Essay "Oscar Wilde's fairytales"

Oscar Wilde's fairytales

Wilde's children's stories are splendid. In addition, it seems to me that they should be revisited as a defining part of his creative process.

«The Happy Prince» starts a new note in Wilde's writing: loss. Emotions as poses are a distinctive feature of Wilde's work («I can sympathise with everything except suffering»), and the poems had their fair share of lamentation, but from now on, loss is not a pose; it is real.

Fairytales always involve reversals of fortune. This works in both directions: beggars become kings, palaces collapse into hovels, the spoilt son eats thistles. Wilde's own reversal of fortune from fame and money to destitution and exile shares the same rapid drama. Fairytales are also and always about transformation of various kinds – frogs into princes, coal into gold – and if they are not excessively moralistic, there is usually a happy ending. Wilde's fairytale transformations turn on loss. Even «The Star-Child», in which meanness and vanity are overcome by compassion, ends with a kingdom that lasts only three years.

Wilde had a streak of prophecy in him. The children's stories can be read as notes from the future about Wilde's fate. It is as though the little child in him was trying to warn him of the dangers his adult self would soon face. «Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy», he writes in «De Profundis».

«The Happy Prince»  is the story of a gilded and jewelled statue on a pedestal high above the town. One day, a Swallow late-flying to Egypt, after an unsatisfactory dalliance with a reed («She has no conversation»), rests at the feet of the Happy Prince, who tells him of all the suffering he can see. He asks the Swallow to take the ruby from his sword and give it to a poor family. The Swallow does so. The Prince begs him to stay and to strip him bit by bit of all his gold and jewels to distribute to others. The weather is getting colder and the Swallow knows he should fly to the sun. But as he takes the Prince's jewelled eyes, he realises that he must stay, for now the Prince is blind. This is a lovely echo of King Lear, when the blinded Gloucester is not abandoned by his son Edgar – just as Cordelia never abandons the love-blind Lear.

Winter comes. The Swallow dies at the feet of the Happy Prince, no longer sparkling with jewels and gold. The Mayor has the statue pulled down – proposing one of himself in its place. As the workmen melt down the Prince they find they cannot melt his heart. They throw it on the rubbish heap next to the body of a swallow.

I don't think anything could be closer in description than this to the rubbishing of Wilde and his genius by a society obsessed by appearances and indifferent to imagination. The soul is often described as a bird – and if Wilde is the Happy Prince, then the Swallow is his soul, that returns to him and will not leave him. The Reed, shallow-rooted, flirtatious, blown about by every wind, is certainly Douglas.

Wilde believed in the soul. He played with ideas of the separation of self and soul. This is the pivot of his chilling story «The Picture of Dorian Gray», but he explored this sinister theme for the first time in his fairy story «The Fisherman and his Soul». A young man wants to be rid of his Soul so that he can marry a Mermaid. He gets a magic knife from a witch and cuts away his Soul. But his Soul returns to him once a year seeking reconciliation. The story ends in death, but not in tragedy – at least not in Wilde's worldview, where Love is the supreme value. And it is Love that asks for the supreme sacrifice.

In «The Nightingale and the Rose», a Nightingale colours a white rose red with her own heart's blood so that a poor student will have the most beautiful flower in the world to give to his beloved. His beloved rejects him and his rose, and the rose is thrown in the gutter, where it is broken by a cart-wheel. As Wilde says to Douglas in «De Profundis»: «Having got hold of my life you didn't know what to do with it … and so you broke it.»

Indifference to gift and sacrifice is a theme of these fairy stories. In «The Birthday of the Infanta», the haughty princess humiliates the Dwarf who loves her.

Wilde had a lifelong interest in Catholicism, although he was only baptised on his deathbed. He had a theory that Christ was the perfect example of what an artist should be – a true individual, a political and social radical, someone who enjoyed the company of the poor and the outcast – as Wilde did. Someone who could forgive and in whom love was transfigured as imagination. What is the resurrection if not the triumph of imagination over experience? His most overtly religious story is «The Selfish Giant». In a world that is always winter, long before CS Lewis created Narnia, Wilde's Giant is both fairytale giant and Victorian industrialist. Wilde hated the hoarding and excesses of his epoch's materialism – not because he was a socialist, but because his whole endeavour, his cult of art and beauty, was a fight against the coarsening of the soul.

When the Giant builds a wall around what is «his» and drives the children away, he drives away the springtime, too. His only friends are hail and snow and bitter wind. Then one day, by a miraculous intervention, unsought and undeserved, the children creep back through a hole in the wall, led by the most mysterious child of all, whom the Giant comes to love. It is this Christ-child who returns for the Giant as he dies, covering his body in white blossom – the living opposite of the snow that had for so long covered the garden. The little child is wounded in the hands and feet when he returns – but in answer to the Giant's cries of outrage and revenge, the child explains that they are «the wounds of love».

Reason and logic are tools for understanding the world. We need a means of understanding ourselves, too. That is what imagination allows. When a child reads of a Nightingale who bleeds her song into a rose for love's sake, or of a Selfish Giant who puts a wall round life, or of a Fisherman who wants to be rid of his Soul, or of a statue who feels the suffering of the world more keenly than the Mathematics Master who scoffs at his pupils for dreaming about Angels, the child knows at once both the mystery and truth of such stories. We have all at some point in our lives been the overlooked idiot who finds a way to kill the dragon, win the treasure, marry the princess.

As explanations of the world, fairy stories tell us what science and philosophy cannot and need not. There are different ways of knowing. «Bring me the two most precious things in the city,» said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.