Shakespeare and the Medieval World

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devout republicanism and his explicit criticisms of racist imperial policies.4 Such reassessment promises to elucidate Wilde's most neglected work: his fairy tales,.
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Suffer the little children: Anglo-Irish revivalism in the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde BRANDON JERNIGAN

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.1 If in the last century [Britain] tried to rule Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race-hatred and religious prejudice, she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions.2 Only in the last decade has Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde been closely re-evaluated in the wake of post-colonial Irish studies. Responding to earlier critics like Robert Sherard, who claimed that ‘although Oscar Wilde never denied his nationality, he took particular care not to let it transpire’,3 recent studies have stressed Wilde’s engagement with Irish politics, including his open support of Parnell, his devout republicanism and his explicit criticisms of racist imperial policies.4 Such reassessment promises to elucidate Wilde’s most neglected work: his fairy tales, collected in The happy prince and other tales (1888) and A house of pomegranates (1891).5 1 O. Wilde, ‘Phrases and philosophies for the use of the young’ in O. Wilde, The major works (New York, 1989), p. 572. 2 O. Wilde, ‘Mr Froude’s blue book’, Pall Mall Gazette, 13 Apr. 1889. A review of J.A. Froude’s anti-Irish novel, The two chiefs of Dunboy. 3 D. Coakley, Oscar Wilde: the importance of being Irish (Dublin, 1994), p. 2. 4 Ibid.; D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the literature of a modern nation (London, 1995); J. Killeen, The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde (Burlington, 2007); J. McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman (New Haven, CT, 1998); R. Pine, The thief of reason: Oscar Wilde and modern Ireland (New York, 1995); V. Mahaffey, States of desire:Wilde,Yeats, Joyce and the Irish experiment (New York, 1998); N. Sammells, ‘Rediscovering the Irish Wilde’ in C. George Sandulescu (ed.), Rediscovering Oscar Wilde (Gerrards Cross, 1994); N. Sammells, ‘The line is immaterial: Oscar Wilde and some trends in contemporary Irish studies’, Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 10:1 (1999), 1–11 . See also special issue Irish Studies Review (summer 1995). For a survey of Irish Wilde studies, see M. Ní Fhlathúin, ‘The Irish Oscar Wilde: appropriations of the artist’, Irish Studies Review, 7:3 (1999), 337–46. 5 On Wilde’s tales and Paterian aesthetics, see N. Wood, ‘Creating the sensual child: Paterian aesthetics, pederasty and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales’, Marvels & Tales, 16:2 (2002), 156– 70; C. Nassaar, ‘Wilde’s The happy prince and other tales and A house of pomegranates’, Explicator, 60:3 (2002), 142–5. On the tales as positive representations of gay desire, see J.-C. Duffy, ‘Gay-related themes in the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 29:2 (2001), 327–49. See also R.K. Martin, ‘Oscar Wilde and the fairy tale: “The happy prince” as self-dramatization’, Studies in Short Fiction, 16:1 (1979), 74–7. On the tales’ religious and folkloric context, see J. Killeen, Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, folklore and Ireland (New York, 2005). On Wilde’s tales and the fairy tale form, see M. Kotzin, ‘“The selfish giant” as

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In light of the Irishman’s interest in immediate social concerns, this essay explores his fairy tales as a revivalist mode of writing Ireland rather than situating them, as the few critics of Wilde’s stories have proposed, in the context of British class struggle or a more universal ethics. His ‘tales for children’, I argue, embody an alternative form of revivalism that tackles the challenges of articulating an ethical role for the Anglo-Irish in an Irish nationalist project. On one hand, Wilde shares with fellow Irish artists the strategic reversal of colonial discourse, trans-valuing perceived Hibernian stereotypes (as childlike, as imaginative and so on) into desirable alternatives to the market-driven, rationalizing British colonizers. On the other hand, from within this revivalist practice, Wilde reveals the unrealizable longing, on the part of nationalists, for an authentic identity uncorrupted by colonial trauma. In fact, the figure of the child – as both the protagonist of the fairy tale and the imagined audience – allows Wilde to construct critical narrative analogues for the Irish revival. Both the colonized and the child are human subjects whose status as ‘being owned’ must be extensively rationalized. Faced with such ownership, the fairy tale (as a genre) and the Irish revival (as a form of cultural nationalism) respond in similar ways. The fairy tale legitimates the child as an autonomous subject, and yet, with its pedagogical function, it also represents the child as threatened and vulnerable. This dual function, Wilde’s tales imply, serves as an analogy for the cultural politics of the Anglo-Irish revivalists, who recognize the native Irish as complex subjects and yet construct authentic Irish identity as pristine, pre-colonial and endangered by modernity. According to such logic, the Irish deserve independence because of their unspoiled moral superiority. In fact, as Declan Kiberd points out, such a response risks repeating colonial logic, which justifies rational imperial rule by representing the Irish as immature children.6 Wilde confronts this dilemma in his tales for children. Rather than reading his stories as an exercise in occasional conservative moralism – as some have argued7 – I hope to situate them within Wilde’s self-reflexive rewriting of aesthetic conventions. This critical aesthetic, in fact, drives Wilde’s alternative revivalism, which participates in the revivalist project even as it voices the emerging challenges of Irish nationalism. Ultimately, his stories attempt to imagine a constructive space for Anglo-Irish participation in Irish nationalism while resisting the colonial logic (whether British or revivalist) that insisted on an essential Irishness. Rather than imagining an authentic Irish unity, his fairy tales emphasize the contingency of identity. Irishness, for Wilde, takes the form of dispossession, mutual recognition and shared becoming.

