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PB October/November 2023 October/November 2023 67
Gothic is in many ways the truest genre for
each of them. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
(1890) is based on ‘Melmoth’ whose assorted
narratives portray consecutive downfalls of
its doomed multi-life Faustian hero, one of
the earliest vampires
A
t the North-West corner of Merrion
Square in Dublin, you face notorious
poet Oscar Wilde’s reclining statue
and surrounding artefacts. He is
perhaps the most famous of our
artists, still the embodiment of wit 123 years after
his death. However, his mother, Jane Elgee Wilde
(1821-96), was a folklorist like her husband and
a poet like their son, and notorious in her own
ways. After her husband, Sir William, an ear
surgeon, died virtually bankrupt in 1876, she
joined her sons, Willie and Oscar, in London, in
poverty, Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’
atrophies aspects of Elgee’s artistry, using
measured stanzas of formal diction and rhyme,
in ballad form.
The mother-poet: son-poet requires their
reuniting on Merrion Square, with a statue to
both.
But the square requires a monument to another
family member also: Jane’s uncle, Charles
Maturin (1780-1824) is author of ‘Melmoth the
Wanderer’ (1820) and the principal originator of
Gothic literature, fearful and characterised by the
past haunting the present, in Ireland. Maturin
was legendary by Jane’s time, having been
recommended by Sir Walter Scott to Lord Byron.
He is mostly now out of print.
Gothic is in many ways the truest genre for each
of them. Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
(1890) is explicitly based on ‘Melmoth’, whose
assorted narratives portray consecutive
downfalls of its doomed multi-life Faustian hero,
making him one of the earliest vampires in
literature. Jane’s political ballads plumb abysmal
depths of disintegration, integration, tragedy and
triumph.
Their parallels merits a PhD study.
The most obvious point is physical. Oscar was
ungainly and gigantic. He came in at six foot
three to his mother’s six foot even. Maturin too
was tall.
And they were all big characters. Jane idolised
“everything” about Maturin: his “notoriety, his
literary talent, his sacerdotal eccentricity — he
wandered about town in dressing gown and
slippers” (O’Sullivan).
An obituary in the University Magazine
describes Maturin as “eccentric almost to
insanity and compounded of opposites – an
insatiable reader of novels; an elegant preacher;
an incessant dancer; a coxcomb in dress and
manners”. It could have been Oscar.
The Wildes too were incorrigible socialites
despite the infamous moodswings of William
who suered from manic depression and other
maladies.
Their invitations were extensive, and the
literary scene ‘came to them’: it included the
comic novelist, Charles Lever; poets Samuel
Ferguson and Aubrey de Vere; the mathematician
and astronomer, William Rowan Hamilton and the
archetypal novelist of the Famine, William
Carleton.
They were all proudly Irish. Oscar self-identified
as a “brilliant young Irishman out of Oxford”.
According to Richard Ellmann, the most brilliant
of his biographers, we can assume that “Lady
The call of
the Wildes
The logic of a sprawling Oscar Wilde on Merrion Square demands two further
statues: one of his mother, the poet Jane Elgee ‘Speranza’ Wilde and, no
less, of her uncle Charles Maturin father of Gothic literature in Ireland
By Kevin Kiely
Wilde communicated to her son both her
nationalism and her determination to embody it
in verse.”. Jane wrote, in what could constitute an
obituary: “I wore the mask of folly while I sang of
deepest woe.
But, courage! years may pass—this mortal
frame be laid in earth, But my spirit reign
triumphant in the country of my birth”. Piper and
Jeares define Maturin as ‘one of the earliest
distillers of that blend of nationalism and
romanticism which was to be so potent in the
nineteenth century”. The Anglican clergyman
Chrles Mturin: scerdotl eccentricity
CULTURE
68 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 PB
Alonzo Monçada’s story from the Melmoth by
Eugène Delcroix (oil on cnvs, 1831): Gothic
Spernz Wilde: ntionlistic nd
best seen s gothic
became very much more Irish than the
Ascendancy; in fact, he typified progressive
Protestants who turn anti-British, as instanced in
his novel ‘The Wild Irish Boy’ (1808).
Jane was an ideological militant invited by
Charles Gavan Duy to contribute to his ‘The
Nation’.
Her poems on the famine, landlordism,
evictions, and imperial oppression are significant
ballads of witness.
Oscar’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, which is
similar in form, particularly its stanzas and
rhyming, acknowledged her influence.
In the end the authorities at Dublin Castle shut
down ‘the Nation’ and brought Duy to court for
refusing to name Jane as the author of a seditious
article, Jacta Alea Est (the die is cast). She
reputedly stood up in court and claimed
responsibility for the article, though the
authorities all ignored her..
Jane’s heroes, as her letters reveal, included
Daniel O’Connell, John Mitchell, Thomas Francis
Meagher, Charles Stuart Parnell, and Michael
Davitt all of whom endured terms of imprisonment.
Ultimately Oscar himself reputedly, instead of
fleeing to Paris ‘accepted’ his prison sentence
because of Jane’s revolutionary ideals, and
indeed was inspired to write ‘De Profundis’ as a
prisoner. Maturin’s fictional hero in ‘Melmoth’
spends most of the novel in a prison , the wrong
side of the Spanish Inquisition. More definitively,
‘Melmoth’ was the surname-pseudonym,
adopted by Oscar Wilde on his release from
Reading Gaol when he left England for France,
never to return. Prisons were a family thing.
