The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde

Jarlath Killeen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317032137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Oscar Wilde's two collections of children's literature, The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), have often been marginalised in critical accounts as their apparently conservative didacticism appears at odds with the characterisation of Wilde as an amoral aesthete. In this, the first full-length study of Wilde's fairy tales for children, Jarlath Killeen argues that Wilde's stories are neither uniformly conservative nor subversive, but a blend of both. Killeen contends that while they should be read in relation to a literary tradition of fairy tales that emerged in nineteenth century Europe; Irish issues heavily influenced the work. These issues were powerfully shaped by the 'folk Catholicism' Wilde encountered in the west of Ireland. By resituating the fairy tales in a complex nexus of theological, political, social, and national concerns, Killeen restores the tales to their proper place in the Wilde canon.

Part I
The Happy Prince and Other Tales

Chapter One
‘The Happy Prince’

My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom … [But] the other side of the garden had its secrets for me also.

Of course, all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my art. Some of it is in ‘The Happy Prince’. Oscar Wilde (Letters 739–40).

Oscar Wilde appears to have come up with the story of ‘The Happy Prince’ when, on a visit to Cambridge in 1885, he was asked to entertain some student friends. Critics have found the biographical impulse almost irresistible when looking at this tale, and it has most persistently been read as an oblique commentary on Wilde’s sexual history. Richard Ellmann claimed that the story turned ‘on the contrast … of an older, taller lover with a younger, smaller beloved’ (253), and thus mirrored Wilde’s first known homoerotic relationship with the young Canadian Robert Ross, whom Wilde met in 1886. Often this biographical reading has been quite literal in its application of personal names and histories to the characters in the story. Robert K. Martin has argued that ‘a good deal of Oscar’s experience with Constance [Wilde]’ informs the relationship between the Swallow and the Reed, since Constance ‘though attractive, was hardly literary and was intellectually incapable of sharing her husband’s life’ (76), a claim with which Gary Schmidgall agrees believing that ‘it is difficult to read of this romance without thinking of Constance’ (155). In this reading the story is configured as ‘a miniature, and moving, celebration of a tragedy of the Love that dare not speak its name … a melancholy evocation of gay experience in a frosty, inclement, threatening society’ (156). Schmidgall is supported by John Charles Duffy in this, who believes that the relationship between the Prince and the Swallow is best seen as a ‘patently non-sexual’ but ‘spiritually transforming’ same-sex passion mirroring the intense friendships favoured by Oxford Platonism (331).

Other critics have pointed out that the story is best read as an attack on the utilitarian and pragmatic mentality which governed public and political dealings with the poor in nineteenth century London and an attempt to find a more compassionate, and effective, means of dealing with what seemed to be an intractable problem. Philip Cohen claims that the story ‘looks outward on human suffering and ponders the problems of economic inequality and injustice’ (81), an analysis echoed by Jack Zipes who, somewhat improbably, claims that Wilde’s intention is ultimately to expose the actions of the Prince as wrongheaded: ‘though Christlike behaviour is laudable, it is not radical enough … Wilde uses the figure of Christ [in the Prince] to show the need to subvert the Christian message’ (Fairy Tales 116). Zipes is here influenced by a straight reading of Wilde’s later article on ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), which denounced philanthropy, arguing that ‘it is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property’ (Collins’ Complete Works 1174). Rodney Shewan, too, worries that the Prince’s sacrifice has been for nothing as ‘the beauty of the acts of self-sacrifice seems marred by the obtuseness of their objects’ (41). Guy Willoughby points out that ‘in concrete terms’ the sacrifice of the Prince is ‘quite futile’ (Art and Christhood 26). Society continues on in exactly the same way after the Prince’s sacrifice as before. These critics are disturbed by the fact that the self-immolation of the Prince ultimately appears to change nothing in the political or economic establishment. His gifts of gold and jewels have merely provided a local and temporary respite for some from the full rigours of the capitalist system which inevitably marginalises so many. Either Wilde’s tale exposes private charity as a misguided, though understandable, activity or it has no answers to the problems of economic exploitation it poses.