literary fairy tale’, Studies in Short Fiction, 16:4 (1979), 301–9; J. Zipes, Fairy tales and the art of subversion (New York, 1988), pp 111–21. 6 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, pp 101–14. On the infantile Irish stereotype, see M. de Nie, The eternal paddy (Madison, WI, 2004), pp 222–3, 260. For the Victorian trope of childhood, see L. Berry, The child, the state and the Victorian novel (Charlottesville, VA, 1999). 7 In the first and only full-length account of Wilde’s fairy tales, Killeen argues that the tales oscillate between ‘both conservative and subversive energies’: see Killeen, The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, p. 1.

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Unless you understand that Oscar is an Irishman through and through, you will never get an idea of what his real nature is. In many ways he is as simple and innocent as a child.8 Of all Wilde’s fairy tales, ‘The happy prince’ has the most peculiar beginning. Though the tale centres on the relationship between a swallow and the statue of the happy prince, it begins with a rather absurd scene between the swallow and a reed – a scene that appears to have no connection whatsoever to the ensuing tale. Before the swallow decides to migrate for the winter, he falls in (and out) of love with a reed, whom he has courted all summer. The swallow, fidgety with wanderlust, grows dissatisfied with the reed’s domesticity. He asks her to travel with him, but ‘the reed shook her head, she was so attached to her home’.9 In the fairy tale’s anthropomorphic allegory, neither of the two lovers actually possesses a choice. The reeds are ‘rooted’ while the swallows must migrate. Moreover, other swallows disapprove of their relationship: ‘“It is a ridiculous attachment”, twittered the other swallows; “she has no money, and far too many relations”; and indeed the river was quite full of reeds’.10 Of course, neither the reed nor the swallow has any use for money, but the pair stage a particularly Irish predicament when the patriarchal business of marriage impedes their romance.11 Though inherently cosmopolitan, the swallow migrates because the reed’s family, rooted in their overcrowded marshy ground, is too large to offer any significant dowry. This minor introductory scene serves as an opening programme for the rest of Wilde’s tale and subsequent stories. In part, it allows the selfish swallow to redeem himself by repudiating his wanderlust and devoting himself to the Christ-like prince. But, more importantly, ‘The happy prince’ begins by thwarting conventional expectations of a fairy tale. Not only does the initial scene foreshadow an ongoing resistance in Wilde’s tales to heterosexual marriage, the telos of many fairy tales, but it immediately allows particularly Irish socio-economic demands – especially economic necessities revolving around land – to infiltrate the marvellous world of fantasy. This mutual imbrication of fantasy and social reality manifests most vividly in the tales’ various settings. Literary fairy tales are most often set in a vague, magical and distant past in an equally remote land. Dislodged from the contingencies of the here-and-now, this imagined time and place allows tales to avoid the laws that govern everyday life. Wilde’s stories regularly depict such vague landscapes, but they are also filled with images of marshes and wattle-dwellings. In ‘The star-child’, woodcutters wander through a cold marshland; in ‘The happy prince’, sparrows migrate from a 8 Lord Alfred Douglas, quoted in Pine, The thief of reason, p. 109. 9 O. Wilde, ‘The happy prince’ in O. Wilde, The complete works of Oscar Wilde (London, 2003), p. 271. 10 Ibid. 11 See R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (New York, 1989), pp 340–1, 371; C. Breathnach, ‘The role of women in the economy of the west of Ireland, 1891 –1923’, New Hibernia Review, 8:1 (2004), 80–92; D. Fitzgerald, ‘The modernisation of the Irish female’ in P. O’Flanagan, P. Ferguson and K. Whelan (eds), Rural Ireland, 1600–1900: modernisation and change (Cork, 1987), pp 162–80.

