Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. While still a student, he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1878, and soon after leaving university, his first volume of verse was published. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884 and the couple had two sons. His publications include a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and a critical essay on the role of the artist, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891). However, it was as a playwright that Wilde had his greatest popular and critical success with comedies such as Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). By 1895, Wilde was conducting a homosexual affair with Alfred Douglas, and when the Marquis of Queensberry heard about his son's relationship with Wilde, he publicly pronounced the writer a "ponce and sodomite". Wilde sued for libel but lost his case and was prosecuted and imprisoned for homosexuality under the terms of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Released from Reading Prison in 1897 he moved to France. His time in prison badly damaged his health and he died in1900.

Wilde was a master raconteur and wit and regaled both adult acquaintances and his own children with stories often told in the form of the fairy tale. He published nine of these tales in two collections, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). Although the fairy tales have attracted relatively little academic attention, his writings have become the focus of a whole range of critical perspectives. They have been the subject of so-called ‘queer studies’, of Anglo-Irish, psychoanalytic and post-colonialist studies, of reader response and Marxist theories. They have attracted attention as an exercise in anti-mimetic form, as an example of fin de siecle decadence and aestheticism. The plays have been adopted as significant elements of the canon of polished, mannered drawing room drama whose antecedents include Congreve. As this range of approaches suggests, Wilde is problematic, shifting, challenging, contested, transgressive. This paper will suggest that the fairy tales are metonymic of the whole corpus of his work, in that they encapsulate the problematics that have given rise to such a wide range of responses.

To what degree do Wilde’s stories fit the predictable patterns of fairy tales? Marina Warner summarises our expectations as follows:

Fairy tales exchange knowledge between an older voice of experience and a younger audience, they present pictures of perils and possibilities that lie ahead, they use terror to set limits on choice and offer consolation to the wronged, they draw social outlines around boys and girl s, fathers and mothers, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled, they point out the evildoers and garland the virtuous, they stand up to adversity with dreams of vengeance, power and vindication.

Warner’s description of the functions of fairy tales focuses on the transmission of moral and cultural values and character formation. She also highlights their role in constructing selfhood, and in power politics, in the guise of class and gender . In Wilde’s hands these issues are represented but in a more ambiguous manner. His tales both break with and adhere to the fairy tales’ conventions in terms of form, style and content. In the first place, they are characterised by narrative forms so complex as to be untypical of the form. Wilde employs the technique of the embedded narrative in several tales including ‘The Star-Child’, ‘The Young King’ and ‘The Devoted Friend’. In contravention of the expectations of the fairy tale reader his endings are often unhappy. Death is not even a happy release for his characters as is the case with Andersen’s little Match Girl - in ‘The Happy Prince’ the protagonist is already dead before the story begins. In accordance with modern conventions in the fairy tale form, he combines aspects of both the literary and the oral traditions to which he had privileged access. (His parents were distinguished - and eccentric - folklorists and his formal education provided him a rich literary intertext.) His style is ornate and sensuous, replete with loving detail reminiscent of a realist approach but its cumulative effect is anti-realistic. His characters are types rather than rounded, individuated and complex, as one might predict of the genre, but - untypically - their motivations are often inscrutable. Bad and good are not always comfortably polarised as folk tale might have them. The beautiful are not always good, as the case of ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ reveals. As befits a literary genre (and this is a characteristic which Warner ignores), the stories establish strong intertextual relationships with the work of Tennyson, MacDonald, Browning, Pater, Ruskin, Andersen and Perrault. In terms of content the stories stress the value of suffering, but unlike Perrault and the Grimms, Wilde’s moral positions are not always clear. This is not to suggest that he does not hold ethical views, but that he presents them obliquely, and they may not be bourgeois values. His emphasis on the aesthetic means that that the stories may be seen as pedagogic texts that teach lessons about form and evaluate style rather than about morality. Finally, there is a certain ambiguity surrounding the intended audience of the stories that Wilde himself has served to complicate rather than resolve. Are the tales for children or adults, for sophisticated or unschooled readers? Wilde’s denial that they were intended for children (which he contradicts elsewhere) may relate more to his dislike of then current constructions of childhood rather than a denial of a child audience per se.

Maria Tatar levels several accusations at Wilde’s fairy tales. She believes that they ‘seem to have forgotten that the folktale thrives on conflict and contrast, not on sentiment and pathos’, that the tales are ‘self-consciously artless’, and that that Wilde is ‘moving in an imitative mode’. That they also contain unpalatable doses of sentiment and pathos (this is nowhere more evident than in ‘The Selfish Giant’) only goes to indicate how Wilde disrupts old dualisms. As to their artlessness, it is rather the case that they are self-consciously artful and artistic, as their insistent and overt aestheticism suggests. The close readings of two of the stories undertaken in this essay will focus on that artfulness and self-consciousness, and the conflicts and contrasts that are inimitable to them.

