancy that there may be many meanings in the tale, for in writing it, and the others, I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets, and many answers” (Wilde qtd. in Markey 104). “By refusing to impose his own reading of the story on his correspondent,” 98 98

Markey summarizes, “Wilde acknowledges that authorial intent is not the key to interpretation, which must remain provisional and incomplete” (Markey104). Wilde ensures this indefiniteness of meaning through his structuring of the tales. Markey’s discussion of the dialectical movement of “The Birthday of the Infanta” in itself helps to explicate the structures of other tales in Wilde’s collections. Wilde’s Infanta was partly inspired by the little Infanta Margaret Theresa as depicted in Velásquez’s “Las Meninas,” and Markey has compared reading Wilde’s tale to the viewer’s experience of the Velásquez’s painting: the painted infanta, made radiant by light from the open door in the background and a side window, is set apart from other figures, but though the viewer’s eye is first attracted to her, the composition of the painting encourages it to “range around other, less obvious but no less compelling, loci of interest”; correspondingly, in his tale Wilde “foregrounds the Infanta but draws attention to supporting characters in the story, whose presence alters the perspective from which the reader views life at the Spanish court” (Markey 159). These shifts in perspective, in Markey’s view, draw the reader into a contemplation of “such varied issues as parental duty, the precarious position of the artist who depends on patronage and the relationship between the good and the beautiful,” and the implication of this painting-based reading is that like the image the text remains perpetually in flux (Markey 160). Though critics have rarely described the tales in language that suggests their containing or being shaped by dialectical sensibility, the inability to consistently or holistically define what each or any of the tales represent entails an acknowledgment of this trait. Critics have identified within “The Happy Prince”— often considered one of Wilde’s simplest tales—deliberations on the opposed claims of socialism and individualism, the relative values of philanthropy and sacrifice, bourgeois philistinism and materialism, and the relationship between 99 99 ethics and aesthetics, which is perhaps the one made most obvious through the tale’s ending. As both Markey and Killeen realize, the tale also encapsulates conversations about British imperialism, and perhaps more especially its involvement in Ireland and the plight of the transplanted Irish poor who had fled famine only to move into British cities and starve in industry. The Irish context is most directly established, Markey argues, through allusion to the Trafalgar Square riots of 1887, which took place during the year of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and less than six months before publication of The Happy Prince and Other Tales. Though Markey does not annotate this interpretation, it seems that she may have been making a connection between the statue, evocative of the lavish Albert Memorial erected in memory of the “pure-hearted” Prince Albert, and its position relative to the poor city-dwellers in the story, which Killeen identified as probably Irish. The statue itself, like the Albert statue, overlooks the people from on high, but of course he does so in Hyde Park, not Trafalgar Square. Wilde uses the space of the fairy tale to relocate Albert, and thus Victoria and Victorians, for whom the aesthetics of the statue symbolized cultural sensibilities. Wilde ostensibly brings this loaded cultural symbol into contact with Trafalgar Square, partly to provoke assessment of Victorian social and imperial mores and also to alter the perspective of his middle to upper class readership. Indeed, Trafalgar Square was partially chosen by rioters due to its imperial symbolism, because the demonstration was in large measure an Irish and Anglo-Irish protest against the Coercion Acts. Markey also sees Wilde using the tale to allude to the philanthropic projects of socially-conscious, evangelizing aesthetes who believed that the conditions of the poor could be ameliorated through aesthetic education. Wilde clearly felt that their work was misguided, Markey notes, and he in fact wrote that 100 100

There is something a little pathetic in the attempt to civilise the rough street-boy by means of the refining influence of ferns and fossils. . . The poor are not to be fed upon facts. Even Shakespeare and the Pyramids are not sufficient; nor is there much use in giving them the results of culture, unless we also give them those conditions under which culture can be raised. (Wilde qtd. in Markey 102) It is all but obvious that Wilde intended to present these issues, perhaps even for political purposes, but it is more significant that he resists moralizing on these subjects, where a didactic moral would have been easily articulated. The Swallow’s self-sacrifice could, for instance, readily be construed as an endorsement of artists sacrificing themselves to social reform. The swallow himself is, after all, evocative of the artist through his stories of the Egypt, which correlate him with Gautier's “Ce que disent les hirondelles”2 in which the speaker compares himself to a captive bird who cannot escape to warmer climes, “car le poete est un oiseau, mais captif”3 (Markey 98). Unaware of Wilde’s criticism of such aesthetic projects, it would be easy to read into this allusion a didactic connection between the work of the artist and social reform, and yet Wilde’s tale evades this moral, not so much advocating political art as tapping into the aesthetic sensibility of Wilde’s middle to upper class readers, more particularly their reading. For those of means to be well-read and educated, Wilde’s story is peppered with allusions to other texts and traditions. There are of course references to

