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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2020

« “I am not a Catholic, I am simply a violent Papist”: Oscar Wilde’s Protestant “Romishness » (Chapter 10)

Résumé

During his last trip to Rome in April 1900, Oscar Wilde wrote: “My position is curious: I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent papist”. A few months later, he was received into the Church on his deathbed, years after having first flirted with Roman Catholicism while a student at Oxford. This essay attempts to show that the Church which fascinates Wilde is not so much a community of believers or a hierarchical structure as the locus of a highly subjective experience. Private judgement (religious or aesthetic) is at the heart of his “religion”, and he tends to see the Roman Church through a fundamentally Protestant lens. Of course, the main element of attraction in Catholicism for Wilde is that, precisely, it is not Protestant and thus represents an un-English, exotic world of Latin, incense clouds and beautiful vestments. Yet, at the same time, Wilde focuses on aspects of the Catholic faith that are most polemical in the late-Victorian context—the very same aspects that are highlighted and denounced in the anti-Catholic pamphlets of the time. Wilde’s Catholic temptation, just like Dorian Gray’s, is first and foremost a revolt against the society that shaped him, a Protestant’s provocation geared at his own world.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

halshs-03979162 , version 1 (08-02-2023)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-03979162 , version 1

Citer

Claire Masurel-Murray. « “I am not a Catholic, I am simply a violent Papist”: Oscar Wilde’s Protestant “Romishness » (Chapter 10). Wilde’s Other Worlds, 2020, 9780367666576. ⟨halshs-03979162⟩
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