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land full of reeds; in ‘The young king’, lepers are said to live in houses built of wattles; and in ‘The fisherman and his soul’, the fisherman constructs a coastal home also of wattles. With landscapes poised between the commonplace and the fantastic, the tales present rich depictions of exotic lands while constantly returning to bleak marsh landscapes strikingly familiar to an Irish or English audience. Moreover, although the marshland settings may recall the moors of England as well as the bogs of Ireland, Wilde’s references to wattle dwellings suggest, as in Yeats’ ‘The lake isle of Innisfree’, prehistoric crannogs, the mythic home of the Fianna. Thus, Wilde’s stories inhabit a space between the supposed universality of fairy tales and the specific rooted context of Irish culture. By situating his tales in a vaguely Irish setting, Wilde participates, to some extent, in a quite recognizable mode of revivalist writing. The fairy tale and folk tale enjoyed widespread popularity at the end of nineteenth century, especially in Ireland, where cultural nationalists, including Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats, collected, translated and published traditional Irish tales. They were, of course, following the example of Wilde’s mother, Speranza, who had helped popularize traditional folklore from the west of Ireland in collections such as Ancient legends, mystic charms and superstitions of Ireland (1887), which Yeats hailed as ‘the fullest and most beautiful gathering of Irish folk-lore in existence’.12 Of course, for the cultural revival, the west became emblematic of authentic Gaelic identity. In John Synge’s The Aran Islands and Thomas Alfred Jones’ Irish Colleen paintings, the rural landscape itself stands in literal opposition to Englishness, recalling instead traditional ways of Irish life.13 Likewise, Wilde’s fairy tales, insomuch as they offer both an idyllic promise of an escape and remain rooted in their Irish locality, seem to construct, much like Synge’s idealized countryside, a romantic conception of the Irish landscape as a locus for an authentic cultural identity. Moreover, the dreamlike temporality of Wilde’s tales, set in a conventionally distant but vague past, seems ubiquitous in the work of Anglo-Irish revivalists, who, like the young Yeats, found an imaginary escape to mythic Celtic lands, such as Tír na nÓg, the distant island of the ever-young.14 Nevertheless, Wilde’s settings also tap into another generic possibility. Their otherworldly atmosphere, in which immediate social concerns impede on a mythic temporality and native Irish landscapes intermix with exotic locales, produces a sense of displacement or estrangement from the present that cannot simply be read as a conventional escape into innocent timelessness.15 In the context of colonialism, Wilde’s ambiguous landscapes seem both 12 W.B. Yeats, ‘Tales from the twilight (review of Lady Wilde’s Ancient cures)’, Scots Observer, 1 Mar. 1890. Reprinted in J.P. Frayne and M. Marchaterre (eds), The collected works of W.B. Yeats, volume ix: early articles and reviews (New York, 2004), p. 114. 13 See E.F. Martin, ‘Painting the Irish west: nationalism and the representation of women’, New Hibernia Review, 7:1 (2003), 31–44; P.J. Duffy, ‘Writing Ireland: literature and art in the representation of Irish place’ in B. Graham (ed.), In search of Ireland: a cultural geography (New York, 1999), pp 64– 83. 14 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 103. 15 D. Haase, ‘Children, war and the imaginative space of fairy tales’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 24:3 (2000), 360–77, esp. 362–3. Haase argues that the conventional ambiguity of fairy tale settings offers a potential strategy for registering

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familiarly Irish and still alien. Through the fairy tale form, Wilde captures the hybrid formation of the colonial setting, in which the colonized become estranged from their own environment, including their language, culture, history and property. Not only does Wilde puncture his fanciful settings with the historical sediment of colonial Ireland, but he constantly resists positing an original Gaelic authenticity. As in the opening scene of ‘The happy prince’, ‘The selfish giant’ centres on a struggle over land ownership. In Wilde’s most popular tale in Ireland and abroad, a land-owning giant returns from Cornwall to find poor children playing in his garden and forces them out. He builds high walls around the garden and justifies their construction with a tautology of ownership, ‘my own garden is my own garden’, and a legalistic display: a sign reading ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’.16 As a result, the children spend their afternoons trying to play on the dusty road outside the garden, while still reminiscing about their past pleasure. Inside the walls, however, the giant’s garden becomes submerged in perpetual winter. When the children sneak back into the garden, spring returns with them and, witnessing their happiness, the giant’s heart melts and he welcomes them in. The children, however, quickly flee at the sight of the giant – except for one small boy, who sits crying because he cannot climb one of the garden’s trees. The giant lifts the boy into the tree and the children, realizing the giant is no longer a threat, return to the garden. The story moves forward to the day of the giant’s death, when the young boy he once helped (Christ in disguise) returns to escort him into heaven. Although, like ‘The happy prince’, ‘The selfish giant’ re-enacts the Christian felix culpa, humanity’s expulsion from Eden and its subsequent redemption through Christ, the tale also stages a particularly Irish and revivalist allegory. As both Owen Dudley Edwards and Jarlath Killeen suggest, the struggle over land – against a paternalistic absentee landlord, who spends most of his time in England – evokes one of the most immediate land struggles of the late nineteenth century, the chief concern and justification of Irish nationalist branches like the Land League.17 Without the children, the giant’s garden remains barren; just as Fanny Parnell urged tenants, the children literally ‘hold the harvest’. Of course, the exiled children do not explicitly engage in any form of political protest or social unrest; instead, as in many traditional fairy tales, social actions infiltrate in ways that appear natural and automatic. Symbolically, this organic withholding, which renders the landscape untenable as a result of the giant’s expulsion of the children, relies on a geopolitical and cultural notion of a collectively prosperous, pre-modern and pre-colonial Ireland left sterile by colonial exploitation – a sentiment shared, for example, by Young Irelanders and echoed by Wilde himself in his 1882 lecture, ‘The Saxon took our lands from us and left them desolate’.18 the violent displacement and alienation of war. 16 O. Wilde, ‘The selfish giant’ in The happy prince and other tales (1888), p. 283. 17 Killeen, Fairy tales, pp 65–74. 18 O. Wilde, ‘The Irish poets of ’48’ in H. Montgomery Hyde (ed.), The annotated Oscar Wilde (London, 1982), p. 378.

