Oscar Wilde
1854–1900

(Full name Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde; also wrote under the pseudonyms C.3.3. and Sebastian Melmoth) Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, critic, poet, short-story writer, and author of fairy tales.

The following entry presents an overview of Wilde's career through 2004.

INTRODUCTION

Although Wilde is best remembered as a playwright, novelist, essayist, poet, brilliant conversationalist, and flamboyant personality, he was also an author of original fairy tales. Wilde's notoriety—including his arrest and conviction in 1895 for violating England's 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which criminalized homosexual activity—led some to regard him as an inappropriate writer for children. However, Wilde's fairy tales reveal themes of morality, Christianity, and beauty and thus reflect the contradiction between Wilde's public persona and his literary works. Collected in two volumes, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), Wilde's fairy stories were published at the beginning of his most productive literary period. Influenced by the author's association with John Ruskin and Walter Pater, they remain remarkable examples of the literary fairy tales popular in Victorian England and contain themes that dominate Wilde's other, more notable literary works.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland, Wilde was the second son of three children. He was educated at home until the age of nine, where he reveled in the impressive social circle of his parents which included such leading figures of the era as George Petrie and Samuel Ferguson. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a prominent ear and eye surgeon who also authored books on Irish folklore. His mother, Jane, was an active Irish nationalist and a respected writer in her own right, writing fairy tales and Irish folklore under the pseudonym of "Sperenza." Attending elite private schools in Ireland, Wilde graduated from Trinity College in Dublin where he majored in classics and was the recipient of the Berkeley Gold Medal, which marked him as the top student in his department. Earning a scholarship to further his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford University, he continued to demonstrate his high intelligence, winning the prestigious Newdigate Prize for his poem "Ravenna" in 1878. Living in London, Wilde quickly became immersed within the Aesthetic and Decadent Movements, which essentially advocated an "Art for art's sake" credo; that is, the creation of works of beauty and importance merely for the joy of creation rather than for financial gain. He released his first collection of poems, Poems in 1878, which was met with mixed reviews, among them the accusation that the work was highly derivative of a host of earlier writers. Wilde was asked to tour the United States and Canada by Richard D'Oyly Carte in 1882 on a lecture series on behalf on the English Aesthetes. Over the course of the following decade, Wilde continued to build his reputation for both his brilliant intellect and notorious off-the-cuff witticisms. Upon one of his infrequent visits to Dublin in 1884, he met the heiress Constance Lloyd, whom he married on May 29, 1884. Over the next two years, the couple produced two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. In 1887 Wilde became a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and was later hired as the editor of Woman's World in 1889. It was during this phase of his career that Wilde first began reciting the stories that would eventually become the core of his fairy tale collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. While The Happy Prince was a critical and commercial success, A House of Pomegranates was not as favorably received, particularly after Wilde's candid remark to an interviewer that "I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I did of pleasing the British public." While some saw such comments as Wilde's snide dismissal of his juvenile audience, most contemporary critics believe that Wilde was instead demonstrating his low opinion of the British critical aristocracy. Regardless, the resulting backlash damaged the book's reputation, and for whatever reasons, he never composed another book of fairy tales. But Wilde's literary success continued to grow, thanks largely to the popularity of his first and only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

Over the course of the following decade, Wilde would focus his writing efforts primarily on the theatre, authoring several enormously popular plays, including Lady Windermere's Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1894), The Importance of Being Earnest (1899), and An Ideal Husband (1899). Earning a reputation as a master of the "comedy-of-manners" genre of storytelling, Wilde soon began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas which would later have disastrous consequences on both his career and, ultimately, his life. After Alfred's father, John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of being a sodomite, Wilde responded with a lawsuit charging Queensberry with libelous slander. During the trial, Wilde denied having ever had a homosexual relationship, a claim to which Queensberry's barrister refuted by parading a series of witnesses who corroborated Wilde's homosexual liaisons. After Wilde's admission of perjuring himself on the witness stand, the case was thrown out. However, based on Wilde's public admission of his sexual orientation, he was arrested on April 6, 1895, for violating the Criminal Law Amendment Act. He was convicted on May 25, 1895, after a well-publicized trial, and sentenced to two years hard labor. Assigned with the prison number C.3.3—which he would later use as a pen-name for The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1896)—Wilde was initially barred from writing, although after a year, a change in wardens allowed him to once again take pen to paper. Upon his release in 1897, Wilde retired from public society, retreating into a state of exile in Paris, France. Living and occasionally writing under the pseudonym of "Sebastian Melmoth," Wilde's fortunes and health changed drastically after his release from prison. He spent his last three years living penniless in a Paris hotel until he died from cerebral meningitis at the age of forty-six on November 30, 1900. After his death, a host of admirers contributed to the construction of a tomb for Wilde in Paris' Le Père Cemetery.

MAJOR WORKS

Comprising nine stories over the span of two books, Wilde's fairy stories rely heavily upon the traditions of Victorian fairy tales and Irish myths, as well as suggestive elements from two of Wilde's strongest influences: the Aestheticism of Walter Pater and the Christian theology of Hans Christian Andersen. Wilde's children's stories highlight both the positive and negative in mankind; virtues and sins are both featured, although, surprisingly, the virtuous are often victimized and suffer much more than those who embody immoral traits. In terms of construction, The Happy Prince (which consists of the stories "The Happy Prince," "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Selfish Giant," "The Devoted Friend," and "The Remarkable Rocket") displays more conventionally Victorian-styled fairy tales, while A House of Pomegranates (featuring "The Young King," "The Birthday of the Infanta," "The Fisherman and His Soul," and "The Star Child") employs more complicated plotlines and atypical narrative structures. Wilde's first volume of fairy tales, The Happy Prince, shares many narrative elements with traditional folktales: the triumph of good over evil, the creation of a fantasy world, and the use of the supernatural. The collection also employs a literary device made popular by Hans Christian Andersen in which any object, natural or man-made, can be personified. The fairy tales present characters with obvious vices—selfishness, greed, vanity, egotism, insensitivity—and the reader watches while some overcome their sins and others fail. For example, in "The Selfish Giant," the title character drives children away from his beautiful garden, but soon learns that Spring will no longer enter his garden either. After the children sneak back into his now-frozen garden and the giant helps one of the youngsters reach the branches of a frost-covered tree, the child kisses the giant, breaks the curse, and wins his heart. Despite Wilde's trademark wit, there is nonetheless a somber tone throughout most of his fairy tales, underlying Wilde's emphasis on the importance of morality. Some scholars have argued that the overt Christian dogma featured in stories such as "The Selfish Giant" seems to indicate that Wilde was beginning to question many of the former beliefs that he held while he was an active participant in the Decadence Movement. However, not all of the characters in The Happy Prince show remorse, and several of the stories end on a seemingly negative note, acting as cautionary tales that warn against the world's greed and insensitivity. In the title story, "The Happy Prince," a gleaming statue of a young prince stands high above a city and becomes more and more concerned about the town's poverty and sorrow. Since he cannot move, the prince convinces a swallow to take the gold and jewels from his statue body and distribute them to the city's poor. But, after the prince loses his beauty and ornamentation, the towns-people tear down the statue, and the swallow dies after staying with the prince throughout the freezing winter months. "The Nightingale and the Rose" follows a similar narrative pattern—a bird vows to help a young student find a perfect rose to win the heart of his true love. The Rose-tree forces the nightingale to sing all night with its breast against a thorn to obtain the rose, an effort that ultimately kills the bird. When the student takes the "perfect" rose to his love, she rejects it in favor of jewels from another suitor. The student, ruminating on "what a silly thing Love is," tosses the flower into the street and returns to his books. In the Wildean fairy tale, the good are made to suffer, even in their kindness, while the misguided and immoral often reap the benefits of their injustice. Such incongruity, critics suggest, indicate a new internal dialogue featuring several conflicting aspects of Wilde's innate nature: his repressed homosexuality, his Aesthetic background, and a growing religious awakening that would culminate with his conversion to Catholicism shortly before his death.

The four fairy tales in A House of Pomegranates are more sophisticated, both stylistically and thematically, than those in Wilde's previous collection. Longer and more reflective of Walter Pater's polished, embellished prose style, they contain classical allusions such as those to the "Bithynian slave of Hadrian" and "silver image of Endymion" in "The Young King." The tales also place greater emphasis on human suffering. In "The Young King," for example, the king's grandson, who has been raised by peasants, is brought to the palace to be acknowledged as the ruler's heir. Exhibiting a "strange passion for beauty," he concerns himself with finery and rejects the poor, weak, and oppressed. On the night before his coronation, he has three dreams which show him the depths of human suffering, and when he awakes the next morning, he rejects his regal robe, scepter, and crown for the simple garments of a beggar. In "The Birthday of the Infanta," a Spanish princess is laughingly entertained by a grotesque Dwarf who thinks that she loves him. When he sees his own horrible reflection in the mirror, he realizes that she was merely mocking him, and in an outburst of revulsion, he weeps, kicks, and screams until he dies of a broken heart. The theme of suffering also dominates "The Star Child," in which a vain and selfish golden-haired foundling child rejects a poor beggar woman who claims him as her son, saying he would rather kiss a toad or an adder than her. As a consequence, his physical appearance is transformed so that he becomes "as foul as the toad, and as loathsome as the adder." Vowing to find his mother and ask her forgiveness, he embarks upon a long, arduous three-year journey during which he suffers and comes to know the suffering of others. Finally, in "The Fisherman and His Soul," a young Fisherman rejects his soul for the love of a beautiful Mermaid. Wanting to dwell with the Fisherman, the Soul returns for consecutive years offering him wisdom and riches, but the Fisherman refuses until he is offered beauty. He goes with the Soul, which, existing without a heart, has become evil and tempts the Fisherman to steal, strike a child, and kill. The Fisherman attempts to return to the Mermaid but finds only her dead body, at which point he dies of a broken heart. Each of these tales delineates pain and suffering caused by rejection. They underscore Wilde's growing concern for the rejected of society—the poor, the weak, the oppressed—and denounce the indifference of the wealthy ruling class. The fairy tale has traditionally been a literary form that enables writers to address modern realities in a fantasy setting, and Wilde seems to have also invoked this function to address questions of sexual preference. In Wilde's fairy tales, heterosexual love, as exemplified by the Fisherman and the Mermaid in "The Fisherman and His Soul" and the student and his love in "The Nightingale and the Rose," is flawed. The most sympathetic characters are young males—the Happy Prince, the Young King, the Selfish Giant—and the most perfect relationships are those bonding two males, one larger and more dominant than the other, such as the Selfish Giant and the child who kisses him, or the Happy Prince and little swallow who will not leave him. In his fairy stories, Wilde also focuses on another issue that stood at the core of his life: aesthetics. Ironically, at a time when Wilde was perceived as an aesthete and a decadent, his fairy tales espoused virtue and social responsibility above hedonism and art.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Wilde was a figure of enormous controversy and curiosity throughout his life. His larger-than-life public persona has brought attention—both negative and positive—to his literary works and his personal history. This has, in turn, colored the critical reception of Wilde's oeuvre, particularly his two children's works, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. One of Wilde's contemporaries, critic Alexander Galt Ross questioned the suitability of Wilde's fairy tales for children, asserting that Wilde "has chosen to present his fables in the form of fairy tales to a public which, though it should count among its numbers most persons who can appreciate delicate humor and an artistic literary manner, will assuredly not be composed of children." Such criticism has seeped into contemporary analyses of Wilde's presumed juvenile canon, with some suggesting that the tales' lack of a definitive target readership weakens their value. Robert Keith Miller has argued that as Wilde's fairy stories are "too sophisticated for children and too contrived for adults, they suffer from an inadequately defined sense of audience. In expecting his tales to both amusing and edifying, sensuously evocative and morally resolute, Wilde expected them to do too much." Despite such complaints, others have disagreed, claiming that Wilde's fairy stories belong in the same brilliantly subversive category as many of his later works. Elizabeth Goodenough, for instance, has stated that, "Just as the ironic wit of The Decay of Living rehabilitated fiction, the beautiful boy and the enchanted but 'safe' turf of children's fantasy articulated Wilde's vision of pain as the redemptive heart of life." While the bulk of scholarship on Wilde's short fiction has largely ignored the author's juvenile works, in recent years, scholars have begun more extensive studies of Wilde's fairy tales. Isobel Murray has commented that, "Previous critics, where they have attended to the tales at all, have been too intent to read into them only Wilde's personal development, and so have missed the qualities that have made them widely and lastingly popular among readers who have known nothing of his personality or its problems." Regardless of their critical perception, many of Wilde's fairy stories, particularly "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose," have been continually included in children's anthologies, and nearly all of the stories have been the subject of lavishly illustrated reprinted editions within the past decade.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Children's Works

∗The Happy Prince and Other Tales [illustrations by Walter Crane and Jacob Hood] (fairy tales) 1888
†A House of Pomegranates (fairy tales) 1891
The Nightingale and the Rose [illustrations by Freire Wright and Michael Foreman] (fairy tales) 1982
The Devoted Friend (fairy tales) 1987
The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde [illustrations by Michael Hague] (fairy tales) 1993
The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde [edited by Neil Philip; illustrations by Isabelle Brent] (fairy tales) 1994
The Selfish Giant [illustrations by Saelig Gallagher] (fairy tales) 1995
The Fisherman and His Soul and Other Fairy Tales [edited by Giles Gordon] (fairy tales) 1998
Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde [illustrations by P. Craig Russell] (fairy tales) 2004

Selected Other Works

Newdigate Prize Poem: Ravenna. Recited in the Theatre, Oxford 26 June 1878 (poetry) 1878
Vera; or, The Nihilists (play) 1880
Poems (poetry) 1881
The Duchess of Padua: A Tragedy of the XVI Century, Written in Paris in the XIX Century (play) 1883
Guido Ferranti: A Tragedy of the XVI Century (play) 1891
Intentions (criticism) 1891
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (short stories) 1891
The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1891
Lady Windermere's Fan (play) 1893
Salomé: drame en un act (play) 1893; published as Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act, 1894
A Woman of No Importance (play) 1893
The Sphinx [illustrated by Charles Ricketts] (poetry) 1894
The Soul of Man (criticism) 1895; published as The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1904

An Ideal Husband (play) 1895
The Importance of Being Earnest (play) 1895
The Ballad of Reading Gaol [published under the pseudonym C.3.3] (poetry) 1896
Poems in Prose (poetry) 1905
De Profundis (essay) 1905
Impressions of America [edited by Stuart Mason] (criticism) 1906
A Critic in Pall Mall, Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies (criticism) 1919
For Love of the King: A Burmese Masque (play) 1922

∗Includes the fairy tales "The Happy Prince," "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Selfish Giant," "The Devoted Friend," and "The Remarkable Rocket."

†Includes the fairy tales "The Young King," "The Birthday of the Infanta," "The Fisherman and His Soul," and "The Star Child."

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Robert Keith Miller (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: Miller, Robert Keith. "Mannered Morality: The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates." In Oscar Wilde, pp. 90-115. New York, N.Y.: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982.

[In the following essay, Miller examines how each of the fairy stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates are indicative of Wilde's attempt to express the beauties of virtuous behavior and the vile nature of self-indulgences.]

Despite a growing consensus that Wilde deserves to be taken seriously, critics have tended to dwell on those aspects of his work that reflect the wit and decadence with which one usually associates his name. No area of Wilde's work has been more consistently slighted than his fairy tales, in part, I suspect, because they offer inconvenient evidence that Wilde is more complex than he looks at first glance.

Originally published in two volumes—The Happy Prince in 1888, and A House of Pomegranates in 1891—these stories reveal an uneasy blend of the moral and the fantastic. There are nine stories altogether—five in the first volume and four in the second. They have a number of features which make them characteristically Wilde's. But taking them in the order in which they first appeared, let us begin our analysis with a summary of each.

"The Happy Prince"

Set upon a column overlooking the city he once ruled stands a beautiful statue of the Happy Prince, covered with gold leaf and fitted with precious stones. One night, shortly before winter, a swallow lands at his feet, seeking shelter before continuing on its flight south. It is startled to discover that the Happy Prince is crying. The statue explains that he is called the Happy Prince because he had done nothing but dance and play when he was alive. Now that he is dead, however, and set high above the city, he sees all the misery he had done nothing to relieve when it was in his power to do so.

Over the next three days, the statue asks the swallow to help him help his people. He orders it to remove the precious stones with which he is set, including his two sapphire eyes, and distribute them to the poor. When the swallow has done so, the Prince urges it to leave for Egypt before winter sets in. But the swallow refuses to abandon the Prince: "You are blind now," it tells him, "so I will stay with you always."

Even after the snow begins to fall, the swallow remains faithful to the Prince, singing to him during the day and at night removing pieces of gold leaf to give to the poor. Eventually the swallow realizes that it is going to die from the cold; it kisses the Prince goodbye and falls dead at his feet, prompting the statue's heart to break in two.

The townspeople are dismayed to find the statue looking so shabby. The Mayor complains: "The ruby has fallen out of his sword, his eyes are gone, and he is golden no longer … in fact, he is little better than a beggar." The statue of the Happy Prince is pulled down and melted in a furnace, all but its heart, which will not melt and is thus thrown into a heap of garbage with the dead swallow.

But virtue does not go unrewarded. When God asks one of His Angels to bring Him the two most precious things in the city, the Angel returns with the dead bird and the statue's heart. "You have rightly chosen," said God, "for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me."

"The Nightingale and the Rose"

A student is passionately in love with a young woman who has promised to dance with him only if he presents her with a red rose. There are no red roses in his garden, however, and he loudly bemoans his fate. A nightingale hears his lament, and she decides, "Here indeed is the true lover…. What I sing of, he suffers; what is joy to me, to him is pain." She decides to help the student and flies around the garden in order to find at least one red rose. She finds white roses and yellow roses, but the red rose bush is barren; the frost has nipped it buds. The bush explains that there is only one way it can be brought to yield a rose:

If you want a red rose … you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your heart's-blood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine.

The nightingale does so that very night, pressing its breast against the thorn and singing more beautifully, and more frantically, as she grows weaker. At dawn, she lies dead in the grass, but the bush has produced a lovely red rose.

When he wakes at noon, the student discovers the rose and brings it to the girl he loves. She responds by telling him, "I am afraid it will not go with my dress … and besides, the Chamberlain's nephew has sent me some real jewels, and everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers." The student is very much annoyed, and he throws the rose into the gutter. He decides that love is "a silly thing" and "not half as useful as Logic." He thereupon returns to his room and devotes himself to a great dusty book.

"The Selfish Giant"

For seven years, the Giant has been away visiting his friend the Cornish ogre. "After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited." He returns to his own castle and is upset to discover that, in his absence, local children had formed the habit of playing in his garden. He chases the children away and builds a high wall around his property. "My garden is my own garden," he declares, "anyone can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself." He posts a sign that reads "Trespassers will be Prosecuted," and the children are forced to play in the road.

Because the Giant has been selfish, the spring refuses to visit his garden, and winter reigns there for over a year. But then the Giant wakes one morning to the sound of birds singing outside his window. When he looks outside, he discovers that the children had crept back into his garden through a hole in the wall; they are sitting in all the trees, and every tree in which a child sits is full of beautiful blossoms. Only in one corner of the garden is it still winter. There is a little boy standing there, but he is too small to climb into a tree.

The Giant immediately realizes that he had been wrong to force the children from his garden:

How selfish I have been … now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever.

When he steps outside, however, the children are frightened and all run away—all but the little boy who had been unable to climb the tree: "His eyes were so full of tears that he did not see the Giant coming." The Giant picks him up and puts him in a tree, which immediately breaks out into blossom. The other children see that the Giant is no longer wicked, and they return to the garden, which is now more beautiful than ever.

There is, however, no sign of the small boy whom the Giant had put in the tree. Years pass, and the Giant continues to hope that he will once again see the child who had led him away from selfishness. One winter morning, when he is quite old, the Giant looks out his window and sees:

a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.

The Giant rushes to the child and finds nail prints upon his hands and feet. He asks who has harmed the child and is told that "these are the wounds of Love." The Giant kneels down before the child—who is, we may infer, the Christ child—and is told that he is about to enter Paradise. That afternoon, when the children arrive to play in the garden, they find the Giant lying dead beneath a tree.

"The Devoted Friend"

A number of animals are discussing the nature of friendship. A linnet asks a water rat what it means to be "a devoted friend." The water rat replies, "What a silly question! I should expect my devoted friend to be devoted to me, of course." This prompts the linnet to tell the story of an honest little fellow named Hans. Hans works hard for a living, raising wonderful flowers that he takes to market to sell. He earns enough money to support himself through most of the year, but in the winter when there are no flowers, he is often cold and hungry.

Hans has a friend, a very large friend named Hugh the Miller, who is quite rich. So devoted to Hans is the Miller "that he would never go by his garden without leaning over the wall and plucking a large nosegay, or a handful of sweet herbs, or filling his pockets with plums and cherries if it was the fruit season." He justifies this behavior on the grounds that "real friends should have everything in common," but he never gives Hans anything in return. Even in the winter, when he knows that Hans is suffering, the Miller never moves to help the friend to whom he is supposedly so devoted. Sitting comfortably before his fire, he tells his wife, "When people are in trouble they should be left alone, and not bothered by visitors."

Come spring, the Miller goes to visit Hans. He learns that Hans has been forced to sell his wheelbarrow in order to buy food, and he offers to give Hans a wheelbarrow of his own:

It is not in very good repair; indeed, one side is gone, and there is something wrong with the wheel-spokes; but in spite of that I will give it to you. I know it is very generous of me, and a great many people would think me extremely foolish for parting with it, but I am not like the rest of the world. I think that generosity is the essence of friendship, and besides, I have got a new wheelbarrow for myself.

The Miller expects a great deal in return for this offer. He begins by helping himself to all of Hans's best flowers and a plank of wood that Hans had hoped to use himself. The next day, the Miller appears with a large sack of flour which he wants Hans to carry for him to market. Hans tries to tell him that he is busy, but the Miller retorts: "Well, really, I think that, considering that I am going to give you my wheelbarrow, it is rather unfriendly of you to refuse." Hans is mortified and quickly agrees to carry the flour to market. It is a long trip, and Hans is lying in bed exhausted when, early the next morning, the Miller arrives to demand that Hans come and repair the roof of his barn. Once again, Hans neglects his own responsibilities in order to help his friend.

Finally, the Miller appears one stormy night and asks Hans to fetch the doctor for his young son who has fallen off a ladder. Because the doctor "lives so far away, and it is such a bad night … it would be much better if you went instead of me." He reminds Hans of the promised but still undelivered wheelbarrow, and Hans sets out to find the doctor in the midst of a terrible storm. Although he manages to fetch the doctor, Hans loses his way home. He drowns in a pool of water into which he accidentally stumbles, and his body is discovered the next day. There are many mourners at his funeral, the chief among them being the Miller, who explains that he has experienced a great loss—he no longer has a way to dispose of his broken-down wheelbarrow.

"The Remarkable Rocket"

A variety of fireworks have been assembled for the celebration of a royal marriage. Principal among them is a very conceited rocket that speaks "with a very slow, distinct voice, as if he was dictating his memoirs." He explains that he is "a very remarkable Rocket, and come of remarkable parents." He observes that the king's son is lucky to be married on the same day he will be let off and boasts that he knows no equal: "The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated." Moreover, he expects to be the center of everyone's attention:

I am always thinking about myself, and I expect everybody else to do the same. That is what is called sympathy. It is a beautiful virtue, and I possess it in a high degree.

The Rocket is so moved by his own magnificence that he bursts into tears and becomes so wet that he cannot be used when it is his turn to be let off. All the other fireworks are a great success, but the Rocket is discarded as refuse. His vanity is so great, however, that he cannot recognize what has happened to him. When workmen come to throw him away, he pretends that they are an official deputation which he must receive with "becoming dignity," and he looks more supercilious than ever. And when he is thrown into a mud puddle, he decides that it must be "some fashionable watering-place, and they have sent me to recruit my health. My nerves are certainly very much shattered, and I require rest."

Eventually he is seized upon by a couple of boys who are looking for kindling. They lay him on their fire, but he is so wet that he does not go off until after they have fallen asleep. As he finally shoots into the sky, he succeeds in frightening a goose. Vain and silly to the end, he observes, as he goes out, "I knew I should create a great sensation."

"The Young King"

A young princess secretly marries a "young man of marvelous and foreign beauty" and has a child by him. She dies shortly thereafter, and the child is raised in the forest by a peasant and his wife. Sixteen years later, the king sends for the child, his grandson, so that he can acknowledge him as his heir.

The story begins on the eve of the young king's coronation. We are told that he has "a strange passion for beauty"; when he sees beautiful jewels and fine fabrics, he reveals a "fierce joy." "Like one who was seeking to find in beauty an anodyne from pain, a sort of restoration from sickness," the young king seems to have abandoned himself to the worship of physical splendor:

It was said that a stout Burgomaster … had caught sight of him kneeling in real adoration before a great picture that had just been brought from Venice, and that seemed to herald the worship of some new gods. On another occasion he had been missed for several hours, and after a lengthened search had been discovered in a little chamber in one of the northern turrets of the palace gazing, as one in a trance, at a Greek gem carved with the figure of Adonis.

At midnight, he goes to sleep, and he dreams three dreams. In his first dream, he sees gaunt and haggard weavers working at their looms. He is told:

In war … the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tred out the grapes, and another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.

To his horror, the young king then discovers that these workers are intent upon weaving the robe that he is supposed to wear at his coronation. He wakes, but soon dreams again.

In his second dream, the young king finds himself upon a galley pulled by slaves. They reach a small bay, and the youngest of the slaves is seized upon by the overseers. His ears and his nose are filled with wax, a large stone is tied around his waist, and he is sent into the sea in order to search for pearls. He dives many times, and each time he comes to the surface, he brings with him a beautiful pearl:

Then the diver came up for the last time, and the pearl that he brought with him was fairer than all the pearls of Ormuz, for it was shaped like the full moon, and whiter than the morning star. But his face was strangely pale, and as he fell upon the deck the blood gushed from his ears and nostrils. He quivered for a little, and then he was still.

