Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales: No One Lived Happily Ever After

Oscar Wilde offended Victorian society by producing works of social mockery, aside from living a scandalous life. Although Wilde's fairy tales were intended for a young audience, they contain social overtones that most children would not understand, but that are meant to project a higher social ethic upon later generations. The criticism of the Victorian society in Wilde's fairy tales is apparent in the parallels between the situations he imagines and real-life situations, and also in the high moral standards that Wilde holds up by contrasting the bad behavior with the good. In his tales, he shows the unfairness of society's institutions, especially of the factory system and its inhumane practices, by describing with more emotion the hopelessness of the lower class characters (the workers), while his upper class characters (the wealthy/factory owners) cruelly remain oblivious to the problems of others, except in the case of The Young King. Wilde's criticism of the lack of progress in society is augmented by the fact that his tales rarely have a truly happy ending, reflecting his pessimistic views that society is not likely to change for the better.

Wilde's tale The Birthday of the Infanta is a criticism of the behavior of the upper class towards those in the lower class. In this tale, the princess, obviously symbolic of the wealthy, takes advantage of an ugly dwarf, who symbolizes society's pitiable. She treats him as a toy instead of as something that is alive and that has feelings, as all humans have. The manner in which she treats him is much like the way that the factory owners treated their workers, seeing them more as money-making machines than as humans. Just as businessmen were only concerned with the profit produced by his workers, all the Infanta is concerned about is her own pleasure, as she demands to be entertained:

He [the dwarf] crawled, like some wounded thing, into the shadow, and lay there moaning.

And at that moment the Infanta herself came in with her companions through the open window and, when they saw the ugly little dwarf lying on the floor with his clenched hands, in the most fantastic and exaggerated manner, they went off into shouts of happy laughter, and stood all round him and watched him.

"His dancing is funny," said the Infanta; "but his acting is funnier still. Indeed he is almost as good as the puppets, only, of course, not quite so natural." (Wilde, "Fairy" 50).

The dwarf represents the lower class people who were often manipulated and used by those in power. Wilde gives more deeply emotional attributes and actions to the dwarf to make the reader pity him. The dwarf is likened to "some wounded thing" while the Princess appears to be a cold, unfeeling brat. His life is very similar to the one described by Wilde's contemporary, Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor, written two decades before Wilde's fairy tales. The emotions that Wilde assigns to the dwarf are also like the feelings of Mayhew's street performer. Mayhew's description of the conditions of the working poor in England pertain not only to street performers, but to the lower class in general:

He was a melancholy-looking man, with the sunken eyes and other characteristics of semi-starvation, whilst his face was scored with lines and wrinkles, telling of paint and premature age.

...and the readiness and business-like way with which he resumed his professional buffoonery was not a little remarkable. His story was more pathetic than comic, and proved that the life of a street clown is, perhaps, the most wretched of all existence...

"Frequently when I [the clown] am playing the fool in the streets, I feel very sad at heart. I can't help thinking of the bare cupboards at home; but what's that to the world? I've often and often been home all day when it has been wet, with no food at all, either to give my children or take myself, and have gone out at night to the public-houses to sing a comic song or play that funnyman for a meal...(28)

The dwarf's realization that he is the monster in the mirror is symbolic of society's problem, as seen by Wilde, in which one becomes disillusioned with society upon discovering that there is no such thing as upward mobility in the social hierarchy. The dwarf is able to be happy before he knows he is ugly, because he does not recognize his impediment. Once he sees that he is the monster, he knows that what he had perceived as the Princess' love was a deception, and that she had only been mocking him (Wilde, "Fairy" 49). This scenario is similar to the experience of a lower class citizen who works and works, trying to get ahead in life, until finally realizing that the struggle is futile, because there is not a valid reward. To the workers, life became a hopeless routine.