Wilde himself was clear enough on his intentions in writing the story. In a letter to Leonard Smithers he explained that ‘the story is an attempt to treat a tragic modern problem in a form that aims at delicacy and imaginative treatment: it is a reaction against the purely imitative character of modern art’ (Letters 355). The letter is a warning that although the story is indeed tackling real social problems, the problems of unemployment, poverty, exploitation, unjust social structures, the very problems ‘imitative’ (for which read ‘realist’) literature has been ‘blowing loud trumpets’ about (ibid 355), Wilde believes that a different form – and perhaps a different solution – is necessary to properly tackle these issues. Where the realists were making rather large claims as to the anthropological and social importance of their art, Wilde inverts their logic believing that an entirely different approach is required to correct wrongs which are as much moral as they are social. By using a fairy tale to examine these questions, the very form considered escapist by the realists and the middle classes, Wilde suggests that social inequality cannot be solved by a radical shake-up of the political system, but only through a radical moral transformation of the individual. As Willoughby insists, ‘charitable gestures may be [socially] useless, but in individual terms … such sacrifices are vital’ (Art and Christhood 26). And this moral transformation takes a very theological character in the shape of both Prince and Swallow. Moreover, a close reading of the tale demonstrates not only its theological (rather than social) character, but also the extent to which Wilde was influenced in his reading of social problems by his Irish background.

This chapter reads ‘The Happy Prince’ as concerned with, not only the economic problems of Victorian London, but also the dynamics of Irish immigrant life there. When the Irish poor fled an impoverished existence to work in England, legend has it that they believed they would find the streets of London paved with gold because the British economy was such a paper success. Indeed, it was, by most economic indicators, the most successful in the world. Other economies depended upon it, using its ships, its banks, and its people for global trade. The British economy grew by approximately 1 per cent per annum every year between 1860 and 1914, facilitating a rise in both wages and life expectancy, from 40–41 years in 1871 to 50 years by 1901 (Floud 1–7; Baines 145–6), and London was at the centre of this economic hit. Asa Briggs calls it the ‘world city’ due to its enormous influence on the global economy (323–72).

Social researchers, however, found that beneath the official statistics, a very different London could be discovered. John Knox complained that:

When we look at this great city, with all its pomp and splendour – its wealth, power, and greatness – its palaces, cathedrals, and mansions – its courts of justice, academies of science, and institutions of philanthropy – surely we mourn that such a city has so much wickedness, degradation, infidelity, heathenism, and profligacy … The swarms of wretched, filthy, haggard, dissolute, profligate, careworn, outcast masses who inhabit the dingy courts, dingy cellars, and miserable garrets of our great towns, call loudly upon us to go and carry the message of peace to their benighted homes … (quoted in Dyos 13–14).

The phenomenal growth in the economy had disproportionately benefited the middle-class, and the economic and social divisions between most of the population and those in the top 5 per cent increased. While economic growth did bring about an overall improvement in welfare, as evidenced by the increase in life expectancy, it ‘left behind a substantial residue of the population in poverty’ (Floud 9). While the wealthy moved out of the centre itself and migrated to the suburbs, the poor and the immigrant took up residence in the confining streets and laneways (Dyos and Reeder), and a ‘deep gulf’ became established between the ‘experiences and values’ of slum dwellers and suburbanites (Briggs 326).

Living conditions in big cities and towns were almost indescribable. In a spectral reverse image of the salubrious conditions of middle-class life, and the unbridled luxury of the aristocracy, the working-class resided in appalling circumstances. A large percentage of the urban poor were actually migrants of some form, either from the countryside or the colonies (indeed in 1851 half the adult population in London was migrant) and one cause of urban disease appeared to be the continuation of rural sanitary practices in an urban environment. Contemporary observers struggled to articulate the conditions they discovered on studying these places. In November 1883, Punch described how, to reach the slums, investigators had to ‘penetrate courts reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all directions. You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin …’ (quoted in Dyos 19).

Without an adequate sewerage infrastructure, the accumulation of such refuse polluted rivers and drinking water and saturated the air to such a degree that even religious charities found it next to impossible to be of any assistance. Urban areas were overwhelmingly more precarious places to live than their rural counterparts and those in the worst jobs, such as bargees, watermen, soot merchants and chimney sweepers, died at a horrifying rate of 150 per cent higher than the clergy (Floud 10). Charles Booth has become famous as the most thorough and extensive researcher of social conditions in Victorian England. He had initially been driven to this research by scepticism when he read a report which claimed that 25 per cent of all Londoners lived in some form of poverty. Believing this was simply socialist propaganda he set out to disprove it through his own research which he carried out between 1889 and 1902. Out of this research he produced his massive, 17 volume Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1902). Rather than disprove the original claims he was so suspicious of, his work tended to confirm the worst descriptions of poverty. For example, he found that in the East End, at least 35 per cent of the population lived in poverty. Perhaps his most important discovery was that this poverty was not simply the result of inveterate working-class laziness and alcohol-consumption but was a function of the economy itself, especially employment and family situation (as well as Booth, for a vivid description of the state of life in the London slums of the period, see Davin 29–61; Lees 71–87).