The slave's body is thrown overboard, and the master of the galley laughs. Examining the pearl, he announces that it shall be set into the scepter of the young king. The young king cries out in his sleep; he wakes, but soon begins to dream again.

In his third and final dream, the young king finds himself in a dim wood "hung with strange fruits and beautiful poisonous flowers." He comes upon a great crowd of men toiling in a dried-up river bed. He watches as they all die. "And out of the bottom of the valley crept dragons and horrible things with scales, and the jackals came trotting along the sand, sniffing up the air with their nostrils." The young king weeps and asks what the men had been searching for. He is told by a pilgrim that the men had been digging for rubies for the crown of a king. "For what king?" he asks. And he is handed a mirror in which he sees his own face.

When he wakes from this dream it is morning. His robe, scepter, and crown are brought in to him so that he may ready himself for his coronation. But remembering his dreams, he tells the assembled lords, "Take these things away, for I will not wear them." He bathes himself in clear water and dons the simple clothes he had worn in the forest. For his scepter he takes out a rude shepherd's staff, and for his crown he wears a spray of wild briar.

He leaves the palace and makes his way toward the cathedral. Along the way he is jeered by the crowd, and when he arrives at the cathedral, the bishop urges him to return to the palace and "put on raiment that beseemeth a king." The young king responds by kneeling before an image of Christ and bowing his head in prayer.

At this moment, a group of nobles breaks into the cathedral with drawn swords. "Where is this dreamer of dreams," they cry, determined to slay the young king for bringing shame upon the state. The young king rises up at the foot of the altar in order to meet them.

And lo! through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him, and the sunbeams wove around him a tissue that was fairer than the robe that had been fashioned for his pleasure. The dead staff blossomed, and bare lilies that were whiter than pearls. The dry thorn blossomed, and bare roses that were redder than rubies…. He stood there in the raiment of a king, and the gates of the jeweled shrine flew open, and from the crystal of the many-rayed monstrance shone a marvelous and mystical light. He stood there in the king's raiment, and the glory of God filled the place, and the saints in their cavern niches seemed to move.

The people fall down upon their knees in awe, and the bishop declares, "A greater than I hath crowned thee."

"The Birthday of the Infanta"

A great celebration has been organized in honor of the twelfth birthday of the Infanta, the daughter of the King of Spain. Sitting on a "gilt and ivory chair" in a "long pavilion of purple silk," she is entertained by a tight-rope walker, a magician, and a puppet show. The climax of the festivities, however, is a dance performed by a horribly grotesque dwarf who is unconscious of his own deformities:

When the children laughed, he laughed as freely and as joyously as any of them, and at the close of each dance he made them each the funniest of bows, smiling and nodding at them just as if he were really one of themselves, and not a little misshapen thing that Nature, in some humorous mood, had fashioned for others to mock at.

The Infanta is fascinated by him, and at the conclusion of his performance she throws to him a beautiful white rose that had adorned her hair. She commands that the dwarf dance for her again after she takes her siesta.

The dwarf believes that the Infanta must love him, and he runs around the palace garden filled with the hope that she will come and live with him in the forest. Impatient to see her again, the dwarf decides to look for her in the palace. He wanders through a series of rooms, each more beautiful than the last, until he enters a room with a large mirror—something that he had never previously seen. He does not realize, at first, that he is gazing at his own reflection, but thinks that the creature he sees staring at him is "the most grotesque monster he had ever seen." When he finally understands that he is looking at his own self, he falls sobbing to the floor. Self-discovery has led to despair. He now knows that "it is at him that all the children had been laughing, and the little Princess who he had thought loved him—she too had been merely mocking at his ugliness, and making merry over his twisted limbs."

The Infanta enters the room and sees the dwarf "lying on the ground and beating the floor with his clenched hands, in the most fantastic and exaggerated manner." She laughs and applauds, pronouncing his acting to be even funnier than his dancing.

Suddenly the dwarf gives a curious gasp and becomes perfectly still. The Infanta is very much annoyed that the show has stopped. The dwarf, we learn, has died of a broken heart. The Infanta frowns and commands: "For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts."

"The Fisherman and His Soul"

A young fisherman catches a mermaid in his net one day. She is so beautiful that he falls in love with her. He agrees to set her free on condition that she come and sing to him whenever he calls.

Every evening after that, the mermaid rises out of the water and sings to the fisherman so beautifully that his nets are always full, for the fish are enchanted by her song. As the days go by, however, the fisherman neglects his nets, for he comes to care for nothing but the mermaid. He begs her to marry him, but she replies: "Thou hast a human soul…. If only thou wouldst send away thy soul, then could I love thee."

The fisherman decides to do just that. "Of what use is my soul to me?" he asks himself. "I cannot see it. I may not touch it. I do not know it." He consults the local priest as to how he may lose his soul, and the priest sends him away, telling him that there is "no thing more precious than a human soul" and that he is mad to want to part from his. The fisherman then tries to sell his soul to the merchants gathered in the marketplace, but they show no interest. "Of what use is a man's soul to us?" they ask. "It is not worth a clipped piece of silver."

But the fisherman then remembers that there is a witch who lives in a cave near the shore. He forces her to help him lose his soul. She pleads "Ask me anything but that!" but ultimately gives him a special knife, and tells him that if he stands with his back to the moon and tells his soul to leave him as he cuts his shadow from around his feet, he will have his wish.

The fisherman's soul begs to be allowed to dwell within him. When the fisherman refuses, his soul says to him:

If indeed thou must drive me from thee, send me not forth without a heart. The world is cruel, give me thy heart to take with me.

But the fisherman responds that his heart belongs to the mermaid. He cuts his shadow from around his feet, and his soul rises up before him, telling him, "Once every year I will come to this place, and call to thee." The fisherman responds by plunging into the sea, where he is embraced by the mermaid.

After a year has gone by, the soul comes down to the shore and calls to the fisherman. It tells him of its adventures during the past year—how it had traveled to the East and found there the Mirror of Wisdom, stolen it from the temple in which it had rested, and preserved it in a secret place. "Suffer me to enter into thee, and none will be as wise as thou." But the fisherman replies, "Love is better than Wisdom," and returns to the mermaid.

After the second year is over, the soul returns to the fisherman and tells him how it has traveled to the south, where it has discovered the Ring of Riches. If the fisherman will come out of the sea and rejoin his soul, then he will be richer than all the kings of the world. But the fisherman responds, "Love is better than Riches." And once again the soul goes off alone.

After the third year, however, the soul tempts the fisherman with beauty. It tells him of a marvelous dancing girl, and remembering that the mermaid cannot dance, the fisherman leaves the sea. He says to himself: "It is but a day's journey, and I can return to my love."

The soul then leads the fisherman on a long journey. On the first day it commands him to steal a silver cup from a booth in a bazaar; on the second day it demands that he strike a young child, and on the third day it tempts him to slay a merchant who has given him hospitality. The fisherman does what he is told to do, but he does not like it. He asks his soul why it has made him do these things. And the soul tells him: "When thou didst send me forth into the world thou gavest me no heart, so I learned to do all these things and love them."

The fisherman realizes that his soul has become evil, and he vows to bind his hands and seal his lips, if necessary, to keep from doing the soul's bidding. He returns to the seashore and calls to the mermaid, but she does not answer. Although his soul continues to tempt him, first with the pleasure of evil and then with the power of good, the fisherman stays by the water's edge, where he calls to the mermaid every day. Eventually, the mermaid's body is washed up on the shore, causing the fisherman's heart to break. Through this break, the soul is able to enter once again into him. And in the morning, the fisherman is found dead on the beach with the body of the mermaid in his arms.

The priest declares that the fisherman has been slain by God's judgment, and he orders that his body and the body of the mermaid be buried in a desolate field. From the ground in which they are buried, there spring strangely beautiful flowers that, when they are used to decorate the altar, inspire the priest to speak "not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love." Although the flowers never bloom again, the priest has learned to be more forgiving. He goes to the sea "and blessed the sea and all the wild things that are in it." As the story ends, we are told, "All the things in God's world he blessed, and the people were filled with joy and wonder."

"The Star Child"

Two woodcutters are making their way home through the forest on a bitterly cold night. They see a star fall nearby and rush to it in the hope of discovering a pot of gold. But when they arrive on the spot, they find not gold but a small child wrapped in gold cloth. One woodcutter argues that the child should be left to die, as they are both too poor to raise it. But his companion argues that this would be evil, and he brings the child to his home and gives it food that might otherwise have fed his own children.

The Star Child, as he comes to be called, grows into a thoroughly mean and selfish but incredibly beautiful boy who sticks reeds into the eyes of animals and throws stones at beggars. One day, when he is ten years old, there comes to the village a beggar woman who recognizes him as her own child. Although she is able to prove that she is indeed his mother, she is scorned by the Star Child, who tells her: "I am no son of thine, for thou art a beggar, and ugly, and in rags." He insists that she leave him alone and refuses to kiss her when she agrees to leave, saying that he would sooner kiss a toad or an adder.

The woman leaves the village, and the Star Child rejoins his companions. The other boys in the village now refuse to play with him, however, because he has suddenly become "as foul as the toad, and as loathsome as the adder." When he sees his reflection in a well, the Star Child realizes that he has been physically transformed as a punishment for his sin. He vows to wander the world over in order to search for his mother and to beg for her forgiveness.

For three years he wanders without finding "love nor loving-kindness nor charity … but it was even such a world as he had made for himself in the days of his great pride." One evening, he comes to the gates of a city, and the soldiers who are standing guard there sell him as a slave to an old man who proves to be an evil magician.

The magician brings the Star Child to his home and locks him in the dungeon. In the morning, he tells the child to go to the forest; hidden there are three pieces of gold, one red, one yellow, and one white. The magician orders the boy to bring him the piece of white gold, telling him that he will be whipped if he fails to do as he has been told.

The Star Child searches all over the forest, but he cannot find the piece of gold. At sunset, however, he discovers a hare caught in a hunter's trap. He takes pity on it and sets it free. "Surely thou hast given me freedom," says the hare, "and what shall I give thee in return?" The Star Child tells the hare of his quest for the white gold, and the hare is able to lead the boy directly to it.

The Star Child makes his way back to the city, delighted that he will be able to please his master. But at the city gates he meets a leper who says, "Give me a piece of money, or I must die of hunger." The boy takes pity on the leper and gives him the piece of gold. When he returns to his master emptyhanded, he is beaten and thrust unfed back into the dungeon.

In the morning, the magician comes to him and tells him to go back to the forest for the piece of yellow gold. Once again the Star Child searches in vain all day, and once again he is led to the gold by the hare at sunset. Upon his return to the city, he once again takes pity on the leper, who waits at the city gates, and the boy gives him his piece of gold. When he returns to the magician, he is beaten and loaded with heavy chains.

The next day, the magician commands the boy to return to the forest and bring to him the piece of red gold hidden there, vowing to set him free if he does so but to slay him if he fails. The hare once again leads the child to the piece of gold, and once again the boy gives it to the leper.

But now that he has shown charity for the third time, a great change takes place. The Star Child recovers his physical beauty, and the people of the city bow down before him. He is led to the palace of a king, and the priests and high officers of the city proclaim: "Thou art our lord for whom we have been waiting, and the son of our King."

The Star Child denies that he is the son of a king, and he argues that he is unworthy to rule the city because he had denied his own mother. At this moment he sees his mother standing in the crowd beside the leper he had helped. He kneels down at his mother's feet, and washes them with his tears, as he prays:

Mother, I denied thee in the hour of my pride. Accept me in the hour of my humility. Mother, I gave thee hatred. Do thou give me love. Mother, I rejected thee. Receive thy child now.

His mother and the leper both bid him to rise. And when he does so, he sees that they are truly a king and queen. They lead him into the palace, where he is crowned, and until his death, he rules over the city with wisdom and justice.

It is readily apparent that these stories advocate a consistently moral point of view. Each is designed to reveal the ugliness of a particular vice or the beauty of a particular virtue. Selfishness ("The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Selfish Giant," "The Devoted Friend" ), vanity ("The Remarkable Rocket," "The Star Child" ), heartlessness ("The Birthday of the Infanta," "The Fisherman and His Soul" ), and self-indulgence ("The Young King" ) are all shown to be wrong. It we wish to find redemption from these sins, we must learn to be more open and generous. Like the Selfish Giant, we must break down the walls with which we surround ourselves; like the Happy Prince and the Star Child, we should give of ourselves even if it hurts.

The Happy Prince is called "happy" only because he lived his life in isolation from his fellow man and thus knows nothing of suffering. Like the Spanish Infanta (or the young king before his redemption), he has lived entirely within his palace and its grounds. It is only after he is dead that he realizes an important truth: "more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and women. There is no Mystery so great as suffering." Story after story emphasizes that it is wrong to close one's eyes to this suffering, and we find within them a growing concern for the poor. In the early stories, the poor tend to be vaguely picturesque—in "The Happy Prince," for example, the first two beneficiaries of the statue's generosity are both artists of a sort: a seamstress "embroidering passion-flowers on a satin gown" and a playwright living in a garret. But by the second volume of stories, Wilde has extended his sympathy to workers, slaves, lepers, and dwarfs.

Wilde argues that our values are misplaced. One of his most prevalent themes is that beauty, art, and wealth have little importance. Throughout "The Happy Prince," our sympathies are entirely with the statue and the swallow; Wilde shows that the precious stones and gold leaf that make the statue aesthetically pleasing are valuable only insofar as they may help to relieve the misery of men. Beauty that serves no higher purpose is apt to be corrupting, as we see in three other stories: "The Young King," "The Star Child" and "The Birthday of the Infanta."

When we first meet the young king, with his "strange passion for beauty," he seems given over to a life of sensual gratification. He is sprawled out "on the soft cushions of his embroidered couch, lying there, wild-eyed and open mouthed." As we watch him worship "a Greek gem carved with the figure of Adonis," escorted by a bevy of "slim, fair-haired Court pages," it seems likely that he will become as corrupt as Dorian Gray. But he learns, through his dreams, that the luxuries that adorn his palace could not exist were it not for human suffering. Although his robe, crown, and scepter are "more beautiful … than aught he had ever seen," he finds his redemption in their denial.

The Star Child is also saved from a vain obsession with beauty, in this case his own. We are told early in the story that "every year he became more beautiful to look at…. Yet his beauty did him evil. For he grew proud, and cruel, and selfish." It is only after he loses his beauty that he is capable of repenting for what he has done. Self-denial leads, once again, to the emergence of a better self.

In "The Birthday of the Infanta," however, the principle character remains unredeemed. Although of all the "slim Spanish children … the Infanta was the most graceful of all," she is, at the end of her story, more heartless than ever, curling her lips with "pretty disdain" as she watches the death of one who had loved her. Our sympathy is with the ugly dwarf, and we come to see that there is something corrupt in the heavy beauty of the Spanish court, where even nature seems artificial and overwrought:

The purple butterflies fluttered about with gold dust on their wings … the pomegranates split and cracked with the heat, and showed their bleeding red hearts. Even the pale yellow lemons, that hung in such profusion from the mouldering trellis and along the dim arcades, seemed to have caught a richer colour … and the magnolia trees opened their great globe-like blossoms of folded ivory, and filled the air with a sweet heavy perfume.

There is something almost sinful about this garden; the key words in its description—"split," "cracked," "heat," "bleeding," "pale," "mouldering," "dim," "sweet," and "heavy"—all suggest a world that is over-ripe or over-tired.

The dwarf stands in sharp contrast to the artificiality of the court. His element is nature:

For though he had never been in a palace before, he knew a great many wonderful things. He could make little cages out of rushes for the grasshoppers to sing in, and fashion the long-jointed bamboo into the pipe that Pan loves to hear. He knew the cry of every bird…. He knew the trail of every animal.

There can be no question but that we are meant to prefer the dwarf and his world, to the Infanta and her court. And we find here another of the themes that link Wilde's stories together: the superiority of the natural over the artificial.

Of course, it must be admitted that Wilde's conception of nature is highly fanciful, populated as it is with mermaids, fauns, anthropomorphic animals, and sentimentally inclined birds. Nonetheless, a surprising number of the fairy tales reveal sympathy for what Wilde calls "the wild things." In "The Fisherman and His Soul," for example, the priest is redeemed when he comes to accept all "the pagan things God suffers to wander through His world." Early in the story, he condemns the wild because it threatens him:

Accursed be the Fauns of the woodland, and accursed be the singers of the sea! I have heard them at night-time, and they have sought to lure me from my beads. They tap at the window, and laugh. They whisper into my ears the tale of their perilous joys. They tempt me with temptations, and when I would pray they make mouths at me. They are lost…. For them there is no heaven nor hell, and in neither shall they praise God's name.

But at the end of the story, he is inspired by flowers he has never seen before and "spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love." He blesses the fauns "and the little things that dance in the woodland, and the bright-eyed things that peer through the leaves" filling the people with "joy and wonder." He has learned, in short, that God can be found in all His creations.

We find a comparable association between God and nature in "The Young King." Redemption is signaled when the young king dons the simple clothes he had worn in the forest. After his transfiguration in the cathedral, "no man dared look upon his face, for it was like the face of an angel." And when the wild briar with which he has been crowned bursts into bloom, the roses are redder than rubies, and "whiter than fine pearls were the lilies."

Wilde's reference to "the God whose name is Love" is characteristic. During the years in which he wrote these stories, Wilde was becoming increasingly interested—as one of his best biographers has observed—"in the personality of Jesus Christ, an interest which increased every year until at length he almost identified himself with Christ and often spoke in parables."¹ Christ appears only once in the stories—in "The Selfish Giant." But the themes we have detected in the stories as a whole—the importance of charity, tolerance, and love—may be seen as a reflection of Wilde's growing interest in Christianity.

But Wilde's attitude towards love is complex. It figures prominently in many of the stories, and it is recognized as an important virtue. On the other hand, it is frequently associated with pain. When the Selfish Giant meets the Christ child, he is told that His wounds are "the wounds of Love." The nightingale suffers a prolonged and painful death for the sake of love, but this proves that her sacrifice is in vain. The swallow's love for the Happy Prince leads it to die at his feet, prompting the statue's heart to break in two. After he falls in love with the Infanta, the dwarf dies of a broken heart. And in "The Fisherman and His Soul," the mermaid dies after she is abandoned by the fisherman, and the fisherman dies of grief after he discovers her body.

Wilde's ambivalence toward love may be related to his ambivalence toward women. Many of the women in these stories are portrayed as incapable of love. In "The Happy Prince," a young man tries to speak to his love of the stars; she responds by saying, "I hope my dress will be ready in time for the State-ball." The girl who demands a red rose in "The Nightingale and the Rose" cannot recognize its value when it is presented to her. The Spanish Infanta demands, "Let those who come to play with me have no hearts." And the mermaid makes her love conditional upon the fisherman giving up his soul. It may be no accident that Wilde's most attractive characters—the Happy Prince, the Selfish Giant, little Hans, the young king, and the Star Child—are all bachelors.

It must be acknowledged that, despite their strong moral content, many of Wilde's fairy tales have an underside that is distinctly unnerving. This is most clearly evident in their conclusions: Wilde often goes out of his way to warm us that, even in fairy tales, it is hard to live happily ever after. Consider, for example, the conclusion of "The Star Child." The story seems headed for a happy ending; the Star Child has been rewarded for his self-denial. The second to last paragraph sees him become a prince. Moreover:

Much justice and mercy did he show to all, and the evil Magician he banished, and to the Woodcutter and his wife he sent many rich gifts, and to their children he gave high honour. Nor would he suffer any to be cruel to bird or beast, but taught love and loving-kindness and charity, and to the poor he gave bread, and to the maked he gave raiment, and there was peace and plenty in the land.

A more conventional tale would conclude at this point. But Wilde adds one more paragraph:

Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.

"The Fisherman and His Soul" ends with a similar retreat. After the priest has blessed the sea and filled the people with "joy and wonder," we expect the story to conclude on an affirmative note. But the last two lines emphasize defeat:

Yet never again in the corner of the Fuller's Field grew flowers of any kind, but the field remained barren even as before. Nor came the Sea-folk into the bay as they had been wont to do, for they went to another part of the sea.

It is impossible to overlook the sense of failure that permeates these stories. In "The Remarkable Rocket," failure is treated comically—we feel that the rocket deserves to fail because it had been so vain and silly. But this is an exception; for the most part, we regret the way in which essentially sympathetic characters are defeated before the story is over.

Almost invariably, the character with whom we have been encouraged to sympathize is eventually dispatched by the author's pen. The swallow in "The Happy Prince," the nightingale in "The Nightingale and the Rose," little Hans in "The Devoted Friend," the dwarf in "The Birthday of the Infanta," and the Star Child in the story that bears his name are all allowed to die. Occasionally, the virtuous are rewarded in a life after death, as in "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant." But in other stories, death seems to be triumphant, and the virtuous disappear, leaving only cruelty in their stead, as in "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Devoted Friend," "The Birthday of the Infanta," and "The Star Child."

Resolutions of this sort make it clear that Wilde was not writing for the entertainment of children. Although they are filled with types of characters that would be familiar to children from more traditional fairy tales—kings and dwarfs, woodcutters and giants, magicians and talking animals—most of these stories are likely to depress young readers.

That Wilde was writing for an adult audience is also suggested by his prose style; it becomes increasingly ornate in A House of Pomegranates, making the stories, according to Yeats, "over decorated and seldom amusing."² Few children are likely to care that the young king admires an antique statue "inscribed with the name of the Bithynian slave of Hadrian," or that the throne room of the Spanish king includes "a black ebony cabinet, inlaid with plates of ivory, on which the figures from Holbein's Dance of Death had been graved." Indeed, even an adult audience may be forgiven for feeling that Wilde's lengthy descriptions of jewels, flowers, clothes, and furniture is sometimes a bit excessive.

Finally, the question of audience is raised by the humor of these stories, humor that is frequently satirical, especially when it comments on the manners and conventions of the society in which Wilde moved. In "The Devoted Friend," a duck counsels her children, "You will never be in the best society unless you can stand on your heads." When the swallow has an affair with a reed in "The Happy Prince," the other birds are indignant: "She has no money, and far too many relations; and indeed the river was quite full of Reeds." In "The Remarkable Rocket," a frog observes, "Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions." And the rocket itself may be seen as a parody of the dandylike pose Wilde himself often affected. It complains that it finds itself living it a neighborhood that is "essentially suburban" and defends its lack of accomplishment on the grounds that "hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do." While not especially subtle, humor of this sort is still too complex to be readily understood by children.

When asked by a hostile reviewer if he considered A House of Pomegranates suitable for children, Wilde responded: "I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public."³ And this points to the chief problem with these stories. Too sophisticated for children and too contrived for adults, they suffer from an inadequately defined sense of audience. In expecting his tales to be both amusing and edifying, sensuously evocative and morally resolute, Wilde expected them to do too much. Had he made them either simpler or more consistently ironic, the result might have been more satisfying. But even if they do not reveal Wilde at his best, these stories should not be dismissed lightly. Offering much evidence of ethical concerns, they make it clear that Wilde was no simple decadent.

Notes

1. Pearson, pp. 120-121.

2. Quoted by Edouard Roditi, in Oscar Wilde (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1947), p. 71.

3. Letters, p. 302.

Elizabeth Goodenough (essay date September 1999)

SOURCE: Goodenough, Elizabeth. "Oscar Wilde, Victorian Fairy Tales, and the Meanings of Atonement." Lion and the Unicorn 23, no. 3 (September 1999): 336-54.

[In the following essay, Goodenough suggests that Wilde's fairy tales in The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates are evocative of the Victorian sensibilities of religious atonement and Christian belief.]

What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr.

                   (Søren Kierkegaard, 1813–1855)

But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character.

                     (Albert Schweitzer, 1875–1965)

In 1889 W. B. Yeats was invited to the Wildes's house at Chelsea. The young poet, whose Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) was reviewed that year by Wilde, was asked by Oscar to tell his son a fairy tale. Yeats got as far as "Once upon a time there was a giant," when the little boy ran screaming out of the room. "Wilde looked grave and I was plunged into the shame of clumsiness," the poet recalled in his autobiography (91). This act of storytelling seduction that backfired dramatizes how the verbal formulas of adults can pale before the authorial divinity of the very young. Even as they conjure ghosts of the punitive father, such sensitive listeners seem to determine the fate of adult words at their moment of utterance. As William Blake's Songs suggest, the literal-minded innocent can be a creative visionary as well. "Children are never earnest in the way that adults are," Dusinberre states, which is why they became Wilde's most explosive weapon in attacking Victorian earnestness (261). The self-authorizing world of children, like the self-referential work of art, embodied Wilde's esthetic credo that "[i]t is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors" (17) and that self-realization is the aim of life.

Yeats was mortified as a storyteller, but his fairy-tale incantation worked like a charm in making the hidden bogeys of childhood visible. Like the inner tyrant of retributive justice, the terrors of a grown-up, a semi-divine monster moving on legs, is well-known to small children and their nightmares. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, an intellectual fascination with the irrational and unconscious mind catalyzed a variety of linguistic rituals, esoteric doctrines, and literary alchemies. As Alex Owen has shown, the suggestive power of magic, like the supersensual, paranormal, and occult phenomena attractive to Wilde's circle, anticipated psychoanalysis as an avant garde mode of self-realization and the "inward-looking spirituality" of C. G. Jung. In 1892 Yeats, who like Wilde's wife was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Door, declared in a letter to John O'Leary that "[i]f I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word" (211). For Wilde, another verbal wizard, magic was not the art of covering things up but the act of embodying secrets of the self. Feminist criticism has examined the way women writers of the nineteenth century (Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Perkins Gilman) used Gothic elements to express subversive female feelings (rage, sexual desire, reproductive dread). Less attention has been paid to the way Victorian fairy tales blend sensual imagery, physical abandon, and corporeal suffering to explore the mysteries of atonement.

John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, A. E. Housman, E. Nesbit, and Kenneth Grahame all wrote magical tales, just as Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, T. S. Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning invoked, in a variety of genres, the figure of Christ. But oral wonder tales by George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, and Oscar Wilde recast the gendered and generational stereotypes of religious authority in the Victorian period. Unlike the lengthy German "liberal lives" of Jesus, which proliferated from scholarly presses of the 1860s, these works were brief and spoke directly to the need to find a new human Christ implicit in Mary Arnold Ward's enormously popular Robert Elsmere (1888). In the widespread speculation of Victorians about the personality and divinity of Jesus may be glimpsed tensions inherent in Christology since the pre-Nicene church regarding the problem of post-baptismal sin. Whether the body of Christ was conceived as the bestower of all divine good or the supreme sacrifice for our sins, opposing views of his efficacy developed early in church history and spawned competing, though sometimes overlapping, meanings of atonement: repentance as change of life or the work of penance.¹ How the lapsed could find salvation—by changing their mind or that of God, by meritorious works, or by grace, faith, love, friendship, prayer, suffering, or art—became for Rossetti, MacDonald, and Wilde an intense inner question that inspired their fantasy. Tapping realities that could not be approached through the logic of a sermon or a novel, archetypal fairy tales by these three writers revitalized Christianity with energies of the body suppressed in the dominant culture. In an immaterial space somewhere between Calvinism, Catholicism, and the Church of England, a Scots "stickit" minister without a pulpit, a woman poet who rejected the call of the cloister, and the Irish nephew of three clergymen who aspired to write "the Epic of the Cross" established unorthodox ministries through radical fairy tales that have now transcended their communal meaning.

At the end of the twentieth century these works of narrative fantasy endure not only as popular children's texts but as tales of transformation for adults who seek through mainstream churches, identity politics, and New Age therapies to connect the creative spirit of the inner Child and feminist and gay liberation with religious faith. In the case of Wilde, this appropriation is especially striking since a century ago his Salome, the "Ur-nymphet" or "paedophile's femme fatale" of recent criticism, created such a stir in London with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role that the play was banned for portraying biblical characters on stage (Hutcheon 19). The 1998 Anglican Digest, however, recommends as "gems of Christian literature" the "children's stories" of Oscar Wilde, "one of the most fascinating figures of the nineteenth century"—"a must, not only for your children or grandchildren" (10). Wilde's once iconoclastic creeds now undergird a wide body of literature connecting faith with fiction in conservative and mainstream religious circles that look to the arts to "incarnate our experience of mystery, wonder and awe" and to "aid us to encounter the holy or sacred" in "the original vision" of embodied childhood (3). While writers like Woolf and Hemingway undermined a Godlike authorship in their fiction, contemporary novelists like Tim O'Brien in "The Lives of the Dead" (1990)² and Frederick Buechner in The Wizard's Tide (1987) illustrate how telling stories for a child within—oneself or an imagined other—can save us. As Buechner explains in his 1991 memoir, retelling the tale of his father's suicide "in language a child could understand" and reliving it "for that child and as that child" released him from the spiritual dungeon of his fifties (34).

The Romantic revaluation of childhood epitomized in William Wordsworth's paradox that "The Child is father of the Man" prefigures the sacred privilege of juvenile readers in the Victorian period, the Jungian archetypes of Christ and the child, MacDonald's reverence for the Childlike, and Rossetti's seductive nursery lyrics. Like Dickens's angelic girls, Wilde's injured boys and helpless "wee folk" have become a powerful trope of "post-traumatic culture," suggesting how homeless and fatally abused children in the media indict a ruthless economic system (Kirby 132). At the same time Wilde, who wore a crucifix on his chest as he died, struggled to define something about himself through claiming the godlike inspiration of a first-century Jew. How Wilde identified with the prophet who came as a child, melted people's hearts, and was reviled and crucified illustrates, like Yeats's anecdote, the profit and peril of traipsing backwards to that distant uncharted borderland where words are first beginning to establish meaning on the tongue.

"The mind of a child is a great mystery … who shall divine it, or bring it its own peculiar delights?" Wilde remarked to Richard Le Gallienne about fairy tales. Before it "You humbly spread … the treasures of your imagination, and they are as dross" (252). Sanctifying and flirting with this impressionable subject beyond the generation gap, he embraced the Shavian irony that youth is wasted on the young. A flagrant cross-writer, he ignored conventional boundaries between juvenile and adult literature when he spun out two volumes of literary fairy tales in the 1880s and early 1890s, persuading many like Swinburne that turn-of-the-century writing for children—works like Graham's The Golden Age (1895) and E. Nesbit's Bastable stories—provided the best reading for adults. But when asked by a reviewer about the "suitability" for the young of A House of Pomegranates (1891), Wilde remarked in a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, "I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public" (301).

Less catechetical than casuistical, Oscar Wilde claimed at his trial that "I rarely think that anything I write is true." Although slighted until gay studies reenergized Wilde criticism, his nine fairy tales, written while he wrote The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) and tasted both fatherhood and homosexual experience for the first time, are pivotal in understanding the consistency of Wilde's moral and aesthetic philosophy. Just as the ironic wit of The Decay of Lying rehabilitated fiction, the beautiful boy and the enchanted but "safe" turf of children's fantasy articulated Wilde's vision of pain as the redemptive heart of life. The doctrine of physical anguish and self-giving developed in "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Happy Prince," "The Young King," "The Fisherman and His Soul," and "The Star Child" prefigures his later ennoblement of suffering as "the supreme emotion" in De Profundis and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

Wilde's unorthodox mingling of spirituality and sensuality, framed in moral guise, turned the Evangelical on its head in a darker, more disturbing way than MacDonald and Rossetti had done. Celebrating self-discovery and transformation over self-denial and obedience, he proclaimed in "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" that "[t]he first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible" (1205). Blending biblical language with homoerotic imagery and Protestant discourses of heroic martyrdom, subverting the Victorian pathos of broken hearts and the cult of dying children, his tales are strikingly sad and graphic portrayals of expiation and renunciation, failure and death. Motifs of nakedness, penetration, piercing and wounding illuminate the perception of his own later extremity of hurt as a Tiger of Experience. Like childhood's "moments of being" that Virginia Woolf claimed as the basis of her creative life, the terrible shocks received in prison were ultimately viewed by Wilde as Blakean auguries, moments of searing revelation and visionary intensity. The face of the trooper Woolridge, hanged in Reading Gaol, Wilde said, would "haunt me till I die" (Ellman 533). Although they may be read like Rossetti's and MacDonald's tales as an alternative religious discourse, or what Ellman calls "sacraments of a lost faith" (299), Wilde's fairy tales also reveal why the child embodied the creative spring of his tragic sense of life. From this imaginative construct, he drew not only his flamboyant style and fatal boyish lover, but also his figure of Christ and the social conscience that compelled him to write on behalf of incarcerated juveniles. The Wildean child finally explains the mythologizing of his own public shaming and affliction in prison as a discovery of his Soul. "Praise makes me humble," he said, "but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars" (Redman 249).

"At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be," Wilde wrote in De Profundis (922). Not surprisingly, the sadness and grief of the fairy tales, which launched his great years of creative production, have been read as allegories of homosexual oppression. Why, for example, does "The Star Child" end on such a gratuitously melancholy note: "Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly" (284). "Was some deep tragic and prophetic instinct urging Oscar to anticipate the mere three years he himself was to live after his 'bitter' testing in prison?" Gary Schmidgall asks in The Stranger Wilde (148). Elucidating the tales as tragic idylls of the Love that dare not speak its name or wish fulfillment fantasies of gay liberation (158) thus provides a compelling reading of Wilde's spiritual self-portrait of multiple selves. Wilde inscribed The Happy Prince to a special American friend, eleven years his junior: "Faery-stories for one who lives in Faery-Land" (Schmidgall 154). Presupposing the author's inner circle of gay male readers illuminates the existential estrangement pervading these wintry tales as well as the warm valedictory kisses that liberate and transform such odd couples as the happy prince and swallow, the fisherman and his mermaid. But while the homosexual subtext in Wilde's other experiments in popular subgenres crackles with insouciant drawing room wit and urbane double entendres, the tension between child and adult reader and the presence of the child as auditor or observer in the fairy tales lend gravity to these works that deepen their resonance beyond the recovery of erotic messages from London's fin de siècle gay subculture.

Moreover, modern conceptions and analyses of sexuality, usually framed in secular contexts, may overlook why intense identification, or at-one-ment, with another person is so compellingly embodied in Wilde. Accused at his 1895 trial of "acts of gross indecency with another male person" (Hyde, Trials 1179), he eloquently defended the "deep, spiritual affection" between an elder and a younger man as the noblest of human attachments, "such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare." Wilde's brilliance in reviving the "idiom of Greek ideality" does not just signify, as Linda Dowling points out, a triumph of Victorian Hellenism and the seizing of a new vocabulary for "an epistemological space that would soon enough … be reconquered in the name of new clinical or psychiatric languages of sexual pathology" (3). Wilde, Ellman argues, was convicted for sexual acts that Douglas actually committed. His passionate apology for same-sex love while on trial was based on the enlargement of human capacities flowing not just from Oxbridge classical ideals and the one-on-one tutorial system but also from the Christian doctrine of atonement and a romanticized Jesus.

Combining these energies steadily undermined the idea of "effeminacy" as corrupt, "vain, luxurious, and selfish," and therefore dangerous as this master term had been used in British civic discourse over the previous two centuries. As Dowling points out, the "protean figure" of the effeminatus in classical republican theory relied not on the gender oppositions of today but on a conception of "aimless and self-regarding egoism" undermining the rights of full citizenship as these were thought to derive in ancient times from the willingness of a single warrior to die "in the name of a community not present on the field of battle" (7). Styling the aesthete as the champion of "purer" Platonic love and male procreancy, Wilde proclaimed at the end of "The Soul of Man under Socialism" that "the new Individualism is the new Hellenism" (1104) and resolved in his prison cell, where he read the Gospels in Greek, that his next work would be a study of Jesus as precursor of the Romantic movement. The prophet of individualism, Christ according to Wilde felt sympathy for mankind in ways that led him to realize "his perfection through pain" (1103).

Comparing miraculous scenes of feeding and corporal rescue in MacDonald and of healing embrace and bodily recovery in Rossetti with scenes of heterodox encounter and isolate injury in Wilde suggests how variously the fairy tale has served a faith whose murdered messiah has never lost his symbolic identity as a child. Nevertheless the choice of this traditional mode with pagan roots as an alternative religious discourse may seem an odd conjoining. Fiction was disdained in the Scots Calvinist ethos where George MacDonald grew up, and in more liberal environments where children's fairy tales still competed with the primer and the moral tale, educated adults influenced by German historical criticism had come to regard Christianity itself anthropologically. Matthew Arnold in his Preface to God and the Bible wrote in 1875, "For us, the God of popular religion is a leg-end, a fairy tale; learned theology has simply taken the fairy tale and dressed it metaphysically." In retrospect, however, it is the empirical and rationalizing trend of nineteenth-century thought—the positivist tendency to make science sacred—that makes fairy stories an attractive form in which to articulate a sacramental world view.

Not only did the use of a presumably less serious and traditional form generate a "willing suspension of disbelief," but this tolerant and looser genre was well-suited to writers reluctant to interpret their own works. In fact MacDonald, Rossetti, and Wilde each seems to have adopted this mode from a need to express a larger, more personal understanding of his or her own gendered spirituality than was available through conventional discourses. Christina Rossetti, for example, was excluded from the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood that her brother founded. When William Holman Hunt used her as a model for "The Light of the World," the painter was reviled by Thomas Carlyle for making Christ "a puir, weak, girl-faced nonentity, bedecked in a fine silken sort of gown" (Zemka 103). A lifelong spinster, she dedicated her life to Anglo-Catholicism and the writing of poetry, much of it devotional, in the Tractarian mode. Working with her sister, an Anglican nun, with prostitutes at the St. Mary Magdalene Home, Rossetti dramatized in "Goblin Market" (1862) the psychological effects of succumbing to temptation. D. M. R. Bentley has conjectured that "Goblin Market" was read, or was written to be read, aloud by the author to an audience of Anglican sisters and fallen women at the House of Charity where Rossetti worked (58). As U. C. Knoepflmacher points out, it is possible to read this work as "an Anglican tract, a lesbian allegory, a feminist manifesto" as well as "a children's book attractive to such major illustrators as Laurence Houseman (1893), Arthur Rackham (1933), and Martin Ware (1980)" (321). As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's study of "Goblin Market" as a "cross-audienced poem" suggests, the work cut through many boundaries from the outset: "it was written for adults; it used the form of the children's fairy tale; and it was about sex" (183). Yet Rossetti claimed that the title work of her first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), which established her reputation in literary London, was simply a fairy tale. In 1904 when her brother William glossed this point, he only maintained that its "incidents are such as to be at any rate suggestive, and different minds may be likely to read different messages into them" (459).

George MacDonald, who said he wrote for "the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five," went further in explaining the spiritual value of tales like The Light Princess (1864) which can't have one meaning. Called a jeu d'esprit by his son Greville (324), this light, even satiric work parodies Sleeping Beauty and anticipates The Waste Land in using the Percival legend to portray the sterility of never connecting with other people. Along with The Golden Key (1867), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), and The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Light Princess has gained today what Jonathan Cott has called a "pop Scriptural status" for a Congregational minister forced to resign his pulpit because of his unorthodox beliefs about salvation. To account for the ongoing appeal of The Light Princess and other tales in 1904, Greville MacDonald recurred to the catechistic method of his father in "The Fantastic Imagination" where the process of "calling up" forgotten materials in writer and reader into "new forms" is given an extra-literary sanction: "When such forms are new embodiments of old truths we call them the product of the Imagination; when they are mere invention, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy." Sanctifying the mind of the maker as well as the "germinal power" of early life enabled the author not to dogmatize his writing. Instead he invited his auditors and readers to awaken and reverence the play of their own minds when he concluded "your meaning may be superior to mine" (317).

Wilde developed this creed of the redemptive power of Imagination by deifying and embodying Art, likening self-realization to atonement. The experience of Russell Hoban, himself a children's writer, might exemplify Wilde's ideal reader. Hoban's memory of the look and feel of A House of Pomegranates, which he discovered at age eight or nine in the family library, exemplifies Terry Eagleton's assertion that "aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body" (13): "a small orange volume with the author's signature stamped in black on the cover … came off the shelf into my hand like magic," Hoban recalls, in a distant space where sunlight flooded his reading on a rose and gold Orientalish carpet (23). He credits "the Wildeness of the prose" in this volume bursting upon him "in widescreen glorious colour" with setting him on the writing road (29). "Enthralled by the language and the brilliance of the images," he responded not only to the sadness of "The Fisherman and His Soul" but also to "the dark stillness and lethal clarity of the mirror in which the dwarf sees himself for the first time in 'The Birthday of the Infanta.' That mirror took me to a place I'd never known before, a place that has stayed with me ever since" (23). This child, a sensory explorer converted to art at the same time that he falls into Experience through the mirror of literature, fulfills Wilde's ultimate agenda: the only way a critic can interpret the personality and work of others is "by an intensification of his own personality": he must treat Art "not as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed … but as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify." Indeed the little boy's "wild" response to Yeats's hackneyed beginning is an exemplum of Wildean art, for Wilde celebrated interpretations that are in their own way "more creative than creation," likening the highest criticism to "the purest form of personal impression."

Developing his own embodied psychology of faerie, J. R. R. Tolkien, a Catholic whose orcs descended from "the goblin tradition" of MacDonald (178), suggested that children's books "like their clothes should allow for growth" and indeed encourage it. But he argued there is no natural connection between the minds of children and fairy stories, and he saw these tales as essentially Christian or as an archetypal version of the Christian (hi)story: among the marvels of the Gospels is "the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe." For Tolkien, fantasy is "the most nearly pure … and so (when achieved) the most potent" form of Art (69), the one that helps us recover what age takes away: the capacity to "be startled anew" (77). The criminal prosecution in which Christ suffered unto blood may be counted a "good catastrophe" only in the "otherworld" setting the fairy tale provides: "a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur" (86). Evangelists, Tolkien argued, are no more the authors of the story of the Resurrection and how it becomes the eucatastrophe of the story of Incarnation than children are the sole or natural audience of these works of fantasy. Establishing the Child as a trope for the soul, Rossetti and MacDonald make happy endings of growing Childlike, bearing children, and the "sense of belonging" intrinsic to early oral tales (Zipes 2), but Wilde depicts the "terrible beauty" of human potential with darker irony, "on that imaginative plane of art where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfillment" (1045). Or as in "The Remarkable Rocket," "The Birthday of the Infanta," and "The Devoted Friend," he shows how the self can be destroyed, its capacity for growth wasted, thwarted, or blighted by egoism or the sadism of others.

Alice in Wonderland (1865), which was given by Charles Dodgson to his friend MacDonald in manuscript to try out on his children, was dubbed by Harvey Darton "the spiritual volcano of children's books" (quoted in Dusinberre 37). But the "directness of such work," inspired by Carroll's eros for little girls, did not encompass in its "liberty of thought" their own carnality. "Goblin Market" and The Light Princess—also tales of fallen females—showed several years before Lewis Carroll's secularizing text the spiritual implications of the female eros. In these tales a young hero and two heroines are saved—not by a magic wand or a prince galloping in or by awakening from a dream—but by the utterly real self-sacrifice of a peer. Yet unlike in Wilde's tales, each case of atonement involves scenes of eucharistic tasting. Unusual sexual overtones arise in these intense moments of bonding and conjure the agony of the addicted. "Curious Laura" regenders Francesco Petrarca's "disastrous passion" as Rossetti described it in The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857–1863): the poet-lover became a "veritable slave of love," "harassed" by "temptations of the flesh" from the moment he "first beheld that incomparable golden-haired Laura" (164). After seeing the Goblin Men, Laura "sucked and sucked and sucked the more/Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,/She sucked until her lips were sore;/Then flung the emptied rines away." Gnashing her teeth "in a passionate yearning," "weeping as if her heart would break," Laura is then tortured by cravings for exotic fruits but is never able to hear the goblin men hawking their wares a second time. Her sister Lizzie, who brings back the fruit as medicine for Laura, defies the goblins, refusing to eat in a violent and graphic scene suggesting rape. But with the syrup running down her face, the pulp smashed to her lips, she rushes back to Laura crying,

     Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
     Squeeezed from goblin fruits for you,
     Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
     Eat me, drink me, love me:
     Laura, make much of me:
     For your sake I have braved the glen
     And had to do with goblin men.

After a hideously painful convalescence in which the antidote acts like poison on Laura, the poem celebrates the power of sisterhood:

     For there is no friend like a sister
     In calm or stormy weather
     To cheer one on the tedious way
     To fetch one if one goes astray
     To lift one if one totters down
     To strengthen whilst one stands.

In The Light Princess a baby cursed by a bad fairy at her christening is deprived of her gravity. The child sails laughingly above the heads of adults, unable to touch ground or feel anything but giddy delight. Even spectacles of human suffering give her "violent hysterics." At seventeen, however, she discovers ecstasy in swimming, especially with the help of a young prince who jumps off cliffs into a lake with the light princess in his arms. The two share a passion for plunging into the warm water and floating together on moonlit nights until the lake begins to dry up—a drought caused by the killjoy wicked fairy. The prince, who has "fallen" for the weightless princess, offers to staunch the flow of the lake with his own body since only a voluntary human sacrifice can reverse the curse. The princess, who just cares about swimming in her lake, falls asleep in a boat while the young prince awaits death by drowning. At his request, she offers him biscuit, wine, and then a "long, sweet, cold kiss" before he goes under. But as the bubbles of his last breath break on the water, she "gives a shriek," springs into the lake and risks her own life to save him. Only the next morning, when the young prince revives, does she finally burst into tears and regain gravity, as the rain falls throughout the land.

Traditionally fairy-tale characters are destined to be orphaned, exposed, and abandoned so they can go on perilous quests, be empowered by magic, and eventually transformed into sparkling adults. In Rossetti's and MacDonald's fairylands, however, the misogynist myth of Eve's frailty and biblical pattern of fall and redemption are framed as sexual maturation, a process occurring in an interpersonal context where acts of intercession diminish individual achievement and autonomy. Alone, each heroine is completely lost were it not for the intervention of a Christ-like friend. In "Goblin Market" "sweet-tooth" delight is prelude to enthrallment and death, while in MacDonald's work, bodily pleasure leads to authentic recovery and flowering fertility. But both fairylands offer a world apart to explore how a riot of sexual yearning leads to a recognition of self-giving as the ultimate human value. Such an accommodating space was not available in the realistic novel of the period. Nor presumably in juvenile literature—even if such writing, because children were deemed innocent, generally went uncensored. Although Wordsworth suggested in "We Are Seven" that children could not conceive of death, Rossetti and MacDonald portray the prospect of dying young without sentimental piety or reverence for the ideal of progress implicit in the bildungsroman. The spiritual awakening of both heroines is manifested by their growing young at the end: Laura wakes laughing "in the old innocent way … her gleaming locks showed not thread of grey," and the light princess finds herself lying on the floor like a baby who must learn to walk.

After administering last rites, the princess jumps into the lake to save the prince, a reversal no less surprising than Lizzie's rescue of Laura from the harassment of stunted animal men. The triumph of virginity and heroic resistance, the womanly eucharist and Rossetti's pun on cloistered "sisters" together suggest the relevance of this text for feminist theology. MacDonald also revived the Motherhood of God from medieval mysticism in images of female plenitude and power that resonate with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's portraits. North Wind, for example, has a streaming mane of hair that blends with the night: the darkness of Diamond's hayloft looked "as if it were made of her hair." Her numinous presence and that of MacDonald's other magical grandmother and goddess figures, wise old women and earth sprites, communicate Juliana of Norwich's insight that at the core of life all will be well. Cultivating a language to express the interiority of things when seen from the vantage point of spiritual enlightenment, he asked,

Why should I not speculate in the only direction in which things worthy of speculation appear likely to lie? There is a wide may be around us and every speculation widens the probability of changing the may be into the is.

In their complex and haunting symbolism developed with Pre-Raphaelite visual intensity, MacDonald and Rossetti defamiliarize the ordinary as Wilde does—whether it be voluptuous goblin fruit or tears that fall like jewels of rain, or a marvelous rose, crimson as a ruby at the heart. These puzzling images, ellipses and reversals, oppositional language and symbolist techniques reclaim the creative and mythmaking power for the religious sensibility. Like Blake's "Auguries of Innocence," these fairy tales work to regenerate ways of seeing the human body and to stimulate a palpable understanding of their parabolic meanings.

"Evangelicalism at its best is an offensive religion," Mark Noll argues, and Ruskin found scenes of a girl's maturing sexuality and loss of restraint in The Light Princess salacious. But MacDonald's wish to awaken the emotional imagination is grounded in his sense of how body and spirit are interconnected in the mutual dependence of male and female development. The hungry female kisses that exorcise Laura's "poison in the blood" become a distant memory at the end of "Goblin Market" when both sisters become wives "with children of their own," and Laura weaves cau-tionary tales of "her early prime." That Lizzie "stood in deadly peril to do her good" acts as a warning of forbidden pleasures, for few Victorian parents would advocate careers culminating in martyrdom. (Wilde's mother was an exception.) The assault on Lizzie suggests Stephen's grisly fate, described with agonizing traits in Acts. Yet writers who would make Christ's love real, that is, relevant and contemporary, cannot leave the Cross as a dogmatic abstraction: they must reconcile a criminally executed Jew with a divine Savior. When Paul developed the classic theory of atonement that in Christ God is Man and Man is God (2 Cor. 5:19), he also gave rise to the notion of the church as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27), an entity later enlisted by the penance tradition as an essential mediator of forgiveness. Preaching the widest, simplest basis for salvation—identification of "Christ as the source of Life"—and distancing himself from the doctrine of vicarious atonement and the punitive God it implied became a critical issue in MacDonald's search for a parish after losing his first (and only) pastorate at Arundel.3 Discarding the Calvinist notion of infant depravity, he drew on a christology of the child that developed in early Christianity as well as the ancient tradition in which the newly baptized or converted were considered as newborn or small children (Bovon 20). Embodying the mind of a beginner in the flesh of a child, he celebrated the abandonment of a priori modes of thought. To rouse trust, that "indescribable vague intelligence" that enables progress through Experience, he placed at the heart of The Golden Key (1865), "in the secret of the earth and all its ways," the oldest man of all who can help everybody—a naked child "who had no smile, but the love in his large grey eyes was deep as the center" (61). In Phantastes, which C. S. Lewis claimed had "baptized his imagination," MacDonald's narrator states:

It is no use trying to account for things in fairy land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the whole idea of doing so, and takes everything as it comes; like a child, who being in a chronic state of wonder, is surprised by nothing.

Wilde's sexuality and utopian orientation toward Individualism radicalized the socializing mission of the literary fairy tale in starker ways than Rossetti and MacDonald. While the latter emphasize the miraculous change of life that standing in another's place can bring, Wilde is closer to the penance tradition in his vision of Christ as the Man of Sorrows and his emphasis on feeling others' pain as prelude to self-sacrifice. Rossetti's idyll of sisterly love is set in an elfin glen where wares luscious as budding sexuality are hawked morning and night; MacDonald's Fairyland offers journeys to mystic awareness. But Wilde's settings are detailed like Blake's visionary and satiric Songs to depict the brutal injustice and crass conformity of contemporary society. Whatever sacred moments of sacrificial love arise amid the world's wanton cruelty thus come as fleeting miracles. No feeding ritual makes self and other "one body." Instead neglect of the poor is expiated by the Star-Child in beatings by a Magician who "set before him an empty trencher, and said, 'Eat,' and an empty cup and said, 'Drink'" (199). At the end of "The Happy Prince," an Angel brings God the Prince's leaden heart and the dead bird from a trash heap: their suffering is sanctified as "the two most precious things in the city" (291).

While the Grimms rarely eliminated violence from Nursery and Household Tales (1817), lurid depictions of murder, cannibalism, and mutilation were muted in fairy tales written during Victoria's reign. Self-inflicted injury or the sight of a horrifying and alien face in the mirror were not part of this complacent agenda. But the practice of reading the body of a dying child for signs of God's presence had shaped the earliest tradition of writing for juveniles in the seventeenth century and had mutated into the most sentimental scenes of Victorian novels. Literary representations of the spiritual precocity of dying children, like scenes of execution in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, shaped the enduring ideal of protestant heroism. Wilde's description of Guido Reni's St. Sebastian recalls these Marian martyrs who affirm their identity as true Christians by gestures like clapping their hands in the flames.

When Wilde wrote in 1886, "I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last," he added that one infinite fascination remained for him, "the mystery of moods." His fairy tales, he said, were "Studies in prose … meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness" (Letters 219). The poignant and satiric tonalities of the tales, which verge on religious mysticism as they expound a Christian socialism, sound a dual audience. They invert the logic of Janeway's premature little adults and the Victorian morbidity of gazing on childish pain by registering a childlike responsiveness to the feelings of others, a compelling lyric to which adults are tone deaf. The prosperous Miller's youngest son in "The Devoted Friend," for example, hears of little Hans the gardener having troubles, and wants to invite little Hans into their home, saying, "I will give him half my porridge, and show him my white rabbits." At this he is rebuked by his father with a hearty sermon:

What a silly boy you are! … I really don't know what is the use of sending you to school. You seem not to learn anything. Why if Little Hans came up here, and saw our warm fire, and good supper, and our great cask of red wine, he might get envious, and envy is a most terrible thing, and would spoil anybody's nature. I certainly will not allow Hans's nature to be spoiled. I am his best friend, and I will always watch over him, and see that he is not led into any temptations.

                                    (303)

"When friends are in trouble, they should be left alone," the Miller righteously declares. Opposed to this paternalistic exploitation of the poor, which institutionalizes pain through schooling, church, and state, is Wilde's representation of childhood as fraught with passionate personal experience. Although feelings of being lost, confused, vulnerable, and small are aroused, Wilde avoids what Marina Warner calls "the Oxfam Syndrome"—which makes the oppression of children "look like endemic, perennial hopelessness" (47)—by drawing on energies of creatures like "the little people" of Irish folklore. The small boy in "The Selfish Giant" and the Star-Child are christlike beings who emanate new life; they function in the narrative like Jungian archetypes to pave "the way for a future change in personality" (83). The Giant who has built a wall around his garden so children can't trespass has a change of heart when he sees a boy "so small he could not reach up to the branches of the tree … wandering all around it and crying bitterly" (298). After he has kissed the boy, opened his garden to all the children, and grown old, his special little friend reappears with wounds on his hands and feet. His longing for the Christ child prefigures the salvation that awaits the Giant in death, as he leaves his body to join the boy in Paradise. That we do not see this child receive stigmata after the conversion of the Giant is characteristic of the way Wilde represents suffering as unseen theatrical.

Gaston Bachelard observed that "the nest image is generally childish…. Physically, the creature endowed with a sense of refuge huddles up to itself, takes cover, hides away, lies snug, is concealed" (93). Within these intricately framed tales are nested multiple narratives that converge on or circle round some secret or unregarded pain at their heart. Culminating moments of misery, public spectacles or private exhibitions of pain, strike contradictory responses in bystanders—the romantic, the pragmatist, and the cynic parody Victorian community in their solipsistic points of view. Only to the statue of the Happy Prince comes the revelation in his blindness that "[t]here is no Mystery so great as Misery" (290). Only the Charity School children recognize the Prince as an Angel like the one they have seen in their dreams. To the Mayor and the Town Councillors—the philistine, utilitarian, and worldy—the statue divested of gold looks shabby, "[l]ittle better than a beggar" (291). When Wilde asked in prison if his hair must be cut, he added with tears in his eyes, "You don't know what it means to me." The hair was cut. "The horror of Prison life," he later wrote, "is the contrast between the grotesqueness of one's aspect, and the tragedy in one's soul" (Ellman 496). Such oppositions that privilege suffering on a private stage form the crux of Wilde's tales.

In "The Nightingale and the Rose," for example, a little bird leaves her nest in the oak tree to enact the highest form of sympathy. To help a student in the agonies of unrequited love, the nightingale impales herself on a thorn to create a red rose for the youth to give to his beloved. Moving from spectatorship to identification and finally to self-abandonment and hurt, the nightingale herself proves to be the true lover and artist. Wilde wrote his own name into the poetry describing the fierce pang that shot through her at the last: "Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb." Yet the nightingale's sacrifice is callously ignored and misunderstood: when the girl rejects his red rose, the student throws this token of the nightingale into the gutter where a cart wheels over it. Nevertheless, the personal injuries that inscribe Wilde's modes of self-realization gesture toward a transfigured realm. At the little bird's "last burst of music,"

[t]he white Moon … forgot the dawn, and lingered on the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstacy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river and they carried its message out to sea.

                                              (295)

Of Jesus, Wilde said, "one always thinks of him … as a lover for whose love the whole world was too small" (925). The too small world of partial and partisan vision depicted in these narratives ultimately conjures a God-suffused reaction. Crucifixion, the highest mode of perfection in a hostile world, can only be seen as sublime in a realm that cannot be figured. Wilde's use of Christian metaphor anticipates Tolkien's claim that the fairy tale "does not deny the existence of … sorrow and failure" but gives "a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief" (86).

Notes

1. Contending with apostates in mid-third-century Rome, Cyprian used Paul's notion of the church as the body of Christ to establish an ecclesiastical centralized hierarchy in which bishops had authority to approve penance for the lapsed and to forgive those who had made sacrifices to the emperor. See Daniel Goodenough, "Repentance of Life vs. The Work of Penance," unpublished manuscript, 1975, p. 53.

2. Brian Attebery suggests "postmodernism is a return to story-telling in the belief that we can be sure of nothing but story" (40). O'Brien opens, "But this too is true: stories can save us" (255).

3. "For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another." (1 Rom 12:4, 5). See The Letters of George MacDonald: "I believe in the perfect and full atonement of Jesus Christ—that he has, as it were, saved all men already, if by unbelief they did not put themselves out of his salvation" (24). His belief that animals have souls and the Heathen might be saved in the afterlife were deemed heretical at Arundel (Greville MacDonald, 180).

Works Cited

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MacDonald, George. The Complete Fairy Tales. New York: Schocken, 1997.

―――――――. An Expression of Character: The Letters of George MacDonald. Ed. Glenn Edward Sadler. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994.

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Owen, Alex. "Magic and the Ambiguities of Modernity." Unpublished paper presented at the University of Michigan, March, 1999.

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―――――――. Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti. Ed. David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.

Rossetti, William M., ed. "Notes by W. M. Rossetti." In The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1904.

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Warner, Maria. Six Myths of Our Time. New York: Random House, 1994.

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

―――――――. The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Alvin Redman. New York: Dover, 1959.

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―――――――. Letters. Ed. Allan Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

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Naomi Wood (essay date 2002)

SOURCE: Wood, Naomi. "Creating the Sensual Child: Paterian Aesthetics, Pederasty, and Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales." Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 156-70.

[In the following essay, Wood explores how Wilde's fairy tales reflect the duality of upright Christian morality and idealistic sensuality, arguing that, "Wilde's ultimate goal was to make life conform to art and to evade the bourgeois censors by making the dangerous pleasures of aesthetic delight available to children—and whoever else would listen—in an apparently innocuous genre like the fairy tale."]

In The Case of Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose declares that children's literature often stages a seduction in which the author attempts to draw the child reader into complicity with the pleasures offered by an adult's vision of the ideal child. As chronicled by critics from Humphrey Carpenter to James Kincaid, writers of children's literature in the late nineteenth century—the golden age of children's literature in England—provide numerous examples of children's authors soliciting audiences with more than words. In addition to capturing little girls' interest with stories, Lewis Carroll provided himself with pins when he went to the beach so as to be able to help them tuck up their skirts; John Ruskin fell desperately in love with nine-year-old Rose LaTouche; J. M. Barrie was hopelessly devoted to the family of five boys for which he created Peter Pan; and many others violated or contemplated violating the boundaries our culture has placed between children and adult sexualities (see Carpenter; Kincaid). Oscar Wilde's fairy tales are not often discussed in this context, though his sexuality has been discussed extensively by a panoply of critics in the century since his death. Oscar Wilde's fairy tales encode the vision of an idealistic pederast, a man who loves beautiful youths; the style and content of his fairy tales offer a vision of love and beauty that urges a different aesthetic and moral relationship to the world and experience from the heavily censored and didactic productions of the Grimm brothers. Oscar Wilde's fairy tales rhetorically create a new, morally sensual child by enacting Walter Pater's aesthetics.

The connection between Oscar Wilde's manifesto in The Picture of Dorian Gray and the notorious work of his Oxford mentor Walter Pater has long been noted. Wilde called Pater's The Renaissance: Studies in the History in Art and Poetry his "golden book" and declared that he never traveled anywhere without it; he described it as "the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written" (qtd. in Ellman 284). Indeed, Pater's "golden" and "poisonous" work, as Wilde frequently called it, and the fin-de-siècle's "how-to" manual for the decadent homosexual aesthete, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), invite connection. Less frequently considered, however, is the presence and significance of a similar aesthetic in Wilde's fairy tales for children. Published before and after Dorian Gray respectively, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891) are frequently grouped together in collections of his work and dissociated from the decadence that Dorian Gray so quickly came to signify.¹ What are the implications of such an aesthetic in a text for children?

The Happy Prince in particular has been a perennial favorite of children, going into multiple editions even during Wilde's short but controversial lifetime, and continues to be reprinted today, more than one hundred years later. This essay explores Wilde's context in the homosexual subculture of the "Greats" at Victorian Oxford, his aesthetics and their relation to Pater, and the ways his literary fairy tales encode and express a pederastic ethos through the particular focus on sensual experience and moral enlightenment. At the same time that Wilde preaches an ostensibly orthodox Christian morality in his tales, he also expresses a pagan joy in sensation for its own sake; he seduces his readers away from joyless innocence, takes them out of conventional bounds in order to explore new pleasures, and proffers an artificial, idealistic sensuality.

Pedagogy, Paedeia, and Pederasty

Some of the most productive learning about other times and peoples arises when we are confronted with categories of ordering different from those with which we are familiar or comfortable. As Foucault writes, such encounters productively "[break] up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things" (xv), allowing us to understand the contingency and artificiality of all human productions including our own categories of order. What does it mean that, though recent gay liberation movements have refused the historical association of homosexuality with pederasty, late nineteenth-century writers made no such distinction? For some writers of the fin-de-siècle, the continuum between teaching boys and loving them—idealistically or physically—was both intuitive and natural. As Timothy d'Arch Smith notes, homosexual advocates like J. A. Symonds, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter all assumed male-male love transcended age as well as gender taboos: "in Symonds's and Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion (London, 1897), seven of the cases discussed exhibit a liking for adolescent boys and twenty (including Symonds's own case-history printed as no. xviii) for grown men, the two phenomena not being sub-divided and separately treated. Carpenter's Intermediate Sex (London, 1908) advocates a similar tolerance for love between schoolmaster and pupil as it does for adult homosexual affections and his anthology of 'friendship,' Ioläus (London and Boston, 1902), intermingles indiscriminately homosexual and paederastic passages" (41n36).

During the mid- and late-Victorian period pederasty was tacitly promoted by J. A. Symonds and Walter Pater as the truest expression of the classical heritage. After all, "paedeia," the "sum of physical and intellectual achievement to which the human body and mind can aspire" (OED), was both implicitly and explicitly linked to the love inspired between pupil and teacher by the mutual enjoyment of philosophy and physical beauty. In an era which granted great intellectual prestige and cultural capital to the Classics, paederastia, or "Greek love," was embraced as an ideal of "spiritual procreancy" superior to merely carnal heterosexual breeding (Dowling 29). Extolled by Socrates in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, the sexual and spiritual relationship between tutor and student allowed the older, wiser man to inspire—to spiritually impregnate—the beautiful youth who has elicited the tutor's admiration and love (Dowling 83). In the words of Socrates, tutors, after having been inspired themselves by love of the godhead, "go out and seek for their beloved a youth whose nature accords with that of the god, and when they have gained his affection, by imitating the god themselves and by persuasion and education they lead the beloved to the conduct and nature of the god, so far as each of them can do so[…]. Thus the desire of the true lovers, and the initiation into the mysteries of love, which they teach […] is beautiful and brings happiness from the inspired lover to the loved one" (Plato 495). Far from being a monstrous evil that violates the pure youth and impairs him psychologically, pederastic practice as extolled by Socrates actually raises the youth to the level of a god. Linda Dowling has shown how the pederastic tutorial ideal, promoted as metaphoric by educational reformers such as Matthew Arnold and Benjamin Jowett, was historicized by Walter Pater and his peers as being "no mere figure of speech" but a model to be emulated physically as well as spiritually (95). According to Pater, the physical, material component of the Socratic eros is essential to education: education "must begin in sensuous impressions" (Dowling 98). The all-male culture of Oxford University, its tutorial system, and its emphasis upon the transcendent value of the "Greats," particularly Plato, provided a fertile breeding ground for a pederastic code that eventually informed an apt pupil in Oscar Wilde.

Not only was classical imprimature given to pederasty, but the epoch was already infatuated with the idea of childhood. Inheritors of a Wordsworthian Romantic tradition that privileged childhood over adulthood and innocence over experience, fin-de-siècle authors produced a newly sensual Romantic child through books directed toward children and about them, resulting in the "Golden Age of Children's Literature."² Eschewing the didactic texts which taught children the values and ideals that would enable them to become rational, pious, and thrifty adults (such as those by Maria Edgeworth or Mary Martha Sherwood), these writers adjured children to be "childlike"—to repudiate adult values in favor of fantasy, play, and joyous anarchy. Authors remembering their own childhoods or admiring the beautiful children around them wrote emotionally charged renderings of the precious and transient nature of childhood in their writings for adults, then adapted those images and themes for the consumption (or indoctrination) of children. Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan analyzes J. M. Barrie's adaptation of Peter Pan from an idyll in his adult novel The White Bird to an entire play for children, exemplifying the trend. Frequently what was intended as an homage to childhood became an imperative to children to shape themselves to match the artfully artless ideal.

The child-loving ideals of Romanticism thus culminated, appropriately, in the decadent fin-de-siècle's exploration of perilous beauty and forbidden objects of desire. This was a period in which an artist could openly identify himself as "Uranian" and write poems and paint pictures celebrating the beauty and sensual appeal of boys, as shown by d'Arch Smith and Julia Saville, art that in today's political climate would probably be subject to censorship as child-pornography. Martha Vicinus has argued that for many during this period, the "femme fatale" was actually the adolescent boy, whose image connoted the romance and intoxication of doomed love. Vicinus notes that gay and lesbian writers simultaneously desired to love and desired to be the adolescent boy, who represented a liberating liminal state between the helplessness of childhood and the constraint of manhood, a state poignant in its beauty and transience, exciting in its earthiness and potential for passion (83-85).

An Education of the Senses

Oscar Wilde is famous for the apparently seamless correspondences between his life and art. Frequently his art is used to explain his life rather than vice versa, and, like his contemporary and acquaintance Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilde's life threatens to attract more attention than his writing as his supreme creative product. Those who write about Wilde are frequently tempted to spend more time on his biography than on his writing. Nevertheless, it is clear that Wilde lived his art and theory in a far more consistent fashion than many; having acknowledged as his inspiration Walter Pater's "poisonous book" The Renaissance, he both embodied its message and inspired his hearers—in all senses of the Socratean word eispnelas (Dowling 83)—in social as well as textual settings.

Throughout his most productive period, beginning with The Happy Prince in 1885, Wilde received sexual and literary tributes from troops of ardent youths and sought out himself attractive "boys" for mutual pleasure.³ An integral part of this process was the dinner party, in which all of the senses—sight, taste, smell, and sound—were stimulated and satisfied. William Butler Yeats writes of his first dinner with Wilde: "The drawing room and dining room were done in white, the walls, furniture, and carpets too. The exception was the red lampshade suspended from the ceiling, which cowled a terra-cotta statue on a diamond-shaped red cloth in the middle of the white table" (Ellmann 284). Champagne, pâté, and other delicacies complemented the visual delights of the room while flowers scented the air and lent their grace to the grace of the whole. Rather than privileging the intellectual, the Hellenic coterie led by Wilde emphasized the physical senses as a means to artistry. Amplifying the myriad satisfactions of sensuous delight was Wilde's unparalleled conversational skill as he regaled his hearers with bon mots, epigrams, and stories.

It is clear that Wilde was aware of the aural appeal of his tales, and he polished them and their delivery as carefully for his hearing audience as for his reading one. Making use of aural conventions already well established by the fairy-tale convention, such as ordering events and actions in threes, repeating key phrases and images in order to clarify structure, and using biblical diction and style, the tales are made to be heard, meant to entice.⁴ As Maria Edelson has anatomized, Wilde relies upon fairy-tale conventions: he personifies abstractions and objects, anthropomorphizes animals, gives his settings allegorical place names and his characters generic names. What Edelson finds distinctively different from the fairy-tale tradition is the wealth of imagery steeped in the homosexual discourses which Wilde was so instrumental in disseminating: the tragic liebestod endings, the aesthetic appeal of the exquisite, artificial, and bejewelled, the "exquisite poison" of alternate sensuali-ties (169-71). Vicinus points out that many homosexual writers at this time drew on Classical myth and Bible stories for inspiration, "reinterpret[ing] common myths, den[ying] or revers[ing] familiar metaphors, and privileg[ing] the mannered, the irrational, and the inexplicable" (85). She adds, "Men and women whose sexual lives were in opposition to biological reproduction did not defy its hegemony, but rather insisted on a superior option—art.[…] Nature too is redefined, away from images of fertility toward images of freedom" (86). In contrast with the traditional fairy-tale plot ending with marriage, a kingdom, and "happily ever after," Wilde's fairy tales typically culminate in strikingly beautiful, albeit often painful, climaxes, with somberly ironic endings. When the Nightingale gives her life's blood to create a red rose for the superficial Student, all Nature recognizes the nature and beauty of the sacrifice, but the Student, frustrated with his object, throws that costly rose into the gutter and shuts himself away with his books. Beauty creates its own meaning, whether or not it is transmitted to others.

Wilde's choice of the fairy tale was part of his own pederastic mentorship of youths into aesthetic manhood. The first record of "The Happy Prince" is as a story told in 1885 to a group of Cambridge undergraduates who had invited Wilde to attend their production of the Eumenides (Ellmann 253). Wilde's tale of the love relationship between the happy prince and the male swallow who serves and learns from him clearly drew upon and analyzed the transcendent effects of the pederastic relationship. What Dowling writes of Pater is equally applicable to Wilde: "the very occasion of his essay—read aloud to a listener who is its subject within a symposiumlike scene of all-male sociability, refreshment, and philosophic discourse—allows Pater not simply to invoke the forgotten culture of the Symposium but to enact it as well" (83). Other stories Wilde told parodied the moral tracts so frequently given to children and the poor. One parodic project—which Wilde told E. F. Benson was to have a preface by the Bishop of London and be given as a Christmas present—was a volume of "ethical essays," which would illustrate in fable form such virtues as "The Value of Presence of Mind," in which the actor-hero, caught on stage during a theater fire, tells everyone to be calm and not to panic, leaves the stage in peace, and allows the audience to be "burned to a crisp" (Ellman 279). Wilde's various audiences, his own sons, the women he befriended, and in particular his growing coterie of young men, were all enthralled.

Pater's aesthetic credo in The Renaissance clearly informs Wilde's fairy tales. Wilde, however, is too independent an artist to simply echo Pater's words: he extends their implications to life, and critiques reflexively by demonstrating both the pleasures and perils of such an ethos. In Dorian Gray Lord Henry Wotton, who plays the eispnelas for Dorian, urges him, almost in Pater's words, to live for experience. Lord Henry says: "Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.[…] A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants" (35). Likewise, Pater had written: "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.[…] To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend" (236-37). Pater's description of experience as "flamelike," paradoxically "hard and gemlike," suggesting both the preciousness of experience, but also its impermanence. In saying that we refuse to submit to habit with its stereotypical relation to the world, Pater might be said to advocate looking at the world through the Romantic child's eyes who has not yet learned habit or stereotype. Different from a child, though, is the melancholy awareness of brevity and urgency—that all will be lost and soon. Pater writes: "With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.[… W]e are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve[…]. We have an interval and then our place knows us no more.[…] Our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time" (238).

Pater's words became part of the idiom of Wilde's circle: "exquisite," "strange," as did his valorizing of "curiousness" as an aesthetic category and "subtle" as a term of sensuous approbation. Eve Sedgwick analyzes Wilde's adjectives in Dorian Gray, in particular his heavy use of the words "curious" and "subtle" to describe jewels, furniture, and fabrics as quintessentially decadent, particularly in its exploration of the ways of life—homosexuality and addiction to oriental drugs—that had come to be defined by the nineteenth-century medical and legal establishment as expressions of unnatural and vitiated appetites (172-74). Pater's glancing reference in the previously cited passage to finding in "the face of one's friend" the aesthetic and experiential benefits of art, encapsulated the entire culture of pederasty that he and many others helped to develop as the heart of the educational system of elite young men at Oxford and in many of the public schools and that coded the primacy and superiority of male-male friendship, "Uranian" desire (238).

Pater asserts that sensory experience, not morality, ought to be the goal of life. Anything more contrary to the generic constraints of the didactic genre of children's literature is difficult to imagine. Even Lewis Carroll, for all his vaunted liberation of children's literature in the Alice books, did not particularly urge sensuous awareness; rather, he took pleasure in children's presumed immunity from it. Although the child in this period was thought best kept away from experience, especially sensual experience, Wilde provocatively insists his child readers experience Paterian "stirring of the senses, [with] strange dyes, strange colors" (Pater 237), and so give themselves over to a sensual pleasure not linked with the moral of the tale, or linked with it in particularly decadent ways, by appealing to the curious, the alien, and the pagan.

In addition to the thematic borrowings from Pater, Wilde also employed recognizably homosexual icons in his tales: "The Young King" of A House of Pomegranates is entranced by images of beautiful Greek boys, Adonis, Endymion, and "The Bithynian slave of Hadrian," beautiful Antinous, whose image is kissed passionately by the young king (House 7). The narrative is for the most part oblivious to the feminine; the "slim, fair-haired Court pages" occupy more lines than any of the ladies-in-waiting, if indeed any exist (6). Adolescent male beauty occupies much of the description of people in the stories, while female beauty, when mentioned, is described more dispassionately. The Star-Child is "white and delicate as sawn ivory, and his curls were like the rings of the daffodil. His lips, also, were like the petals of a red flower, and his eyes were like violets by a river of pure water, and his body like the narcissus of a field where the mower comes not" (140). The curling hair of Hyacinth, beloved of Apollo, and the male beauty of Narcissus clearly inform this description, recalling "Greek love" for those schooled in the classics, and even for common readers. In contrast, the beautiful Infanta is only described by her dress, her gold aureole of hair, and her "pale little face," apparently modeled on "Las Meninas" by Velazquez. Adolescent male beauty is celebrated in most of the stories, and the adjectives recall Wilde's epithets for his objects of desire—descriptions of boys as fauns, their attributes "gilded" and floral. One of the letters used by the prosecution in Wilde's trial was a note he had written to Lord Alfred Douglas: "My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days" (qtd. in Ellman 367). Educating the senses, living each moment as joyously and painfully fleeting, the lovers of Wilde's fairy tales willfully annihilate themselves for art and love.

Wilde's fairy tales grow out of an environment which privileges and encodes homosexuality as a subtext in ostensibly conventional genres and in particular glorifies the pederastic relationship between pupil and teacher. In addition to the obvious influence of Pater, pederastic themes and images are drawn from the historic tradition Wilde cited during his trial. From the intimacy of David and Jonathan and the relationship between Christ and his beloved disciple, Wilde draws on biblical genres such as parables and allegories. Christlike in this sense at least, Wilde performed his own parables many times in front of groups of his "disciples," often provoking similarly puzzled responses. From Plato, Wilde derived his dialectic technique of the paradox, posing and counterposing utterances in order to demonstrate some new, paradoxical understanding of truth. Finally, as Pater expressed this tradition in a nineteenth-century context, Wilde emphasized physical sensation as an integral part of the spiritual and moral aspects of humankind. The only truly dead characters in his stories are those who are so limited by preconceived notions of themselves and their relation to others that they cannot experience life or themselves with the deliberation of artists. Wilde's monstrous characters are, like the Remarkable Rocket, the Devoted Friend, and the Infanta, grotesquely selfish and exploitive, relying upon their status, wealth, and importance in society to insulate them from the pain and suffering of others. The resonant characters are those who love and are willing to cut short their own lives and possibilities to remain true to that love, making their lives art. During his trial, Wilde put into words the im-pulses and philosophies of an entire generation by justifying "the love that dare not speak its name" as "such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michaelangelo.[…] It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him" (qtd. in Ellmann 435).

Decadent Morality

If, then, it is true that Wilde's fairy tales are heavily informed by homosexual coding filtered through Paterian aesthetics and "yellow-decade" style, what implications does this have for a fuller understanding of the fairy tales and their relation to child readers, if not the primary, at least a likely, audience?

Many critics have commented upon the homosexual undercurrents of "The Happy Prince," one of the most famous and certainly one of the most popular of Wilde's tales.⁵ A Swallow stops overnight on his way to Egypt. He has been in love with a Reed, but tires of her because she is "too domestic" and has "no conversation." First attracted to the Prince because of his beauty (he is a gold-leaf covered statue with a ruby in his sword hilt and sapphires for eyes) and his "low musical voice," the Swallow comes to love him for his soul. Pederastic coding in their descriptions include the description of the Prince's voice as musical, which echoes descriptions of Socrates' voice ("flutelike"). The Prince, fixed as forever young and beautiful (an interesting counterpoint to Dorian Gray and to the notoriously ugly Socrates himself), tutors the Swallow in what it means to love. In dialectical interchanges, the Prince shows the Swallow the material misery of the city as the Swallow counterposes descriptions of the beauty of Africa:

Far away in a little street there is a poor house. One of the windows is open, and through it I can see a woman seated at a table. Her face is thin and worn, and she has coarse red hands, all pricked by the needle, for she is a seamstress. She is embroidering passion-flowers on a satin gown for the loveliest of the Queen's maids-of-honour to wear at the next Court-ball. In a bed in the corner of the room her little boy is lying ill. He has a fever, and is asking for oranges. His mother has nothing to give him but river water, so he is crying. Swallow, little Swallow, will you not bring her the ruby out of my sword-hilt?[…]

I am waited for in Egypt,[…] My friends are flying up and down the Nile, and talking to the large lotus-flowers. Soon they will be going to sleep in the tomb of the great King. The King is there himself in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen, and embalmed with spices. Round his neck is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are like withered leaves.

                             (Wilde, House 171-72)

A beautiful Socrates, the Prince dialogically teaches the Swallow to care for misery, and the Swallow consoles the Prince with tales of Africa and the East. Noteworthy too is the kiss the Swallow gives the Prince before he dies of cold—a rare male-male kiss in children's literature. At first, the Swallow acts only out of love for the Prince, but finally both are apotheosized, the one because he loved the miserable and the other because he loved his friend. Wilde deliberately used the Socratean dialectic, upsetting conventional expectations about the relationship between tutor and student. Here the tutor is young and beautiful while the student is a refugee from domesticity, and both elevate themselves through mutual love, conversation, and charitable action. Ultimately, both sacrifice themselves and gain thereby a greater reward: eternal transcendence in a better paradise than the prince's terrestrial San Souci or even the Swallow's Egypt.

In "The Happy Prince," a Paterian emphasis on sensation guides the reader to appreciate the artful, art-inspired aspects of nature. As many have noted about the tales, nature is made to sound like a painting, a sculpture, or a piece of jewelry. An example is the Swallow's description of the exotica of the lands he has visited: "He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch goldfish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves, and are always at war with the butterflies" (House 179). Here, Wilde catalogues hypnotic, intensely aesthetic experiences simply to imagine color, taste, smell, and sight in a vastly different world from the English nursery. Reminiscent of Greek epics and The Arabian Nights, both well known in Victorian times (particularly by the educated male elite) to celebrate sexualities officially taboo to English citizens,⁶ the Swallow regales the prince with descriptions of places and people informed by assumptions and values so alien as to render them objects simply of fascinating aesthetic contemplation. What makes these themes and descriptions particularly pederastic? They tutor the young reader in love, what it means to love, and how one achieves it. At the same time, that love is rarely depicted as heterosexual, never domestic, and most likely to culminate in death. Even "The Fisherman and His Soul," which features a love relationship between a fisherman and a mermaid, emphasizes what Norbert Kohl calls "a mixture of aesthetic sensuality and the thrill of the abnormal,[…] a perversion of nature" (59). Sometimes the lover who initiates the relationship is the younger or smaller of the pair, as in "The Selfish Giant," where the death and sacrifice themes attendant upon such love invoke Christ as well as the Classical tradition. When the Giant sees the child whose love has inspired him to become unselfish, the child reveals "the wounds of Love" in his palms and feet and invites the Giant to play with him in Paradise (Wilde, House 208). The tales thematize and valorize male-male friendship, impossible loves, and nobility that expresses itself by working against the grain of social expectation.

Thus, like other works by Wilde, the fairy tales not only teach and embody Paterian aestheticism, but also the homosexual counter-discourse it inspired. Pederastic references in the tales are similarly imbued with this aestheticism, part of the overarching formal structure of the works. Although specific pederastic practice is certainly not to be gleaned from the fairy tales, the fairy tales use the ideals and images surrounding Classical and contemporary homosexual discourses to offer an alternative, idealized form of love and morality, one that emphasizes spiritual procreancy, unselfish self-sacrifice, and, paradoxically, immersion in sensual experience as the means to true spirituality.

Pointing to the style of Wilde's tales as evidence, contemporary audiences recognized that the lessons the tales taught were not standard fairy-tale morality. Alexander Galt Ross's May 1888 review of The Happy Prince speculated that Oscar Wilde's primary audience was probably not children because of the "delicacy" and "artistry" of the work: "Mr. Oscar Wilde […] has chosen to present his fables in the form of fairy tales to a public which, though it should count among its numbers most persons who can appreciate delicate humour and an artistic literary manner, will assuredly not be composed of children. No child will sympathize at all with Mr. Wilde's Happy Prince when he is melted down by order of the Mayor and Corporation in obedience to the dictum of the art professor at the University that, since 'he is no longer beautiful, he is no longer useful.' Children do not care for satire, and the dominant spirit of these stories is satire—a bitter satire differing widely from that of Hans Andersen, whom Mr. Wilde's literary manner so constantly recalls to us" (Saturday Review 20 Oct. 1888: 472, qtd. in Beckson 61). Ross assumes that children are not equipped to appreciate delicacy or satire. As a matter of fact, of the different levels of satire present in the tales, there is plenty of situational and dramatic irony not requiring outside knowledge of the kind implied by the reviewer's quote to grasp or appreciate. More telling, however, is another reviewer's objection to Wilde's stories from an aesthetic standpoint. Linking his writing with Robert Buchanan's famous attack on the Pre-Raphaelites as the "fleshly school of poetry," an anonymous review of Wilde's next volume of fairy-tales, A House of Pomegranates (1891), asserted that "the ultra-aestheticism of the pictures seems unsuitable for children—as also the rather 'fleshly' style of Mr. Wilde's writing. The stories are somewhat after the manner of Hans Andersen—and have pretty poetic and imaginative flights like his; but then again they wander off too often into something between a 'Sinburnian' [sic] ecstasy and the catalogue of a high art furniture dealer. Children may be very much attached to bricà-brac (though of this we have our doubts), but the more natural among them would certainly prefer Hansel and Grethel's sugar-house to any amount of Mr. Wilde's 'rich tapestries' and 'velvet canopies' "(Pall Mall Gazette 30 Nov. 1891: 3, qtd. in Beckson 113). Clearly, both of these reviewers responded suspiciously to the fairy tales, noting the ways that Wilde appealed to his readers' senses. In this second review, the writer upholds the Germanic Grimms' appeal to the child's sweet-tooth as "natural," while rejecting as unnatural the "Sinburnian ecstasy and the catalogue of a high art furniture dealer." In fact, however, children had already long enjoyed precisely those unnatural qualities in The Arabian Nights, pleasantly exotic and lushly ornate, where fabulous caches of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds dot the pages and the oriental Other gives license to imagine paradise as dalliance with shapely houris rather than as endless choir practice in a refrigerator-white setting.

The fact that many children can appreciate the aestheticism, the underlying subversion of gender, as well as the unconventional morality of Wilde's tales is supported by the visceral response Russell Hoban recalls from his encounter with A House of Pomegranates at the age of eight or nine: "When I first read 'The Fisherman and His Soul' as a child I was enthralled by the language and the brilliance of the images it evoked—the story itself was everything and the name of Oscar Wilde had no more significance for me than the name Spalding on a baseball.[…] It is not for me to attempt to psychoanalyse the stories of A House of Pomegranates. As I've said, when I read 'The Fisherman and His Soul' as a child it rang true and I responded to the sadness of it. More than that, the Wildeness of the prose, bursting upon me in wide-screen glorious colour, undoubtedly set me on the writing road. Yes, I owe him thanks for that, my long-ago companion of the sunlight on the rose and gold of the not-really oriental carpet" (25, 29). Hoban's memory of responding to the beauty, lushness, and piercing, pleasurable descriptions of pain in Wilde's tales support the notion that they can inspire a sense of the "Eros which lies at the heart of Agape" (Martin 74). Part of the attraction of the tales for children might be the ways in which children can occupy multiple positions—both subject and object of desire, both inspirer and inspired, in a heady aesthetic and lush abundance of words.

In response to the hostile reviews of his fairy tales, Wilde pointedly wrote that he "had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as [he] had of pleasing the British public" (qtd. in Beckson 113). This retort has been taken to mean that he did not write these stories with a child audience in mind. It is the contention of this essay, however, that the key term in Wilde's sentence is "British public"—the bourgeois British public that Wilde had deliberately baited for years. In fact, Wilde's ultimate goal was to make life conform to art and to evade the bourgeois censors by making the dangerous pleasures of aesthetic delight available to children—and whoever else would listen—in an apparently innocuous genre like the fairy tale.

Notes

1. Gary Schmidgall, Jerusha McCormack, and Robert K. Martin have been the exception to this rule.

2. For a discussion of the ways in which an actual child responded to this discourse, see my "Who Writes and Who Is Written?"

3. Wilde's initiation into homosexual sex was apparently by Robert Ross, his faithful friend and editor, when Ross was seventeen and Wilde thirty-two. "Ross turned seventeen on 25 May 1886, and this age is one that Wilde returns to in his writings as if it meant something special to him" (Ellman 261).

4. Wilde's Irish-Nationalist mother, Speranza, published a collection of Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland in the same year that Wilde published The Happy Prince, and both were famous conversationalists, attributing this skill to their Irish sensibility (McCormack 102-03; and Snider 3). Claudia Nelson has also noted the traditional fairy-tale components of Wilde's tales (100), as has Norbert Kohl (55).

5. Robert K. Martin's analysis is thorough, and Ellman, McCormack, Nelson, and Schmidgall all treat this connection.

6. For example, the accurate and therefore censored translation by Sir Richard F. Burton of The Arabian Nights.

Works Cited

Beckson, Karl. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Secret Gardens: A Study of The Golden Age of Children's Literature. Boston: Houghton, 1985.

d'Arch Smith, Timothy. Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English "Uranian" Poets from 1889 to 1930. London: Routledge, 1970.

Dellamora, Richard, ed. Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.

Edelson, Maria. "The Language of Allegory in Oscar Wilde's Tales." Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture. Ed. Birgit Bramsbäck and Martin Croghan. Proc. of the Ninth Interna-tional Congress of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature, 4-7 August 1986, Uppsala University. Vol 2. Stockholm: Almqvist, 1988. 165-71.

Ellman, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin, 1987.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Hoban, Russell. "Wilde Pomegranates: The Ghost of a Room and the Soul of a Story." Children's Literature in Education 28.1 (1997): 19-29.

Kincaid, James. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Kohl, Norbert. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Trans. David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Martin, Robert K. "Oscar Wilde and the Fairy Tale: 'The Happy Prince' as Self-Dramatization." Studies in Short Fiction 16 (1979): 74-77.

McCormack, Jerusha. "Wilde's Fiction(s)." The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Ed. Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 96-117.

Nelson, Claudia. "Fantasies de Siècle: Sex and Sexuality in the Late-Victorian Fairy Tale." Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction. Ed. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson. New York: St. Martin's, 1994. 87-103.

Oxford English Dictionary. 2001. Oxford UP. 14 Oct. 2001 #220〉http://dictionary.oed.com/#221〉.

Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 5th ed. London: Macmillan, 1910.

Plato. Plato I: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Ed. G. P. Goold. Trans. Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London: Heinemann, 1982.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Saville, Julia. "The Romance of Boys Bathing." Dellamora 253-77.

Schmidgall, Gary. The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar Wilde. London: Abacus, 1994.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Snider, Clifton. "Eros and Logos in Some Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde: A Jungian Interpretation." The Victorian Newsletter 84 (1993): 1-8.

Vicinus, Martha. "The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siecle Femme Fatale?" Dellamora 83-106.

Wilde, Oscar. The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 1908–1922. Ed. Robert Ross. 15 vols. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969.

―――――――. A House of Pomegranates, The Happy Prince and Other Tales. 1891 and 1888. Vol. 10 of Wilde, First Collected Edition.

―――――――. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. Vol. 12 of Wilde, First Collected Edition.

Wood, Naomi J. "Who Writes and Who Is Written?: Barbara Newhall Follett and Typing the Natural Child." Children's Literature 23 (June 1995): 45-65.

Christopher S. Nassaar (essay date spring 2002)

SOURCE: Nassaar, Christopher S. "Wilde's The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates." Explicator 60, no. 3 (spring 2002): 142-45.

[In the following essay, Nassaar reflects upon the influence of Walter Pater—particularly that of The Renaissance—on Wilde's fairy tales in The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates.]

In a famous statement to W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde called Walter Pater's The Renaissance "my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it."¹ Nor is Pater's influence limited to a single book. Marius the Epicurean also had a strong impact on Wilde, and during his imprisonment, Pater's Greek Studies, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits were among the few books he asked for and received (Letters [The Letters of Oscar Wilde] 399). Pater also had a powerful influence on Wilde's fairy tales, which critics have not so far focused on.

The fairy tales of The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates reveal many influences—Hans Christian Andersen, Blake, Carlyle—but Pater is a chief influence on many of them. In De Profundis, Wilde wrote of Marius the Epicurean that in it

Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion in the deep, sweet and austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator indeed,[…] yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied with the comeliness of the vessels of the Sanctuary to notice that it is the Sanctuary of Sorrow that he is gazing at.

                                       (Letters 476)

In many of the fairy tales, Wilde's concern is exactly that of Pater in Marius—to blend Christianity and the artistic life or aestheticism. In others, he is more concerned with the conclusion to The Renaissance, with its insistent advice that we should devote our lives to the private enjoyment of the best objects of art—advice which he strongly rejects.

"The Happy Prince," for instance, belongs to the latter group. When we first meet the happy prince, he is a beautiful statue, "gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold," his eyes are "two bright sapphires," and "a large red ruby" is fixed on his sword-hilt (271). His position as an aesthetic object high above the city symbolizes the isolated, carefree, pleasure-seeking life he led before his death, when he lived in a beautiful palace that is itself a work of art. Every evening, he tell us, "I led the dance in the Great Hall" (272). The happy prince, then, begins his existence as an aesthete, a follower of Pater's advice in The Renaissance that

to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.[…] We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song.[…] Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.

                                            (123)

Even as a child, the happy prince devotes himself instinctively to a Pateresque life of art, song, and beauty, but in doing so he locks out Christian sweetness and purity.

When he becomes a statue, the happy prince gradually recognizes all the pain and sorrow that exists in the city below him, and he develops into a Christian, a child of light. His heart overflows with love and pity, and he sacrifices his aesthetic glory to help others. In this, he is aided by a swallow who undergoes a similar pattern of development. Finally, he strips himself of all his beauty, and his leaden heart cracks when the swallow dies, but both are ready now to enter Heaven. Christianity and aestheticism do not blend in "The Happy Prince": Pater's Renaissance is seen as an early, selfish stage that human beings should outgrow. The great problem of the infanta in "The Birthday of the Infanta" is that she does not go beyond the private aestheticism Pater recommended in his conclusion but remains monstrous in her icy beauty and cold palace, with its many objects of art.

In "The Young King," on the other hand, Christianity and aestheticism blend fully. The young king, the son of an artist, is disowned at first by his grandfather the old king, but is later acknowledged as heir to the throne and brought into the palace. "From the very first moment of his recognition," we are told,

he had shown signs of that strange passion for beauty that was destined to have so great an influence over his life.[…] The wonderful palace—Joyeuse, as they called it—of which he now found himself lord, seemed to him to be a new world fresh-fashioned for his delight; […] he would run down the great staircase, with its lions of gilt bronze and its steps of bright porphyry, and wander from room to room, and from corridor to corridor.

                                      (213-14)

This crucial passage reveals the young king as a disciple of Pater's Renaissance, constantly in a state of "ecstasy," burning with "a hard gem-like flame" as he privately enjoys the manifold beauties of his palace of art. But as his nature develops, he becomes terribly aware, through three successive dreams, of the pain and evil that accompanied the acquisition of such magnificent objects of art. He becomes a Christian, embraces poverty, and goes to his coronation in rags. The realm mocks and opposes him, from the people to the nobles to the bishop, but he presses on and enters the church. The nobles follow with drawn swords, intent on killing him, but God intervenes and crowns him:

And lo! through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him, and the sunbeams wove round him a tissued robe that was fairer than the robe that was fashioned for his pleasure. The dead staff blossomed, and bare lilies that were whiter than pearls. The dry thorn blossomed, and bare roses that were redder than rubies.

                                             (221)

The young king enters a new aesthetic realm, pure and indescribably beautiful. Christianity in this tale is the highest form of aestheticism: the young king abandons Pater's Renaissance and discovers a higher, religious Epicureanism, much as Marius does when it dawns on him—in the "Divine Service" chapter of the novel—that Christianity is "the most beautiful thing in the world" (303). Like Marius, in his final stage of self-development, the king blends Christianity and aestheticism.²

The protagonist of "The Fisherman and His Soul" does the same thing. Initially, fascinated by the beautiful mermaid who sings marvelous songs and lives in a wonderworld beneath the sea, the fisherman casts away his soul and joins her. By the end of the tale, however, his heart becomes large enough to embrace in love both the mermaid and his soul: without abandoning aestheticism, he becomes a Christian, and his grave blooms, prompting a change in the wrathful priest, who speaks of all-embracing love and blesses all of God's creatures. Similarly, in "The Star Child" the star-child's physical beauty returns only when he becomes spiritually beautiful along Christian lines: the two go hand in hand.

Over and over in the fairy tales, but especially in "The Young King," Wilde blends Christianity and aestheticism in the manner of Marius the Epicurean, and over and over he rejects the advice of the conclusion to The Renaissance, presenting it as an inadequate initial stage in the soul's spiritual development.

Notes

1. W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1953): 80.

2. In this essay, I follow Gerald Cornelius Monsman's reading of Marius in Pater's Portraits: Mythic Pattern in Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967). Although Marius never takes the final step of officially converting to Christianity, his death according to Monsman is the prelude to a final awakening and the full experience of God.

Works Cited

Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. In The English Literary Decadence: An Anthology. Ed. Christopher S. Nassaar. Lanham: University Press of America, 1999. 1-124.

―――――――. Marius the Epicurean. London: Macmillan, 1910.

Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works. 3rd Ed. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994.

―――――――. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.

Ann Shillinglaw (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Shillinglaw, Ann. "Fairy Tales and Oscar Wilde's Public Charms." In Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World, edited by Robert N. Keane, pp. 81-91. New York, N.Y.: AMS Press, Inc., 2003.

[In the following essay, Shillinglaw discusses Wilde's potential motivations for targeting juvenile audiences in The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates, including the author's possible financial, familial, and personal impetuses.]

The gift of writing fairy tales is rare, and Mr. Oscar Wilde shows that he possesses it in a rare degree.

                       —Athenaeum review, 1888

The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde rarely gain the attention of scholars and, if they do, are usually considered minor works. However, we can learn much about Wilde through a consideration of his motivation to take on a literary genre that was held in extremely high regard by the Victorian public. Wilde's motivations for writing fairy tales can be found in his family background, and the specific juncture in his writing career of his foray into fairy tales arises from his desire to be financially successful. While Wilde is famously subversive, there are ways in which his production of two volumes of original fairy tales points to a desire to win over the public and the cultural elite.

It is easy to assume that Wilde wrote fairy tales simply to delight his two sons. For instance, Wilde's friend Richard Le Gallienne recalls Wilde stating: "It is the duty of every father to write fairy tales for his children" (107).¹ However, there are more compelling reasons why Wilde was motivated to write fairy tales.

When Wilde married Constance Lloyd in May, 1884, he learned that a wife and family would require the kind of income that resulted from reaching a wider audience than his previous writings had ever achieved. His wife had family wealth, but it is clear from Wilde's biographies that her income was not enough to support a family of four that included a man with a taste for the finer things in life. Following the birth of his two sons, Wilde began the editorship of the Woman's World in 1887, and in May, 1888, he published his first fairy tale collection. It is possible that his wife encouraged his production of fairy tales due to her own interest in the genre. In the same year that Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Constance published two children's books, There Was Once and A Long Time Ago.

An Ethnic Heritage That Encouraged Wilde's Fairy Tale Authorship

In addition to his obligations as a father, Wilde's role as son of Lady and Sir William Wilde was probably an equally strong impetus to writing fairy tales. Sir William Wilde was a physician who was interested in Irish folklore. He made a practice of having an assistant write down his peasant patients' stories, superstitions, cures, and charms, which, according to Wilde's biographer Ellmann, he would accept in lieu of his fee (11).

Sir William Wilde published Irish Popular Superstitions (1852) and, after his death, Lady Wilde collected the stories her husband had gathered through his practice into two volumes, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1888) and Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland (1890). Ellmann calls her two volumes "important" (125) and notes that other authors borrowed from them, including William Butler Yeats (125).

Lady Wilde was keenly interested in the folklore of her nation and ardently nationalistic in her own writing. Lady Wilde and her literary son were proud of her achievements and her role as a nationalistic figure for Ireland. Wilde's third issue of Woman's World, January 1888, includes a poem by his mother, and the November 1888 issue, coming after his publication of The Happy Prince and Other Tales in May, includes Lady Wilde's "Irish Peasant Tales" from her collection of stories gathered by Sir William Wilde.

A look at Lady Jane Wilde's Poems shows an intense interest in folklore and mythology. Her poem "Undine" follows the myth of the mermaid. While Lady Wilde notes that she based her poem on de la Motte Fouqué's "Undine" (Poems 135), it is interesting that her son followed with his own mermaid tale in "The Fisherman and His Soul." Lady Wilde's poem "The Fisherman" (138) also treats this theme, featuring a sea nymph who tempts a fisherman into joining her. Her poem "A Warning" subtitled "From the Danish" (127) involves a merman who rises from the waters to tempt Fair Guniver.

Thus, we should not overlook the possibility that Wilde worked in the fairy tale medium to honor his parents' folkloric writings. As an example of the esteem in which he held his mother's authorship, Wilde wrote in De Profundis that his mother ranked intellectually with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and historically with Madame Roland (942).

The Wilde family interest in folk tales is remarked upon in almost all of Oscar Wilde's biographies. For example, Arthur Ransome notes, "Both Sir William and Lady Wilde busied themselves in collecting folklore. Wilde in boyhood traveled with his father to visit ruins and gather superstitions. His childhood must have had a plentiful mythology" (27).

In addition to his family's interest in folklore, we should consider Wilde's Irish heritage itself as an impetus towards the production of fantasy or fairy tale literature. In Matthew Arnold's 1867 Cornhill Magazine essay entitled "On the Study of Celtic Literature," originally delivered as lectures at Oxford, 1865–66, Arnold makes observations on the Irish character. Arnold states that Celts are linked to "the magic of nature," not merely to the beauty of nature as the Greeks had been, but to "the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm" (483). In such a frame of reference, Wilde was acting as a true Celt in writing stories that were linked to "fairy charm."

We know that Wilde read Arnold's essay, and Wilde even sent a copy of his book Poems (1881) to Arnold.² When Grant Allen's essay "The Celt in English Art" appeared in the Fortnightly Review of February 1891 alongside Wilde's "The Soul of Man under Socialism," Wilde wrote to Allen that his article asserted "that Celtic spirit in Art that Arnold divined, but did not demonstrate." He went on to say, "all of us who are Celts, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish, should … assert ourselves, and show these tedious Angles or Teutons what a race we are, and how proud we are to belong to that race" (Letters [The Letters of Oscar Wilde] 286-87).

His authorship of fairy tales can be seen as an effort to bring the Celtish fairy charm, in Arnold's words, to the English reading public, and thereby gain for himself a much wider audience than his previous writings had received.

The fairy tales occurred in Wilde's career at roughly the same time as his acquaintance with William Butler Yeats. Yeats places their first meeting around September 1888, several months after Wilde's first fairy tale collection was published. Yeats's publication of Irish folktales coincides with Wilde's production of fairy tales, publishing Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), which Oscar Wilde reviewed favorably, and Irish Fairy Tales (1892).

Wilde's fairy tales were written before he would become known for drawing room comedies. At the time of his fairy tale authorship, Wilde was like his fellow "ethnic" Brits, the Irish and Scottish, such as Yeats and Robert Louis Stevenson. Ignoring the works to come later, it is interesting to consider that Wilde's life drew a kind of parallel to an author he greatly admired, Robert Louis Stevenson. Both Wilde and Stevenson were ethnic outsiders who became known as great British authors.³

Leading Victorian Authors Wrote Fairy Tales

In addition to Wilde's familial and ethnic reasons for writing fairy tales, we can also see a clear-cut desire for popular recognition at this stage in his career. The fairy tales build on his earlier activities as a public aesthete.

Unlike today's segmented literary landscape, Victorian writers wrote serious literature both for adults and children and regularly turned to "the fairy realm" in imaginative writing. The period's enthusiasm for fairy tales could hardly be overlooked by Wilde, and in writing them he was simultaneously continuing a family tradition as well as making a commercially productive move. In an 1844 essay "Children's Books" published in The Quarterly Review, Elizabeth Rigby notes the popularity of writing children's books for profit: "Ever since the days of Goldsmith the writing and editing of children's works has been a source of ready emolument—in no class of literature does the risk bear so small a proportion to the reward …" (19).

In writing fairy tales, Oscar Wilde was aware that he was following in the footsteps of leading Victorian literary figures before him. These included Thackeray, author of the fairy tale "The Rose and the Ring" (1855), Ruskin, author of "The King of the Golden River" (1851), and Kingsley and Dickens, both authors of several fairy tales. Not only did Dickens write straightforward fairy tales, but, as noted by Harry Stone in Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making (1979), he follows a fairy tale narrative pattern in his major novels. It is significant in considering Wilde's motivations for writing fairy tales to recall that the Victorian era's dominant prose writer and popular literary figure was wedded to the fairy tale narrative structure.

These authors served as examples or models for Wilde, who was carving out a career for himself as a serious author when he wrote fairy tales, and who looked up to Ruskin, one of the dons at Oxford during Wilde's student days. In 1890 Joseph Jacobs published English Fairy Tales, a collection of traditional tales, followed by other fairy tale collections. Wilde knew Jacobs and saw firsthand that a contemporary of his could achieve success with fairy tales. Andrew Lang, another Oxford student in Wilde's day, wrote original fairy tales and edited books of traditional tales from other sources. In addition, authors less familiar to twentieth-century readers, such as Jean Ingelow, Margaret Gatty, Mary De Morgan, and Mrs. Molesworth, were regularly producing popular fairy tale collections.

Victorians were well aware of the power of enchantment of fairy stories. In Dickens's words, "In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected" (25). The century's earlier Romantic movement, with its respect for the world of the imagination, helped the fairy tale gain prominence in the nineteenth century. As Jack Zipes notes, "the return of the magic realm of the fairies and elves was viewed by the Romantics and many early Victorians as a necessary move to oppose the growing alienation in the public sphere due to industrialization and regimentation in the private sphere" (Revolt xv).

The list of suggested members for the Academy of Letters in 1897 shows in what high esteem the Victorians held their fairy tale authors, for it included George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Andrew Lang, and J. M. Barrie (Letters 692).

The act of writing fairy tales can be seen as an impulse seeking acceptance from Wilde's literary world and society at large, a desire to charm by bringing his writing talents to a genre that was not only beloved by the public but practiced by the key imaginative authors of the day.

Audience for Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales

Regenia Gagnier makes an argument that Wilde wanted to have it "both ways," to give the public what it wanted and to provide an engaged protest against the elements of nineteenth-century British culture, such as utilitarianism, that he opposed.

Wilde provides charming children's stories and yet at the same time wants to delight cosmopolitan readers who would be bored with ordinary children's tales. His second volume, A House of Pomegranates, is dedicated as a book to his wife, with each story dedicated to a particular woman who was a member of the culturally elite society Wilde apparently hoped to charm. For example, Wilde dedicates "The Young King" to Margaret de Windt, wife of Sir Charles Johnson Brooke, second Rajah of Sarawak. "The Fisherman and His Soul" is dedicated to the Princess of Monaco, and Wilde wastes no opportunity to ingratiate himself; he writes to the Princess of Monaco, "I am so pleased you like the book, and am charmed to think your name is in it to adorn it and make it lovely" (Letters 303). He seems with these dedications for A House of Pomegranates to seek to impress sophisticates. As Gagnier puts it, he dedicated his second volume "to women of Society who would thereby ensure his reputation" (66). It should also be noted that these society women were close friends of Constance, according to Joyce Bentley's biography, The Importance of Being Constance. Wil-de's wife had met the Ranee and Princess Alice of Monaco as well as Lady Mount Temple when she was a young woman, and remained friends with them throughout her life. By dedicating his fairy tales to his wife's friends, Wilde was perhaps commenting, through each story itself, upon the personality of each society woman well known to his wife or even, perhaps, attempting to make an impression upon Constance herself.

Wilde's letters give a glimpse of how proud he was of his first volume of fairy tales. Wilde refers to them as "little" stories, but it is clear he considered them representative of his talents because he sent them to people whose opinions he valued. For instance, the month of its publication, he sent a copy of The Happy Prince and Other Tales to John Ruskin with a letter stating that his dearest memories of his Oxford days were his walks and talks with Ruskin: "Dear Mr. Ruskin, I send you my little book, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and need hardly say how gratified I will be if you find in it any charm or beauty." He goes on to praise Ruskin: "There is in you something of prophet, of priest, and of poet, and to you the gods gave eloquence such as they have given to none other …" (Letters 217-18). In this letter and its enclosed fairy tale volume, Wilde is clearly attempting to charm Ruskin, himself a fairy tale author.

When Wilde had not received a reply by July, he wrote again to Ruskin, asking if he had received the fairy tale book. One month after its publication, Wilde sent The Happy Prince and Other Tales to Florence Balcombe, an early romantic interest of his who was by then married to Bram Stoker, stating "I hope you will like them, simple though they are" (More Letters [More Letters of Oscar Wilde] 73).

In January, 1889, Wilde sent American writer Amelie Rives Chanler a copy of his first fairy tale volume, writing: "I hope you will like them: they are, of course, slight and fanciful, and written, not for children, but for childlike people from eight to eighty!" (Letters 237).

With his second volume, a Pall Mall Gazette reviewer questioned if Wilde's intended audience still included children. This inspired Wilde to send a sharp letter to the editor in which he states, "in building this House of Pomegranates I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public…. No artist recognizes any standard of beauty but that which is suggested by his own temperament" (Letters 302).

Wilde makes clear he will not allow his artistic expression to be molded by what the public wants. However, his statement implies he hopes the public would share his vision rather than, as he felt the reviewer was attempting to do, regulate it. Unfortunately, Wilde's comments were construed as snobbery when a reviewer turned to A House of Pomegranates with an unsigned notice in the Athenaeum, in February 1892, which read:

Mr. Oscar Wilde has been good enough to explain, since the publication of his book that it was intended neither for the 'British Child' nor for the 'British Public', but for the cultured few who can appreciate its subtle charms. The same exiguous but admiring band will doubtless comprehend the naming [of the volume A House of Pomegranates ] which we must confess is not apparent to our perverse and blunted intellect.

                                          (117)

As his correspondence written to William Gladstone shows, Wilde's desire to serve readers seems evident as he provides Gladstone with a copy of The Happy Prince and Other Tales and notes, "It is only a collection of short stories, and is really meant for children, but I should like to [present it] to one whom I, and all who have Celtic blood in their veins, must ever honour and revere" (Letters 218).

When Walter Pater received from Wilde The Happy Prince and Other Tales, he noted that despite being confined to his room with gout, he was consoling himself with The Happy Prince, noting he found the prince and his companions "delightful." "I hardly know whether to admire more the wise wit of 'The Wonderful [sic Remarkable] Rocket', or the beauty and tenderness of 'The Selfish Giant' : the latter certainly is perfect in its kind" (Letters 60). Wilde admits in a letter to his publisher after receiving Pater's response: "Mr. Pater has written me a wonderful letter about my prose, so I am in high spirits" (Letters 219).

Alexander Galt Ross's review in the Saturday Review of 20 October 1888 notes, "Mr. Oscar Wilde, no doubt for excellent reasons, has chosen to present his fables in the form of fairy tales to a public which … will assuredly not be composed of children" (61). Yeats wrote in a United Ireland review that it is "a volume of as pretty fairy tales as our generation has seen" (Beckson 111).

Wilde's first volume of fairy tales sold well and the initial run of 1,000 went into a second edition in January, 1889 (Beckson 7).

The reception of his second volume of fairy tales was less enthusiastic. However, it is difficult to know if the second volume was received on its own merits, or through the lens of a changed perception of Wilde, the "immoral" author. In the interval following The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Wilde had given the public one of the most overtly homosexual stories of its day with the short story "The Portrait of W. H." and followed it with The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel also with overt homosocial overtones. The cry of immorality Dorian Gray produced was intense enough to inspire defensive reactions from Wilde and a preface to its publication in book form in which he attempted to make clear his aesthetic beliefs about morals and art. Thus A House of Pomegranates arrives after the most publicly perceived "immoral" Wilde fiction.

Despite the lukewarm reception—the first press run was sold off as remainders—some of Wilde's contemporaries praised the second volume. Lord Alfred Douglas felt A House of Pomegranates eclipsed the first volume and that it "contains some of the most musical and perfect prose ever written in the English language" (Summing Up 105). Douglas believed the fairy tales in the first volume were "admittedly imitations of Hans Andersen" (Summing Up 104) and that the second volume was "a work of original genius, and just as it imitates no other writer so it has no successors, as far as I know, in its genre" (105).

To Charm the Public, One must First Get its Attention

Not only did Wilde want an audience for his fairy tales, but he was mindful of the publicity value of a public personality; reviewers duly took note of Wilde's self-marketing skill. The Athenaeum review of Intentions in 1891 notes Wilde's salesman side when it declares, "it is a pity that he should think, or find, it necessary to resort to the tricks of the smart advertiser in order to attract attention to his wares" (92).

This attention to publicity, advertising, and sales was perhaps a product of his 1882 year-long speaking tour of the U.S. and his more recent experiences editing the Woman's World magazine.

When the general manager of Cassell's publishing firm approached Wilde about editing what was then the Lady's World, Wilde became eager to give the public a journal of substance. His letter to Wemyss Reid reveals that Wilde was mindful of what the readership wanted. He notes literary criticism could be done in paragraphs "not from the standpoint of the scholar or the pedant, but from the standpoint of what is pleasant to read" (Letters 195). Wilde notes that, while it is dull to read about music, "a children's column would be much more popular," and he states, "A popular serial story is absolutely necessary for the start … it should be exciting but not tragic" (Letters 196).

At this stage, Wilde was no longer the aesthete poet removed from commercial considerations. He had begun to consider an audience as never before, and it was shortly after his editorship began that he produced his first volume of fairy tales.

Gagnier asserts that Wilde was able to reach the public by successfully making a place for himself in the literary world and in the public eye. Anya Clayworth notes that his editorship of a women's magazine enabled him to learn how to reach the public. In her words, "Wilde learned the skill of writing to public demand from his career as a journalist" (85). Clayworth claims that the magazine's brief success was due in part to Wilde's "popularity with the public" (95). While I would not go as far as Clayworth in saying of his subsequent literary successes "the main reason that his work sold was that he made what the public wanted to read a critical factor in what he chose to write" (98) and in fact, find this to be a vast overstatement of what I see as Wilde's healthy interest in reaching public acclaim, I agree with Clayworth that Wilde's interest in reaching the public had grown as a result of his editorship. The fruits of this interest are, in part, the production of fairy tales, a popular and highly acceptable Victorian literary art form.

As Stephanie Green points out in her essay on Wilde's editorship, "If women's magazines are the bearers of commodities, they are also a commodity in themselves, in which women consumers take different types of pleasure" (116).

Indeed, Wilde was by now very aware of his writing as a commodity. When his fairy tales were published, Wilde reminded his publisher in June 1888, the month following their publication, of the media who should be sent review copies of The Happy Prince and Other Tales. Wilde suggested a card for advertisers to display in their shops as promotion for his book, perhaps featuring on the card Walter Crane's frontispiece and the book's title. "And is it not time for a few advertisements?" Wilde asks. "Punch and the World are capital papers to advertise in—once" (Letters 219).

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would argue that a full understanding of Wilde's life as a writer is possible only when one takes into consideration Wilde's fairy tale authorship and the impulses driving this effort. By writing original fairy tales, Oscar Wilde took part in a hugely popular as well as esoteric literary movement that served both the mass public with tales such as Dickens's A Christmas Carol or "The Magic Fishbone," as well as the cognoscenti who could appreciate Wilde's strange "The Fisherman and His Soul" and other less accessible examples of the genre by Victorian writers. We cannot understand the trajectory of Wilde's career if we do not consider that the fairy tales show a deep desire for both public and high-culture acceptance of his work, his impulse to folklore and fantasy, and his status as a writer of Celtic heritage in English society. Our twentieth-century separation of children's literature from serious literature has prevented us from learning what these stories have to teach us of Wilde's literary motivations, which, like Wilde himself, were complex and multifaceted.

Notes

1. This Richard Le Gallienne recollection appears verbatim in H. Pearson's The Life of Oscar Wilde, 185.

2. Along with his volume of poetry, Wilde wrote an appreciative letter to Arnold, mentioning "the constant source of joy and wonder that your beautiful work was to all of us at Oxford" (Letters 78).

3. It is interesting to consider that Wilde's life drew a kind of parallel to an author he greatly admired, Robert Louis Stevenson. Both Wilde and Stevenson were ethnic outsiders who became known as great British authors, who turned their genius to children's literature. Wilde and Stevenson lived concurrently and share similarities as "ethnic" British authors. Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in November, 1850 (Wilde in Dublin October 1, 1854), son of an engineer (Wilde was son of a doctor), enjoyed travel (as did Wilde), went to America in 1879 and was living there when Wilde conducted his year-long tour of the U.S. in 1882, had financial troubles like Wilde and died too young, on December 3, 1894, at 44, compared to Wilde's death at 46 in 1900. Both authors died on foreign soil. Stevenson's greatest stories precede Wilde's attempt at children's literature by only a few years. The Stevenson-Wilde link helps us see how Wilde was positioned prior to his stage successes—as an "ethnic" British author of uncertain future attainments. Both men left their homelands in a kind of quest for two different goals and both wrote some of the greatest works of fantasy literature for children and adult readers yet produced.

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. Poetry and Prose. John Bryson, ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967.

Beckson, Karl, ed. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970.

Clayworth, Anya. "The Woman's World: Oscar Wilde as Editor." Victorian Periodicals Review. Summer 1997: 84-101.

Dickens, Charles. "Frauds on the Fairies." Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism. Peter Hunt, ed. New York: Routledge, 1990. 24-26.

Douglas, Lord Alfred. Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up. London: Duckworth, 1940.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986.

Green, Stephanie. "Oscar Wilde's The Woman's World." Victorian Periodicals Review. Summer 1997: 102-20.

Holland, Vyvyan. Son of Oscar Wilde. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954.

―――――――. Oscar Wilde: A Pictorial Biography. London: Thames and Hudson, 1960.

Ransome, Arthur. Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913.

Pearson, Hesketh. The Life of Oscar Wilde. London: Methuen, 1954.

Rigby, Elizabeth. "Children's Books." Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism. Peter Hunt, ed. New York: Routledge, 1990. 19-22.

Stone, Harry. Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Wilde, Lady Jane. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, & Superstitions of Ireland. London: Chatto & Windus, 1899.

―――――――. Poems. Glasgow: Cameron & Ferguson, 1871. (Accessed from the Electronic Collection of the Victorian Women Writers Project, Indiana U, wwweb.)

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1994.

―――――――. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.

―――――――. More Letters of Oscar Wilde. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. London: John Murray, 1985.

Zipes, Jack, ed. Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves. New York: Routledge, 1987.

TITLE COMMENTARY

THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER TALES (1888)

Alexander Galt Ross (review date 30 October 1888)

SOURCE: Ross, Alexander Galt. Review of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, by Oscar Wilde. In Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, edited by Karl Beckson, pp. 61-2. New York, N.Y.: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1970.

[In the following review, originally printed in the October 30, 1888 edition of the Saturday Review, Ross praises Wilde's linguistic artistry in The Happy Prince and Other Tales, though he finds the work unsuitable for children.]

One of the chief functions of the true fairy story is to excite sympathy. Whether they are princes, peasants, or inanimate objects (Was the immortal tin soldier an inanimate object?), the joys and sorrows of the heroes and heroines of fairyland will always be real to those persons, whatever their age may be, who love the fairy story, and regard it as the most delightful form of romance. Mr. Oscar Wilde, no doubt for excellent reasons, has chosen to present his fables in the form of fairy tales to a public which, though it should count among its numbers most persons who can appreciate delicate humour and an artistic literary manner, will assuredly not be composed of children. No child will sympathize at all with Mr. Wilde's Happy Prince when he is melted down by order of the Mayor and Corporation in obedience to the dictum of the art professor at the University that, since 'he is no longer beautiful, he is no longer useful.' Children do not care for satire, and the dominant spirit of these stories is satire—a bitter satire differing widely from that of Hans Andersen, whom Mr. Wilde's literary manner so constantly recalls to us. This quality of bitterness, however, does not repel the reader (except in the story of the 'Devoted Friend,' which is at once the cleverest and least agreeable in the volume), inasmuch as Mr. Wilde always contrives to leave us at the end of every tale with a very pleasant sensation of the humorous. Perhaps the best example of Mr. Wilde's method is to be found in 'The Nightingale and the Rose.' Here the nightingale has sacrificed its life in order to obtain a red rose for the student. The student repairs with the nightingale's gift to the daughter of the Professor, in order to present the rose to her:—

But the girl frowned.

'I am afraid it will not go with my dress,' she answered; 'and besides, the Chamberlain's nephew has sent me some real jewels, and everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers.'

Then the student, having thrown away the rose, returns to a great dusty book, reflecting:—

What a silly thing Love is. It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen … In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.

It may be remarked in connexion with this story that, in order to get the desired effect at the conclusion, Mr. Wilde has gone dangerously near the region of sham sentiment. It is the only place in the book where his artistic sense has stumbled a little along with his natural history.

Robert K. Martin (essay date winter 1979)

SOURCE: Martin, Robert K. "Oscar Wilde and the Fairy Tale: 'The Happy Prince' as Self-Dramatization." Studies in Short Fiction 16, no. 1 (winter 1979): 74-7.

[In the following essay, Martin characterizes "The Happy Prince"—the title story of Wilde's fairy tale collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales—as a rejection of the author's previous belief in the Aesthetic Movement and an embrace of his homosexuality.]

Oscar Wilde's fairy tales have been little considered, and, when discussed, frequently misunderstood.¹ And yet the fairy tale was important for Wilde, enabling him to express his own inner development in a form free from social scrutiny. Wilde used the fairy tale to express some of his deepest concerns and to record his own growing commitments, including one to homosexual love, in a way which would have been impossible without the protection offered by the conventions of fantasy.

"The Happy Prince," probably his best-known and most successful tale, conveys a change of heart, a rejection of hedonism and aestheticism and an acceptance of involvement in the human condition of suffering, brought about through love. For, as Wilde points out clearly in his tale, it is Eros which lies at the heart of Agape.²

The change of heart is conveyed by the symbolic transformation of the Prince's heart. Now that it is lead, ironically, it displays far more sympathy than when it was human. The weeping Prince informs the swallow, "When I was alive and had a human heart, I did not know what tears were … now that I am dead … and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep."³ The Prince's transformation has already occured; it remains but for him to realize that transformation by carrying out the acts of self-sacrifice which form the basis of the tale. The swallow is not yet transformed, however, and it is the Prince who will lead the swallow along the path to spiritual regeneration through love. Thus, at the end, each arrives at a perfected spiritual state, and they are able to share a state of bliss.

The Prince specifically rejects his former state, in terms which cannot fail to remind us of Wilde's own life and reputation: "I lived in the Palace of SansSouci,⁴ where sorrow is not allowed to enter … My courtiers called me the Happy Prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness" (p. 8). Wilde's distinction between pleasure and happiness points to his rejection of a pure aestheticism which ignores the problems of the real world and which substitutes physical gratification for spiritual enrichment. This element of renunciation in the tale, combined with its composition in the years immediately following Wilde's marriage (in 1884) and the birth of his sons, has led many critics to see this tale and others as statements of an attempt to reject homosexuality. One writes, for instance, "A biographer might read the fairy tales as Wilde's attempt to assert the primacy of his family life and to reject the siren call of homosexuality,… [The tales] are probably Wilde's attempt to remain within the charmed circle of his children, innocent and safe from evil."⁵ In fact, the opposite is true: "The Happy Prince" announces the beauty and value of homosexual love in contrast to heterosexual love, and specifically uses homosexual love as a model of selfless love and heterosexual love as a model of selfish love. In "The Happy Prince" (written about 1886) Wilde depicted the superiority of homosexuality over the heterosexual life he had lived before—precisely because the heterosexuality depicted in "The Happy Prince" is loveless.

Although the Swallow has not yet reached the state of transformation of the Prince, his situation is analogous. The Swallow's Egypt represents a symbolic state not unlike that of the Prince's Sans-Souci: it is characterized by forgetfulness ("large lotus-flowers"), sleep, and death. It stands for the death of the soul, in a world of comfort which ignores suffering. The Swallow's willingness to stay one night with the Prince is the first postponement of his desires, the first recognition of the possibility of a higher claim, a claim which unites personal love (the Swallow's for the Prince) with impersonal (the Prince's for his people).

The Swallow's first mission for the Prince gives him, in passing, an illustration of the vanity of women. Whilst on his way to bring the Prince's ruby to the poor seamstress who is embroidering passion-flowers on a gown for a maid-of-honour, he passes over the beautiful girl who remarks to her romantic lover: "I hope my dress will be ready in time for the State-ball; I have ordered passion-flowers to be embroidered on it, but the seamstresses are so lazy" (p. 11). The episode offers an illustration of the indifference of the maid-of-honour, her inability to understand the lives of those who work for her, and, not insignificantly, her lover's inevitable deception at the hands of so unworthy a beloved (a theme developed more fully in "The Nightingale and the Rose" ). The Swallow has already had his own experience of heterosexual love, with the Reed. Attracted by "her slender waist," he soon discovers that "She has no conversation" and is too "domestic" (pp. 5-6). A good deal of Oscar's experience with Constance undoubtedly went into that passage: she, although attractive, was hardly literary and was intellectually incapable of sharing her husband's life.

As the Swallow performs the three tasks asked of him by the Prince, his love for the Prince grows. He even abandons his plan to go to Egypt, declaring to the Prince no longer, "I will stay with you for one night," but, "I will stay with you always" (p. 18). This decision means his death, of course, since he cannot support the cold, but first his love for the Prince must be consummated. When he asks to kiss the Prince's hand, the Prince responds, "I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow, you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you" (p. 21). The dynamics of the fairy tale allow Wilde to present two men kissing on the lips, a taboo relationship which would be "inconceivable" in serious fiction; ironically, such forbidden love can only be portrayed in the world of children's literature, where nothing is "real." What is more, although both the Prince and the Swallow must "die," they are not to go unrewarded; nor is their love to perish. In the next world, they are to be reunited and in God's "garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore" (p. 24). The restored Paradise is a world of friendship, caring, and love—unlike the real world.

Readers have often misunderstood Wilde's tale because they have tended to identify aestheticism and homosexuality in his work. In fact, this is merely the application to literary criticism of a more general social attitude, in which homosexuality is linked to a concern for beauty at the expense of larger social concerns. Since Wilde is well-known as a homosexual and as an exponent of aestheticism, it is convenient to suppose that the two are linked in his work. But "The Happy Prince" specifically condemns the Aesthetic Movement through the character of the Art Professor, who maintains of the Happy Prince, "As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful" (p. 23). Wilde, who had made his reputation as a spokesman for the Aesthetic Movement, was developing into the second major stage of his career, which would see the publication of "The Soul of Man under Socialism" as well as his biting satiric dramas of upper-class life (and marriage in particular) and of course his own arrest and imprisonment. As G. Wilson Knight has pointed out, Wilde's arrest and conviction were due not only to his homosexuality but more importantly to his consorting with lower-class boys, what Knight has termed his "sexual ratification of human unity."⁶ His homosexuality had offered him a way out of the narrow confines of the world of aesthetic theory and social graces and into a world of greater caring.

In the fairy tale Wilde dramatizes himself as the Happy Prince, a man who renounces the Palace of Sans-Souci, who gives up his worldly wealth, in order to share his goods with the poor and to share his happiness with his beloved Swallow. The tale reveals that Wilde yearned for a lover whom he could teach to love selflessly and who would come to share with him in acts of self-abnegation and spiritual development. Alfred Douglas, alas, was hardly that ideal Swallow. Nonetheless, "The Happy Prince" remains an important inner journal, an account of the way in which for Wilde the recognition and acceptance of his homosexuality coincided with the rejection of his previously held Aestheticism. Far from being the cause of frivolity and his Aesthetic Camp, Wilde's homosexuality led to a deepening of the human capacity for love and the willingness to sacrifice all for a beloved. The only literary form in which he could record this change of heart was the fairy tale. Wilde's legacy to his sons was the journal of his own heart.

Notes

1. I know of only two specialized studies. David M. Monaghan, "The Literary Fairy Tale: A Study of Oscar Wilde's 'The Happy Prince' and 'The Star-Child'", Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 1 (1974), 156-166, takes a primarily structural approach. I agree with his interpretation of such elements as the initiation theme, the three tasks, etc. But he has little to say about the tales' meaning. John Allen Quintus, "The Moral Prerogative in Oscar Wilde: A Look at the Fairy Tales," Virginia Quarterly Review, 53 (Autumn 1977), 708-717, argues that the tales "propose decency and generosity in human relations," but the essay as a whole is so superficial as to be useless.

2. This point is made in some detail by G. Wilson Knight, "Christ and Wilde," in Richard Ellmann, ed., Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 138-144.

3. Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London, 1888), p. 8. All further citations are to this edition and are indicated in the body of my essay.

4. Wilde may have intended a reference to the homosexual Frederick the Great through the name of the Palace. If so, he is suggesting that such a transformation never took place for Frederick.

5. Christopher S. Nassaar, Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 35-36. Nassaar terms the "governing principle of Wilde's fairy tales" a "fall from the world of innocence" (p. 20). That seems to me true, but Wilde's "innocence" is far different from Nassaar's understanding of it.

6. Knight, p. 144.

Guy Willoughby (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: Willoughby, Guy. "Jesus as a Model for Selfhood in The Happy Prince and Other Tales." In Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, pp. 19-33. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1993.

[In the following essay, Willoughby asserts that Wilde deliberately chose the framework of the fairy tale to portray Jesus as the ideal model of moral selflessness in The Happy Prince and Other Tales.]

"One always thinks of him," wrote Oscar Wilde of Christ in his famous Apologia, "as a lover for whose love the whole world was too small" (Letters [The Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde], p. 478). In Wilde's mature fiction and essays, the question posed for ethics by that myth, once shorn of its ecclesiastical covering, is an abiding, urgent theme—particularly as the context of that theme is, in general, the world now drained of religion, released from theological thrall into Walter Pater's "relative spirit."¹ More particularly, the author's representations of Christ allow us to grasp the full import of his aesthetics. With this in mind, I consider in this chapter the first sustained allusions to the Galilean, those found in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888).²

In three of these decorative fables—"The Happy Prince," "The Nightingale and the Rose," and "The Selfish Giant" —a pattern of references establishes Jesus as the compelling ethical model for the central characters, as they battle to win community in a sadly fractious world. Before we can examine these stories in the context of the volume, however, it is instructive to relate the writer's activity in The Happy Prince to the rephrased Platonic theories of his concurrent dialogue, "The Decay of Lying" (January 1889).³

To begin with, Wilde's generic choice in The Happy Prince is ironically apt, given his themes and his audience. Fairy tale and fairy-tale conventions had become a convenient and popular Victorian means of presenting topical moral problems without reference to Naturalistic demands;⁴ for Wilde, whose stories satirize the very notion of a mutually understood moral problem, the associative resonance of the genre nevertheless ensures a readership. Wilde's elegant tales of mutual misunderstanding reflect an awareness, imbibed most noticeably from Walter Pater's The Renaissance (1873),⁵ of the fracturing and relativist universe that science, psychology, and social dislocation were exposing at the end of the 1880s.⁶

Paradoxically, the fairy-tale genre of The Happy Prince enables the author to depict the post-Paterian universe of partisan visions, "each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world," as the writer of The Renaissance hauntingly describes it,⁷ in a popular and accessible form. Moreover, at the same time that the dangerously solipsistic intellectual climate of the age is dramatically rendered, the style and structure of each tale triumphantly demonstrates Wilde's mature aesthetic theory. At the time of publication he wrote that the stories are "an attempt to mirror modern life in a form remote from reality—to deal with modern problems in a mode that is ideal and not imitative,"⁸ and this brief statement of intention relates the book to the author's wider intellectual concerns.

This germ of theory is elaborated in the first of Wilde's critical dialogues published in The Nineteenth Century for January 1889, in which Vivian proposes to Cyril that the "decay of lying" in English letters signals a dangerous misunderstanding of the true relations of art and life, and of the role of the art work in offering to a skeptical era new, outlandish, and regenerative modes of action; in a phrase, that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life" (p. 982).

What follows is a sustained and witty attack on the notions of sincerity and verisimilitude so dear to the Victorian reader—an attack, according to certain later readers, that presages the new aesthetic directions of the early twentieth century.⁹ Those very "lies" which Plato feared would sully and distort ideal forms, become—in an age without belief in enduring verities—vitally important:

Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form. But it is not so…. Art develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of her own age. It is the ages that are her symbols.

                                          (p. 987)

Wilde's reference to Plato's metaphor of the cave emphasizes his view that, in the 1880s, there were no longer any absolute values for the artist to advance or distort. Art is likewise detached from "reality" (a word which in The Republic signifies the a priori world), and "turned away from the cave" in which Plato's spectators gaze at dim reflections of those perfect forms.¹⁰ Describing "her own perfection," art exists in no facile relation with either a dubious ideality or with everyday life, but in her perfection, existing without immediate reference to her surroundings, a new ideal may yet be figured forth for humanity to follow. Those who gaze at the "marvellous, many-petalled rose" will discover in its abstract perfection their own unconscious desires, and may thus be encouraged to enact them in life. The energy of life, Vivian states earlier in Aristotelian accents, is "simply the desire for expression," and art provides the forms whereby this may be achieved (p. 985).

Wilde's magister goes on to stress art's independence of current issues, for "the more abstract, the more ideal art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of the age" (p. 988). The art that combines thematic suggestiveness and formal congruity can most successfully bear the burden of the Zeitgeist; in the terms of Wilde's teasing transposition, "it is the ages that are her symbols" because art will inspire the spectator to transfer that unconscious "desire for expression" into life.

Whatever the flaws in his argument, Wilde's proclamation of the nonrepresentational and innovative aspect of art is one important reaction to the severe assaults that Romantic notions of individual integrity were currently undergoing. Certainly Wilde is trying to find a way to graft the wider social role of art—as prescribed by his mentors Ruskin and Arnold¹¹—onto the truly contemporary problems of aesthetics and the individual consciousness that he found expressed by Pater and the French decadents.¹² Art is the ultimate statement of defiance against mechanistic philosophy, against "Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general" (p. 981), a spirited protest that individuality will not wither, but consolidate. If "self-perfection," the Hellenic dream that Wilde shares with Arnold and Pater, is to be realized, the role of art in offering individual consciousness a model of complex integrity, will be crucial. This is the kind of model the storyteller offers in The Happy Prince.

In these tales the conflicting claims of self and community are proved to be indissoluble aspects of that Hellenic "self-perfection" that haunts the writer's work; the narrowly egotistical characters like the Rocket and the Water-Rat may survive in smug myopia, but they are clearly shut out from the greater self-knowledge of their more generous counterparts. Only those characters who imitate Jesus' unconditional love can attain, as we shall see, a genuinely liberating selfhood.

In "The Selfish Giant," which chronologically follows "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose," Christ's symbolic meaning in all these tales is illuminated in a deceptively simple allegory. The deployment of Jesus here is a masterful illustration of the claims Wilde would make in both of his major Christological essays: The Soul of Man under Socialism and De Profundis. Christ teaches, not by doctrine or declamation, but simply by example. "He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something," Wilde would write a decade later in De Profundis. "Once in his life each man is predestined to walk with Christ to Emmaus" (p. 487).

This is the impact the Christ-child has on the Selfish Giant, who epitomizes the myopia that leads to dangerously subjective vision. Behind high walls the Giant attempts to keep his beautiful garden for his own pleasure: "My own garden is my own garden," he states with the superb tautology of selfishness; "Anyone can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself" (p. 110). As a result of this extreme post-Paterian exclusivity, his garden remains frozen in the white thrall of winter all year round. The psychic consequences of wilful withdrawal from community could hardly be more efficiently presented.

The unannounced appearance of Christ, in the simple guise of human suffering, initiates the Giant into a new phase of selfhood that the unlucky Water-Rat and Remarkable Rocket of the last tales will not attain. One day the children who had been chased out of the garden manage to break in, and the springtime returns—with one telling exception. In a corner of the garden the Giant espies a small boy, "so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree" (p. 112), whose presence inspires the watcher's dormant compassion: his "heart melted as he looked out," and he declares, "'How selfish I have been!'" (p. 112).

The archetype for the Giant's Christian discipleship is St. Christopher, who unwittingly took Jesus on his own shoulders; now the title-figure of this tale takes the child "gently in his hand, and put him up into the tree" (p. 112). His entry into a vital new relationship with all life is heralded by the return of the springtime, for "the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them around the Giant's neck and kissed him" (p. 112). The muted syntactic echoes of the Authorised Bible affirm the moral: Jesus, "who pointed out," Wilde was later to write in De Profundis, "that there is no difference at all between the lives of others and one's own life" (Letters, p. 480), suggests to the individual how he might be integrated with his community.

The resolution of the story warns of the daunting consequences of a mode of life based on altruism, however. When the child reappears after many years, Wilde highlights the sacrificial aspect of the love he incarnates:

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?" For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant: "tell me, that I might take my big sword and slay him."

"Nay!" answered the child: "but these are the wounds of love."

                                        (p. 114)

Wilde implies that the compassion that the Giant has learned, through the agency of the child, now enables him to comprehend a mode of love that is founded on a deeper sacrifice. The Giant discovered and practiced love by sharing his garden with the children; the Christ-child by laying down his life. In "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose," the nature and imperative of such Christlike sacrifices, in the interests of a new wholeness both personal and public, form the central theme.

The title-character of the first tale is identified with Jesus himself, in a subtle pattern of allusion. In the first place, the Prince's uniquely composite vision of his society resembles that of Christ, whom Wilde would call in De Profundis "the first to conceive the divided races as a unity" (Letters, p. 477), and, in the action of the story, the Prince's comprehension is contrasted with the self-interest of his subjects. Ironically, it is only after death and his elevation as a statue "on a tall column" that the Happy Prince is able to perceive the condition of poverty and exploitation that, juxtaposed with the wealth and ease of a few, actually characterizes his city. Thus Wilde neatly symbolizes the partisan views held by the members of a stratified community: only when raised above the pleasant distractions of his formerly protected life, significantly also behind "a very lofty wall" (p. 97), can this ruler understand complex social realities. The Little Swallow, who carries out the Prince's acts of charity, discovers the truth of the statue's perceptions; flying over the city, he "saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates," and in the nearby lanes he encountered "the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets" (pp. 101-2).

The absence of comprehensive vision in the society at large is amusingly illustrated in the opening paragraphs by the conflicting interpretations the citizens offer of the beautiful statue. To the Utilitarian town councillor, he is beautiful, but "not quite so useful" as a weathercock; to a "sensible mother," he is a paragon of smug respectability that, because he "never dreams of crying for anything," she can hold up to her son; to the Charity Children he is "an angel," the idealization of their hopes and dreams, which he clearly is not to the coldly scientific Mathematics Master, who "did not approve of children dreaming" (p. 95). These variegated responses emblemize the profound lack of mutual understanding that the action of the story describes; they also illustrate Vivian's argument in "The Decay of Lying" that the spectator accords art with her own perceptions.

Of course, none of these interpretations bears any relation to the Prince's actual deep concern for the plight of his society. The arrival of the self-absorbed Swallow, who hopes, like the Remarkable Rocket of the last tale, that the town "has made preparations" (p. 96) for his brief sojourn on the way south, enables the Happy Prince to involve himself in the life of his subjects in a manner never possible in his lifetime. Like the Selfish Giant when faced by the suffering Christ-child, the Swallow becomes the agent of the Prince's far-reaching altruism: "I am covered with fine gold," said the Prince, "You must take it off, piece by piece, and give it to my poor; the living always think that gold can make them happy" (p. 102).

Moved by the Prince's sadness, the Swallow begins his task, gradually forgetting his own egotistical concerns out of a growing love for the statue. He becomes, in fact, a kind of disciple, distributing the alms of the master in much the same way—as the in-struction above suggests—that Christ's apostles did in the Gospel stories. Indeed, he is not unlike the Holy Ghost itself, that in the form of a dove visits upon Christ's favored ones the spiritual benison of God.¹³

But in this parable the remorseless consequences of Christian imitation are taken to their fullest extent. It is only when the Happy Prince has been reduced to complete anonymity by his deed—"'Dear me! How shabby the Prince looks!'" the Mayor remarks; "'in fact he is little better than a beggar!'" (p. 103)—that his task has been completed.

The Prince's divestment of his outer apparel, and his resultant loss of superficial identity, recall Wilde's evocation in an earlier sonnet of the rending of Jesus' garments at Cavalry. In "On the Sale by Auction of Keats' Love Letters" (1886),¹⁴ this episode becomes an image for the apparent destruction by a callous society of the Saviour's identity:

     Is it not said that many years ago,
        In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
        With torches through the midnight, and began
     To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
        Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
     Not knowing the God's wonder, or His woe?
                                              (ll. 9-14)

In the poem, Wilde compares Christ's humiliation with the unfeeling dispersal of John Keats's love letters amid the avaricious bidders at Sotheby's, and this identification of the artist-martyr of Shelley's Adonais with the crucified Son of Man has implications for the author's developing conception of the artist's relations with society. At this stage I would point out the parallels between the dishonored Christ of the sonnet and the stripped statue in "The Happy Prince" —like Jesus in that sestet, it is only when the Prince has been divested of all outer apparel, indeed of all recognizable signs of identity, that his true spiritual beauty is manifested. The squabbling of the avaricious town councillors recalls the "brawlers of the auction mart" (1.3) who fight over Keats's letters, as well as the soldiers' wrangle for "mean raiment" in the sestet:

Then they melted the statue in a furnace, and the Mayor held a meeting of the corporation to decide what was to be done with the metal. "We must have another statue of course," he said, "and it shall be a statue of myself."

"Of myself", said each of the Town Councillors, and they quarrelled. When I last heard of them they were quarrelling still.

                                         (p. 103)

There is another striking parallel between the Happy Prince and Christ at the end of the story, one that points to the real nobility of sacrifice in a callous world. In an act of self-annihilation the Happy Prince distributes his body literally among his subjects, as Jesus did symbolically at the last supper. But for the fin de siècle altruist, the parallel is filled with irony.

The true significance of his selflessness is not only unperceived by his various beneficiaries—the young playwright thinks of the Prince's sapphires as a present "from some great admirer," while the match-girl mistakes the other one for a "lovely bit of glass" (p. 100, 101)—but, in concrete terms, is quite futile. Even though "the children's faces grow rosier" as a result of the Swallow's piecemeal distribution of the statue's gold leaf, we know that the oppressive conditions that perpetrate the wretched poverty of their lives will continue. At the end of the story civic power is still firmly vested in the hands of the mayor and his corporation, with their recognizably middle-class self-interest, false gentility, and Utilitarianism, and the rich will not doubt continue making merry in their houses while the beggars sit at the gates. In concrete political terms, then, altruism is of no account. Three years later, in The Soul of Man under Socialism, Wilde would actually condemn charity for the way in which it blunts the political consciousness of the poor, and "The Happy Prince" certainly exemplifies his view in the essay that charity is "a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution" (p. 1081).

In wider social terms, such charitable gestures may be useless, but in individual terms, the terms in which Christ realized himself fully, such sacrifices are vital. When he divests himself of his wealth, the Happy Prince, and not his community, becomes the recipient of grace—or "perfection"—to use the more numinous Wildean term. He is akin to a Gospel character whom Wilde would introduce into both of his later theoretical discussions of Christ. When the rich young man came to Jesus seeking eternal life, he was entreated to give up all his possessions in the interests, not of others, but of his own perfection; "it is not of the state of the poor that [Christ] is thinking," Wilde wrote in De Profundis, "but of the soul of the young man, the lovely soul that wealth was marring" (Letters, p. 480).

The new integrality the Happy Prince attains is confirmed when the angel chooses the pair as "the most precious things in the city." Henceforward the altruists of the story will dwell ever close to God: "in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for ever-more, and in my City of Gold, the Happy Prince shall praise me" (p. 103). Christian discipleship, then, in spite of societal hostility or incomprehension, becomes the warrant of a wonderful perfection, paradoxically achieved after death by a commitment to others that effaces self.

In "The Nightingale and the Rose," the "perfection" attained by the songbird through sacrifice is realized, not in heaven, but in a work of art. Through her assumption of the lovesick young Student's burden, she exemplifies Wilde's later reflection in De Profundis on Christ: "he realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of art is the sole secret of creation" (Letters, p. 476).

That "imaginative sympathy" is crucial to the Nightingale's accomplishment, for she represents the Romantic artist, who—as Wilde had declared in the sonnet on Keats's letters—is martyred by a hostile society that fails to comprehend the value of her art. In "The English Renaissance of Art" (1882), the most extended of his early lectures on aesthetics, Wilde first makes this connection between the artist's experience, the completed art work, and an audience's response. His remarks illuminate the artistic parable in "The Nightingale and the Rose" :

… while the incomplete lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the thorn-crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure: for our delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like Adonis, be beautiful in its agony: and when the poet's heart breaks it will break in music.¹⁵

In this sonorous passage, the necessary relationship between pain and great art is explicit: the artist's "despair" will be his audiences' "delight," his "pain" will be "beautiful" to his viewers. The reference to Adonis, the martyred fertility god who is the subject of the first Greek idyllic poetry, suggests that the artist's creation becomes his elegy, a beautiful monument to his own sacrifice. This is encapsulated in the figure of roses blooming from the symbolically resonant "thorn-crown." More than this, Wilde asserts here that, in creating fine work out of his suffering, an artist perfects himself—his despair "will gild its own thorns"—and, in so doing, he will bring a "healing power" to those "incomplete lives of ordinary men."

Wilde's story of the Nightingale is an allegory for the all-consuming love and commitment required of Christ's most notable imitator, the artist. In literal terms the "thorn-crown" of her agony will blossom into a red rose, venerable symbol of love, beauty, and perfection, which represents the artwork in whose symmetry and formal coherence the martyrdom of its creator is incarnate.

The rose includes in the reverberance of its literary associations an image of Heaven itself, and therefore of divine love, as used by Dante in Il Paradisio. The Nightingale, of course, has been celebrated throughout European literature for the power and quality of its song, and is therefore an apposite emblem for the artist.¹⁶ In "The Nightingale and the Rose" the wonderful power of the bird's song becomes a potent image for the transformation of experience of which art, according to the arguments of "The Decay of Lying," is capable.

The story begins with the Student's stagey protestations of unrequited passion, which place him in that long line of ardent and mellifluous suitors that we trace back to Petrarch and the mediaeval conventions of courtly love. In the responses of the Nightingale, listening intently from the holm-oak tree, the vital idealizing power of the artist is emphasized: "'Here at last is a true lover,' said the Nightingale. 'Night after night have I sung of him, though I knew him not; night after night have I told his story to the stars, and now I see him'" (p. 104). The post-Platonic artist, as viewed by Vivian in "The Decay of Lying," always figures forth an ideal, a beautiful "lie" which in turn will be embodied in life. In this story, the Nightingale's "true lover" appears to personify the convention itself.

In a sense, then, the student seems to be the Nightingale's creation, the ideal lover that she and her predecessors—Petrarch, Sydney, Spenser, and the rest—have embodied in song. This explains her excitement: it is the excitement of recognition, proof positive that the images of art may become concrete. This excitement is reinforced in her second reflection, which deliberately echoes the first: "'Here indeed is the true lover', said the Nightingale. 'What I sing of, he suffers; what is joy to me, to him is pain. Surely love is a wonderful thing'" (p. 104).

Moved by the Student's plight, the sympathetic Nightingale decides to do all she can to create the "red rose" needed by the young man to win his beloved's hand. Her life is at stake, for the bird must press her breast against the thorn of the barren rose tree—a venerable device whereby the author skillfully combines a variety of literary and mythic con-ventions to emphasize the enormity of the Nightingale's sacrifice. Traditionally, the red rose was believed to be infused with the songbird's blood, for by piercing itself against the thorn the Nightingale is able to sing by night, and so to resist falling asleep and becoming prey to its traditional enemy, the snake.¹⁷

This connection between the quality of the bird's song and the rose which is infused with its blood acquires a richer meaning, one central to the connection Wilde is making, when we recall the medieval myth that Christ's blood turned the white rose red at the time of the crucifixion. In the image of the rose deepening in color as the life of the Nightingale ebbs away, Wilde is creating a resonant symbol for the Christlike totality of sacrifice art requires of its practitioners. That this symbol of perfection is to be "built" from the bird's music by "moonlight," and nourished with its "own heart's blood", powerfully represents the artist's commitment and her method.

It is the business of art, says Vivian in "The Decay of Lying," to help life express itself in a new form, and the Nightingale's relationship with the rose-tree, who "shall have no roses at all this year" without the bird's help (p. 106), accords with this Aristotelian prescription. Only the artist-Nightingale can help nature realize that triumphant new form; she must submit herself to the rose-tree's invitation, that "'the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins and become mine'" (p. 106). If art represents a brilliant refinement of nature, the bird's agonies allegorize the terrible toll exacted of the artist who creates that new form.

It is important in terms of the parable Wilde is constructing that the Nightingale understand fully the extent of her sacrifice. She signals an acute anticipatory sense of loss, that culminates in a moving assertion: "'Death is a great price to pay for a red rose,' cried the Nightingale, 'and life is very dear to all…. Yet love is better than life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?'" (p. 106).

The Nightingale's touching attempts to communicate with the young Student, and his brusque refusal to take her seriously, is a suggestive figure for the author's acute sense of the current divide between art and its audience. The bird's attempts to reassure the weeping Student—"'be happy!' cried the Nightingale, 'be happy, you shall have your red rose …'" (p. 106)—meet with complete incomprehension. The artist and her subject, who is also her audience, do not share a common language, even though the latter is susceptible to her influence: "The Student looked up from the grass and listened, but he could not understand what the Nightingale was saying to him, for he only knew the things that are written down in books" (p. 107). The artist and her audience in this story are literally of different species, and in the Student's terms the bird cannot "speak"; accordingly, the true value of her work will be unrecognized, and her sacrifice unseen.

The Student's reflection on the Nightingale's song underlines this complete divorcement of understanding. Like Mr. Bright, the representative Philistine in Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, he demands of art some practical use. Pulling "a note-book and a lead pencil out of his pocket," he vividly typifies the Victorian middle-class position on aesthetics:

She has form … but has she got feeling? I am afraid not. In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others. She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows the arts are selfish. Still, it must be admitted that she has some beautiful notes in her voice. What a pity it is that they do not mean anything, or do any practical good!

                                         (p. 107)

Here Wilde satirizes the prevailing assumptions—so ably expressed in the pages of Punch—about the Aesthetic Movement in particular, and artistic endeavor in general. The clear remove the Student espies between art and life—"'She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows the arts are selfish'"—is a kind of popular parody of the ideas of a Whistler or a Pater. But in presenting a disjunction between stylistic or formal coherence and the "sincerity" or otherwise of the artist, the Student describes only his inability to understand the real demands of the creative process: indeed, only his own self-absorption is revealed. Wilde would rephrase it crisply three years later in the "Preface" to Dorian Gray: "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." The author's comments on "The Nightingale and the Rose," in a letter written to an interested reader in May 1888, are illuminating in this regard: "I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the tale, for in writing it I did not start with an idea and clothed it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers."¹⁸

But of this kind of thinking that the storyteller derives from the contemporary French symbolistes, of the kind of imaginative engagement with art that Wilde is inviting, the Philistine student knows nothing. His own limited vision is made plain in that final exclamation: "What a pity they do not mean anything, or do any practical good!" (p. 107).

The artist's actual commitment to her audience, and thereby to her creation, will in fact be powerfully demonstrated while the student is asleep on his pallet-bed. She will literally pour herself into her work, and so will celebrate, in the perfect Rose, the love the true artist feels for her subjects: "She sang first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl. And on the topmost spray of the Rose tree there blossomed a marvellous rose, petal following petal, as song followed song" (p. 107). The blossoming rose will, in short, be an objective correlative for the evolution of love, and this is signified in the deepening color of the flower. The artist-bird achieves this representation by exercising her "imaginative sympathy," and literally assuming the burden of pain her subject experiences. She "pressed closer to the thorn, and louder and louder grew her song, for she sang of the birth of passion in the soul of a man and a maid" (p. 108).

It is only when the artist apprehends the nature of a love that transcends the limits of her immediate situation, however, that the artwork is perfected. Such apprehension is obtainable only when she achieves a total transference of being from herself to her creation:

But the thorn had not reached her heart, so the rose's heart remained white, for only a Nightingale's blood can crimson the heart of a rose.

And the tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the thorn.

                                         (p. 108)

With the climax of the process, the bird celebrates in the rose a love that in its intensity defies physical life. At this triumphant moment the epoch-making sacrifice of Jesus is directly recalled, so that the author can invest the Nightingale-artist with the same awesome power of imaginative assumption:

So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the love that is perfected by death, of the love that dies not in the tomb.

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky.

                                         (p. 108)

The sacrifice calls forth a magnificent correlative, a rose whose symmetry represents the love that Christ embodied in his life and death, and which the artist, in her turn, may similarly realize in her work.

There is a further crucial dimension to the parable, one that brings us back to the issue of the audience's response. In "The Happy Prince," the hero's altruism is completely unperceived, not only by a myopic and complacent governing clique, but by its very recipients; in "The Nightingale and the Rose," the Student and his beloved are incapable of truly valuing the lovely flower. They are both the offspring of modern book-learning—he is a student, and she the coquettish daughter of a professor—and the exchange between them reveals that they have been corrupted by a Utilitarian scale of values. In the young woman, fashion has combined with acquisitiveness to make her rejection of the Student's offering especially callous:

"I am afraid it will not go with my dress," she answered; "and, besides, the Chamberlain's nephew has sent me some real jewels, and everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers."

                                         (p. 109)

In terms of the fable, both this young woman and her suitor cannot realize any beautiful suggestion from the Rose, because they lack the imaginative sympathy to see beyond their prejudices. Discussing the story in the letter quoted above, Wilde made this point in forthright terms:

I am afraid I don't think as much of the young Student as you do. He seems to me a rather shallow young man, and almost as bad as the girl he thinks he loves. The Nightingale is the true lover, if there is one. She, at least, is Romance, and the Student and the girl are, like most of us, unworthy of Romance.¹⁹

Not only are the Student and the professor's daughter too selfish to love each other, but they are also too selfish to respond to abstract beauty. Only those with compassion have the true aesthetic instinct, the denouement here suggests, and that is why the Nightingale-artist is the true disciple of Christ.

The Student's petulant reaction to her rejection—he tosses the Rose into the street, "where a cartwheel went over it" (p. 109)—indicates that he clearly has as little appreciation for the flower as has the girl. Being a more intellectual Utilitarian, he will seek consolation in his studies, and his final reflections are a fine parody of the Benthamite notion of utility that the British middle classes had appropriated. It is the perspective of a Mr. Gradgrind that we recognize—the Gradgrind of the opening scenes of Hard Times:

"What a silly thing love is," said the Student as he walked away. "It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy, and study Metaphysics."

                                         (p. 109)

The irony of Wilde's story is, of course, that whereas in Hard Times the representative Utilitarian learns, through experience, that without love his philosophy is worthless, in "The Nightingale and the Rose," the Student arrives at the opposite conclusion; he begins as an ardent romantic, and concludes as an advocate of computable knowledge. This ironic reversal of what had become a familiar thematic structure in nineteenth-century English fiction highlights Wilde's profound pessimism about the real capacity of an audience to "learn," in a didactic sense, from art. On the contrary, such a tale points to a widening divide between artist and spectator, of a manifest failure of the later to grasp either the artist's intention or achievement.

And yet, in a further analysis, the validity of the bird's sacrifice, like that of the Happy Prince or the little Swallow, is unaffected. Even though the beautiful Rose is crushed in the street, the Nightingale has realized herself in an awe-inspiring act of self-denial. If the beautiful creation which embodies that perfection has been obliterated at the hands of a callous materialistic audience, her achievement remains undiminished.

Although the story evokes the collapse of communication between the artist and her spectators, it nevertheless becomes in its readability—like the Rose—the bird's record and its monument. By composing such a parable, its writer assumes, and invites, an audience, and accordingly supposes that at least some of those "many meanings" referred to in the letter above may be apprehended.²⁰

In "The Nightingale and the Rose" the bird's imitatio Christi is perfected in a beautiful correlative, a peerless work of art, which Vivian had similarly characterized as a "marvellous many-petalled rose" in which the "wondering crowd" discovers a host of meanings. This delicately couched tale dramatically identifies Christ with the artist, exemplifying in the Nightingale's passion and death the author's later thesis in De Profundis that artistic endeavor is, in essence, a mode of love.

To conclude, we find in these brief but suggestive tales a fascinating variation on the meaning of Christ in a fluid and arbitrary world. Christ personifies a commitment to community, and "The Happy Prince" is a shining allegory for the individual completion that will follow such commitment; "The Nightingale and the Rose" is Wilde's definitive representation of the suffering witness to imaginative sympathy that artists enact. The storyteller is trying to formulate a model personality that incorporates ethics within the canons of aesthetics. As these tales suggest, that model will be increasingly identified with the figure of Christ.

Notes

1. This resonant (and oft-repeated) phrase occurs in Pater's early essay on "Coleridge," republished in his Appreciations (London: MacMillan, 1889): "To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions…. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life" (pp. 64-65). Wilde singles the essay out for especial praise in his review of Appreciations: see "Mr Pater's Last Volume," The Speaker, I, 6 (8 February 1890), repr. in Reviews, ed. R. B. Ross, pp. 538-45. For a contemporary estimate of Pater's cultural significance, see my "Deforming Habits: Reading The Renaissance Today," English Studies in Africa, XXX, 2 (1989), pp. 101-10.

2. Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London: David Nutt, 1888); repr. in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray. All references to the stories are to this edition, cited in the text as The Happy Prince.

3. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying," in Intentions (1891; repr. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. J. B. Foreman). The dialogue originally appeared in The Nineteenth Century (XXV, 163, January 1889), and was considerably revised for volume publication. All references to Intentions in this book are to The Complete Works and are given in the text.

4. See John R. Reed, "Fairy Tale Design," in Victorian Conventions (New York: Ohio University Press, 1975), pp. 29-33. Reed's first chap-ter contains an excellent discussion of the forms of stylization and convention in Victorian literature that became more self-conscious toward the end of the century. A recent consideration of this topic is contained in Jack Zipes, ed., Victorian Fairy Tale: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (London: Metheun & Co., 1987).

5. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; London: Macmillan, 1888). Richard Ellmann points out that Pater is the first writer to describe consciousness in the amorphous terms of water, as "the race of the midstream" (p. 221)—a metaphor from which our century has not yet recovered. For the influence of Pater's criticism—particularly this collection of essays—on Wilde's imaginative and theoretical writings, see George Woodcock, "The Hard Gem-like Flame," in The Paradox of Oscar Wilde (London: Macmillan, 1948); Wendell V. Harris, "Arnold, Pater and Wilde and the Object as in Themselves They See It," Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, XI (Autumn 1971): pp. 733-747; and Richard Ellmann, "The Critic as Artist as Wilde" and "Overtures to Salome" in his Golden Codgers (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). Ellmann discusses the phrase quoted on pp. 65-66.

6. The Aesthetic "movement" of late nineteenth-century England, which coalesced around the independence and exclusivity of the artist, was one obvious symptom of the break-up of shared assumptions between writers and readers. Wilde's own "despair" with an increasingly hostile general readership is registered, according to R. J. Green, in the provocative subjectivity of Intentions, a volume that marks "the end of the Victorian age, of the great seers listened to by an admiring audience," and the start of the modernist era, "whose greatest critics—T. E. Hulme, Pound, Eliot, Leavis—reveal their dislocation and distance from a public no longer 'theirs.'" ("Intentions: An Early Modernist Manifesto," British Journal of Aesthetics, XIII, 4, Autumn 1973.) See also Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

At the same time, the integrity of the individual consciousness itself seemed threatened by empirical science and its latest progeny, the infant discipline of psychology. The impact of theories of the split or fracturing self on imaginative writers is considered by Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 1969) and Jacob Korg, "The Rage of Caliban," Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, XXX, 1 (1971). Wilde's own contribution to this accumulating literature, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is the focus of Korg's stimulating article.

7. Pater, "Conclusion," The Renaissance, p. 221.

8. Letter to Amelia Rives Chanler with a copy of The Happy Prince, January 1889, in The Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. This collection is designated Letters throughout my text.

9. See R. J. Green, "Intentions: A Modernist Manifesto," in which the writer argues that Wilde anticipates the concerns and attitudes of the Modernists of a later generation; and Alice I. Perry Wood, "Oscar Wilde as a Critic," North American Review, CCII (December 1915); repr. in The Critical Heritage of Oscar Wilde, ed. Karl Beckson (London: Routledge, 1970) pp. 345-55. In this last mentioned article the writer traces the origins of British post-Impressionist thought in Wilde's Intentions.

10. Plato, "The Simile of the Cave," in The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 316-26. Wilde appears to have in mind the passage in which Lee translates Plato thus: "The mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change, until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which is what we call the good" (p. 322).

11. Ruskin's influence on Wilde's early aesthetic ideas, especially in relation to the younger writer's habitual connection of social harmony with artistic excellence, is most noticeable in the lectures he delivered in America during 1882, repr. in Essays and Lectures of Oscar Wilde, ed. R. B. Ross. The mature Wilde pays stylistic and thematic tribute to Matthew Arnold's habitual concern with a commonwealth of values in "The Critic as Artist" (1890), which constitutes a refinement of Arnold's notions of "culture" and "criticism" for a more relativist age. For Ruskin's influence on Wilde, see George Woodcock, "The Roadmakers," in The Paradox of Oscar Wilde, and Richard Ellmann, Four Dubliners (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986). Arnold's epistemological relations with both Pater and Wilde are vigorously argued by Wen-dell V. Harris in "Arnold, Pater and Wilde and the Object as in Themselves They See It."

12. The impact of Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and others on the solipsistic tendencies of English Aestheticism is recorded in William Gaunt, "A Continental State of Mind," chapter 1 of The Aesthetic Adventure (1945; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957). Wilde's most ambitious fictive exploration of the individual consciousness, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is in part a response to Huysman's extraordinary portrait of self-absorption, A Rebours (1884), which Wilde called an "over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our unartistic age" (Letter to E. W. Pratt, 15 April 1892, in Letters, p. 313). For a discussion of Wilde's relations with Huysmans and other French writers, see Isobel Murray, "Some Elements in the Composition of The Picture of Dorian Gray," Durham University Journal, LXIV, 3 (June 1972).

13. Wilde refers to this venerable image of the Holy Ghost in one of his early devotional sonnets. In "Ave Maria Gratia Plena," he describes a painting of the Assumption thus: "A kneeling girl with a passionless pale face / An angel with a lily in his hand / And over both with outstretched wings the dove" (Poems [1881]; repr. in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. J. B. Foreman). This collection is henceforth referred to as Complete Works.

14. Published in The Dramatic Review, II, 52 (23 January 1886), p. 249; repr. in Complete Works. The original manuscript is dated 1 March 1885, the day before Keats's to Fanny Brawne were sold at Sotheby's. See Mason, Bibliography, pp. 59-60.

15. "The English Renaissance of Art" in Essays and Lectures, p. 135. This lecture was first delivered on 9 January 1882 in New York, and was not published in the author's lifetime. See Letters, p. 85.

16. The youthful Wilde had already reworked Keats's famous ode in The Burden of Itys, one of the linking poems in Poems (1881). This ornate piece represents a narrator who urges a nightingale to "sing on," and so transport him away from unpleasant realities to the idyllic Arcadian world. See the Appendix to this study for a closer examination of Wilde's themes and influences in this anthology.

17. Wilde's most immediate source is probably Thomas Moore's poem Lalla Rookh (1817). See Isobel Murray, Complete Shorter Fiction, p. 267.

18. Letter to Thomas Hutchinson, 7 May 1888, Letters, p. 218.

19. Letters, p. 218.

20. With regard to contemporary theories of literature, we may read "The Nightingale and the Rose" as a riposte to Stanley Fish's optimistic notion of the "interpretive community" which makes sense of a text (Is There a Text in This Class?, 1980). The modernism of Wilde's story inheres in its urging not one meaning, but several (and chiefly, the paradoxical view that art may fail to mean anything). More pertinently, then, "The Nightingale and the Rose" is a scriptible or writerly text in the terms of Roland Barthes (The Pleasure of the Text, 1975); it invites, but does not demand, an aesthetic and social allegory. That allegory, which concerns the riches of art as a product of the artist's love, must reverberate along the reader's parole if it is to avoid being consumed (Barthes's term again) as a fixed, conventional fairy-tale narrative. For a more detailed enquiry into Wilde's work as re-viewed through recent theory, see my "Oscar Wilde and Poststructuralism," Philosophy and Literature, XIV, 2 (1989): pp. 316-24.

A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES (1891)

William Racicot (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Racicot, William. "Dream Vision Form of Oscar Wilde's 'The Young King.'" In Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World, edited by Robert N. Keane, pp. 93-9. New York, N.Y.: AMS Press, Inc., 2003.

[In the following essay, Racicot states that Wilde's "The Young King"—one of the central fairy tales in A House of Pomegranates—favors more than just an economic reading and instead largely explores the nature of political authority.]

Any reading of Wilde's "The Young King" must be a materialist one, and the tale's many temptations include reading it from a strictly economic perspective. It is tempting to see Ruskin's economic influence on the tale and look no further. However, formal, structural, and humane thematic issues temper the undeni-able importance of economics in the story. The three sections of "The Young King," an atypical dream vision, do not conform to generic expectations when read from a strictly materialist perspective. The first waking period does not set up the story's very real economic problem; the dreams themselves, three in number, do not propose a solution to the story's economic problem; the final waking section does not enact the dream-inspired solution to an economic problem. Economic concerns are not the primary focus of this dream vision.

Nevertheless, Ruskin's fingerprints litter "The Young King" as surely as they decorate Wilde's essay, "The Soul of Man under Socialism." In his essay in defense of Gothic architecture, Ruskin asserts that to purchase items manufactured by people who could exercise no imagination in their work is to participate in the most pernicious slave trafficking. Because "imperfections" in their work represent the honest mistakes of craftsmen allowed to exercise their creativity and strive toward their best selves, toward the happy state Morris paints in his socialist dream News from Nowhere, what Wilde himself would call "individualism," Ruskin claims the moral—and aesthetic—superiority of Gothic architecture.

Wilde's agreement with Ruskin's notion is evident from his own essay, "The Soul of Man under Socialism," and the opinion furthermore speaks directly to "The Young King." To illustrate that the exclusively economic reading is insufficient for this story, I will briefly describe how such a reading would likely look. In the fairy tale, the young king, born under questionable circumstances and raised by peasants, finds himself suddenly royal. He delights in fine and beautiful things, especially the splendid vestments he will wear to his coronation. When he dreams, though, about the circumstances under which his fine coronation garments have been created, he rejects them, as he would reject slavery. He will not accept his role as the man who causes divers to bleed through ears and nostrils and die; he will not willingly participate in the deaths of entire mining communities.

Nevertheless, the young king cherishes beautiful things. Although he is "always apt to chafe at the tedious Court ceremonies" that are his responsibility, he considers the palace "a new world fresh-fashioned for his delight" (225). In his mind, the lad naturally associates beauty and art with the court. Yet the orthodoxy of the court binds him uncomfortably. The circumstances of his own birth display in sun-bright gold the intolerance of his predecessor's regime, a regime he has inherited. His mother married beneath her station. She became pregnant. Barely an infant, the babe was taken from her and hidden away in the forest with a childless goat herder. Her lover disappeared, with the strong suggestion of foul play. She herself takes ill and dies, again with the heavy-handed suggestion of murder. The inflexible expectations of the court for proper behavior result directly in calamity for the entire family. Less spectacular, but possibly more compelling, evidence of courtly intolerance is this quip from the tale's first paragraph:

His courtiers had all taken their leave of him, bowing their heads to the ground, according to the ceremonious usage of the day, and had retired to the Great Hall of the Palace, to receive a few last lessons from the Professor of Etiquette; there being some among them who had still quite natural manners, which in a courtier is, I need hardly say, a very grave offence.

                                                    (224)

The courtiers need instruction, not because they have bad manners, but because they have natural manners.

The language with which the lad himself is described makes him seem strangely out of place in this artificial world, despite his newly discovered love for beautiful things. On at least two occasions, Wilde uses the word "flung" to describe his movements. He uses animal imagery to describe the lad, comparing him to "a young fawn" who has been "hunted" (224) and brought to the palace. Pastoral language, associated in the story with the lad's former life as a goat herder, suggests natural freedom abridged by the court. The tale accompanies courtly language, associated with his new life, with notions of restriction in the form of sanction, lessons from the Professor of Etiquette, etc. Naturally, a boy so raised, who resents even the artifice of courtly life, would reject slavery as the ultimate abridgement of the freedom he prizes.

I will not claim that this reading is wrong. That would be naïve. I do claim, however, that such a reading is incomplete, missing much of the significance of the story and largely ignoring the apotheosis at the end.

To understand why requires an understanding of the tropes and structures of the dream vision, a long established literary form dating back hundreds of years. Structurally, the dream vision is divided into three sections: The dreamer is awake; the dreamer sleeps; and the dreamer is again awake. The first section sets up the theme of the story, often some sort of problem for the dreamer. The dream itself postulates with dream logic some solution to the problem, which the dreamer on waking either sets or resolves to set into motion.

Although the dream vision as here described is a medieval form, the Victorian dream vision is its active and legitimate successor: Alice dreams of Wonderland, Dorothy of Oz. Both girls learn in their dreams to cope with personal crises related to adolescence and their roles in the world. Bored, Alice dreams of a place where so much happens so quickly that all the action makes her irritable. Dorothy, who longs to go to exotic places, realizes that "There's no place like home."

Even Morris's hero in News from Nowhere, who yearns for a population mature enough to survive without rulers, discovers in his dream that a person raised to injustice cannot muster the sophisticated innocence necessary to live comfortably among such a populace. Only in its economic perspective is this novel similar to Wilde's story, though, as Morris writes of a world wherein no individual has authority over any other, and "The Young King" leans so heavily toward the importance of good kingship. Indeed it is tempting to think of Wilde's story as advice to the English royal family.

Given the Victorian dream vision form as a legitimate successor to the medieval, and given the plight of the working classes as the theme, the opening section of this tale ought to introduce the plight of the working classes. Yet with the exception of the young king's foster parents and possibly his ill-fated father, we see only courtly folk until the lad dreams. He has little notion that the working classes are especially oppressed—a point that ought to come as no surprise: Wilde himself asserts in "The Soul of Man under Socialism" that the poor seldom recognize their oppression until told about it, and, indeed, are often not grateful for charitable efforts to help them: "We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so…. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it" (1081).

What the young king does recognize in the first waking section of the story is political: that his freedom has been abridged by the demands of his counselors and the traditions of his ancestors, and that those traditions at which he chafes enable him to possess and absorb the beautiful things around him. He must somehow cope with the conflicting results of palace life: limitation of freedom and the presence of beauty.

Again, if the main theme of the dream vision were improving the economic situation of the peasants and workers, the dreaming section would postulate some way to do so. Here also the story fails to live up to that expectation. Far from offering a solution to the problem of slavery inherent in producing coronation garb, the dreams make the problem apparently worse. When the young king, having refused to wear his rich vestments, proceeds to the cathedral, he encounters a peasant who demands the lad go back and don the jeweled symbols of his reign because "to toil for a master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still" (232). The king's dream-inspired sympathy for the man has made the separation between them more profound.

The dreams do postulate a solution to a problem, but not to the immediate economic imbalance between classes. Instead they address a more political problem. The visions make explicit to the boy the connection between beautiful artifacts and a kind of social injustice that Wilde, following Ruskin, would call slavery; the visions also make explicit the contradiction between the freedom he requires and the beautiful things he desires. How can he have those things without abridging the freedom of other men? What the dreams make clear is that he cannot, at least if he intends to obey his advisors and follow the protocols of courtly life as they have been presented to him.

What the young king learns, in short, is this: Someone, in his name, has committed atrocities to produce his beautiful vestments, and that cannot be allowed. He must act for himself, take responsibility for the kingdom. He must exercise the authority of kingship responsibly and creatively, free of the chains his advisors and their traditions attempt to place on him, becoming his best self, an individual of the type Wilde develops in "The Soul of Man under Socialism," because others will not act responsibly.

Coming back now to the final section of the dream vision: it should come as no surprise when I point out that the events closing the tale do not represent the enactment of a solution to the economic problem of social inequity. Indeed, the young king can only weep when the peasant man calls him Cain. He has no solution, nor is it clear the peasant man wants one. Instead the young king begins refusing to submit to the expectations of those around him. His advisors, his subjects, and the bishop all for various reasons advise him that wearing his rustic weeds to be crowned is ill advised, yet he knows that he must take responsibility for himself and by extension for the kingdom.

The real focus of the story, a political focus, is on the origins of authority in free, responsible behavior, and the main clue comes from alterations, largely of a religious nature, to the dream vision form. Into a form with three sections, Wilde inserts additional triples, three being of numerological significance since medieval times or before, particularly in Christian contexts: the young king has three dreams, each of which reveals the mistreatment of his subjects to create his coronation vestments, and he is tempted three times to wear the rejected garments for which his subjects suffered so sorely. The problem presented in the first waking section is that the young king does not understand how the beautiful objects he cherishes come to be, nor the nature of his responsibility for those circumstances. What he learns through the dreams is that a good king, a good person, does not accept what he has not earned, including authority. The dream-inspired solution he enacts is to reject the tainted splendor of his rich clothing and wear instead the uniform he has earned through work: shepherd's weeds.

To add legitimacy to this dream-inspired solution, Wilde chooses to have the young king tempted three times, in imitation of Christ—an imitation that comes back in the iconography of the story's end. the courtiers advise him that people will not recognize him. His rejection of their advice suggests that political authority does not come from clothing. The poor man berates him for threatening his ability to work, claiming that the king must wear the corrupt vestments or lose his authority. The king's denial of that claim indicates that the privileges of a king, with their accompanying responsibilities, must not persist in the absence of good will toward his subjects. That is, he cannot wear fine garments dyed in the blood of his people. The Bishop's temptation, his claim that no man can bear the world's weight alone, the young king counters with veiled reference to Christ, asserting that a king's duty is to bear just that responsibility.

Regal authority and responsibility require great strength, and that strength must come from within. To that end, the young king rejects the separation of his personal and political bodies, just as Christ rejects the separation of his physical and divine bodies in Gethsemane. The night before his arrest, Christ receives the vision of a cup, representing his responsibility, and asks "let this cup pass me by," affirming his humanity. Like Wilde's young king, he has three such visions, and on the third iteration, accepts his responsibility, rejecting the separation of his human body from his divine.

Wilde's "The Young King" functions parallel to the story of Christ in Gethsemane in other ways as well. After his visions, the young king dons the simple rustic clothes of a herdsman, and his page says: "My lord, I see thy robe and they sceptre, but where is thy crown?" (231). In response the young man braids a crown out of briars. The day after his visions in Gethsemane, Christ is arrested, and crowned with thorns. This connection grows even stronger when, in the cathedral, the young king's briar crown grows beautiful red flowers, recalling the blood from Christ's thorn-pierced brow and forecasting regeneration. Wilde's Christianity was not what anyone would call orthodox, but it was consistent. His essay on socialism discusses Christ as the pinnacle of individualism, a man who had found what he was meant to do and did it fully (1085–87). The young king finds in his visions the strength to begin the journey to his own individualism.

Oscar Wilde was well read, and there is no doubt that he was aware of the discursive norms of the dream vision, a form used by no less prominent an author than Geoffrey Chaucer, translated during the period by Skeat. Of course, Wilde did not have to accept the traditional uses of the form. He might have deliberately deviated to achieve some effect other than those traditionally associated with the dream vision. He did not. Reading the story through the lens of vision narrative results in rich thematic discoveries that would be impossible with a simple economic interpretation.

Works Cited

Albert, John O., CSO. "The Christ of Oscar Wilde." American Benedictine Review 39:4 (1988): 372-403.

Brown, Julia Pruitt. Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde's Philosophy of Art. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997.

Morris, William. News from Nowhere. In: News from Nowhere and Other Writings. ed. Clive Wilmer. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Quintus, John Allen. "Christ, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33:4 (1991): 514-27.

Ruskin, John. "The Savageness of Gothic Architecture." In: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed. vol. 2. Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

Wilde, Oscar. "The Soul of Man under Socialism." In: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994. 1079-1104.

―――――――. "The Young King." In: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994. 224-33.

THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ROSE (1982)

Ruth MacDonald (review date August 1982)

SOURCE: MacDonald, Ruth. Review of The Nightingale and the Rose, by Oscar Wilde, illustrated by Freire Wright and Michael Foreman. School Library Journal 28, no. 10 (August 1982): 109.

K-Gr. 3—This book [The Nightingale and the Rose ] features a new set of illustrations for Wilde's fairy tale about the self-immolation and disappointment of love. The delicately shaded watercolors emphasize the vividness of the story about a swallow who sacrifices her life so that a student may give a frivolous princess a red rose in winter as a sign of his love. She scorns the gift, he scorns her sex, and the swallow has not died for love, but rather in vain. The sentimentality of the story is emphasized by violet colors. The illustrations are quite good, presenting the surreal aspects of the story and its delicacy in their color washes and swirling patterns. The question is why one would want a new edition of a story that has as its main theme the futility of love and the bathetic, purposeless suffering of the bird. Though the story might be interesting to scholars and might be suitable for reprint in an anthology, it does not deserve the elegant attention it receives here.

THE SELFISH GIANT (1995)

Elizabeth Devereaux and Diane Roback (review date 27 March 1995)

SOURCE: Devereaux, Elizabeth, and Diane Roback. Review of The Selfish Giant, by Oscar Wilde, illustrated by Saelig Gallagher. Publishers Weekly 242, no. 13 (27 March 1995): 84.

Gallagher's (Moonhorse) eerily stylized paintings lend a haunting resonance to [The Selfish Giant, ] this moralistic tale of a hardened man who learns to open his heart. When the curmudgeonly Giant denies the local children access to his expansive garden, a great chill descends on them all. Winter lingers and spring refuses to scale the garden walls. But the children find a way into the beloved spot and the trees, grateful for the company and attention, begin to bloom. Seeing such beauty, the Giant is transformed and befriends his young neighbors, allowing them free rein. Not long afterward, a special boy appears to escort the old man to Paradise. Wilde's lessons are easily deciphered, though children may be confused by the overt religious imagery at tale's end. The towering but somehow gentlemanly Giant on the book's black-bordered jacket cuts an intriguing and imposing swath. Meanwhile, Gallagher's gallivanting and ghostly-white Snow, Frost and North Wind characters and her warm and golden images of happy children and gorgeous blossoms create plenty of drama. All ages.

FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE (2004)

Karen T. Bilton (review date November 2004)

SOURCE: Bilton, Karen T. Review of Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, by Oscar Wilde, illustrated by P. Craig Russell. School Library Journal 50, no. 11 (November 2004): 153.

Gr. 4-7—Russell continues his accessible, comic-book adaptations of Wilde's fairy tales [in Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde]. "The Devoted Friend" is the story of the one-sided relationship between a rich, selfish miller and a poor, kindhearted gardener. The miller claims to be Hans's most devoted friend and the naive young man believes every word he says, which ultimately leads him to his death. In "The Nightingale and the Rose," a student laments his lack of red roses, which he believes will help him win the heart of a fickle young woman. A selfless nightingale sets out to find him such a flower. The bird must sacrifice its own life to aid the young man who, when he delivers the rose to his love, finds she now prefers jewels. Russell's vivid artwork and graphic-novel style open Wilde's tragic stories to a new audience while remaining true to his thoughtful, moral prose.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Cohen, Philip K. "Dynamics of Faith and Genre: The Fairy Tales." In The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, pp. 73-104. London, England: Associated University Presses, 1978.

Examination of the morality practiced by Wilde in his fairy tale collections.

Kotzin, Michael C. "'The Selfish Giant' as Literary Fairy Tale." Studies in Short Fiction 16, no. 4 (fall 1979): 301-09.

Defines "The Selfish Giant" as a literary fairy tale, or, a contemporized rendering of the folk tale model with a specific—in this case, a Christian—objective in mind.

Lewis, Naomi. "Introduction to The Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde." In The Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde, pp. 7-12. London, England: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1985.

Introduction that discusses several of the influences behind Wilde's fairy tales.

Murray, Isobel. "A House of Pomegranates." In The Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde, pp. 13-17. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Thematic overview of Wilde's short fiction, including his children's works such as A House of Pomegranates.

Nassaar, Christopher S. "The Fairy Tales." In Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde, pp. 1-36. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.

Extensive critical reading of the thematic elements in Wilde's fairy tales.

Shewan, Rodney. "The Happy Prince and Other Tales." In Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism, pp. 40-69. New York, N.Y.: Barnes & Noble, 1977.

Details the inherent conflicts between the practical and the ideal in Wilde's fairy tales.

Additional coverage of Wilde's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 49; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 15; British Writers, Vol. 5; British Writers: The Classics, Vols. 1, 2; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1890–1914; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 104, 119; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 112; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 10, 19, 34, 57, 141, 156, 190; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Dramatists, Most-studied Authors, Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Drama Criticism, Vol. 17; Drama for Students, Vols. 4, 8, 9, 21; Exploring Short Stories; Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, Ed. 3; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Ed. 1:1; Literature Resource Center; Novels for Students, Vol. 20; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 7; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 11, 77; Something about the Author, Vol. 24; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twayne's English Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 8, 23, 41; World Literature and Its Times, Ed. 4; World Literature Criticism; and Writers for Children.