Another tale of Wilde's that has strong social overtones is The Young King. The Young King can perhaps most easily be compared to the Victorian era because in the tale, he experiences three dreams that open his eyes to the conditions of his society, which most closely resemble Wilde's society. The king's first dream depicts the workers slaving over looms to finish a magnificent robe, which was meant for him to wear at his coronation. The working conditions Wilde describes are very much like those of the laborers in England's factories. The weavers tell the king that, "in peace, the rich make slaves of the poor. We [the workers] must work to live, and they [the rich] give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time...We tread out the grapes, and another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; we are slaves, though men call us free." (Wilde, "Fairy" 10). In Victorian England, the poor, including children, were forced to work constantly just to be able to survive, and even when they worked constantly, they could not earn enough to be comfortable, and suffered from malnutrition and homelessness. Factories, which did not exist until the Victorian era, became as plantations were to slaves in the United States, even though the factory workers were technically free, they did have invisible chains. Factory workers were engaged in their employment for a huge portion of the day, and received very little in return. The factory owners, on the other hand, reaped the benefits of the company and go to "drink the wine" that they had no real part in making. Factory workers were like slaves, in the way that they were tied to their jobs. They had to work hard, and still suffered, but they could not quit or they would surely die.

Wilde goes into more detail about the place of the poor worker in life in his The Soul of Man Under Socialism, as excerpted by Owen Dudley Edwards: "...there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want" (173). Here, Wilde's description of the worker is correlated to the conditions he described in The Young King.

Unlike many of Wilde's characters, the young king feels sorrow and pity for the workers, and though he can live his life as a lower class citizen, as he ends up doing in the end, the lower class can never rise to live like the upper class. As was the case with The Birthday of the Infanta, characters are stuck in the class in which they grew up. In Victorian society, a person could never rise, but was always capable of a fall, as Wilde himself found out when he was jailed, and later exiled, for being a homosexual. Although the king was of noble birth, he was raised by a shepherd, and ended up returning to the life of a shepherd so that he would not be a hypocrite, but Wilde's plots cause the reader to contemplate the psychological factors that existed in society, and which contributed to the isolation of the classes, though in The Young King, the isolation is self imposed. In this story, Wilde is trying to show that even if there was the chance to rise in the social hierarchy, a peasant may feel uncomfortable taking on a more powerful role, and therefore would be more likely to remain in his original position.

Wilde's The Fisherman and His Soul is another tale that has deep social meanings. The fisherman must get rid of his soul, symbolizing great risks and sacrifices, in order to be with his lover who is a mermaid. The difference of species is only a representation of the struggle that two people of different classes would face if they fell in love in the Victorian era. The fisherman struggles to cross class boundaries, all the while believing that "Love is better than Riches" (89), and his story ends in tragedy when his mermaid dies, showing that the cross-class marriage was doomed. All of the other humans, representing people within the fisherman's social group, try to persuade the fisherman not to give his soul to live with the mermaid. This is an allusion to the Victorian, practice of the wealthy marrying the wealthy, and the poor marrying the poor without regards to love. The fisherman is caught between the classes, while his soul takes on the role of an upper class person, who cares more about money than anything else. The soul becomes, like a class stigma, attached to the fisherman. The upper class soul also happens to lack a heart, because the fisherman "gave [him] no heart" (95), echoing the fact that many lower class citizens perceived the heartlessness of the wealthy who refused to give charity. The soul argues with the fisherman that money is the most important thing: " 'Nay, but there is nothing better than Riches,' said the Soul" (Wilde, "Fairy" 89).

Instead of beginning his works with a conflict and ending with a resolution, Wilde builds up the conflict without offering a resolution, and unlike most fairy tales, his do not have "happily ever after" endings. The lack of resolution causes the reader to finish the work feeling unfulfilled and dissatisfied with the lack of positive outcome, just as Wilde was dissatisfied with the lack of improvement in his so-called "progressive" Victorian society. After sarcastically foreshadowing in the beginning of the tale, with a description of the Infanta as someone who "they [the "troop of handsome Egyptians"] felt sure that one so lovely as she could never be cruel to anybody, Wilde ends The Birthday of the Infanta," with the Princess' perspective on her own cruelty: "For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts" (52) - rationalizing her own rude behavior by blaming the object of her cruelty, just as the rich often blamed the poor for the unfavorable conditions in England.