Las Meninas: Intellectual daring

The inspiration for one story from The House of Pomegranates, ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, is a painting by Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), and it offers a fruitful modus operandi for reading all of the tales. As a seminal work on surface as text, Las Meninas pre-empts Manet’s Le bar aux Folies Bergeres. As a set piece that explores perspective, it is without parallel, and it is a work with which Wilde was familiar. The emphases on both surface and perspective, as we shall see, are central to readings of Wilde’s fairy tales. Las Meninas depicts the artist at his easel, possibly at work on a portrait of the Spanish king, Philip IV, and his queen, Mariana, who are reflected in a mirror. In the background, two paintings by Rubens depict the downfall of humans who challenge the gods. Las Meninas self-consciously privileges the artist, yet confronts the viewer with the dangers associated with art and hubris. As such, it demands that the viewer acknowledge conflict and conflicting constructions of reality. The Infanta dominates the scene. But the viewer’s eye passes from her immediately to the square, inscrutable countenance of her dwarf, Maribarbola, and to her brooding and detached dog, who are in the first plane of reality. And who are in the last? The King and Queen, whom one might expect to dominate the scene, here reduced to reflections in a shadowy mirror.

The painting problematises representation: it is about the act of representing the king and queen, but the painter’s head is placed higher than any other, so elevating him above royalty. With brush in hand, he is in the act of representing. - but what? We see a represented space - much of which is blank; there is also the space of the model, or models which is not represented, being outside the frame of the painting. There is also the actual material canvas surface, which is concealed by the act of representation. On the back wall is a mirror that almost merges with the paintings that surround it. The painter relegates the product of mimesis, of the realistic reflection of reality, to a shadowy insignificant spot. The mirror image of the royal couple gazes intently out of the picture at their unseen real physical selves. Critics are divided as to what is represented in the mirror. Is it the image of the royal couple as captured on the canvas - all we see is its back - or is it the reflection of the actual couple who stand somewhere close to or the same as that of the spectator. Either way, the image in the mirror is ‘not a glimpse of life, but rather an artful composition which gives every indication of being shown in reverse’.

The ostensible subject of the painting, the Royal couple, is caught at two removes, through a mirror image of a painting of the reality, which in turn is framed within another painting. We could say therefore that the real subject of the painting is the role that is played by vision in shaping the human self, the very subject that is central to Wilde’s tales also. What we see depends on how and from what perspective we see it. The viewer’s perspective is further complicated because it is mediated by the canvas in the foreground that insists on the materiality of the painter’s activity. Painting may give the illusion of reality but its reality is that of brush strokes on a stretched framed canvas. Wilde’s focus on the materiality of language, delaying narrative with rich ornamental detail, is the correlative of Velasquez’s meta-portraiture.

Foti summarises the complexity of the painting as follows:

Las Meninas deploys the resources of a certain ‘code’ so as to problematise it and place it, so to speak, en abime. It offers no univocal message to be disengaged but brings the viewer up against the ineluctable differential and an anarchic character of perceptual and interpretative coherence. Illusionary form and materiality are equally compelling, so that which commands primacy is undecidable. One cannot acquiesce in the idea that one’s sophisticated perception unveils the painting’s ‘truth’, for one’s perception may be part and parcel of illusions and simulacra.

It becomes apparent that this painting's narrative lies somewhere other than in the telling of its professed story. The viewers are implicated in the narrative of the painting, because they are standing in front of a picture of people - the painter and his subjects - looking at them, and they see the gaze of the painter fixed on them. They are forced to acknowledge that they are seen; in other words, they are obliged to become self-conscious. The painting goes beyond its frame into our lived reality and implicitly questions the reliability of its own representational style by relegating the mirror image - and the mirror is a powerful symbol of mimesis - to the shadowy background. This distrust of the mimetic, combined with the multiple and often contradictory perspectives the painting affords, prevents any unilateral response. Acute reflexivity and formal scepticism such as may be found here are both themes and features of Wilde’s tales, as our reading will show.