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We should note that the children are banished, not to the schoolyard or other gardens, but to the dusty road. The figure of the nomadic vagrant in the Irish revival – in the work of Synge, for example – often functions as a symbol for the authentic yet dispossessed Irishman. The romantic tramp, in Synge’s In the shadow of the glen, avoids the fraught and sedentary domesticity of Michael Dara’s home by choosing a life on the road, a free-spirited existence intimately connected to the Irish landscape. Moreover, not only does the figure of the tramp recall the eighteenth-century spailpín poets evicted and forced out onto the roads, as Kiberd suggests, but trampdom, having no place to go or call home, also becomes a sign of authenticity, where home itself has been expropriated by the colonizer.19 However, as little exiled tramps, the children in ‘The selfish giant’ function quite differently from Synge’s Irish vagrants. Most notably, they do not enjoy their life on the road like the romantic tramp. The children find ‘the road . . . very dusty and full of hard stones’ and eventually they sneak back into the garden.20 Tramps, like children or fairies, cannot be bothered by the intricacies of bourgeois law. Through his window, the giant hears ‘lovely music . . . so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the king’s musicians passing by’.21 When the free-spirited children, embodying the liberatory Irishness of the drifter, return to the desolate garden, they revitalize it with verdant life and birdsong. Wilde, however, explicitly avoids romanticizing the displaced status of the children.22 Their trampdom, the tale suggests, need not necessarily become the marker of their identity. Instead, it is a stage of exile followed by a return to a collective utopia. Not only is it a return, but it is also a reconciliation and cohabitation with the former oppressor. The children’s power lies in their collective ability, as R.F. Foster describes the initial force of the Land League, to suggest alternative moral codes that question and resist English law and its ineffective expediency.23 Irish nationalist rhetoric, in fact, frequently refashioned the stereotype of the Irish as children into a critique of the British. Drawing on the romantic conception of the child, the Irish could transvalue this discourse by representing themselves as the moral superiors of the market-driven British. Rather than an instructive tale, in which the adult world socializes its future replacements, Wilde offers children who speak back to the values of the imperial capitalist system. Elsewhere in his fairy tales, however, Wilde moves beyond the binary form of reconciliation that we witness in ‘The selfish giant’ between the native dispossessed and a foreign oppressor. On one hand, as Jerusha McCormack argues, Wilde identified with the Celt as an embodiment of ‘all that was alien and rejected by the English; 19 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 538. 20 Wilde, ‘The selfish giant’, p. 283. 21 Ibid., p. 284. 22 Patrick Pearse would later draw on Wilde’s story in ‘Íosagán’ (1906), which stages a similar act of redemption between faithless Old Matthias and a young Christ in the guise of Íosagán, who appears ‘without shoes or cap, as is the custom with the children of the West’. When Matthias asks Íosagán where he has been for so many years, Íosagán replies, ‘I was here always. I do be travelling the roads, and walking the hills’. In contrast to Wilde’s tale, the simple boy’s wanderings highlight his genuine spiritual connection to the landscape and, as a result, the nation of Ireland. 23 Foster, Modern Ireland, pp 405–15.