There is a large cognitive gap between language and experience, especially when it comes to describing life for the poor. The word ‘slum’, for example, indicates not just another mode of living but another form of language: by the 1820s, ‘slum’ was a slang expression for taverns, loose talk and gypsy language and a room in which ‘suspect’ activities took place (Dyos 7–8). In official-speak a ‘slum’ indicated a house that was ‘unfit for human habitation’, a rather ironic description since such places tended to be teeming with human life (ibid 9). These structures were an architectural obscenity: an ugly reminder of the grim face of capitalism, but a self-reflecting mirror of Calvinist assumptions of predestined misery. They drove many to radical action and the eruption of socialism and philanthropic charity; they confirmed to others the depravity of the poor and guaranteed their positions at the margins of society.

Wilde decided that such liminal spaces, hovering on the edges of language and meaning, required analysis through a form less obvious than the realist novel: the problem of poverty needed ‘delicacy and imaginative treatment’ rather than a merely fictional version of the sociological researches of Charles Booth. As I outlined in the Introduction, the fairy-tale form operated in this marginal space, hovering between hegemony and rebellion, conservatism and subversion and thus was a suitable location for the site of social critique. Wilde, a middle-class writer with aristocratic pretensions, who was irresistibly drawn against Victorian hypocritical piety towards the peasant Catholicism of the Irish, was in a good position to contemplate such issues. London is important to our interests because it is clear that it is the intended subject of many of Wilde’s fairy tales and it is vital to be aware of the conditions that existed in the city in order to fully grasp the aims of the social critique he conducts.

Any journey into the world of fantasy, where statues and birds communicate freely and even reeds take on anthropomorphic qualities, must begin within the normative, the dominant order (see Jackson), which for Wilde was the political and social economy of Victorian London. ‘The Happy Prince’ is a fairy tale emerging from Victorian facts concerning the poverty so evident in London, but it refuses to present these facts in a sociological rather than an imaginative form. The story is populated with ‘Charity Children’, destitute seamstresses, poor artists and the generalised masses who congregate in the back alleys and lanes. In ‘The Happy Prince’ Wilde sets up a disruption of the ‘real’ London – the London of Charles Booth – so as to facilitate a more interrogative position and enable him to posit some type of potential solution to the issues he raises.

London poverty was an appropriate subject for Wilde (see also Von Eckhardt, Gilman and Chamberlin 131–158). His son Vyvyan Holland points out that the reality of poverty was close at hand to the Wilde’s home in Tite Street. He records that ‘the west side of the street backed on to Paradise Walk … one of the most forbidding of Chelsea slums. It was a row of tenement houses with wretched, filthy back-yards, from which the sounds of bawling arose nightly’ (51; Schmidgall points to this also, 155). This fact has important bearings on the story, as it introduces an autobiographical influence perhaps more pertinent than Wilde’s sexual proclivities. Looking out over Paradise Walk from the upper floors of his home in Tite Street gave Wilde the same visual perspective on poverty as the Prince has in his story. Moreover, the name ‘Paradise Walk’ suggests religious and biblical connotations implied throughout the narrative. ‘Paradise’ is theologically, both the lost Garden of Eden in Genesis, and the promised new heaven and new earth of Revelations. Indeed, the Bible is commonly conceived of as the journey from the first Paradise to the second, a journey in which humanity must grapple with its fallen nature and attempt to overcome it. The image of a street leading to Paradise is a typographical appropriation of the nature of the biblical narrative, but it also suggests the psychological movement of the Prince in the story, from initial Paradise of ignorance in Sans-Souci, to the new heaven of love in the final paragraph, via the Augustinian fortunate fall into a knowledge of sin and redemption. To reach the New Kingdom, the Prince must undergo a ritual of self-sacrifice (being deprived of beauty) and love (illustrated by the Swallow’s loyalty), much as the Christ-event inaugurated in terms of biblical and salvation history. This supports the overwhelmingly Christian inflection of the story.