Wilde's own philosophies shine through in his tales, which show his pessimism and his utter dislike of society. In De Profundis, the letter Wilde wrote in prison, he addresses his dissatisfactions:

With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change.

The perspective that Wilde conveys in his fairy tales is that society, in general, does not progress. The "paralysing immobility of life" is directly associated with the exclusive social hierarchy in which people could not transcend their class nor could they be promoted. Although, in many cases Wilde's descriptions of a paralyzed society stem from Victorian society's condemnation of homosexuals, who were on the same level as vagrants and criminals, they are very adaptable to the social class system in broader terms. Norbert Kohl describes the basic structure of Wilde's fairy tales:

They all have as their starting-point some kind of deficiency, which may be manifested in one of two ways: either the characters have no proper understanding of themselves and their surroundings, or they are lacking in love and consideration for their fellow creatures. In both cases, tensions arise between asocial egotism and social responsibility, between selfishness and thought for others...The development of the action in all these stories depends on whether the initial moral defect or lack of insight is overcome - thus leading to a change in the character's behaviour - or continued to the end. Thus there are two types of d�nouement: if the character passes his test and the fault is corrected, the ending is positive, in the form of a reward...if the character persists in his self-deception and egotism, the ending is negative...(52-53)

Kohl's analysis of the fairy tales' plot is accurate, and the concept of the plot alone shows why the fairy tales are social criticisms. Those who do right by their society are rewarded in the end. Even though none of Wilde's tales end with what one might describe as "happily ever after," The Young King is an example of a story in which morality prevailed, and society flourished under the morally genuine ruler. The two types of plots, in which characters either lack compassion, or they do not understand their surroundings, are reminiscent of the way that many people saw the lives of the wealthy. In most cases, the Victorian upper class was either oblivious to the poverty, or they simply did not care.

Wilde wrote many other pieces criticizing the state of Victorian society. Edwards includes an excerpt from one such piece, The Soul of Man under Socialism, which cites that which Wilde was also advocating in his fairy tales: "The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible" (Edwards 172). In his fairy tales, Wilde shines a light on the vast differences between the classes, and the way in which they interact, or fail to interact. It is obvious in Wilde's writings that he was very unhappy with the state of his society, especially after his fall from society's grace upon his being charged with sodomy and cast out.

Though it may seem odd that so many social criticisms were included in fairy tales meant for children, in many ways fairy tales are the best vehicle for criticism. The setting of fairy tales is often ambiguous, and therefore, can be likened to almost any place in real life. Fairy tales, being considered a work of fiction provided the author with a safer way to criticize society, rather than him just stating his criticisms directly. Though they were written in the nineteenth century, and in pertain to Victorian society, they are also adaptable to modern times. Also, fairy tales, being meant for a younger audience, are a practical way of instilling the moral values of the author in future generations. Wilde's fairy tales are, and have been, immensely popular, and they contain important messages about humanity, and the injustices of life. They provided a means of criticism that virtually no other form of literature could supply.Works Cited

Edwards, Owen Dudley. The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde. London: Barrie and Jenkins Ltd, 1989.

Kohl, Norbert. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Trans. David Henry Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Mayhew, Henry. fromLondon Labour and the London Poor. Rptd. in. Victorian Literature 1830-1900. Eds. Dorothy Mermin and Herbert Tucker. USA: Harcourt, 2002. 22-28.

Wilde, Oscar. "De Profundis." 1897. 22. Apr. 2003. .

Wilde, Oscar. "The Birthday of the Infanta." Rptd. in The Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. New York: Random House, 1896. 24-52.

Wilde, Oscar. "The Fisherman and His Soul." Rptd. in The Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. New York: Random House, 1896. 53-105.

Wilde, Oscar. "The Young King." Rptd. in The Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. New York: Random House, 1896. 3-23.