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in turn the Celt rejected what Wilde called the “inherited stupidity” of the masterrace: its common sense, its philistinism, its Puritanism’.24 At the same time, however, Wilde was ‘born into a class known as the Anglo-Irish, at once the pillar of a rotting imperial regime in Dublin and more Irish than the Irish themselves’; ‘as an Irishman, of the Anglo-Irish class’, he continues, ‘Wilde could recall 700 years of being an outsider who was also the insider; he was, if you wish, the enemy from within’.25 Like many other literary revivalists who belonged to the ascendancy, Wilde faced complicity in colonial rule despite his professed nationalism. It is this salient revivalist predicament that Wilde negotiates most complexly in ‘The star-child’. Included in The house of pomegranates (1891), ‘The star-child’ departs from Wilde’s previous fairy tales, published four years earlier in The happy prince and other stories. Many critics, including Rodney Shewan and David Monaghan, have found the story to be – in both its moral and form – a highly conventional fairy tale. Shewan, in particular, dismisses it as the ‘least original’ tale in Wilde’s collection because of its ‘simple and familiar redemptive pattern’, overt biblical style and unambiguous Christian morality.26 In the context of the Irish revival, however, this self-indicting story of redemption, which critics have discounted as ideologically conservative, holds particular currency. ‘The star-child’, I argue, attempts a complex negotiation between the master position, represented by the giant or miller and the precarious status and potential victimhood of the fairy tale’s child protagonists. The fairy tale form itself legitimates children as fully capable subjects, even as the genre places them in vulnerable positions.The children offer the focal point for the audience, whether they be children or adults, and in their vulnerable subjectivity, they may become the fully legitimated subject, the source of redemption for the incognizant status quo, as they are in ‘The selfish giant’, or they may become the pathetic sacrificial victim of the moral lesson, as the unfortunate Hans in ‘The devoted friend’. In either case, Wilde sets childhood in opposition to the dominating imperatives of the adult social world. In his tales, children are not empty subjects awaiting socialization but active sources of imaginative, empathetic energy who expose the contradictions behind the self-righteous world of adults. Of course, this romantic desire for an authentic, unfixed identity also operated within the Irish revival, in which the Anglo-Irish bourgeoisie looked to the culture of pre-Christian Ireland in an attempt to include themselves in an authentic, pre-sectarian Irish identity. As we have seen thus far, these desires work alongside one another in Wilde’s tales; children, anchored in a semi-Irish landscape, often stand in as figures of the imaginative Celt. Engaging the familial discourse of imperialism, Wilde juxtaposes these vibrant ‘native’ children with rationalizing figures of masculine authority, such as the oppressive giant or miller. On one hand, following revivalists’ nostalgic impulse for authenticity, this notion 24 J. McCormack, ‘Introduction: the Irish Wilde’ in J. McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman (New Haven, CT, 1998), p. 2. 25 Ibid., pp 1, 155. 26 R. Shewan, Oscar Wilde: art and egotism (London, 1977), pp 67–8.

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of childhood represents a phase analogous to pre-Christian Ireland. On the other hand, Wilde’s sharp awareness of hypocrisy would hardly be oblivious to the naïve political fantasy of the Protestant ascendancy, who could so easily overlook Ireland’s colonial history and their own participation in its domination. The critical reflexivity of Wilde’s ‘tales for children’ can easily include the ruling classes of Ireland – the Anglo-Irish ascendancy or Catholic bourgeoisie – in their wider critique of the colonial project. Nevertheless, the Anglo-Irish position remains distinct from the uncomplicated master position that the selfish giant, for example, occupies. Ireland, of course, demonstrates the inevitable complications that undercut the colonial dichotomy between colonizer and colonized. ‘The star-child’, in fact, specifically addresses what Joseph Valente deems the Anglo-Irish ‘metrocolonial immixture’, in which ‘affinity with the metropolitan (Anglo) center was assumed and even assured, but was at the same time shadowed (both troubled and exaggerated) by [a] continued connection with the colonial (Celtic) fringe’.27 Such immixture, of course, characterizes Wilde’s own Anglo-Irish family, including his mother who, as McCormack writes, ‘insisted on living as a hybrid’, enjoying her elite social status while advocating violent rebellion against the British.28 In ‘The star-child’, Wilde tackles this uneasy, hyphenated identity and its anxious implication in the colonial history of Ireland. ‘The star-child’, Jack Zipes argues, presents a complex notion of beauty partly in response to those traditional fairy tales, like Anderson’s ‘The ugly duckling’, which so problematically conflate inner and outer beauty. Like most critics of Wilde’s stories, however, Zipes is content to read the tale in the context of Christian morality and Victorian (read: British) class struggle.29 Yet the story begins in a very Irish setting: poor labourers collect marsh wood while praying to St Martin and hoping to find gold where a star falls. Moreover, when they find a child instead, one woodcutter immediately responds: ‘we are poor men, and have children of our own whose bread we may not give to another’.30 Certainly this reference holds currency in any peasant setting, but in a post-famine Ireland, the concept of ‘too many mouths to feed’ in a struggling agricultural economy is particularly charged. When the woodcutter takes the child home, his wife voices her concern: ‘Alack, Goodman! . . . have we not children enough of our own, that thou must needs bring a changeling to sit by the hearth? And how knows if it will not bring us bad fortune? And how shall we tend it? . . . Our children lack bread, and shall we feed the child of another? Who is there who careth for us? And who giveth us food?’. . . [T]he man answered nothing, but stirred not from the threshold. 27 J. Valente, Dracula’s crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the question of blood (Urbana, ND, 2002), p. 18. 28 J. McCormack, ‘The Wilde Irishman: Oscar as aesthete and anarchist’ in J. McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman (New Haven, CT, 1998), p. 82. 29 Zipes, Fairy tales and the art of subversion, p. 119. 30 O. Wilde, ‘The star-child’ in The house of pomegranates (1891), p. 261.

