Brian Wall and Dr. Brandie Siegfried, English Department
Transatlanticism, or the study of the relationship of England and the United States through shared textual themes, is a developing literary movement on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Most researchers emphasize the influence of British authors on the development of the American literary canon. With this paradigm in mind, my proposed research centered on viewing Victorian authors and texts as historical harbingers of contemporary United States society. My findings, however, suggested the presence of a reverse relationship, and my focus shifted as I delved into the works of Oscar Wilde, my selected British Victorian author.
As indicated in my research proposal, I began my project last summer by re-reading the complete works of Oscar Wilde in order to extrapolate the themes and ideas that I would research while studying in London. While reading his short story “Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime,” I was struck by the similarity of the content and general tone to the writings of one of my favorite American authors: Edgar Allan Poe. I also came across one of Wilde’s epic poems – “The Sphinx” – that both bears the same name as one of Wilde’s short stories and deals with the same question of distortions of perspective. After consulting with Dr. Siegfried, my project changed to focus on examining Poe’s literary influence on Wilde. As this idea runs against the grain of most transatlantic theory it became obvious that I would need strong support for my theory, and so the research that I was going to conduct in England became even more critical.
To help me get used to the manner in which archival research was conducted, Dr. Siegfried had me help her with her research on sixteenth-century Irish piracy. In addition to teaching me the steps involved in forming good primary and secondary source bibliographies, she also helped me get access to the vast array of resources available in the British Library. Doing this research for her was good practice for me. Unlike the Harold B. Lee Library, the British Library does not have a large selection of stacks to meander. Rather, I had to request every book that I wanted two hours before I needed it and wait for it to be brought up by the librarians. This was sometimes a frustrating task as the book would often appear to be much more useful from the title than it was, so I learned the importance of ordering multiple sources from different sections of the library to maximize my effectiveness. Dr. Siegfried had me focus on trade relations between Elizabethan England and the Ottoman Empire. One of the more interesting texts that I found during this process was an original 1663 printing of a renewal of a trade agreement originally made by Queen Elizabeth and the Sultan of the British Empire.
After I had become accustomed to archival research, it was time for me to begin researching Wilde’s relationship with Poe. As Poe had died five years before Wilde was even born, it was pretty obvious that there would be no record of correspondence between them. My search focused on finding statements by Wilde in lectures, letters, or memoirs as well as secondary criticism comparing the two authors. In addition to the British Library, my search also led me to the National Records Office in Greenwich, the Royal Shakespearean Library in Stratford-upon-Avon, and a secondhand bookstore in York where I found a dust-covered collection of several of Oscar Wilde’s letters, nine of which contained references to Poe. Among my other findings was a particularly useful source that I found in the Rare Books collection of the British Library: a 1906 printing of a lecture that Wilde gave in Wandsworth shortly after his return from his first visit to the United States.
The research that I found, together with textual analysis of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” and Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime” in addition to the two Sphinx pieces, yielded three main areas of overlapping emphasis to focus on in my writing. The first was a preoccupation with the effects of industrialization. While nineteenth-century Britain was still trying to reconcile her old agrarian lifestyle to this new age of innovation, Wilde noted that “there is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as America.” This manifestation of the harmony between beauty and efficiency resonated greatly in his concept of aesthetics. Wilde admired Poe as “that marvelous lord of rhythmic expression”, and his own characters reflected the same emotional “tintintabulation” from living in this age of jangling machinery as did those of the Baltimore author. Secondly, both Poe and Wilde wrote in the tradition of the macabre. From the mystical House of Usher to Dorian Gray’s ominously aging portrait, both authors cultivated a sense of the eerie and mysterious in their works. Both of these themes culminate in the key similarity between their writings, which is an emphasis on distortions of perspective as a form of social or historic critique. Wilde was interested in the dubious morality of Britain’s occupation of Egypt to maintain the control over the Suez Canal that Gladstone felt the Sultan was unable to exercise. This distrust of Anglo superiority over past Egyptian intellectual milestones shares ideals from Poe’s fictional conversation with the revitalized mummy Allamistakeo in “Some Words with a Mummy.” In addition to this mutual historical interest, both writers manipulate experimentation with the grotesque. Wilde draws upon Poe’s concept of a distorted Sphinx – which, in his story, is an insect 1/16 of an inch long that appears gigantic when next to the narrator’s eye – by attributing all of the godlike powers and epic history of the Egyptian Sphinx to an ordinary housecat. Despite their best efforts, the narrators of both accounts are unable to rid themselves of the phantasm of the enlarged Sphinx. The distortion of perspective is thus two-fold: the intentional dramatization of Egyptian achievement is juxtaposed with the pompous self-superiority of Western assertion of authority. This also is a theme that has continued to be relevant since World War II as the United States and Britain have struggled with their roles as superpowers in the Falklands, Vietnam, and the Middle East.
In September, Dr. Siegfried helped me prepare my early ideas into an abstract to submit to the Transatlanticism in America conference at Oxford sponsored by the Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne societies. My paper has been accepted, so I will be returning to England in July to present it there. I will continue to refine my ideas and expand my research in Provo for this paper. I am planning on beginning my master’s program in the fall, and would like to use this material as the starting point for the development of a thesis.