2 “What the Swallows Say” 3 “for the poet is a bird, but a caged one” 101 101

Hafiz’s poetry and Gautier’s artist-speaker in the tales the Swallow tells the Prince, but “The Happy Prince” is also inhabited by the seamstress of Thomas Hood's “The Song of the Shirt” (1843), the angelic children of the London poor in William Blake's “Holy Thursday” (1789), and the little match girl from Anderson’s tale, and these people-images are intriguing in their blatant objectification. If, as Markey observes, the allusion to Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) in the Swallow's description of death as the brother of sleep “enhances Wilde's contrast between the innocent, childlike vision of the Charity Children and the venal, self-aggrandizing behaviour of the Town Councillors,” it must nonetheless be acknowledged that these children have had to be cast into a generic but beautiful image before their plight can be so widely decried. Populated by aestheticized poor borrowed from other authors, Wilde’s text proposes that destitute must be recast into images, specifically textual ones, for their suffering in the real world to be visible. Just as Dorian is unable to mediate objects or human relationships except through contexts provided by literature, stark realities must be transfigured into symbols of tragic beauty before they can be viscerally acknowledged and subjectively synthesized into belief or action. Similarly, several tales later in “The Birthday of the Infanta,” the importance of filtered images of reality to the Infanta and her realm is striking. In the puppet performance of Sophonisba, “[the puppets] acted so well, and their gestures were so extremely natural, that at the close of the play the eyes of the Infanta were quite dim with tears,” and Jones reminds us that even “the Grand Inquisitor himself was so affected that he could not help saying to Don Pedro that it seemed to him intolerable that things made simply out of wood and coloured wax, and worked mechanically by wires, should be so unhappy and meet with such terrible misfortunes” (Complete Works 237). Although Jones does not go so 102 102 far as to say this, the Infanta’s ability to sympathize with aestheticized forms of grief or death, where she is unable to feel any sadness or remorse for the little dwarf, recalls both Dorian’s fascination with theatre and the true nature of his relationship with Sybil Vane. Furthermore, Wilde’s literary poor, with their ability as symbols to elicit emotional response from readers in ways that the voiceless real poor so often did not, resonate Wilde’s question in “The Critic as Artist” whether the pleasure or pain of the world can exert lasting influence over human life, “if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed one has found the true secret of joy, and wept away one’s tears over their deaths who, like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio, can never die?” (Complete Works 1038). As symbols, the aestheticized poor are a contentious case for Wilde’s aesthetics, encapsulating tensions between the ethical and the sterile, self- indulgent, self-improving emotional response Wilde seems to privilege. They have the potential power to humanize both object and perceiver, teaching the reader to see more deeply and perhaps sympathetically, to become attuned to his place in the world and in relation to others, but this lays upon him no ethical obligation. However hypothetically didactic the combinations and connotations of the symbols in “The Happy Prince,” or other tales, it is not the storyteller’s or the artist’s place to solve the suffering of the poor, but rather to use opportunities for dialectic afforded by the genre and its dependence on symbol to make life in all its variety and condition visible and beautiful. To Wilde nothing except a deliberate refusal to accept responsibility for one’s thoughts could be less conducive to proper development than a lack of self- awareness. This sense is not wholly instinctive and must be learned, whether through incidental encounter or structured practice, and Wilde as chapters 2 and 3 have shown prefers the latter as a surer method. In effect, the dialectics Wilde 103 103 creates open liminal spaces that foster culture of self-conscious subjectivity by forcing the mind of the reader to independently synthesize and prioritize conflicting symbols or ideas. Wilde’s fairy tales perceptibly deliberate on relationships to image and the visible world and often, and perhaps not so incidentally, dialectical thinking is prompted by interpolation of Catholic imagery and ritual. Perhaps in tribute to Alphonsus’s fables, Catholic ritual regularly marks the entrance of dialectic within Wilde’s fairy tales. In “The Happy Prince,” it is only the Prince’s appearance as a Christ figure, his gilding, which evokes the Catholic Church, and his transubstantive giving that any of the various literary, historical, and cultural allusions can happen, and dialectics in many of Wilde’s other tales are similarly managed by reference to Catholic images or themes, but whatever Wilde’s personal religious convictions, the purpose served is ultimately that of constructing spaces where Wilde’s dialectic can operate. In “The Nightingale and The Rose,” for instance, Wilde’s use of symbol is more sophisticated and the wide range of associations that she, and especially her sacrifice, can summon generates indeterminacy that in and of itself averts didacticism. As symbol, the nightingale is linked to narratives of suffering, whether Philomela’s, Mary’s, or Christ’s, but Wilde’s nightingale combines these narratives through the Nightingale’s act of singing and her purported reasons for singing. Because of its literal sacrifice, the Nightingale of Wilde’s tale is commonly understood as a kind of Christ figure, albeit a hybrid one, and the bird’s self-sacrifice does have strong symbolic associations with the bodily sufferings of Christ on the cross. Viewing the Nightingale in Wilde’s story as an avatar for Christ, we can also assess her ultimate sacrifice in Christian terms. In the New Testament, the sinful world is purified by the blood of Christ, who sacrifices 104 104 himself for Man’s salvation. This sacrificial precedent for atonement, in Killeen’s view, “explains why the blood of the Nightingale is so crucial: the Nightingale must spill her blood in order that love be perfected,” literally in the form of the red rose (Fairy Tales 49). The Nightingale is likewise symbolic of Mary who, in many early Christian texts is sometimes identified as co-redeemer with her Son and the Nightingale’s bleeding breast integrates the tears of blood that flow freely from Mary’s own “pierced heart.” Killeen is inclined to believe that the bird appears in something more of a Marian context, because of its purported sex and reference to the immaculate conception in that “…the tree…does not produce by normal methods of pollination…and will yield only one rose for the world,” the blood being a residue of the holy birth (Fairy Tales 50). Certainly, Wilde’s interest in Catholicism overlaps with that of the decadents who were enchanted by the “visscitudes of desire, the metamorphoses of language and religious practice” that render “[the] great mountain of words and gestures, [the] discourse of Roman Catholicism, unstable” (Hanson 20). More specifically, as precursors to the symbolists, the decadents were fascinated by the Catholic Church’s layering of traditions and interpretations and the contradiction and fragmentation inherent to Catholic theology, its symbols and the dissemination of meanings. Catholic traditions and religiously-oriented symbols like the Nightingale are useful because they combine aesthetic, spiritual, and social meanings. Killeen sees that Nightingale image can exist in other relations than the Catholic overtones he perceives: for instance, the Nightingale can be read as an artist figure and the dark rose she produces is allusive to Ireland as “Dark Rosaleen.” The tale as a whole, however, may also be interpreted as a meditation on the relationship of art and artist to society, an indictment of what passed for 105 105 aesthetic education, and as a suggestion of a key problem with Ruskin’s model of seeing. “The Nightingale and the Rose” is plainly concerned with problems of aesthetic education, so that it is unsurprising that in presenting examples of flawed educational schemes Wilde’s text acts to develop the reader’s critical sense, through reading of the Nightingale symbol in relation to the Student. While the Student stands as a parody of scientific rationalism taken to an extreme, within the tale the Nightingale represents Romantic imagination and a faith-like idealism. In the end, though Wilde is more sympathetic to the Nightingale and though her sacrifice is certainly aesthetically beautiful, her more precise role is to prompt reevaluation of the supposedly mutually-exclusive opposition between rationalism and Romanticism and faith. While eschewal of emotionalism and imagination is far from tenable, Wilde’s Nightingale remains a symbol of undulating significance, a dialectic unto herself, so that for each reader the tale is a slightly different space in which the reader has to make interpretive decisions and ultimately become metacognitively aware of interpretive decisions and the philosophical consequences of those decisions. Synthesis is prompted by Wilde’s dialectic arrangement of symbol and, thus, perspective in the fairy tales, which interrupts the expected progression of the narrative to a distinct moral, placing the burden of interpretation on the reader. Such dialectics are most often introduced through the instability created by the appearance of Catholic references into the text, though religious messages are situated as possible meanings among many, showing that symbols can be spiritualizing without being spiritualized. Wilde’s proposal of his “confraternity of the Faithless” in De profundis offers a clue as to Wilde’s perennial interest in Catholic symbol in its purely symbolic context. “When [he] think[s] of religion at 106 106 all,” Wilde writes, he feels “as if [he] would like to found an order for those who cannot believe…where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine” (Complete Works 915). Though apparently constitutionally unable to commit to the uniform beliefs of organized religion, Wilde was equally uncomfortable with the formlessness presented by agnosticism, its absence of ritual or tradition: “Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith” (Complete Works 915). It is impossible to define the extent or nature of another’s belief, that belief being native to the unmapped, alien territory of another’s personality, and this thesis will not presume to do so. Though not necessarily a converted or devout Catholic, it is plain that Wilde did appreciate the power of its traditions and its high aestheticization of spirituality, which for Wilde is a cognate of the “highest Criticism.” As Arata has demonstrated, Wilde largely found value in religious narrative and symbol because they provided ideal forms on which subjectivity could operate and Christ narratives especially could serve as inspirations to self-culture, but it is nonetheless rash to accept Ellmann’s assumption that Wilde is simply intrigued by the aesthetic forms of Catholicism. As the tales go on, references to Catholicism become darker and less orthodox and Wilde meditates more on defining proper, useful symbols or tools of thought as well as the critical distance necessary to true contemplation. In “The Birthday of the Infanta,” the Grand Inquisitor brings with him into the court the shadow of the Spanish Inquisition and the Dance of the Virgin—through its allusions to poisoning in the church, after which the Infanta’s family evidently ceased attending—and not the dwarf, as Jones would have it, more directly signals 107 107 the threat of the world outside the palace, in addition to providing a visual contrast to the dwarf’s ungainly performance. However, the dwarf is an integral component of the dialectical space, with his appearance and behavior within the space as well as his Lacanian misidentification of the Infanta as the “monster” in the mirror unsettling cultural correlations between physical and spiritual beauty. The mirror scene is doubly significant, of course, in that it locates the Infanta’s wholly aesthetic and isolated existence as potentially though not definitively monstrous. Critics have suggested that Flaubert’s Herodias (1877) was, beyond the Velásquez painting, one of the chief inspirations for Wilde’s tale, and this suggests the importance of the dwarf’s perspective: Iokannan, the John the Baptist figure, exposes the corruption of Herod’s court, and if Wilde’s dwarf takes the place of Iokannan, his flawed perception is not entirely to be discounted. Killeen and Markey have noted distinct overlaps in the two texts’ responses to the death of the Iokannan figure as well, Herodias ending with an impersonal description of the removal of Iokannan’s head by his disciples, while “the last sentence of ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ combines the Infanta's chilling lack of feeling with the more prosaic image of a little girl running out to play” and this “combines the horrific and the banal in a disturbing image that simultaneously deflects and directs attention to wilful cruelty” (Markey 164). The refusal of Wilde’s tale to moralize or punish the Infanta for what must appear to most readers as cruelty toward the dwarf is especially significant, not just because it averts a didactic ending, but because it also creates a dialectic space in which the reader is accountable for whatever judgment is to be levied on the little princess. From Flaubert and indeed the various Salomés of Bible and folk legend, Wilde had already inherited an ambiguous and unstable narrative, but Wilde takes 108 108

