Margaret D. Stetz

Greater Than the Mystery of Death: Rewriting Oscar Wilde for Young Audiences

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Oscar Wilde’s works frequently have been rewritten for the young-adult and children’s markets. In some cases, this has resulted in stories inspired by Wilde’s fiction and plays, but only tangentially related to them; in other cases, the relationship to the originals has been much closer. Often, these new versions have involved not merely simplification and over-emphasis on teaching moral lessons (as well as vocabulary lessons), but censorship, especially of the homoerotic elements in Wilde’s creations. Many of these adaptations too have been accompanied by mini-biographies of Wilde that either remain silent about his sexuality or that focus solely on his punishment for “gross indecency,” without explaining what that meant and without mentioning his romantic attachments to men. At the same time, there has been no full-length life of Wilde produced for young audiences—nothing that would allow young readers to connect emotionally or identify with him.

“To Amuse Intelligently and Cleverly”: Carolyn Wells and Literary Parody

Despite the recent revival of interest in earlier American women’s comic writing, Carolyn Wells remains a neglected and undervalued figure, and is the topic of this chapter. While specializing in comic verse in a variety of forms, and while addressing subjects as diverse as women’s fashionable dress and the eccentric habits of bibliophiles (she was an important collector of books herself), Wells often focused her wit on her fellow writers and wrote poems of literary parody. Her targets were frequently male poets and, especially, their representations of women. That Wells did so with works by canonical male authors (especially those from the revered British tradition) ranging from Milton and Shelley to contemporaries such as Swinburne and Kipling attests to her fearlessness in transgressing the boundaries for women, as she asserted her right to “amuse intelligently and cleverly” by poking fun.

Oscar Wilde—The Great Drama of His Life: How His Tragedy Reflected His Personality

ary theories and a mid-century association between genius and insanity. As neurologists began to believe that the highly evolved frontal region of the brain was the source of “the most noble cerebral faculties,” Wells’s images of future men with giant brains and atrophied bodies, “their whole muscular system . . . shrivelled to nothing” seemed increasingly plausible (122, 119). Stiles thoughtfully identifies the qualities ascribed to mad scientists: malevolence, obsessiveness, vulnerability, and social isolation. Wells writes that the fantasy writer should “domesticate the impossible hypothesis” on which a fiction is based (such as time travel) (123). Stiles perceptively links fictional and scientific form by connecting Wells’s own technique of isolating one impossible premise and then “keep[ing] everything else human and real,” to “the scientific method, wherein one variable is tested against a series of controls” (123). The final chapter, “Marie Corelli and the Neuron,” is a compelling contrast to the first four. Corelli opposed scientific atheism and attempted to reconcile materialism and religious faith. Corelli’s Electric Creed conceived of nerve cells as having “the capacity . . . to receive, store, and conduct electricity” (156). Neurologists in the 1890s debated whether neurons were the fundamental unit of the nervous system. Corelli’s female protagonists harness the electrical energies of their minds to access spiritual enlightenment. Corelli’s interest in energy and transmission draws more from thermodynamics, telegraphs, and psychical research than it does from evolutionary science. She offers an imaginative rewriting of the romance that is far more soothing than the dystopic fiction of Stevenson or Wells. Stiles provides a pre-history of our era’s current fascination with the brain. Aside from astute readings of complex scientific moments in popular late-Victorian literature, the most useful contribution this book makes is to flesh out the many approaches to studying the brain between 1860 and 1920 that appear in popular fiction. While many of those novels remain bestsellers, the complex scientific context that produced them has remained far more obscure.

Selling Literary Tourism in The Bookman

Literary tourism may have promoted nation-building, canon-building, and other lofty ideals, but nothing associated with culture in the late Victorian period was innocent of the profit motive. Certainly, anything in which print culture in general, or the world of periodicals in particular, took an interest was sure to be tied directly to business concerns. In the final decade of the century, one of the chief disseminators of information about literary tourism and of visual images related to its pursuit was the Bookman, a British magazine that, in ways both subtle and effective, encouraged, fuelled, and capitalised on the new interest in writers’ houses and fictional landscapes.