Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Hauptseminar: Oscar Wilde
SS 2005, 7. Fachsemester

Religion and mythology in Oscar Wilde′s poem "The Sphinx"

by

Melitta Töller

Inhalt

1. Introduktion... 5

2. Religion and Mythology... 6

2.1. Mythology in the ancient religions... 6
2.2. Religion in Victorianism... 7
2.3 Religious and philosophical ideas of Oscar Wilde... 9

3. The Sphinx... 9

3.1 Characterisation in mythology... 9
3.2 Characterisation in the poem... 10

3.2.1 Male or female?... 10
3.2.2. Old age and wisdom... 11

4. Sexuality and death – the Sphinx as femme fatale... 12

4.1 ‘A thousand weary centuries…’... 13
4.2 Her lovers... 16

5. Ammon... 18

5.1 The ideal lover for the femme fatale... 19
5.2 The ideal lover for the poet... 20

5.2.1 The sphinx as a personification of ‘inner desires’... 20

5.3 A symbol for the end of religion... 22

6. The Sphinx as a metaphor for the loss of Christian faith... 22

7. Conclusion... 24

8. Bibliography... 26
 

1. Introduktion

A poet is sitting in his room beside a Sphinx. Within the poem the Sphinx forms his main focus of interest, his whole attention belongs to her: a cheap souvenir from some street corner. But inside of the poet’s room the Sphinx no longer remains a little piece of stone but, right in front of his eyes, becomes a real-life Sphinx – the age-old female demon of death, who besieged the city of Thebes as a punishment for the king of Thebes who introduced homosexual love into Greek culture and thus incured Hera’s hatred. On top of that, in Wilde’s poem it is the Sphinx herself who becomes the taboo breaking creature, ruled only by her libido, who coaxes lecherous secrets out of the poet, originating in his own imagination.
The Sphinx, one of Oscar Wilde’s most enchanting poems, is woven out of a net of various mythological beliefs and religious ideas. Wilde invokes a hotchpotch of varying creatures, who convey a magical atmosphere of ancient grandeur. In order to understand the poem one has to get to know the concepts that stand behind the various mythical creatures, gods and heroes. Therefore I will explain to which mythologies Wilde relates to and how they refer to each other. In this connection the time of Oscar Wilde has to be taken into consideration, too: Victorianism, with its crumbling of old values and conquering of new worlds. Not incidentally most of the ‘actors’ of The Sphinx go back to ancient Egypt and Greek mythology - a deeper interest and fascination in ancient Egypt was very typical for the Victorian age. The late 19th century was also the period of decadence. The typical ‘pleasure from decay’ manifests in The Sphinx in various motives, e.g. by the Sphinx’s sodomy with gods or the killing of her lovers. All in all the poem shows an excessive refinement of style, love of detail, and an emphasis on hideousness and grotesque which shows that the poet is fascinated with decadence.
Victorianism was also the period of aestheticism. Wilde took an interest in it because it was a theory which made art the highest value in life. Wilde believed that art possesses an immanent value – that it is beautiful and therefore has worth, and thus needs to serve no other purpose, be it moral or political: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”¹ This attitude of l’ art pour l’ art was revolutionary to Victorian England because the Victorians believed art could be used as a tool for social education and moral enlightenment. For the aestheticists, the most important thing in a piece of art was its form, not its content. Features of this philosophy can be unmistakable recognized in The Sphinx, and some interpretations even take The Sphinx to be merely a result of Wilde’s delight in experimenting with words and melody of a poem.² But in my opinion, because Wilde has lifted lots of ideas for the form of The Sphinx from other authors,³ Wilde’s own share in the poem is mainly the content, not the structure.⁴ For that reason I will not go any further into the analysis of aestheticism in the poem, but I will rather show via examples of the text that although you could get the impression The Sphinx was written only because of Wilde’s delight in unusual words and rhyming couplets, Wilde was indeed very interested and well-informed in ancient mythologies and religions. He used the names of their gods, heroes and mythological creatures not just by chance, but with an provoking intention, and it is possible to find striking connections between all of them.
Naturally Wilde’s poem can not be judged without referring to his own cultural background, Victorian culture, religion and morals, which I will shortly explore. I will also give an insight into Wilde’s own ‘Christian’ ideas, which sometimes show their influences in the poem.
In my term paper I do not mean to offer a complete interpretation of the poem, but I would like to show some of the multitude of possible accesses, e.g. the identification of the Sphinx with the figure of the femme fatale; the personification of the Sphinx as the temptations and desires of the poet respectively The Sphinx as a metaphor for the loss of Christian faith in Victorian culture.