It is possible to summarise Velasquez’ painting as a dissertation on painterliness and how visual form constructs and mediates meaning: specifically, with how grouping, shape and perspectives multiply possible readings. Related is the issues of how to balance subjects, artist and viewers; the limits of realistic representation and the role of the viewer in creating the visual texts’ multiple meanings, none of which may be isolated from the others. ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ might be seen as the virtuoso performance of variations on these themes relation to the problematics of linguistic - as opposed to visual - representation. It too produces multiple perspectives; it attends to surface detail, so that the realistic approach so beloved of nineteenth century English novelists is exposed as linguistic effect.

The story begins on the twelfth birthday of the Infanta, the young princess in the Spanish court. The knowing, assured narrator informs us that ‘it was naturally a matter of great importance to the whole country that she should have a fine day’ (119). Immediately our attention is drawn to the issue of what is natural and what it is not. Furthermore, we are initially unsure as to whether this is an objective reliable statement or an example of free embedded discourse, with the narrator echoing the sentiments of the Infanta or a member of her court? The number of possible lens through which we might view the story are already multiplying. And what an unnatural and disturbing place the court is! Nature is all awry. Fruits bleed, the sun glares, flowers are as regimented as though in military service. A realist would balk at the plausibility of lemons and pomegranates ripening while tulips and magnolias flower. The embalmed body of the dead queen occupies pride of place and the king mourns her with necrophiliac excess. It comes as no surprise then that near the end of the story, when the dwarf is suffering the throes of death, the Infanta believes him to be acting, and considers his performance ‘as good as the puppets, only, of course, not quite so natural’. (145) Those like the dwarf who suffer emotion cannot represent it to the satisfaction of others. Yet the ventriloquised misfortune and unhappiness of wooden waxen puppets can evoke empathy in the Grand Inquisitor, who is famed for his cruelty. In the palace it is natural to be artificial and impossible to be natural. Naturalness is a matter of representation, it seems, not an innate quality. Even the categories of the authentic and the genuine are thus called into question.

The story presents us with a series of tableaux that cumulatively represent the court’s preoccupation with entertainment. First there is the mock bullfight, followed by the snake charmers, the solemn religious dance and the gypsy entertainment, and the amusement culminates in the spectators mocking the dwarf who is blithely unaware of the reason why he has attracted attention. Paralleling the court activities is the commentary of the Greek chorus of anthropological flowers, which provides an alternative narrative focus on surface detail. The flowers associate the dwarf’s ugliness with dishonesty (the Rose-tree) and with vulgarity and bad taste (the Violets). They believe that he is determined by his social status. The rooted flowers have a personal stake in the genteel status quo: ‘Well-bred people always stay in exactly the same place, as we do’ (135). Wilde here satirises both the assumptions that appearance may be correlated with moral or social values and the prevailing late nineteenth century bourgeois prejudices that relate poverty to moral, social and cultural depravity. However, equally satirised are the self-regarding birds and lizards, whose deracination has not led to any great insights into their condition. The perils of going below the surface, of which Wilde warned in The Picture of Dorian Gray, are here underlined.

Readers are given contradictory signals. It is ‘natural’ for a reader schooled in late nineteenth century novel-reading to want to identify with one or more characters, and so while the flowers’ vapid snobbery prevents us from identifying with them, we are led to empathise with the dwarf, whose sunny disposition and loving nature are singular. We may even think that he is the embodiment of the ideal of the enfant sauvage, a romanticist child of the forest whose natural goodness and good nature compensate for his undeniable physical ugliness. Yet, when the free indirect discourse of the story produces his perception of the world around him, he is seen to indulge in ornate, self-consciously pre-Raphaelite description, laden with accretions of lush, bright, jewel-like verbal ornamentation. His palette of royal purple and gold accentuates the parallel between the forest’s works of art - nature - and the palace’s - culture. Nature and culture are one, because what is ‘natural’ is an artificial construct. In linguistic terms the dwarf’s apprehension is little different from the narrator’s indulgent description of the palace, with its throne’s ‘rich pall of black velvet studded with silver tulips elaborately fringed with silver and pearls’ (140). The dwarf’s ‘noble hold on nature’ is Ruskinesque rather than Rousseauesque.