Critics have indeed noticed the Christian message central to the tale. Philip Cohen points out that the Prince and the Swallow must learn to ‘reject lower forms of pleasure as they come to realise that the highest happiness results from Christian love’ (87–8), while Jerome Griswold has noted the modelling of the Prince on Christ (103). However, Christianity is crucial to the entire structure of the story which enacts narratively what Paradise Walk performs typographically: both suggest a possible methodology for transforming the real city of London into the mythic New Jerusalem, both suggesting that what stands in the way are forms of egotism. Wilde’s tale attempts to take in all levels of the English society in which he now lived, from the exalted aristocracy to the immigrant periphery. The upper class is isolated and distant, the monarchy especially has become reified, ignorant of the social realities existing outside its ivory towers. When the Prince was alive he lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, ‘where sorrow is not allowed to enter’ (171). Thus mummified, the Prince can possess no information with which to make qualified judgements about the world as a whole. His Garden of Eden contains no Tree of Knowledge and is isolated from all things by a ‘very lofty wall’ (171). Epistemologically, the Prince cannot but have been ignorant of even the meaning of the name of his home: only ever having access to pleasure (later suggesting that he and the entire court had mistaken pleasure for happiness – ‘happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness’ 171), the logic of its opposite can have had no phenomenological reality. He is, as Rodney Shewan points out, a type of egotist, whose penance is ‘to stand as a monument to that perfect happiness which he now realises to have been imperfect and illusory’ (40). The dark side of the garden had no meaning to him and only through a miraculous intervention does it become a reality for him. The Prince’s extreme reaction on critically experiencing the world for himself ironically comes when he is literally metallic, as opposed to the artificial mummification he endured while alive.

While the monarchy live a life of constant pleasure, it is the middle-classes that effectively control and fashion society after their own image. This malign bourgeoisie appear in the guise of the Town Councillor, the Mathematical Master, the Professor of Ornithology and the Watchman, all of whom police the social boundaries set by themselves, defining the terms of working-class action. In both Victorian London and Wilde’s mythical City, the middle class preach the gospel of respectability, improvement and courtesy. They formulate an ideological manifesto implicitly designed to defend and extend their social position. For example, the Town Councillor delineates the imperfection of the statue of the Prince as arising from its impracticality. It is ‘as beautiful as a weathercock … only not quite so useful’ (167). The statement of the Councillor hides his implicit recognition of the supreme usefulness of the statue: it cajoles the working class into silence. If he can be happy, the message goes, so too should they. The Prince died young and yet has retained his happiness; his message to the working class is that the answer to poverty is not social unease but cheerful drudgery. Likewise, the sensible mother quietens her imaginative child by pointing to the statue of the Prince (‘Why can’t you be like the Happy Prince? … [who] never dreams of crying for anything’ 167); the Mathematical Master warns against the futility of dreams ‘for he did not approve of children dreaming’ (168); the dysfunctional courtship of the Reed and the Swallow exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian mating rituals, especially since ‘she has no conversation … and I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind’ (169); the pampered princess frets over the laziness of the over-worked seamstress and is concerned that her dress ‘will be ready in time for the State-ball’ (173); and the Professor of Ornithology dazzles the populace through long words rather than penetrating social comment: ‘Every one quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand’ (174). The middle class protect their privileged position of power by constructing an impenetrable discourse that allows no place for the working class except as cheerful instruments of general economic prosperity.

However, the Town Councillor knows he must pay homage to practicality since it headed the list of Victorian values. By the mid-century a broad consensus had been reached concerning the kind of value system that would best serve a cohesive culture, consisting of rationality, self-reliance, knowledge, independence, education, respectability and improvement. These values permeated the entire edifice and interior of Victorian culture, through the schools, universities, trade unions, churches and social clubs (Tholfsen 161–4). As Tholfsen points out, this ideological structure was upheld fervently and was penetrated with the values and enthusiasm of the evangelical movement. Ordinary activities were given the religious validity of pilgrimage and, indeed, the Victorian gospel of success and enterprise should be thought of in religious terms. Of course, this religion of work and practicality was conducive to the maintenance of the status quo and was in the end a middle-class bulwark. As Tholfsen puts it, ‘Implicit in the articulation of formally universal consensus values were social presuppositions that bent them into the shape required by an inegalitarian society; differential social roles assumed middle-class pre-eminence’ (197).

Wilde unveils utilitarianism and the gospel of success as disguises for egotism: the Town Councillors end up arguing, not about the greater good, but about who the greatest is among them. Indeed, typical Victorian values – such as respectability, independence, rationality, individual dignity – were really code words for the middle-class point of view, although each was propounded as if of universal significance. Rationality, perhaps the most important value in the story, the value that informs utilitarian and pragmatic views of economic deprivation, was really an expression of an ability to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Happy Prince and Other Tales
• Part II A House of Pomegranates
• Bibliography
• Index