Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle by Deaglán Ó Donghaile, and: Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and "De Profundis" by David Walton (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle by Deaglán Ó Donghaile, and: Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and "De Profundis" by David Walton Sos Eltis (bio) Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle, by Deaglán Ó Donghaile; pp. x + 250. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, $110.00, $29.95 paper, $110.00 ebook. Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and "De Profundis", by David Walton; pp. x + 251. Lanham and London: Lexington Books, 2021, $111.00, $45.00 ebook. Since the 1980s Oscar Wilde has undergone a critical transformation from a superficial wit whose life merited more attention than his work to a politically engaged, provocative, and influential thinker, and two new books—Deaglán Ó Donghaile's Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle and David Walton's Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and "De Profundis"—offer valuable and notably different contributions to this ever-growing body of scholarship. Wilde's politics—like every other aspect of his writings—have long been the subject of fierce debate, and Ó Donghaile offers one of the boldest readings to date. He argues that Wilde was a committed and consistent radical progressive, recognized as such by a range of contemporary anarchist and socialist thinkers and activists. Tracing Wilde's critique of capitalism and colonialism from his earliest book reviews through to his final letters from prison, this study brings fresh information and perspectives to bear. Ó Donghaile has a deep and detailed grasp on the Irish context and uses it with great effect in his analysis of Wilde's early play Vera; or, The Nihilists (1883). The play, he argues, was a thinly veiled depiction of British state coercion in Ireland with its engineered mass deaths, imposition of martial law, and suppression of the peasantry, which should be read as a reflection of the Irish Famine of the 1840s and 50s and Land War of the 1880s rather than the depiction of Czarist Russia it purports to be. Detailed and illuminating, Ó Donghaile's interpretation is, however, partial, steering around the play's hesitancies and ambiguities. If the Nihilists are to be read as Fenians, what does their ready embrace of the cynical political operator Prince Paul signify? And [End Page 339] what does it imply when their revolutionary violence exacerbates the Czar's paranoia and leads to further oppression? Consistently informative and often provocative, this study is, however, tactically selective, eliding the elements of Wilde's writings that challenge or complicate its vision of the writer as a committed collectivist anarchist. A chapter on Wilde's fairy tales as a fierce condemnation of imperialist consumption—the environmental damage, colonial exploitation, and cruelty that underpin modern capitalism—centers on attentive close readings of "The Happy Prince" (1888), "The Selfish Giant" (1888), and "The Young King" (1891). Wilde's supposedly consistent advocacy of selfless generosity is, however, considerably complicated by other tales published alongside these stories, such as "The Devoted Friend" (1888) and "The Nightingale and the Rose" (1888). In these two stories, which Ó Donghaile ignores, the naïve protagonists die pointlessly in acts of unappreciated self-sacrifice for unworthy recipients. Ó Donghaile similarly figures The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) as a critique of capitalist materialism with Dorian as the ultimate modern shopper, corrupted by his uncontrolled consumerism. The novel's extensive cataloguing of luxury goods and artifacts thus reveals the emptiness of materialism and the violence and suffering that underpin it—an interpretation that leaves unaddressed Wilde's stylistic choice of lavishly Paterian prose to conjure these art works and linger over their beauty. A detailed appreciation of "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891) outlines Wilde's rejection of market values, utilitarianism, and institutional authority as stunting forces that degrade individual and artistic expression. Uneasy with Wilde's provocative refusal to make selflessness or communal instincts grounds for socialist ideals, Ó Donghaile attempts to align what he identifies as Wilde's "Aestheticism" (with no reference to Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, William Morris, or any other advocate or theorist) with anarchist Peter Kropotkin's mutualism and his advocacy of...