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And a bitter wind from the forest came in through the open door, and made her tremble, and she shivered, and said to him: ‘Wilt thou not close the door? There cometh a bitter wind into the house, and I am cold’. ‘Into a house where a heart is hard cometh there not always a bitter wind?’ he asked. And the woman answered him nothing, but crept closer to the fire.31 While ‘hunger’ reverberates in the Irish context, the wife’s fear that the child is a changeling, while she backs away from the threshold towards the hearth (the centre of domestic space), signals Wilde’s own appropriation of the Irish mythology that attracted nineteenth-century revivalists. Although the child may be seen as a blessing – a ‘stolen child’ recovered from the sídhe – the wife clearly recognizes that, as an alien presence connected with the wild unknown forces of the changelings, he may jeopardize domestic stability. In fact, this struggle between the star-child’s supernatural associations and the stability of the hearth rehearses the mythical opposition between Cúchulainn, the romantic Irish hero, and Conchobor, high king of Ulster. The story of Cúchulainn, appropriated from the Ulster cycle and retold throughout the Irish revival, often centres on the threshold moment when Cúchulainn is bound in domestic space and forced to abandon the constant flux of his wild life.32 Wandering across Ireland, Cúchulainn is closely associated with the wilderness, restless elemental movements and the spirits that inhabit wild places. Conchobor, on the other hand, remains ever mindful of the political stability of his kingdom. Thus, from Cúchulainn’s boyhood deeds to his later marriage to Emer, King Conchobar must carefully manage the fierce instability of his principal champion. The star-child appears as yet another revivalist Cúchulainn figure.33 He occupies the threshold between the domestic security of the hearthstone and the danger of the outside flux. Like Cúchulainn, the star-child boasts celestial lineage. Their respective communities find them beautiful and strange, yet both offer a potential threat to the settled community. When the young Cúchulainn, unaware of the customary appeal for protection, attempts to play with the kings’ sons at Emain Macha, they turn on him (and are promptly beaten by Cúchulainn). Then, after Conchobor grants his acceptance, Cúchulainn turns back to the boy-troop and demands that they implore him for protection.34 Wilde’s stories, however, question the virulent domination of the Ulster cycle, which often equates heroism with brute mastery. The star-child 31 Ibid., p. 262. 32 For the Ulster cycle, see T. Kinsella (trans.),The Táin: from the Irish Epic táin bó cuailnge (New York, 1969). 33 See D. Kiberd, Irish classics (Cambridge, 2001), pp 399–419. Although many of the most celebrated re-workings of the mythic figure, including Yeats’ Cuchulain plays and poetry, followed Lady Gregory’s translation of the Red Branch cycle in Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), Kiberd begins with the second volume of Standish James O’Grady’s History of Ireland (1880). 34 The táin, 76–8.

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Brandon Jernigan grew proud, and cruel, and selfish. The children of the woodcutter, and the other children of the village, he despised, saying that they were of mean parentage, while he was noble, being sprung from a Star, and he made himself master over them, and called them his servants.35

The star-child begins to differentiate himself from, and even persecute, the rest of his village. The story suggests that the star-child’s eventual cruelty, based on the narcissistic sense of his own beauty and lineage, partly stems from ethnic difference: [E]very year he became more beautiful to look at, so that all those who dwelt in the village were filled with wonder, for, while they were swarthy and black haired, he was white and delicate as saw ivory, and his curls were like the rings of the daffodil.36 We might remember that Lady Wilde gave her son two names from the Fenian cycle, Oscar and Fingal, the latter from the cycle’s hero, Fionn mac Cumhaill. The mythical hunter, named Fionn because of his fair hair, is raised secretly in the forest. The star-child shares with Cúchulainn and Fionn a secret lineage: each of the young men is raised as a foster child in the wild places of Ireland with limited knowledge of or access to his past. Thus, each case simultaneously associates the young heroes with native Irishness (through the traditional practice of fosterage and the close connections to the Irish landscape) and the foreign stranger – each alien figure at some point, as the woodcutter’s wife fears, disrupts the social stability of the community. Thus, ‘The star-child’ does not, as Edwards has suggested, centre on the denial of Irish identity; it foregrounds an identity forged in displacement.37 In another moment of theodicy, the priest warns the star-child, ‘Who art thou to bring pain into God’s world?’, yet the child continues to terrorize small animals, beggars and lepers.38 When the star-child stones a beggar-woman, the woodcutter desperately asks him to consider that he was once pitied as a strange child in the forest. The woman hears the story, bursts into tears and claims that she is, in fact, the star-child’s mother. Ashamed at the possibility, the star-child tells her: If in very truth thou art my mother, . . . it had [been] better hadst thou stayed away, and not come here to bring me to shame, seeing that I thought I was the child of some star, and not a beggar’s child, as thou tellest me that I am. Therefore get thee hence, and let me see thee no more . . . thou art too foul to look at, and rather would I kiss the adder or the toad than thee.39 Rebuking his own mother, the boy returns to his companions, only to find that he is now the object of their ridicule. His skin has grown as scaly as an adder and his 35 Wilde, ‘The star-child’, pp 262–3. 36 Ibid., p. 262. 37 O.D. Edwards, ‘Impressions of an Irish sphinx’ in J. McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman (New Haven, CT, 1998), p. 67. 38 Wilde, ‘The star-child’, p. 263. 39 Ibid., p. 264.

