Authors: Declan Kiberd
In consequence, in
The Importance of Being Earnest,
each person
turns out to be his own secret opposite: Algy becomes Bunbury, Jack Earnest, as in Wilde's career the Irelander turned Englander. Whatever seems like an opposite in the play materializes as a double. For example, many critics have found in it a traditional contrast between the brilliant cynicism of the town-dwellers and the tedious rectitude of the rural people; but that is not how things work out. Characters like Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism are revealed to have contained the seeds of corruption and knowingness all along, while Cecily has her most interesting (i.e., evil) inspirations in a garden (rather reminiscent of her biblical predecessor). So every dichotomy dichotomizes. Wilde's is an art of inversion and this applies to gender stereotypes above all: so the women in the play read heavy works of German philosophy and attend university courses, while the men lounge elegantly on sofas and eat dainty cucumber sandwiches.
Far from the men engaging in the traditional discussion of the finer points of the female form, it is the women who discuss the physical appeal of the men: when Algernon proposes to Cecily, it is
she
who runs her fingers through his hair and asks sternly: "I hope your hair curls naturally, does it?"
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(The answer is "Yes, darling, with a little help from others".) When Algy rushes out, Cecily's instant response is: "What an impetuous boy he is! I like his hair so much". The last word on these inversions of gender roles is spoken by Gwendolen, when she praises her own father for conceding that a man's place is in the home and that public affairs may be safely entrusted to women:
Outside the family circle, papa, I am glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.
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It would be possible to see this cult of inversion as Wilde's private little joke about his own
homosexuality, but it is much more than that: at the root of these devices is his profound scorn for the extreme Victorian division between male and female, which he saw as an unhealthy attempt to foster an excessive sense of difference between the sexes. A recent historian of clothing has remarked that if a Martian had visited Victorian England and seen the domes worn there, that Martian might have been forgiven for thinking that men and women belonged to different species.
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In the history of men's fashions over the previous four centuries, it was only in the Victorian age that men
presented themselves with no trace of the "feminine". The Elizabethan gallant had been admired for his shapely legs, starched ruff and earrings; the Restoration rake for his ribbons, muff and scent; the Romantics for their nipped-in waists, exotic perfumes and hourglass shapes. Such details indicate that the
androgyny of the male and female had never been fully suppressed.
Wilde always liked to create manly women and womanly men, as a challenge to the stratified thinking of his day. He had seen in his mother a woman who could edit journals and organize political campaigns in an age when women had no right to vote; and it was from her that he inherited his lifelong commitment to
feminism. "Why should there be one law for men, and another for women?" asks Jack of Miss Prism near the end of
Earnest.
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if the double standard is right for men, then it is right also for women; and if it is wrong for women, then it is wrong also for men. Wilde demonstrates that the gender-antitheses of the age were almost meaningless: in the play, it is the women who are businesslike in making shrewd calculations about the attractions of a proposed marriage, while it is the men who are sentimental, breathless and impractical.
By rejecting such antithetical thinking, Wilde was also repudiating the philosophy of determinism, that bleak late-nineteenth-century belief that lives are pre-ordained by the circumstances of birth, background and upbringing, a conviction shared by a surprising range of the age's thinkers.
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The extreme sects of Protestantism had long believed in the notion of the elect and the damned, but radical critics such as Marx and Freud evolved secular versions of the theory, viewing the person as primarily the effect of childhood training and social conditioning. For these figures, environmental factors often overwhelmed the initiatives of the individual, a view summed up in the Marxian claim that consciousness did not determine social being but that social being determined consciousness. To Wilde, who believed in the radical autonomy of the self, this was hateful stuff. He saw the self as an artwork, to be made and remade: for him, it was society that was the dreary imposition. "The real life is the life we do not lead",
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i.e., the one lived in pure imagination and in acts of playful dissent which deliver us from the earnestness of duty and destiny.
The Importance of Being Earnest
challenges ideas of manifest destiny by the strategy of depicting characters reduced to automatons by their blind faith in the pre-ordained. Gwendolen idiotically accepts Jack in the mistaken belief that he is Earnest: "The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Earnest, I knew I was
destined to love you".
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The whole plot machinery creaks with an intentional over-obviousness: Jack, for instance, says that the two girls will only call one another sister after they have called each other many worse things as well, and this is exactly what happens. The women, perhaps because they seem to have been more exposed to Victorian education than the men, show a touching faith in determinism: ever since Cecily heard of her wicked uncle, she talked of nothing else. Her faith, however, takes on a radical form, as she finds in it the courage to reject the tedious, all-female regime of Miss Prism and to bring her
animus
to full consciousness in the ideal Earnest with whom she conducts a wholly imaginary affair before Algy's actual arrival. In doing this, she was already rejecting the notion of an antithesis between herself and others, because she had already recognized the existence of that antithesis in herself. Just before meeting her wicked uncle, she denies the idea of a black-and-white world: "I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am afraid he will look just like everyone else".
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Wilde insists that men and women know themselves in all their aspects and that they cease to repress in themselves whatever they find unflattering or painful. In abandoning this practice, people would also end the determinist tyranny which led them to impute all despised qualities to subject peoples. Anglo-Saxonist theory, as we have seen, insisted that the Irish were gushing and dirty by inexorable inheritance, and as unable to change any of that as they were unable to alter the colour of their eyes.
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But Wilde showed otherwise.
The Wildean moment is that at which all polar oppositions are transcended. "One of the facts of physiology", he told the actress
Marie Prescott, "is the desire of any very intensified emotion to be relieved by some emotion that is its opposite".