Flaubert’s proto-dialecticism much farther, challenging readers to self-conscious subjectivity and responsibility for derived meanings. In this aesthetic, “The Birthday of the Infanta” gestures to Wilde’s later experiments with symbolism in Salomé, with Wilde’s treatment of the Iokannan and Salomé figures in first “The Birthday of the Infanta” and then Salomé marking increasingly sophisticated uses of “polyphonic space” to prompt reader reflection. As with the Infanta, Wilde does not punish Salomé’s offenses, but Salomé’s escape from external regulation is all the more disquieting in that her actions take place against the backdrop of a clearly hierarchical social system. Whereas Salomé’s raw passion and bloody-mindedness has never ceased to unsettle, our disturbance most often takes a qualitatively different form than that experienced by late nineteenth century audiences, for whom Salomé had become a symbol of misogynistic anxieties about the emergent feminism, which threatened cherished cultural norms. Wilde consciously engages with this discourse in his construction of Salomé, the text describing her desire for Iokanaan’s body and the manner in which she ravenously kisses his lips, biting into his mouth “as one bites a ripe fruit” after he has been beheaded (lines 1010- 1011). Killeen notes that Salomé constantly evokes associations between Iokanaan and food: for Salomé Iokanaan’s hair is “like the clusters of black grapes that hang from the vine-trees of Edom in the land of the Edomites” (lines 321-322); his mouth is “like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory” (lines 337-338); and his voice is “wine to [her].” Some have suggested that in desiring and ultimately consuming Iokanaan’s literal flesh, while herself remaining virginal, Salomé reflects a threat to heteronormative sexuality and patriarchal culture, and it is on this reading that her reputation as femme fatale primarily rests. On the other hand, it is impossible to miss that Salomé’s desire to consume Ioakanaan mirrors the Catholic Eucharist this reference, according to Killeen, 109 109 embeds allusions to the starving of Irish Catholics during the famine, which coincided with the Second Reformation. In this reading, Ioakanaan is representative of the evangelist Protestantism and Salomé’s essential cannibalism is a symbolic reclaiming of Irish cultural identity, in some places inseparable from religious identification. Irish Catholicism is introduced into the space of the play through Salomé’s “fairy dance,” her close textual relationship to the moon, a symbol significant to Irish paganism, and the text’s insinuation that her wilfulness must be somehow controlled incorporates problems of Irish colonialism and Irish Catholicism into the dialectic. Nevertheless, the play refuses to solve these issues didactically or at all, except perhaps through subjective synthesis of individual readers. In the end, as with the Infanta, Salomé represents not a character as such, but a multidimensional metaphor reducible only perhaps, and contingent on individual perspective and worldview. Salomé’s motives, as with Wilde’s, are neither easily nor narrowly quantifiable, and her integrity and relevance as symbol arises from her usefulness as metaphor and as an entity to which meanings can be attached to focus thinking. That Wilde’s Salomé receives its structure from the language of the Eucharist is readily apparent and the metaphor is indeed exceptionally flexible. It joins the spiritual with the aesthetic, and both of these categories to possible ideological or political conversations, visualizing in and of itself the perpetual shifting and reconstitution of ideas and values and the importance of symbol or metaphor to our ability to conceive of complicated truths. Much of the attraction of the Eucharist is that it allows belief to be more easily conceptualized, with the ritual converting spiritual knowledge into a physical representation that can be seen and touched; ritual is a tangible communication of spirituality. If we read Salomé’s coveting of Ioakanaan’s body 110 110 as Killeen does, then her grotesque kiss is in effect an attempt to forcibly take the full spiritual knowledge that Ioakanaan denies her by withholding God’s Word. That she describes Ioakanaan’s mouth as a pomegranate is especially enlightening in that the literal fruit combines at the very least images of the feminine, fertility, Christian as well as pagan knowledge, and through its staining juice, blood. Moreover, her division of Ioakanaan into things seems curiously tied to an attempt to ‘sort out’ Ioakanaan’s ideas relative to her own, Ioakanaan embodying Jesus’s teachings, by engaging sensorially with what contains them. Of course, Salomé’s kiss in the end leaves her still “hungry,” but not for Ioakanaan’s or anyone else’s flesh; her unfulfilled vampirism parallels Dorian’s collecting and coveting of worldly opulence. Just as Dorian finds it difficult to synthesize thought or better his nature in the House Beautiful of his painstaking creation, Ioakanaan is more viable in a symbolic rather than physical relation to Salomé: his physical flesh itself has no spiritual power, just as a physical object has only the symbolic value we attribute to it, and Salomé, or her soul, seems far more nourished by the mental images she creates from the physical than by Ioakanaan’s actual physical body. In the dissatisfaction that results from Salomé’s conversion of Ioakannan into physical symbol, Wilde demonstrates the essential inability of stable physical symbol to stimulate nourishing syntheses of the complex relationships between aesthetics and ethics. Instead, Wilde appears to privilege symbol that self- consciously belongs to the imaginative and the fantastic, because this not only makes acts of reading self-conscious, but expands the possibilities of dialectic through infinitesimal intertextual references, in addition to spiritualizing subjective interpretation. “The Fisherman and His Soul,” published in The House of Pomegranates with “The Birthday of the Infanta” and written prior to Salomé, comments as Salomé does on the fundamental problems intrinsic to immersion in 111 111 things and worldly pleasures, primarily through the Fisherman’s wandering Soul, whose ambiguous deeds recall Dorian’s rumored debaucheries. The Soul, in relating his acquisitions of worldly treasures, repeatedly offers the chilling elision that “[he] did a strange thing, but what [he] did matters not,” but the Soul’s eventual tempting the Fisherman to kill the merchant for his gold insinuates that he has killed for the worldly articles of wisdom he has set aside to tempt the Fisherman from his love. Indeed, for the Soul, it really does “matter not,” because he is quite literally heartless and , therefore, wholly consumed by his pursuit of the marvelous, acquiring through dubious means “the Mirror of Wisdom,” which “reflecteth all things that are in heaven and on earth, save only the face of him who looketh into it… so that he who looketh into it may be wise” and the Emperor’s leaden magic ring that ostensibly supplies the Emperor with his splendid palace, with its “huge tortoise-shells full of pearls, and hollowed moonstones of great size piled up with red rubies, its gold “stored in coffers of elephant-hide,” its “opals and sapphires, the former in cups of crystal, and the latter in cups of jade,” round green emeralds “upon thin plates of ivory, and…silk bags filled, some with turquoise-stones, and others with beryls” among other curiosities of which the Soul tells “but a tithe of what was there” (Complete Works 260, 264). Both wisdom and wealth fail to tempt the Fisherman and it is only by telling of the captivating dancer at an unspecified Inn and promising to take the Fisherman to this girl with a veiled face and naked feet that “moved over the carpet like little white pigeons” that he persuades the Fisherman to emerge from the water and follow him into the world. His Mermaid love, of course “had no feet and could not dance,” and in longing for this connection “a great desire came over him” to meet this enigmatic dancer (Complete Works 265). 112 112