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face as ugly as a toad. Quickly humbled, the star-child leads a quest to find his mother. Along the way, he seeks forgiveness from the creatures he tortured. The starchild himself becomes a beggar and eventually the slave of a Libyan magician. When his master orders him to recover three pieces of gold, the star-child finds them only to give them away to a leper each time. The star-child is beaten repeatedly as a result, and though the magician threatens to kill him if he fails to return the last piece of gold, he still concludes that the leper’s ‘need is greater than mine’ and gives him the gold.40 But this time, as he walks to his fate at the hands of the magician, crowds gather around him, declaring his beauty. Because of his selfless action, the star-child reverts to his former beauty and the city welcomes him as the prince whom the priests had prophesied would one day rule. He then sees his mother, the beggarwoman, who transforms into a queen, and the leper reveals himself as his father, the king. At the heart of the story, in the transformation of the star-child’s mother, Wilde rewrites the Gaelic sovereignty myth, in which a hideous old woman – the sovereignty principle embodied – sexually propositions young heroes. In their embrace or sexual union, the cailleach transforms into a beautiful young woman and legitimates the hero’s right of kingship.41 ‘The star-child’ avoids any sexual act, yet such occlusion characterizes popular revisions of cailleach beare in the Irish revival: [I]n works like Yeats’ Cathleen Ni Hoolihan, Pearse’s The singer, Maude Gonne’s Dawn and Robinson’s Patriots, . . . the fundamental revision involves changing the lusty caillaic beare into a desexualized mother figure, a mother defined, that is, in terms of incestuous desire and taboo.42 As in Patrick Pearse’s The singer, Wilde represents the old beggar-woman – veiled sovereign power – as the protagonist’s biological mother. In the undercurrent of taboo desire, which evokes both incest and the forbidden subtext of Christian gospel (the possibility of sexual desire between Magdalene and Christ), the star-child implores the sovereignty figure to accept him: [A] cry of joy broke from his lips, and he ran over, and kneeling down he kissed the wounds on his mother’s feet, and wet them with his tears. He bowed his head in the dust, and sobbing, as one whose heart might break, he said to her: ‘Mother, I denied thee in the hour of my pride. Accept me in the hour of my humility. Mother, I gave thee hatred. Do thou give me love. Mother, I rejected thee. Receive thy child now.43 The star-child performs a ritual of submission similar to Yeats’ Michael Gillane or Pearse’s MacDara. Both Yeats and Pearse substitute passive self-sacrifice for the sexual 40 Ibid., p. 269. 41 G. Ó Crulaoich, The book of the cailleach (Cork, 2003); J. Valente, ‘The myth of sovereignty: gender in the literature of Irish nationalism’, ELH, 61:1 (1994), 189– 210. 42 Valente, ‘The myth of sovereignty’, 196. 43 Wilde, ‘The star-child’, p. 270.

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consummation of the traditional sovereignty myth. By giving away the final piece of gold, the star-child realizes he will be murdered by the magician: ‘his heart was heavy, for he knew what evil fate awaited him’.44 In truth, the star-child’s assessment that the leper (whom he has already given two pieces of gold) has greater need seems groundless. Though the leper cries that he will die without the money, the star-child is also destined to die if he forfeits it. His selfless act is strictly affective.45 Yet what appears to be an act of surrender to his master’s violence is precisely the hidden key to his own ascension. Rather than the anticipated violence, the story stages a second act of substitution: the eroticized atonement of the star-child (as Magdalene) when he desperately seeks forgiveness at the feet of his mother (as Christ). The crossgendering reflects the inherent gender ambivalence in the revivalist appropriation of the sovereignty myth. As Valente argues, On one side, blood sacrifice is taken to exemplify the traditional warrior virtues of martial heroism and commitment to duty, a masculinized ascetic, of which the mythic strongman, Cuchulian, is the embodiment . . . On the other side, blood sacrifice resonated with a certain ecstasy of immanence or passivity, a self-surrender or abandon that is also a self-exceeding, an idealized and feminized jouissance.46 In ‘The star-child’, the male hero not only supplicates himself to the maternal figure of Ireland but also abandons his masculinist claims of association with Cúchulainn in favour of feminized suffering and self-immolation. Moreover, the star-child’s history attests to his own participation in the very oppression that renders him a slave and threatens his life. This complicity further complicates his status: he is a ‘stranger’, whose origins ally him with both native Irishness (Cúchulainn and the sídhe) and the alien forces of the British. For the first part of the tale, he is an intruder who sits at the same table as the woodcutter’s children (if not takes bread from their plates) and claims he is superior. In his quest for his true lineage, he repudiates this sense of superiority and thus discovers his connection to sovereign power. He unites with the Gaelic sovereign figure and becomes ‘more Irish than the Irish’ peasants that raised him. Like ‘The happy prince’ or ‘The young king’, the story centres on the epiphanic recognition of suffering. The star-child can only regain power when he no longer relies on strict instrumental logic that, in ‘The devoted friend’, the rational miller employs in order to exploit his neighbour while praising his own generous paternalism. In the star-child’s affective self-abandonment, hope re-enters with an alternative to instrumental reason. His ascension to the throne, coded as Gaelic sover44 Ibid., p. 269. 45 As Valente contends, ‘the ideology of patriotic martyrdom . . . while garishly macho in one sense, carries its own distinctively feminized associations, demanding as it does a passive self-immolation justified . . . for its affective value alone’: see Valente, ‘The myth of sovereignty’, 198. 46 Ibid.

