On Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism in His Fairy Tales

Abstract
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet, an apostle of the Aesthetic Movement in the 19th century. The enduring popularity of Oscar Wilde is often represented by the success of his plays like Salome (1891) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) or his novels such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Among all his widely read and seriously scrutinized works, his fairy tales are perhaps least studied. Altogether he published two collections of fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) and A House of Pomegranates in (1891). His fairy tales feature particularly beautiful narratives and fantastic plots. The simplest way to read Wilde’s fairy tales would be as mere ornate descriptions of beauty or trite lessons in altruism, charity, and the like. However, this kind of understanding is incomplete and unbalanced. In fact, Wilde’s fairy tales follow his aesthetic principles. Wilde intends to transform literary experience to aesthetic experience by creating a beautiful Utopia separated from the reality. Apart from the immaterial idea of beauty, Wilde believes that the role of the artist in society also includes exposing and correcting ugliness. He uses his fairy tales to bring beauty to man’s daily life by promoting compassion and empathy. Wilde chooses the fairy-tale genre on purpose because he intends for multiplication of meanings through the use of multiplication of traditional forms.
In this thesis, through extensive literature research and analyses, I will examine Wilde’s fairy tales in relation to his aesthetic principles expressed in his critical writings. In the first chapter, I will give an introduction of Oscar Wilde and his fairy tales as well as literature review. In the second chapter, I will first clarify the essence of Aestheticism and Wilde’s contributions in this aspect. I will refer to his critical works such as “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist”. Wilde’s aesthetic beliefs can be summarized in three aspects: First, art has an autonomous existence; second, art does not seek to imitate or reproduce reality and thirdly, art is amoral. Then I will relate Wilde’s aesthetic principles to his fairy tales in terms of four aspects: narratives, religious undertones, intense sufferings and the ascendance of beauty over utility. Specifically, in the third chapter with regards to narratives, Wilde’s obsession with aestheticism is reflected in his particularly ornate descriptions of details, musicality and imagery. His narratives are imbued with minute details, musical cadence and rich and exotic images. Besides, in many of his fairy tales, Wilde blends Christianity and aestheticism. I will analyze his combination of the biblical linguistic composition and aesthetic language in his stories in light of literary effects in the fourth chapter. In the fifth chapter, I will probe into Wilde’s aesthetic treatment of intense sufferings in his fairy tales which contain prolonged and execruciating depictions of the tale heroes’ self-caused suffering with religious undertones, one of the distinctiveness of aesthetic literature. Finally, I will study Wilde’s debate of beauty over utility in the context of his tales “The Happy Prince” and “The Remarkable Rocket” in the sixth chapter.

Keywords: fairy tales, Aestheticism, suffering, Christianity