THE OSCHOLARS



THE OSCHOLARSTHE CRITIC AS CRITICMARCH 2016Kiss and TellReview by Melissa KnoxEsther Rashkin, Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.Esther Rashkin's ambitious collection of essays purports to elaborate ‘a new form of psychoanalytic cultural studies’–a brilliant goal, one that, in my opinion ought to be pursued by more critics. She adds, ‘The theme that unites all my readings is the unspeakable secret: the shameful, conflicted, undigestible drama that so threatens a character's ability to be that it must be elided from language and either held in an unassimilated, unintrojected state of suspension, or incorporated and encased within an intrapsychic vault designed to insure its integrity and prevent its revelation’(19). What she wants to do with the secrets discovered is not absolutely clear. The general intent–highly desirable–is to explore the ways in cultures employ unconscious strategies in order to remain unaware of their exploitation of other civilizations. The historical situations explored include France's colonization of Algeria and issues involving Jewish identity and the Holocaust. In the case of Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Doran Gray, psychoanalytic theory is misguidedly applied to the ‘narrative life’ of the literary character Dorian in order to throw light on England's exploitation of Ireland. An approach that does not begin by working with Dorian as a figure springing from the creativity, the desires, and the conflicts of the man Oscar Wilde will lose its way in connecting Dorian to Wilde and Wilde's world.The theme of the ‘unspeakable secret’ remains a weak thread. Even though some of Rashkin's insights into character and culture are illuminating, the definition of ‘unspeakable secret’ remains inconsistent–as her own adjectives indicate–changing from one essay to the next and sometimes within the essay. ‘Undigestible’ drama turns out to work nicely as a metaphor in her essay on Babette's Feast, in which, Rashkin insightfully suggests, Babette needs to grieve, is prevented from doing so by her conflicts, and seeks in the preparation of her feast to find a ‘recipe for mourning.’ But Rashkin has not succeeded in establishing a psychoanalytic theory that is consistent enough to use meaningfully. ‘Unintrojected’ and ‘intrapsychic vault’ may not really mean the same thing, and the former has always been a murky concept. ‘Introjection’ is a psychoanalytic term introduced in a 1909 paper by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, used by him so broadly that it could hardly be distinguished from projection, though they are quite different processes. Projection involves rejecting a thought or feeling by convincing oneself that it is really part of the outside world. Freud elaborated on Ferenczi's term in a 1915 paper, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,’ linking introjection to infantile fantasies of oral incorporation, that is, the feeling that ‘I would like to take this person or thing inside myself, so I'll eat it.’ Babies shove any and all colorful objects into their mouths, and we all try to take into our sense of ourselves qualities outside ourselves that we admire. As I understand Rashkin's statement, she means that her readings explore a secret remaining silent because articulation would either establish or increase awareness of a painful truth that threatens the sense of identity– the identity of an individual person or that of a culture. In the first case the secret is repressed in the Freudian sense of that term; in the second it is not. An important influence on Rashkin's thinking is Lacan and his views on language, in particular the idea that the Unconscious is structured like a language, as well his belief that ‘it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.’ Both ideas borrow from Freud's concept of repression, but I find them unclear. In Freud's writings, the theory of repression, is, as he wrote, in The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), the ‘cornerstone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests,’ and can be approximated as the operation by which thoughts and feelings connected to strong instincts, sexuality and aggression, get pushed out of awareness in order to avoid pain or conflict. One could extend the concept to a whole culture if each member of that culture is united in a desire to forget the same thing. In Rashkin's remarks quoted above, she appears to be suggesting that she expects to find in each of the works she explores a secret so shameful or disturbing to an individual person or a culture that it gets confined to a deeply unconscious part of the mind, or of the cultural memory, which will not be integrated into the rest of the desired conscious