In his quest for the dancing girl, the Fisherman, for his Soul reunited with him when he strode forth from the water, looks for her in three different villages to no avail: the Soul never will specify the precise location of the Inn, though curiously this woman “may be” at each of their stops. The dancer’s elusiveness suggests quite baldly that she is an idea the Fisherman wants to realize: a perfect love that balances heart, imagination, and soul. Instead of the dancer, the Fisherman merely finds temptation to evil in the physical world, being urged on by his now hardened Soul to first steal a silver cup, then smite a child, and finally to nearly kill the merchant. Realizing his error in trusting his corrupted Soul, the Fisherman returns to call his Mermaid love from the waters only to find that she is dead, and “weeping as one smitten with pain he fl[ings] himself down beside [the Mermaid], and he kisse[s] the cold red of the mouth, and toy[s] with the wet amber of the hair” (Complete Works 270). “Cold were the lips, yet he kissed them. Salt was the honey of the hair, yet he tasted it with a bitter joy,” and “trembling with joy” he holds the dead Mermaid to his breast, perhaps comprehending that in the Mermaid he possesses all that he requires (Complete Works 270). Interestingly, rather than give the Mermaid legs with which to dance and follow the Fisherman, as Anderson does in his interpretation of the Undine legend, Wilde permits his Mermaid to essentially bilocate, with the veiled dancer being evocative of the Mermaid’s painful dance in Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid,” which earns her the affection but not the love of the prince. Forgoing the supplication and the didactic conversion themes of the Undine legend and Focque’s and Anderson’s renditions of it, Wilde’s Mermaid herself remains intact and enamored of her own world in the sea, a realm of mystery inaccessible except through her song and her agency. 113 113

