Title: THE QUEST FOR FEMALE SELFHOOD IN EVELYN INNES AND SISTER TERESA: FROM WAGNERIAN KÜNSTLERROMAN TO FREUDIAN FAMILY ROMANCE
Abstract: Words cannot tell my delirium, my madness - thus George Moore exclaimed on first hearing Tristan and Isolde in 1892, a few days after attending a Drury Lane production of Wagner's Rhinegold at instigation of his friend and collaborator in Irish Literary Renaissance, Edward Martyn.1 As he later recalled in Hail and Farewell, he had initially been reluctant to accompany Martyn: For Wagner was reputed unmelodious and difficult to all except most erudite, and fearing that I should be bored for several hours by sounds which would mean nothing to me, I began to seek excuses ... but moment horns gave out theme on Rhine my attention was arrested, and a few minutes after it was clear that birth awaited me.2 This new birth, stimulated further by repeated visits to Bayreuth during mid- to late 1890s, spawned ideas in Moore. Wagner and Bayreuth had already featured in his works prior to his initiation in 1892, but had then, in quasi-anticipation of Max Nordau's Degeneration (original German edition, 1892; English translation, 1895), served to signal dysfunctional psychologies. Thus Martyninspired protagonist of A Mere Accident (1887) and John Norton {Celibates, 1895) embraces a Wagnerian aesthetic in order to sublimate passionate impulses in his life, thereby fortifying his Catholic asceticism; his preference for art rather than people points to his profound process of alienation.3Once Moore himself had become susceptible to Wagner, emphasis shifted from exploration of states of alienation and repression to its opposite, expression of sensual affinities, of sensual impulses as they shape both individual characters and authorial style. Therefore, Moore's championship of melodious line is directly attributable to impact of Wagner on his writing.4 Like use of leitmotifs in Evelyn Innes,5 stylistic device of repetition in Diarmuid and Grania (1901),6 jointly authored with Yeats, emulates Wagner's use of musical motifs. As William Blissett noted, play is full of Wagnerian motifs accommodated to Irish legend.7 Wagner's success in establishing a German national opera must have held singular appeal to Irish Literary Revivalists like Yeats, Martyn and Moore, all engaged on setting up an Irish Literary Theatre. To Moore, Wagner also came to represent principle of life that Catholic doctrine set out to deny. In The Lake (1905) sensuality and passion expressed in Wagner is placed in direct opposition to dogma of Catholic Church.8 Ever selfparodist, Moore ironized Wagner's influence on himself by adopting a quasi-operatic structure for his trilogy Hail and Farewell (1911-14) headed by an Overture,9 invoked Wagner's unending melody in The Brook Kerith,10 and concluded his Wagnerian theme by borrowing title of Wagner's 1851 Communication to My Friends for his last work (published posthumously in 1933).As Baudelaire wrote in his 1861 essay on Richard Wagner and Tannhauser, Wagner's operas dramatize the struggle of two principles which have selected human heart as their chief arena, namely struggle of flesh with spirit, of hell with heaven and of Satan with God.11 Wagnerian opera and monumental clash of sensual desires and spiritual imperatives, of life and death drives, are central to Moore's novel sequence, Evelyn Innes (1898) and (1901). Originally conceived as a single text,12 two novels explore artistic, sensual and spiritual trajectory of impoverished daughter of a Catholic musician specializing in medieval and Renaissance periods and a female opera singer and music teacher (now deceased). Seduced by aristocratic art lover and materialist-atheist aesthete Owen Asher, a figure who encapsulated some aspects of Moore himself,13 Evelyn leaves her father's home in Dulwich to become an internationally celebrated Wagnerian soprano, only to withdraw to convent life and a identity as Sister Teresa at culminating point of her public career, after embarking on an affair with Ulick Dean, a Celtic nationalist composer, occultist and pantheist based on Yeats (and in Moore's later revision remodelled to resemble AE or George William Russell). …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 3
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot