“Anything!” the Emperor replied, standing there in the imperial robes that he himself had donned and holding his heavy golden sword against his heart.
“Just one thing,” the nightingale asked. “You must not let anyone know that you have a little bird that tells you everything, for things will go better that way.”
Then the nightingale flew away.
The servants came in to attend their dead Emperor. Yes—there they stood. And the Emperor said to them, “Good morning!”
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† From The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, ed. Maria Tatar (New York: Norton, 2008), pp. 80, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 90, 92–93, 95–97. Copyright © 2008 by Maria Tatar. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company.
INTRODUCTION: Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde and fairy tales? Putting the two into the same sentence has a jarring effect, especially considering that Wilde once declared that it was his “first duty” in life to be “as artificial as possible.”1 The Brothers Grimm told us long ago that simplicity, artlessness, and spontaneity are the chief features of fairy tales, stories that are homespun rather than ornate, sophisticated, and complex. And yet fairy tales, with their stylized openings, predictable plots, repetitive tropes, and ritualized endings, are, in the realm of prose, artfully constructed with a starkly simple yet ornamental beauty. And so it comes as no surprise that Oscar Wilde wrote so many of them.
Oscar Wilde’s claim to fame was, in any case, never based on a foolish consistency, and this teller of tales found in fairy tales a congenial vehicle for displaying the flip slide to his natural talent for inventive satire and coruscating wit. Admirers of Wilde’s urbane and sophisticated prose have anxiously tried to explain the interest in writing fairy tales as the symptom of a developmental defect, of his sexual orientation, or of some odd identity confusion. One critic claims that Wilde was drawn to fairy tales because he was “emotionally undeveloped”;2 a second attributes his decision to embrace the genre to “homosexual tendencies”;3 and a third traces the engagement with fairy tales to “sexual ambivalence.”4 A feature described as literary “degeneration” was identified in Wilde’s fairy tales and explicitly linked to his sexual orientation: “Something had happened to Wilde. He met Mr. Robert Baldwin Ross. The effect of this unfortunate encounter is to be seen in Wilde’s work.… The Happy Prince appeared in 1888; and was followed up in the year 1891, when Wilde made his second unfortunate friendship, with Lord Alfred Douglas, by The House of Pomegranates.… There is nothing here for exultation.”5
That Wilde’s fairy tales are considered aesthetically and ethically suspect (one critic found their style “fleshy” and unsuitable for children) seems peculiar in light of their emphatic articulation of moral truths.6 The same author who recited with glee such dandyish maxims as “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance” embedded in his fairy tales stinging critiques of boorish self-absorption, willful selfishness, and brazen greed. Wilde clearly modeled his stories more on Andersen’s literary tales, with their ostentatious moral orientation and displays of pious self-denial, than on the Irish folklore that his mother collected. The kinship between Wilde’s tales and Andersen’s stories did not escape contemporary reviewers, who found Wilde to be writing “somewhat after the manner of Hans Andersen,” whose works had been available in English translation since 1846.7 That Wilde deeply respected the Danish writer becomes evident from “The Fisherman and His Soul” (clearly inspired by “The Little Mermaid”) and by the unmistakable tribute to “The Little Match Girl” in one of the many visions of human misery in “The Happy Prince.”
In a note to his friend G. H. Kersely, Wilde commented on the implied audience for his collection. The tales, he insisted, were “an attempt to mirror modern life in a form remote from reality.” In other words they would be set in another time and place even as they remained relevant to contemporary concerns. Conceding that the stories were meant “partly for children,” Wilde in the same breath declared the tales to be “slight and fanciful, and written, not for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty!”8
Why would Wilde exclude children from his implied audience, as he ultimately does in setting a lower limit of eighteen years for the stories? Wilde, like Andersen, may have begun some of his fairy tales with the phrase “Once upon a time,” but he never ended them with “happily ever after.” In fact, almost every story culminates in gloom and exhaustion, often with an obligatory scene of death, dismantling, or destruction. The statue of the “Happy Prince” is razed. After his conversion, the Selfish Giant is found “lying dead … all covered with white blossoms” (see here). The self-sacrificing little Hans in “The Devoted Friend” is found drowned, floating in a ditch. “The Fisherman and His Soul” ends with the death of both mermaid and fisherman. The dwarf enamored of a princess in “The Birthday of the Infanta” dies of a broken heart. Even the eponymous hero of the “Remarkable Rocket” expires, without a trace of the glory to which he aspires.
No fairy tale by Wilde is more expansive in its description of the mortal agony of death throes than “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Hoping to produce a red rose of unsurpassed beauty for a lovelorn student, a nightingale sings all night, with her breast pressed against the thorn of a rosebush:
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. (see here)
The songbird’s bid for love marked by transcendent beauty becomes a form of sacrificial suffering, missing its mark (for the student and his beloved have no emotional depth whatsoever) but leading to the expression of her own peerless longing for spiritual release. Beauty, if not salvation, emerges from passionate self-sacrifice, which often takes the form of mortification of the flesh.
In “The Happy Prince,” the statue also engages in a form of self-consuming sacrifice, distributing its excessive ornamentation to relieve suffering. The commemorative artwork in that story is “gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold” and decorated with sapphires and a “large red ruby.” Much admired by the city’s residents, the figure creates a “golden bedroom” for a swallow, a migratory bird that has responded to the tears flowing out of the prince’s eyes and delays its travel plans: “His face was so beautiful in the moonlight that the little Swallow was filled with pity.” Why is the statue in tears? The Prince, who repudiates the life of self-indulgent pleasures he once lived, is suddenly in a position to see “all the ugliness and all the misery” of the city.
In this story there is a double movement at work. First we have a bird, the Swallow that beholds beauty and becomes the agent of justice, redeploying the wealth used for the statue built to honor the prince: “In he hopped, and laid the great ruby on the table beside the woman’s thimble. Then he flew gently round the bed, fanning the boy’s forehead with his wings.” The feverish boy, a victim of poverty, begins to heal and sinks into a “delicious slumber.” Then there is the prince, the statue that beholds what Susan Sontag describes as “repulsive attractions.”9 Staring at misery may be driven by voyeuristic impulses and other “unworthy desires,” but those impulses can be redeemed and take an ethical direction when followed by sympathetic identification and political action. The prince sees, feels, and acts in ways that transform his gaze, both panoramic and telescopic, from what might have been an ethical violation into a redemptive act of healing. Paradoxically, he comes to life only in death, through the statue erected to honor him.
Why would Oscar Wilde, the writer for whom beauty is the “wonder of wonders,” have been moved to disavow the pleasures of the Happy Prince’s lived experience? How is it that an itch for compassion not only trumps beauty but also corrodes it and chips away at it? By the end of Wilde’s story, the Happy Prince has been melted down and reduced to nothing but a “leaden heart.”
Of all the rooms this was the brightest and the most beautiful. The walls were covered with a pink-flowered Lucca damask, patterned with birds and dotted with dainty blossoms of silver; the furniture was of massive silver, festooned with florid wreaths, and swinging Cupids; in front of the two large fire-places stood great screens broidered with parrots and peacocks, and the floor, which was of sea-green onyx, seemed to stretch far away into the distance. Nor was he alone. Standing under the shadow of the doorway, at the extreme end of the room, he saw a little figure watching him.…
It was a monster, the most grotesque monster he had ever beheld. Not properly shaped as all other people were, but hunchbacked, and crooked-limbed, with a huge lolling head and mane of black hair.10
The elaborate description of the interior decorations is not merely a foil to the dwarf’s hideous appearance; it also frames him, turning him into an icon of abject despair, foregrounded by his startling ugliness. The monster in the mirror is as riveting to the reader as it is to the dwarf, and the enthralling spectacle of the misshapen body becomes a powerful magnet of narrative interest.
Hans Christian Andersen might have seen in the dwarf’s shocked discovery of his exterior appearance a moment of redemptive suffering, but Wilde deflates such expectations in the coda to his stories. When the Spanish Infanta learns that the dwarf’s heart has broken in two, she curls her lip “in pretty disdain” and declares: “For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts.”11 Just as the dwarf’s deformed body becomes the dominant figure in the decorative background of the palace’s “brightest and most beautiful” room,12 so too the Infanta’s sneering remark takes center stage, effacing the tragic pathos of the truth that dawns on the dwarf as he looks in the mirror. Wilde may find suffering marvelous and charged with mystery, but he also is not always willing to endow it with transcendent meaning.
The promise of redemption typically rings hollow in Wilde’s tales. The nightingale may be Christ-like in her martyrdom, but she suffers in vain, unable to transform the cynical selfishness of the student and his beloved. In “The Happy Prince,” both the statue and the swallow annihilate themselves in an effort to do good works and end by demonstrating how charity consumes itself. In a sense, they could be seen as staging Wilde’s maxim that “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Wilde, unlike Andersen, does not seem to find salvation, Christian or otherwise, in suffering. In “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” the Irish author made it clear that pain was not “the ultimate mode of perfection,” as it appears to be for Andersen’s Little Match Girl. Pain, he asserted in that essay, is “provisional and a protest”:
It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work.…
Nor will man miss it. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilized, more himself. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval.13
If Wilde himself really believed that “the people who do most harm are the people who try to do the most good,” then the efforts of the Happy Prince, the Selfish Giant, and the prodigal nightingale to alleviate misery and heartache are in vain. That the world is more likely to be improved by resisting the impulse to demonstrate charity and compassion may have been a lesson preached in “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” but it did not carry over perfectly into Wilde’s literary practice, where altruistic impulses remain stubbornly admirable even if they do not improve matters in the grand scheme of things. The cult of beauty may be impossible to destroy but it begins to crumble in Wilde’s work under the pressure of economic realities in which abject misery becomes a moving picture with its own compelling aesthetic power.
Attractions both beautiful and repulsive have the power to move readers, though each with its own emotional vector, one moving in the direction of animation and generosity, the other in the mode of empathy and action. Wilde’s fairy tales shuttle between these two competing aesthetic regimes, with each regime taking an ethical turn in ways far more subtle and compelling than the “morals” often attached to fairy tales. The turn is as intellectual as it is ethical, for it leads us to think more about the stakes in fairy tales and to think harder about their impact on our own minds.
* * *
1. Alvin Redman, ed., The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde (London: Alvin Redman, 1952), p. 116.
2. Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1946), p. 141.
3. Leon Lémonnier, Oscar Wilde (Paris: Didier, 1938), p. 122.
4. Robert Merle, Oscar Wilde (Paris: Editions, 1948), p. 261.
5. St. John Ervine, Oscar Wilde: A Present Time Appraisal (New York: William Morrow, 1952), p. 167.
6. Review of A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde, Pall Mall Gazette, as quoted in Maria Edelson, “The Language of Allegory in Oscar Wilde’s Tales,” in Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature, ed. Birgit Bramsbäck and Martin Croghan (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell and Bromsbäck, 1985), p. 167.
7. Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 58.
8. The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 219.
9. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003), p. 96.
10. Oscar Wilde, “The Birthday of the Infanta,” in Complete Short Fiction, ed. Ian Small (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 97, 112.
11. Ibid., p. 114.
12. Ibid., p. 112.
13. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 288–89.
The Selfish Giant†
Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant’s garden.
It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. “How happy we are here!” they cried to each other.
One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.
“What are you doing here?” he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away.
“My own garden is my own garden,” said the Giant; “any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.” So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.
TRESPAS
SERS
WILL BE
PROSECUTED
He was a very selfish Giant.
The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside.
“How happy we were there,” they said to each other.
Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still Winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. “Spring has forgotten this garden,” they cried, “so we will live here all the year round.” The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. “This is a delightful spot,” he said, “we must ask the Hail on a visit.” So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 49