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eignty, is not strictly the result of his lineage; it is also contingent on the realization of past wrongs, the recognition of complicity in suffering and self-sacrifice. This selfcritical redemption offers a potential solution to the hypocritical revivalist desire for Irish authenticity. Through his fair-haired protagonist, Wilde attempts to imagine a constructive way for the privileged Anglo-Irish to participate in Irish nationalism by rearticulating an inclusive and contingent Irishness within a history of difference and exploitation. Many revivalists, from Yeats to Pearse, found the folk tale a compelling symbolic act in support of national unity, whether imaginatively, culturally or linguistically. Often, cultural nationalists tapped into the fairy tale form’s receptivity to stalwart morality and traditionalism in the face of bourgeois British rule. Yet, while Wilde’s tales engage such discourse, they operate in a distinctively different mode. As a metropolitan member of the ascendancy, acutely aware of the precarious nature of ethno-national identity, Wilde must have found the fairy tale form particularly useful for his revivalist project. Jim Hansen, in his reading of The picture of Dorian Gray, has recently argued that Wilde’s work explicitly accepts and embraces the confines of conventional forms in an effort to rethink, mock and manipulate those forms. In a sense, then, Wilde’s literary conventionality acts as a commentary on social conventions, an attempt to stretch conventions to their most extreme limits yet still maintain them, an endeavour to make a space within conventionality for the unconventional.47 This formal confinement seems particularly suggestive in reading Wilde’s fairy tales, which have been read both as highly conventional and utterly radical. On one hand, literary fairy tales are an explicit appropriation of the folk tale tradition into a bourgeois form. In this sense, they perform cultural work analogous to those Anglo-Irish literati who prospered in the English literary market by drawing on Gaelic folk culture. At the same time, literary fairy tales (as opposed to their folk counterparts) often self-consciously register their own conventionality; no one would mistake Wilde’s aesthetic ‘tales for children’ as collected folklore from the west of Ireland.48 Moreover, he later described his fairy tales as an attempt ‘to treat a tragic modern problem in a form that aims at delicacy and imaginative treatment: it is a reaction against the purely imitative character of modern art’.49 Such stylization remains at the heart of Wilde’s revivalist contribution. From within the genre, Wilde unnerves bourgeois conventions with tramping children who overturn property ownership and speak back to rationalizing imperialist rule. At the same time, the beautiful tales register a conventionality that only heightens their artificiality as fiction. If the 47 J. Hansen, Terror and Irish modernism: the gothic tradition from Burke to Beckett (Albany, NY, 2009), p. 65. 48 For a discussion of ‘The selfish giant’ and the genre of the literary fairy tale, see Kotzin, ‘“The selfish giant” as literary fairy tale’. 49 Quoted in D.M. Monaghan, ‘The literary fairy tale: a study of Oscar Wilde’s “The happy prince” and “The star-child”’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 1:2 (1974), 156–66.

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romantic nationalist longing of the revival demanded authenticity, Wilde renders such desire as an exercise in fantasy. The result, however, as we see in ‘The star-child’, is not merely a collapse into aestheticism. In discussing Wilde’s own Irish identity, Neil Sammells cautions that ‘we should not attempt to scrape away the accretions of Englishness to uncover an authentic, Celtic core or essence. Wilde’s Irishness is not a compromised position, but a wilfully compromising one . . . Irishness, for Wilde, is a form of discursive play and performance’.50 In fact, such a ‘wilfully compromising’ notion of Irishness drives Wilde’s engagement with cultural nationalism in his fairy tales. If colonial discourse (employed for either British or Anglo-Irish purposes) offers civility and paternal leadership, reinforced by claims of the universal or essential, Wilde’s tales reveal that these claims are always pre-emptively and silently contingent on mutually inflected categories of difference.

50 Sammells, ‘The line is immaterial’, p. 7.