The climax of the story coincides with the dwarf’s epiphany, that moment of self-realisation when he discovers his physical ugliness. It is a moment of self-hatred reminiscent of the young boy’s in James Joyce’s story ‘Araby’ in Dubliners (‘I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger’), a moment so intense and destructive that it kills the dwarf. The affectionate little man dies instantly of self-hatred brought on by tainted self-knowledge - unlike Joyce’s character. The dwarf’s restricted physical growth is a metaphor of stunted growth of his self-knowledge. He must keep his mirror images tucked away in his cognitive attic, because he cannot bear too much of its reality. To survive he must instead have recourse to fictional representations of selfhood, to multiple misprisions. But the path was open to him to explore the contradiction of mimesis suggested by the mirror itself. A mirror produces the negative, the reverse of what it purports to present: this much is implied by the shadowy position the mirror image occupies in Las Meninas. What the dwarf saw was not what not what he saw, but its opposite. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. The story, like Las Meninas, is a cautionary tale about both the one-sidedness and unreliability of the mimetic method of representation, and the impossibility of any reality beyond that which we construct with our imagination. Perforce, like Las Meninas, it refuses to allow the readers adopt the role of spectator. Rather the reader is the Ariadne who weaves together the numerous narrative strands and perspectives. He or she is obliged to sift through a web of possible meanings, as must the viewer of Las Meninas.

Let us look at another of Wilde’s fairy tales through Velasquez ‘ optic. ‘The Devoted Friend’ (41-60) is a tale about a miller who claims to be the devoted friend of Little Hans. He shows his devotion by avoiding Hans when he is down on his luck, by taking the flowers Hans planned to sell, and by lending him a broken useless wheelbarrow and taking a handy plank of wood in exchange and by talking at length about friendship. Talking about friendship - representing it linguistically - is, he believes, superior to actively befriending Hans. Finally, when the miller’s son becomes ill, he prevails upon Hans to fetch a doctor. Hans does, but he loses his way home and is drowned. Throughout Hans is unfailingly willing and self-effacing, and, unlike the dwarf, remains entirely unaware of his ‘friend’s’ exploitation.

Lest we are tempted to identify too closely with the Hans character, to adopt his perspective to the exclusion of all others, it is presented to us at two removes, embedded in two Chinese narrative boxes. A green linnet tells Hans’s and the Miller’s story to an audience consisting of a mother duck and a water rat. The trio engage in a discussion on the relative merits of friendship and love, with the rat asserting that ‘there is nothing in the world that is nobler or rarer than a devoted friendship’. (43) He expects his ‘devoted friend to be devoted to [him]’, (44) so echoing the miller’s sentiment, or lack of it. The story ends with the linnet explaining that the story contains a moral, and the Water-rat angrily claiming that he would not have listened had he known that. The Duck comments that telling a story with a moral ‘is always a very dangerous thing to do’. Then, without warning, an unnamed, heretofore concealed narrator makes his (her?) presence felt and remarks ‘I quite agree with her’. (59)

We are alerted to the parallels between the miller in the embedded tale and the water rat in the setting. On a moral or social level, the rat, like the miller, is reprehensible: he believes disobedient children should be drowned, and he empathises with the thoroughly unattractive miller. The water rat himself draws another of these parallels. He is a bookish supercilious fellow who knows a thing or two about fictional form and who consorts with critics. He offers opinions about form and sequence and offers his allegiance to ‘beautiful sentiments’. He disapproves of moral tales, that is, stories that relate to the rights and wrongs of lived reality. The miller too is a theorist. He believes in separating knowledge from experience. In Aristotelian terms, he creates a distinction between what he considered the superior episteme, pure knowledge, and phronesis, skill at living such as that possessed by Hans. He condescendingly informs Hans that ‘at present you only have a practice of friendship; some day you will have the theory also’. (54) The miller, according to himself, has ‘beautiful ideas’. Hans has useful skills and a generous nature. Both the miller and the water rat indulge in rational dualistic games. In each case, the signified has floated free of the signifier, the theory from the practice, leaving the proponents of theories far removed from the lives of the duck and Hans. Both echo Wilde’s assertion - which he often contradicts, not least in Dorian Gray - that ethics apply only to aesthetics.

One might be forgiven for believing that the thrust of the story is to disapprove of such dualism. A traditional, wholesome story certainly would condemn the rat’s and the miller’s reification. But our narrator rouses himself to side with the water rat and announces that he agrees that telling a story with a moral is a ‘dangerous thing’. His voice is confident, assured, bearing the imprint of an authorial hand. But since we cannot trust the tone of the story and its fictional nature is underlined, we are left to our own readerly devices, with only literary, not moral, guidelines to show the way to sense-making.

