| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
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a psychic numbness that the Mitscherlichs had described as an “inability to mourn” on the part of the Germans in 1967.
But the interaction of literature and prejudice goes much further than the character of Shylock. I want to mention here only three writers who have developed genuinely artistic strategies to comment on stereotypes and prejudices: Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison. Oscar Wilde used the genre of the “comedy of manners” in order to (using a formula from Shakespeare's Hamlet) hold a mirror up to Victorian society and expose its stereotypes. He wrote in the genre of comedy, and his plays were part of a “joking culture” in which exaggeration was a salient feature and criticism was made palatable through wit. Wilde's literary strategy was an easy one: he reflected on the norms and values in a mode of indirection by inverting the most nonnegotiable stereotypes. Here are a few examples from his play The Importance of Being Earnest (2003). The problem of sincerity and insincerity is played out in the following comment on marriage: “I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn’t been there since her poor husband's death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger” (I.ii., p. 16). In a similar way, Wilde challenged the common assumptions of the Victorian image of humans in general, noticing that “it is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out” (1966, p. 55). Gwendolen, the other heroine of the play, utters the interesting remark, “The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man” (II, p. 63). While younger generations today may find nothing wrong or funny with this statement, the nineteenth-century Victorian audience that was brought up on Coventry Patmore's normative myth of the woman as “angel of the house” must have roared with laughter at this statement.
A generation later, Virginia Woolf addressed and grappled with the prejudices of a patriarchal society in a much more direct way. Her famous 1929 essay, A Room of One's Own, contains a brilliant anatomy of prejudice which deserves to be reread in this context (2004). In this text, Woolf started from the consequences of discrimination which she experienced as a woman in a physical way when visiting a traditional English college: she was chased off the turf by a