In losing his heart to the Mermaid, Wilde’s Fisherman is forced to divide himself or perhaps more specifically his psyche, cutting away his shadow, the Soul’s body because the Mermaid declares that she cannot reciprocate his love and marry him unless “thou would’st send away thy Soul” (Complete Works 250). The Fisherman, eager to secure the Mermaid’s love, promptly cuts away his Soul in an arcane ritual believing that “much gladness shall be [his]” in doing so and gladness is his, eventually, though not in the manner he theorizes he will become glad (Complete Works 250). In the act of severing his Soul, the Fisherman becomes an outcast not only socially but religiously and, cut loose and sent out into the world without a heart, the Fisherman’s Soul is easily corrupted and brings the Fisherman to grief, so that this “gladness” is not so easily won. Yet, without the undine’s temptation, the Fisherman may never have been drawn far enough from orthodox belief and systems to develop sufficient inner resources to resist the worldly temptations laid before him by the Soul. With his heart in possession of the Mermaid and his Soul roaming the earth, committing unnamed crimes on his behalf, the Fisherman is left merely to perceive the effects of such division and it in this perspective his love for the Mermaid is also the means of developing ethical self-consciousness. Yet the Fisherman’s love for the mermaid is secondary to what love of her prompts him to contemplate. On the surface, her demand that he cut away his soul may appear sinister, but in true Wildean dialectic, she has him cut it away only to be rejoined with him on different terms, which are expressly aesthetic or critical ones. It is vital to the maintenance of dialectic distance that the Fisherman’s love for the Mermaid remains incorporeal, because in this quality, the Mermaid retains her fascination for the Fisherman, luring him progressively further into the flux of meaning that is imagination. The truth of the Mermaid remains always just out of 114 114 reach: she “would never come near him that he might touch her ... and when he sought to seize her she dived into the water,” luring him time and again into mystery (Complete Works 249). As symbol, Wilde’s Mermaid falls within both traditions of folk storytelling and that of Catholic theology and reading. It is of interest that a Mermaid appears in this story because mermaids, along with fairies, nymphs, witches, mythical beasts and other magical phenomena, were elementary to the pantheon of the Irish peasants’ folk-Catholicism—that the Catholic Church was anxiously trying to eradicate during the Victorian period (Killeen, Fairy Tales 149). “To be Irish and Catholic meant that you believed in fairies and angels (or fairies as fallen angels), in mermaids and in priests (or in mermaids as priestly types), in folk rituals and Mass (or folk rituals as a type of the sacrament enacted within the Mass),” and, in his tale, Wilde appears to be toying with these interactions between folk-belief and doctrine which were so problematic for the Catholic Church (Killeen, Fairy Tales 149). In forcing the Fisherman into a dialectical existence, the Mermaid teaches him how to read and develop his Soul, and from this ephemeral creature, the Fisherman learns of a goodness alternate to the Church’s message, one that proposes that higher truths can be reached through earnest investigation of the values on which our ideas are based and our relationship to these ideas, recalling Anselm’s notion that in questioning we could approach nearer the truth of God. Ultimately, the God of Wilde’s tale seems sympathetic to the Fisherman’s love, though this is not categorically demonstrated. When the Fisherman drowns embracing the Mermaid’s corpse, the sanctimonious Priest arranges to have the pair both buried in an unmarked, “sinner’s” grave in the corner of Fuller’s Field. Three years later, the Priest goes to his altar—which someone has strewn with 115 115 flowers—prepared to give a sermon on God's vengeful wrath, but finds himself unable to speak of any subject but God's love. Asking the deacons where the flowers have come from, he is told that they are from the corner of the unhallowed field and, inspired to raptures by these strange flowers, in the end the Priest blesses the sea, and all the wild things that are in it. The Fauns also he blessed, and the little things that peer through the leaves. All the things in God’s world he blessed, and the people were filled with joy and wonder. Yet never again in the corner of the Fuller’s Field grew flowers of any kind, but the field remained barren even as before. Nor came the Sea-folk into the bay as they had been wont to do, for they went to another part of the sea. (Complete Works 272) This ending is enigmatic, leaving the reader to ponder why the miraculous flowers and the sea-folk have alike permanently retreated from the area, but their absence implies an incompatibility between the Fisherman’s love and Christian love as it is espoused by the Catholic Church within the tale. The Priest is unable to synthesize the complex truth, because he is only able to think in the binary rhetoric of the blessed and the damned, and the presentation of the Tannhäuser flowers serves perhaps as a divine indication that not all circumstances fall within the purview or wisdom of orthodoxy. Wilde’s habit of ending his tales like this, appearing to point roughly in the direction of a moral but stopping short of articulating one, helps to explain why Killeen and others have noted a moralizing tendency in Wilde’s tales. However, as should be clear from the various indefinite endings of “The Happy Prince,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Birthday of the Infanta,” and “The Fisherman and His Soul,” Wilde does not quite resolve the ethical dilemmas he presents. 116 116