Partly because the characters in ‘The Devoted Friend’ are mere types rather than complex and rounded, it is difficult to find one with whom a reader might empathise: Wilde does not allow the consolations and delusions of realism. Certainly the miller and the water rat lack any attractive features. The miller equates friendship with bombast and selfishness. Yet the storyteller clearly states that Little Hans’s ‘most devoted friend of all was big Hugh the Miller’. Indeed, even Little Hans, for all his virtue, is difficult to warm to, for his self-consciousness is as limited as is the dwarf’s. We are told that he felt very proud of having a friend with noble ideas such as the miller. He ‘never troubled his head’ (45) about the fact that the miller failed to reciprocate his generosity, and his responses verge on the obsequious. He would sooner have the miller’s good opinion than the buttons he was obliged to sell in order to survive the winter. His good deeds never leave a trace in the black hole of the miller’s greed. He apologises to him for taking a rest, he foolishly believes it is a privilege to hear the miller talk, and that the miller’s exchange of a broken, useless wheelbarrow for a useful plank of wood is ‘an act of pure generosity’. (55) In a word, he lacks self-awareness. He has learnt nothing as the story progresses and his naïve inability to see through, rather than see the surface of the miller makes it difficult to identify with him. His unselfconsciousness acts as a foil to the complex self-reflexivity of the narrative.

It is difficult too to identify with the archly pragmatic mother duck who teaches her offspring to stand on their heads in order to promote them socially. The water rat arouses some finer feelings in her - tears come to her eyes whenever she looks at him. However, anyone who has read Jane Austen might be forgiven for believing that a socially aware mother sees in a confirmed bachelor a lost marital opportunity for her offspring. The problems associated with seeing beyond the surface are neatly summarised in these two examples. The Mother Duck’s expressions of feeling are as likely to be insincere as are the miller’s expressions of friendship. The simulacra of sentiment multiply, and the only representation of ‘real’ friendship, Hans’s, is fatally flawed by its lack of self-consciousness.

We hardly expect to find a moral in a tale written by a man who declared that there is no such thing as a good or bad book but a book well or badly written. And indeed, our distrust is well-founded: the story ends with the duck admonishing the linnet that it is dangerous to tell a story with a moral, and a heretofore silent narrator chimes in his agreement. Who is this narrator? How trustworthy is he/she? Why has his presence remained concealed throughout the tale? Why does the water rat react so violently when the linnet reveals that the story contains a moral? (He ‘screamed’, he responds ‘in a very angry manner’. (58)) Are we readers expected to revise whatever feelings of empathy we had formed when reading the story? Here we have narrative estrangement worthy of Brecht or Calvino.

Wilde’s fairy tales come inscribed with a caveat emptor: what you see is both what you get and what you do not get. Their complex meanings relate to the impossibility of authenticity and genuineness, and the unreliability of mimesis as a method of representing reality. Yet lest we derive any certainties from Wilde’s art, we are obliged to take account of the unstable tone and the unreliable (and, in the case of ‘The Devoted Friend’) concealed narrator. Can we take at face value the ‘morals’ - literary and otherwise - which the tales offer? As to the genuine feeling that is apparent in the more sociological passages of stories such as ‘The Young King’ or ‘The Happy Prince’, it is barely contained beneath the surface, particularly of ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, with its meticulous detailing of cruelty piled upon cruelty, public and private. Readers are denied the neat closure we come to expect of a tale, especially a fairy tale, and are alerted to narrative arrangement and the actual materiality of language as the building blocks of meaning. The reader of the tales occupies a vantage point similar to the artist in Las Meninas - similar in terms of power. It seems that none of the numerous focal points of the stories is the authorised one. It seems as if the moral of the story is that that one should expect only uncertainty, self-awareness, adroitness, flexibility and an education in form and perspective.

 

 

A colour reproduction of Diego Velasquez’ Las Meninas may be downloaded from http://www.artchive.com/meninas.htm

 

 

Bibliography

Kenneth Clarke ‘Looking at Pictures’ Max Harden’s Archive: Velasquez: Las Meninas http://www.artchive.com/meninas.htm

Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, London: The Fourth Estate, 2000

Veronique Foti ‘Representation represented: Foucault, Velasquez, Descartes’, Postmodern culture Vol. 7 No. 1 (September 1996), http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.996/foti.996;

Michel Foucault The Order of Things, Tr. Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon, 1970

James Joyce Dubliners, London: Penguin

Neil Sammell Wilde Style The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde Harlow: Pearson, 2000

Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, ‘Las Meninas and the paradoxes of visual representation’, Critical Inquiry Vol. 7 No. 2 (Winter 1980), pp 429-447

Maria Tatar ‘Introduction’, The Classic Fairy Tales New York: Norton, 1999

Diego Velasquez Las Meninas Museo del Prado, Madrid http://www.artchive.com/meninas.htm

Marina Warner ‘The Old Wives’ Tale’, The Classic Fairy Tales New York: Norton, 1999

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, London: Dent, 1962

- The Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde introduced by Naomi Lewis, London: Gollancz, 1985

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