James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Punitive Child Loss in the Modern Bureaucratic State

Abstract

The intense ambivalence of James Joyce’s references to Oscar Wilde throughout Joyce’s literary career poses a riddle to which scholars have proposed an array of answers. This article seeks the basis for Joyce’s simultaneous identification and disidentification with Wilde in the strata of painful affect that informs collective subjectivity in the modern nation-state. In late 19th century Britain, two nebulous new crimes, coined at the urging of the Social Purity movement—gross indecency, and custodial neglect—rendered families and communities newly vulnerable to punitive child loss. The enforcement of these new laws created conditions under which one might lose custody of one’s children based on a charge that could be brought by anyone, based on anything, or nothing. Gross indecency and child neglect were both ill-defined and highly stigmatizing. Both were difficult to defend against, while their most terrible consequences were often extra-judicial. In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde conveys the dehumanizing anguish of extra-judicial punishments that could be indiscriminately imposed on a new kind of moral criminal by depicting the loss of his children as a figurative crucifixion. This article charts accounts by social historians describing the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s early years in Dublin, and the organization’s impact on socially precarious families, alongside episodes from Joyce’s biography, and his literary reinventions of these episodes. Using passages from De Profundis that influenced Joyce’s writing, historical accounts of moral policing introduced by the Social Purity movement, and Joyce’s biographical materials, letters, and published writing, this article connects changing affect in Joyce’s childhood family to the intense aversion, outrage and empathy that color his recurrent allusions to what he termed Oscar Wilde’s ‘civil death.’