Indeed, in Wilde’s two collections of fairy tales and his symbolist play, Wilde identifies disjunctions between religious and ethical values, aesthetics and ethics, but his synthesis of these perspectives remains equivocal and incomplete. When Wilde’s Fisherman is received into the sea, his synthesis of love combining heart, body, and soul, balancing aesthetic with ethical choices is not cut short, but towed down into obscurity. In his death he becomes effectively mute and is finally entombed, so that the reader is required to personally negotiate subjective balance between the spaces he has left, making sense for the Priest of the mysterious flowers and why his blessing appears to create further division rather than acceptance. Indeed, the presence of the sea in Wilde’s tale and the Fisherman’s descent into it, suggests that these meanings must be perpetually renegotiated just the tide brings new materials to the shore, which must then be assimilated into the human world. Here, as with Wilde’s other tales Wilde eschews the happy ending in favor of an ambiguous one, not only to show that there never can be an ending to thought, religious or otherwise, and certainly not one in which reality and romance harmoniously cohere, but also to position readers to apprehend truth as “rarely pure and never simple.” Often criticized for promoting an impractical aestheticism, Wilde has received little credit for acknowledging the intricate relationships between aesthetic and ethical or practical matters in his work, but within his tales Wilde presents instabilities between cultural and subjective understandings, showing that though a true objectivity is impossible, it is not even desirable that we attempt a neat synthesis of the kind because, in endeavoring to make elements complement or absorb into one another, we necessarily gloss over integral frictions. 117 117