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The trivial comedy turns out, upon inspection, to have a serious point; the audience itself is acting each night and must be congratulated or castigated for its performance; and the world will be an imitation of the play's Utopia, rather than the play imitating an existing reality. That Utopia is a place built out of those moments when all hierarchies are reversed as a prelude to revolution: so the butler begins the play with subversive witticisms which excel those of his master, and the master thereafter goes in search of his half-suppressed
double.
The psychologist
Otto Rank has argued that the Double, being a handy device for the off-loading of all that embarrasses, may epitomize one's noble soul or one's base guilts, or indeed both at the same rime.
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Which is to say that the Double is a close relation of the Englishman's
Celtic Other. Many characters in literature have sought to murder their double in order to do away with guilt (as England had tried to annihilate
Irish culture), but have then found that it is not so easily repressed, since it may also contain man's Utopian self (those redemptive qualities found by Arnold in Ireland). Bunbury is Algy's double, embodying in a single fiction all that is most creative and most corrupt in his creator. Bunbury is the shadow which symbolizes Algy's need for immortality, for an influential soul that survives death; and, at the same time, Bunbury is that ignoble being to whom the irresponsible Algy transfers all responsibility for his more questionable deeds. The service which the Irish performed for the English, Bunbury discharges for his creator: he epitomizes his master's need for a human likeness on the planet and, simultaneously, his desire to retain his own difference. Hence the play is one long debate about whether or not to do away with Bunbury. Lady Bracknell's complaints sound suspiciously like English claims that the Irish kept on changing their question:
I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid.
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Erich Stern has written that "in order to escape the fear of death, the person resorts to suicide which, however, he carries out on his double because he loves and esteems his ego so much".
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Virtually all analysts agree that the double is the creation of a pathologically self-absorbed type, usually male, often chauvinistic, sometimes imperialist: only by this device of splitting can such a one live with himself. Rank actually contended that the double arose from a morbid self-love which prevented the development of a balanced personality.
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If this is so, however, men killing or annihilating the double is no final solution, for his life and welfare are as closely linked to that of his author as are the Irish to the English, women to men, and so on. No sooner is the double denied than it becomes man's fate. Like the "Celtic feminine" in a culture of imperial
machismo,
it comes back to haunt its begetters, enacting what Wilde called the tyranny of the weak over the strong, the only kind of tyranny which lasts. So, in the play, whenever he is most stridently denied, the double always turns out to be closest at hand. When Jack says "My brother is in the drawing room. I don't know what it all means. I think it is perfectly absurd", Algy asks, perhaps on behalf of all uninvited Irish guests:
Why on earth don't you go up and change? It is perfectly childish to be in deep mourning for a man who is actually staying for a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
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The denied double thus ends up setting the agenda of its creator, who, being unaware of it, becomes its unconscious slave. The women in the play set the agenda for men, Bunbury for Algy, butlers for masters, and so on, even as the Irish
Parnellites were setting the agenda for England, repeatedly paralyzing politics at Westminster.
Writers throughout history have found their version of the double in art, that diabolical enterprise which paradoxically guarantees immortality; and this is the one employment of the double which may not be a form of neurosis, since it is presented "in an acceptable form, justifying the survival of the irrational in our over-rational civilization".
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But other uses are pathological and doomed, since the double is devised to, cope with the fear of death but reappears as its very portent. That fear gives rise to an exaggerated attitude to one's own ego, leading to an inability to love and a wild longing to be loved. These, sure enough, are attributes of Algy and Jack before the women break up their self-enclosed rituals (and, it might be added, attributes of British policy in Ireland before independence).
There could hardly be a more convincing psychological explanation of the strange oscillation between conciliation and coercion in imperial policy towards Ireland than Rank's report on the tactics employed in the making of the double. The notion of the "innocent" and "spontaneous" Irish may have been an emotional convenience to those Victorians who were increasingly unable to find satisfaction for feelings of guilt in universally-accepted religious forms. The myth of an unspoilt peasantry, in
Cumberland or Connemara, was, after all, a convenient means of emotional absolution from guilt in a society for which natural instinct was often tantamount to a vice. The sequence of coercion following upon conciliation could be explained in terms of outrage with the symbol when it failed to live up to these high expectations.
If this is so, then the play becomes (among other things, of course) a parable of Anglo-Irish relations and a pointer to their resolution. This should not seem surprising. Wilde, in London, offering witty critiques of imperial culture, was one of the first in a long line of native intellectuals who were equipped by an analytic education to pen the most thorough repudiation of their masters. The violent denunciation of Europe produced by Frantz Fanon would be written to a Hegelian method in the elegant style of a Sartre. In a somewhat similar fashion,
the English didn't just create their own colonialism in Ireland; they also informed most hostile interpretations of it.
The Irish, by way of resistance, could go in either of two ways; and Wilde, being Wilde, went in both. On one side, he duplicated many of the attributes of the colonizer, becoming a sort of urbane, epigrammatic Englishman (just as militant nationalists, going even further, emulated the muscular imperial ethic with their own Gaelic games, Cuchulanoid models and local versions of the public schools). On another more subversive level, he pointed to a subterranean, radical tradition of English culture, which might form a useful alliance with Irish nationalism and thus remain true to its own deepest imperatives. Sensing that England might be the last, most completely occupied, of the British colonies, Wilde offered in saving Ireland to save the masters from themselves. For the Irish, of course, knew more than their island neighbours: their problem was that of a quick-witted people being governed by a dull one. As
Hegel had observed, the losers of history, in learning what it is to lose, learn also what it must be like to win: they have no choice but to know their masters even better than the masters know themselves. To them, the masters (though tyrants) remain always human, but to the masters the subjects are not human, not persons, not really there at all. Hope therefore comes from the initiatives launched by the slaves.
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