identity. Rashkin prefers alterations of Freud's concept of repression that she finds in the writings of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok as well as Sándor Ferenczi. All three were highly creative and original thinkers, but rather idiosyncratic interpreters of Freudian concepts, who felt limited by certain issues key to Freudian theory. Rashkin's final chapter, on which this review will focus, addresses Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray as a ‘subtle commentary on the British colonial enterprise, on Wilde's own complex negotiations with Irish nationalism and Anglo-Irish identity, and on the psychological legacies of personal and political abuse’ (23). Rashkin begins with a letter written by Wilde one week after his two-year prison term had ended. In it, Wilde distinguishes between a child's ability to comprehend a punishment inflicted by a parent and its inability to understand one inflicted by society. Rashkin uses this distinction to elaborate on themes of child abuse that she finds in Wilde's novel and interprets as Wilde's expression of punishments inflicted on Ireland by England.Published in the Daily Chronicle of London, the letter derides the treatment of children in prison. Calling attention to the prison authority's ignorance of the ‘peculiar psychology of a child's nature,’ Wilde asserts that ‘a child can understand a punishment inflicted by an individual, such as a parent or guardian, and bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence.’ He adds, however: ‘What it cannot understand is a punishment inflicted by society.’ I believe that what Wilde meant by these remarks is that children do not apprehend abstractions easily: they think concretely. Anything that has not been seen, held, tasted, touched, or heard by a young child will mystify him or her. When I told my daughter, then age three, that she was going to fly to New York with me, she asked whether we had wings. A child knows ‘family’ as its siblings and caretakers, but it cannot know ‘society’ because it has no sense impression to correspond with that term.Rashkin, however, asserts that Wilde's distinction between a child's attitudes toward punishment by a parent and punishment by society essentially elaborates the same theme she finds in The Picture of Dorian Gray, namely, ‘a complex saga of child abuse . . . cryptically inscribed within the narrative.’ (158) She will later connect the idea of an abusive society to the abuse visited upon the Irish by the English. Her assertion regarding child abuse, within the novel appears to stand or fall on the validity of regarding Dorian Gray not as a literary creation inseparable from the creativity and conflicts of Oscar Wilde but as a real person who was emotionally abused as a child and who has developed conflicts stemming from this abuse. ‘I want to argue,’ Rashkin writes, ‘that Wilde's text narrates a tale of emotional abuse and dramatizes its ramifications for the narrative life of a the main character’ (158). She plans also to expose the novel's ‘unseen connections between abuse and aesthetic creation, and between psychic oppression and the production of a symptom.’ (158) When the latter aim is fully achieved, one ends up with something like Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow (1941).Rashkin also wants to reveal ‘a secret drama of sexual abuse’ that is promised as ‘the key’ to understanding ‘how the story engages with Irish nationalism, British empire, and the abusive rapport between colonizer and colonized.’ (159) She believes that Wilde's prison letter about children not understanding a punishment by society ‘can be read in conjunction with the novel as a symptom of Wilde's own complex relationship to Irish identity, British imperialism, and his own family history.’ (159).I would have expected at least a glance at Wilde's family history at this point –Rashkin takes another forty pages to get to his family–since his parents, especially his mother, were deeply engaged in Irish culture, and his mother considered herself a revolutionary for the Young Ireland movement. As is well known, but not pointed out by Rashkin, Wilde's mother wrote a famous article that resulted in the arrest and trial of her editor, ‘Jacta Alea Est’ [The Die is Cast] in which she envisions ‘a hundred thousand muskets glittering brightly in the light of heaven, and the monumental barricades stretching across each of our noble streets . . .’ (quoted in Melville, 36-7) She gave her Oscar the names of heroes from Irish legend and warlike relatives: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was his full name. She was proud of pumping nationalist ideology into her sons; ‘I made them indeed/Speak plain the word COUNTRY’ is the dedication in her book of poems. (Knox, 7) These specific details, as well as her Protestant family's disapproval of her involvement with the largely Catholic Young Ireland movement and her own deep conflict between supporting and deriding the Irish peasants seems to me the place to start in looking for Wilde's conflicts about Ireland and England. Not included in Rashkin's commentary is, for example, Wilde's remark in a post-prison letter of [?18 February 1898] to Robert Ross that ‘A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet put in prison for loving boys loves boys’ (Complete Letters, 1019). A psychoanalytic interpretation can find much that is relevant in the connections that Wilde himself makes between his identity as a gay man and his conflicted wish to be an Irish hero. Culture is a complex thing, and the critic who approaches the psychoanalysis of culture must, I believe, have a stronger sense of history, an anthropologist's awareness of approaching a remote world. Because Wilde wrote that he had inserted himself into his novel, it is unfortunate that Rashkin appears to be unaware of remarks that he made on the subject. In another letter highly relevant to interpretations of Wilde's novel that she does not include, postmarked 12 February 1894 to Ralph Payne, Wilde wrote: ‘I am so glad you like that strange coloured book of mine: it contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry, what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be–in other ages, perhaps.’ (585, Complete Letters) If Rashkin's assumption of abuse is correct, what are we to make of Wilde's desire to be Dorian, his wistful admiration of Dorian's good looks, his introduction of Dorian as ‘a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,’ not as someone who is being tortured by a wicked grandfather, one Lord Kelso, who is in the 1891 version of the novel the grandfather of Dorian Gray. In the novel, Lord Kelso is described as not wanting his daughter, Margaret Devereux, to marry the ‘penniless . . . nobody,’ Dorian's father, and so Kelso, ‘a mean dog’ contrives to get the nobody killed a few months after the marriage by a ‘Belgian brute who spitted his man like a pigeon’ (31, Complete Works) Rashkin arrives at the theory that Kelso committed incest with his daughter, Margaret, that he is both Dorian's father and grandfather, that he hates the boy for being like his mother. In her interpretation the hidden portrait expresses the sexual abuse of the daughter and the emotional abuse of Dorian.The main evidence offered for this is ingenious: ‘Devereux’ and ‘Kelso’ are names associated with worms–Kelso, she believes, ‘behaves like a worm . . . looks like a worm’ and besides, his name ‘confirms his verminous identity: Kelso rhymes with Kell + sew (something that) spins or 'sews' a 'kell' or cocoon’ (178). All this via the O.E.D. ‘Devereux’ is meanwhile associated with the French word ‘véreux,’ which means ‘decayed, vile, rotten, corrupt, shameful . . . or , literally, 'worm-eaten'.’ On to poisons in Dorian Gray, images of old and worm-eaten decayed flesh covered with jewels, all interpreted as the ‘poison’ of incest, and from that we get ultimately to ‘Wilde's attempt to construct a hybrid space of Anglo-Irish identity by simultaneously identifying with the empire subordinating him as Irish and with the colonized Irish resisting subjugation.’ (195). Of course Wilde identified himself both with the English empire and the Irish resisters, but do we need child abuse to discover this?.‘Kelso’ rang a bell, so I started with Google–wondering if I'd find the name of a household cleanser–but it turns out to be the name of a Scottish border town. Now, Wilde often used place names for characters–Windermere, Worthing, Bracknell are a few examples–and Kelso is not just any old town; it's the town, and the region, from which the noble house of Douglas–yes, as in Bosie Douglas–is said to spring. The first listing on Google explains that the monks of Kelso granted lands to the Douglas clan sometime between 1175 and 1199. But of course most scholars think Wilde hadn't met Bosie Douglas by the time he wrote Dorian Gray. The Lord Kelso character, however, only appears in the 1891 version, and here is what Oscar Wilde had to say about when he met Bosie Douglas in his letter to More Adey of 7 April 1897 (see p. 795): ‘The friendship began in May 1892 by his brother appealing to me in a very pathetic letter to help him in terrible trouble with people who were blackmailing him. I hardly knew him at the time. I had known him eighteen months, but had only seen him four times in that space.’ If Wilde really had known Douglas for eighteen months before 1892, then it seems possible that the Lord Kelso figure is some sort of private joke. Meanwhile, I wrote to Debrett's Peerage–since 1789, a well known genealogical guide to the British aristocracy–and asked if the name ‘Kelso’ really was the ancestral home of the Douglas clan and what other meanings could be attached to the term. I knew that many nineteenth-century novelists who wanted to include aristocratic names and characters used Debrett's the way we use Wikipedia; Wilde mentions it in two stories; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell, and Saki were among those who dipped in for names. Charles Kidd, the Debrett's representative, e-mailed back as follows:I am quite surprised that Wilde used Kelso in his 1891 version of Dorian Gray. Mind you, only a peerage-reading fanatic would have picked up that it was one of the Duke of Roxburghe's subsidiary titles; an ordinary member of the public almost certainly would not have made the connection. But it might be equally fair to surmise that the then Duke was not of a litigious persuasion, otherwise I think he would have had good grounds to sue. Another Oscar Wilde trial!If Wilde had met Bosie Douglas before writing the book version of his novel, then it would make sense for him to have done more than flip through Debrett's Peerage at random, looking for names that sounded good. What if Wilde consciously picked a name that resonated personally? The wicked, wicked Lord Kelso in the novel certainly is consistent with the ‘mad, bad’ Douglas family, Lord Alfred and his father the Marquess of Queensberry merely being among the more flamboyant members. The Marquess, who was known for his rules for boxing, took a swing whenever the spirit moved him, which was often, and died shouting that he was being ‘hounded by the Oscar Wilders.’ Bosie, as everyone knows, fired a pistol shot at the ceiling of a fashionable watering hole when he desired the other patrons to stop delicately averting their eyes from himself and Wilde. Well, I've written to the current Lord Queensberry–address kindly provided by Debrett's–to see what he thinks of all this. If he writes back, I'll ask if I may send on his insights to THE OSCHOLARS.I don't reject Rashkin's worm imagery, incidentally: I think her linguistic interpretations useful in suggesting yet another reason for Wilde to have found the names of Kelso and Devereux attractive. The ‘poison’ that Wilde alludes to with his imagery of decay in The Picture of Dorian Gray is the likely a real one: the syphilis named by one of his favorite writers, Joris Karl Huysmans, the man whose book provided a blueprint for Wilde's novel, the man whose main characters, Des Esseintes, is obsessed with syphilis. Wilde's belief that he had syphilis–and his probable infection with it–should enter into any discussion of his sense of oppression, since any feeling of political or sexual injustice would be complicated by a regret at having been compromised physically. A glance at the history of late Victorian England should alert all writers wading into psychoanalysis or cultural studies that every family had at least one member who was afflicted with syphilis, that all available treatments were highly toxic, that symptoms were entirely unpredictable and that there was no cure. Why presume incest as a ‘poison’ when there's so much actual poison lying around? It would be natural for a syphilitic to feel decayed, worm-eaten. The spirochete, the organism causing syphilis, looks like a worm, but wasn't discovered until 1905. Even so, any physician of Wilde's day who had done autopsies would likely have had occasion to discover the vermiform shapes left by the animal as it bored into the bones and the brain, so the worm imagery was probably around in Wilde's day.Psychoanalysis of culture begins at home–with the family of the subject being examined, meaning as thorough a knowledge of Oscar Wilde's thoughts about his mother, father, sister, brother, friends, and surroundings as possible, and a thorough knowledge of the everyday aspects of that culture: the way he spoke to his friends about being Irish, not the general saga of the mistreatment of the Irish by the British through the ages. Without extensive knowledge of the biography of Wilde and of his culture, it is not possible to achieve the fruitful union of psychoanalysis and cultural studies that could provide insightful commentary.Melissa Knox is the author of Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide (Yale UP, 1994) and Oscar Wilde in the 1990s (Camden House, 2001). She lectures at the University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany.122872513335000To return to the Table of Contents of THE CRITIC AS CRITIC, please click hereTo return to our home page, please click hereTo return to THE OSCHOLARS former home page, please click here ................
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