Abstract
Taking Wilde’s most famous play as its focus, this chapter argues that previous interpretations of The Importance of Being Earnest (while important) have ultimately failed to comprehend the extent of its radicalism, because they have not registered its relation to a ‘theatrical’ faction within the Anglican Church in the nineteenth century — the Ritualist movement. My analysis here is very different from that usually made about this play, and this difference is vital to grasp. The Ritualist movement originated in the Tractarian debates and the shift in High Church Anglicanism to a more coherent form of Anglo-Catholicism. Anglo-Catholic Ritualists surrounded themselves in controversy by rein-stituting the liturgical offices of the Catholic Church, including using ecclesiastical vestments again. Canon Chasuble is the clearest signal in this play that Wilde is attempting to comment on the Ritualist movement, the chasuble being a Eucharistic vestment traditional to the Catholic Church.
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Notes
This chapter will mostly use The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Russell Jackson (London: Ernest Benn, 1980), but will occasionally draw attention to lines from the Licensing Copy which now lies in the British Library. Act and Line number will appear in parentheses in the main text.
See also Russell Jackson, ‘A Classic without Danger: the National Theatre’s Importance of Being Earnest’, Critical Quarterly 25: 2 (1983), 73–80.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993), 63
Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (London: Macmillan, 1991), 171.
For a useful collection, dealing with Kingsley and others of the same ideology, see Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See Joseph Bristow, ‘Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency’, Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992), 44–63.
Also, Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).
See Craft, ‘Alias Bunbury’, passim. Also Jan B. Gordon, ‘ “The Wilde Child”: Structure and Origin in the Fin-De-Siècle Short Story’, English Literature in Transition 15: 4 (1972), 277–90.
For this, see Claudia Nelson, ‘Sex and the Single Boy: Ideals of Manliness and Sexuality in Victorian Literature for Boysn’, Victorian Studies 32: 4 (Summer 1989), 527–50.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the Industrialisation and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986).
Octavius J. Ellis, Some Time Among Ritualists (London: Hatchards, 1868), 10–11.
Quoted in G. W. Soltau, A Letter to the Working Classes on Ritualism (London, 1873).
For drag, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London-New York: Routledge, 1992).
James Laver, A Concise History of Costume and Fashion (New York: Scribners, 1969), 182.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85.
Quoted in Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: a Cultural History (New York and London: Norton, 1992), 132.
Otto Reinert, ‘Satiric Strategy in The Importance of Being Earnest’, College English 18 (October 1956), 14–18 (17).
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987), 112.
Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1992).
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© 2005 Jarlath Killeen
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Killeen, J. (2005). Art and Life: the Politics of Ritualism in The Importance of Being Earnest. In: The Faiths of Oscar Wilde. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503557_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503557_6
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