During her London exile, Jane held a famous
literary salon in a rented house on Oakley Street,
Chelsea, perhaps inspiring her son’s belles
lettres.
She was scholarly and polyglot; and translated
the poet, Alphonse de Lamartine, notably his
treasonous history of the French Revolution.
Oscar, who studied Greats at Oxford, was
fluent in English, German and French and had a
working knowledge of Italian and Greek.
Maturin, as author of ‘Melmoth,’ is credited
with pioneering Gothic literature in Ireland.
Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Honoré de
Balzac, and Christina Rosetti were ardent
devotees of his psychotic masterpiece.
Dorian Gray is often classed as an Aesthetic
novel but in fact Wilde’s later works are best
understood as Gothic. A hallmark of the genre is
that locations need not necessarily be in Ireland
at all, which is true of both of these works. Jane’s
poetry is also typically Gothic in content exploring
abysmal depths of disintegration, integration,
tragedy and triumph.
In a frenzy of assorted narratives ‘Melmoth the
Wanderer’ portrays consecutive downfalls of its
doomed Faustian hero who has many lives,
making him one of the earliest vampires in
literature. Emblematic for Jane is her poem
“Undine” (translated from Friedrich de la Motte
Fouqué) which conjures a wandering bride from
the underworld who seeks a bridegroom and in
so doing, is doomed. The bride is shadowed by
her demon lover, who will never release her. It is
not melodrama to suggest the Wildes were
accursed, or in many ways ‘doomed’.
Jane wrote a lengthy note accompanying
“Undine” where she unveils significant
outpourings about her poetic self and her
marriage. These include personal utterances
reflecting her longings for independence, full
femininity beyond Victorian repression and her
troubled relationship with William Wilde. This is
a salient feature of Jane’s non-political poetry
where “Undine” concludes with a ‘third presence’
who ‘hinders’ the union of bride and groom on
their wedding day: “But lo! a shadowy form is
seen/Betwixt the bridal greeting,/A shadowy
hand is placed between,/To hinder theirs from
meeting”. Jane transforms the supernatural
figure into a hellish male. This Undine figure, is a
perennial visionary in poetry, from Friedrich
Hölderlin’s ‘Brot und Wein’ to Coleridge’s
‘Christabel’ and his opium-dream poem, ‘Kubla
Khan’; and in the twentieth century with Ezra
Pound’s reference to ‘Ondine’ in Canto XCIII and
Neil Jordan’s movie starring Colin Farrell and set
in Castletownbere o the coast of which a young
woman is caught in a trawler net.
An article in an 1883 edition of The
Gentlewoman, ‘A New Era in English and Irish
Social Life’, lauded the newly enacted Married
Women’s Property Act which prevented a woman
from having to enter marriage “as a bond slave”.
Oscar too was political and purported to meld
aestheticism with, as disclosed in his ‘The soul
of man under socialism’, socialism or what is
better described as libertarian socialism.
Scandal too he may have learnt from Maturin
and his parents. Scandal generated by Maturin’s
early almost atheistic Gothic plays almost cost
him his position in the Church of Ireland. It
engulfed the Wildes during the infamous Mary
Travers Libel Case, when Dr William Wilde, Jane’s
husband, was accused of sexual misconduct with
Travers, one of his patients.
Richard Ellmann tells it bluntly: “William had
given her chloroform and then raped her”. On the
witness stand, Travers noted the eect of this on
her, “I took laudanum with the intention of
committing suicide” in his surgery.
Travers paid placard-bearers to promote her
pamphlet-driven campaign on the streets of
Dublin, insinuating and protesting the ‘rape’ with
excerpts of letters to her from William. Jane, by
suing her for libel, was in pursuit of ‘absolute
truth’. However, one is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s
aphorism “the truth is rarely pure and never
simple”.
The trial, over a week in 1864 proved to be free
captivating public entertainment, with spectators
queuing daily for seats. There were elements of
circus. When asked why she had not written to
Travers about the adultery, Jane replied, “because
I was not interested!”. Travers engaged the
barrister and Home Ruler, Isaac Butt, who gained
a farthing in damages for her, and the Wildes had
to pay £2,000 (£320,000 in current prices) in
legal costs.
Maturin too inspired Oscar. ‘Melmoth the
Wanderer’ begins with the destruction of a
picture (portrait), and The Picture of Dorian Gray
ends with the destruction of one. Both novels are
inherently ‘religious’, intensely so: Maturin was a
clergyman and, as Wilde himself remarked
Dorian Gray was “too moral”. Some of Jane’s
poems too are religiously obsessional.
Pamela Brown, commissioning editor of Spa
Cottage Publishing, is producing The Selected
Poems of Jane Elgee-Wilde to be published in the
Autumn as part of a campaign for the trio of
statues.
Kevin Kiely is author of Arts Council Immortals
(available on Amazon Books).
The Selected Poems of
Jane Elgee-Wilde will be
published in the autumn
as part of a campaign
for the trio of statues