Within his writing, Wilde thematically links ability to synthesize complex symbols and associations within his textual environments with self-actualization, but the provisionality of the answer reached is more important than the fact of having come to a conclusion. Wilde’s Criticism, while it does not deny the existence of God, encourages subjective critical engagement with religious and secular matters, conceiving of a spiritual aestheticism higher than ethics and religion, though intersecting with both. In his dialectical construction of his fairy tales and other writing, which prompts Criticism of the kind he describes in his critical work through allusion to Catholic symbol and theology, Wilde affords a solution to the problem of aesthetic education that various aesthetes and those with aesthetic pretensions attempted to address through the House Beautiful. Repositioning synthesis within the subjective, he is not only able to engender that “serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be unattainable,” but also to connect the dialectician to the noble scholarly traditions of Catholicism and Greek civilization (Complete Works 1057). In his writing, most vividly in his fairy tales, Wilde is able to unite his two loves, transfusing his dialectic with the rich symbolic traditions of Catholicism in such a manner that whereas “the principles of [life], as laid down by the Greeks, we [might] not realize in an age so marred by false ideals as our own,” we can at least approximate a New Hellenism, honing the critical spirit through dialectic, and thereby lending greater dignity to human life (Complete Works 1016).

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Fresno State

Non-Exclusive Distribution License (to archive your thesis/dissertation electronically via the library’s eCollections database)

By submitting this license, you (the author or copyright holder) grant to Fresno State Digital Scholar the non-exclusive right to reproduce, translate (as defined in the next paragraph), and/or distribute your submission (including the abstract) worldwide in print and electronic format and in any medium, including but not limited to audio or video.

You agree that Fresno State may, without changing the content, translate the submission to any medium or format for the purpose of preservation.

You also agree that the submission is your original work, and that you have the right to grant the rights contained in this license. You also represent that your submission does not, to the best of your knowledge, infringe upon anyone’s copyright.

If the submission reproduces material for which you do not hold copyright and that would not be considered fair use outside the copyright law, you represent that you have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner to grant Fresno State the rights required by this license, and that such third-party material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the text or content of the submission.

If the submission is based upon work that has been sponsored or supported by an agency or organization other than Fresno State, you represent that you have fulfilled any right of review or other obligations required by such contract or agreement.

Fresno State will clearly identify your name as the author or owner of the submission and will not make any alteration, other than as allowed by this license, to your submission. By typing your name and date in the fields below, you indicate your agreement to the terms of this distribution license.

Embargo options (fill box with an X).

Make my thesis or dissertation available to eCollections immediately upon X submission.

Embargo my thesis or dissertation for a period of 2 years from date of graduation.

Embargo my thesis or dissertation for a period of 5 years from date of graduation.

Kristin Baer

Type full name as it appears on submission

May 9, 2013

Date