2. Religion and Mythology

2.1. Mythology in the ancient religions

„The importance of myths as documents of human thought [...] is now
generally recognized, and they are collected and compared, no longer for the
sake of idle entertainment, but for the light they throw on the intellectual
evolution of our species.“⁵

The Sphinx - the name of the poem does already indicate its mythological content. Mythology is the term for the accumulated myths of a religion: stories about life and death, heroic (or evil) deeds of gods, heroes, saints and mythological creatures, about the creation of the world and the past and future of mankind. Thus, religion and mythology are two strongly connected concepts. Every religion has its own myths without whom it would be purely theoretical: myths bring religious ideas to life. That is the reason why all past and present societies have their own myths. They are part of human life, they reveal confessions, mark social behaviours, justify institutions, rites and values, and shape the world view of a whole culture.⁶ For The Sphinx Wilde chose the two most colourful mythological regions: Egypt and Greece. The mythology of ancient Egypt is closely connected to the Nile, from which the country was completely dependent.⁷ Their myths developed in an environment that was marked by sharp contrasts: the desert and the Nile. This contrast always reminded the Egyptians of the opposites of life and death, of good and evil, morality and sin⁸, and these opposites can also be found in the manifestations of their various gods. Greek mythology is closely connected to Egypt mythology.
When Alexander invaded Egypt in 332 BC the Greek became the new rulers of Egypt, but they allowed the Egyptians to keep their own culture and religion. Moreover they adopted many of the old Egyptian gods into their own religion, but gave them different names because of their supposedly ‘barbaric’ sound.⁹ But 300 years later Egypt was conquered by the Romans, and the culture of ancient Egypt, their religion and rites were supplanted by Christianity.¹⁰ A similar loss of religion happened in 19th century Victorian England.

2.2. Religion in Victorianism

[...]

1 Oscar Wilde. The Preface. The Picture of Dorian Gray. in: The Complete Illustrated Plays and Poems of Oscar Wilde. London: Chancellor Press, 42000. p. 3.

2 B. Fehr e.g. takes the whole poem The Sphinx to be merely a reaction to and processing of Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine. Compare (Cf.): Bernhard Fehr. Studien zu Oscar Wilde’s Gedichten. Berlin: Mayer and Müller, 1918. p. 179-195.

3 E.g. Wilde used the rhyme scheme of Tennyson’s Immemorial, borrowed the whole situation – a narrator taken impressions, visions from a piece of art, from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and took the most unusual expressions from Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine.

4 But influences of other writers of his time can also be seen in the content of The Sphinx, e.g. lines 115 - 116. The idea Wilde describes here, the death of a god converted into a giant destroyed statue, can already be found in the poem Ozymandias of Egypt (1817) by Percy B. Shelley.

5 James G. Frazer in: Ariel Golan. Prehistoric Religion. Mythology. Symbolism. Jerusalem: 2003. p. 9.

6 Cf.: Richard Cavendish and Trevor O. Ling, eds.. Mythologie. Eine illustrierte Weltgeschichte des mythischreligiösen Denkens. Frechen: Komet. p. 8.

7 Egypt is still said to be ‘a present of the Nile’.

8 Cf.: Rosalie David in: Cavendish 96.

9 E.g. they changed Ammon into Zeus, Horus into Apollo, Hathor into Aphrodite and so forth. Cf.: Adolf Erman. Die Religion der Ägypter. Ihr Werden und Vergehen in vier Jahrtausenden. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001. p. 359.

10 Cf.: Martha Holmes, Gavin Maxwell and Tim Scoones. Der Nil. Mythos und Lebensader. München: C.J. Bucher, 2004. p. 63.