The Complete Short Fiction

by Oscar Wilde

  Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888, but literary success eluded him really until 1891, when four of his books appeared in the same year. All consisted of earlier material, some of it in a revised form: Lord Arthur Sarnie’s Crime and Other Stories, Intentions (a collection of four critical dialogues or essays), The Picture of Dorian Gray, and A House of Pomegranates. His play The Duchess of Padua was also produced in New York under the title Guido Ferranti. But most significantly, 1891 saw Wilde begin work on the first of his Society Comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan. The play was staged by George Alexander at the St James’s Theatre in 1892. It was a considerable artistic and financial success; indeed it is estimated to have earned Wilde in excess of £ 11,000, a sum worth much more then than it is now. In the same year Salome, Wilde’s biblical drama, was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, but the final three Society Comedies, which established Wilde’s literary fame, followed in quick succession: A Woman of No Importance and A Ideal Husband were produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre in April 1893 and January 1895 respectively; and Wilde’s masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened at the St James’s Theatre in February 1895, making Wilde the toast of the fashionable theatres of the West End.

  The story of how this dazzling success was transformed into disgrace, imprisonment and destitution in a matter of weeks is one of the best-known narratives in literary history. In 1891 the poet Lionel Johnson had introduced Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry, then, as Wilde had been a decade or so earlier, an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford. Wilde fell deeply and tragically in love, and the affair with ‘Bosie’ (as Douglas was known to his family) is the most exhaustively moralized of all nineteenth-century male-male relationships. Perhaps its two most important aspects were its very public nature and the violent and unpredictable reaction of Douglas’s father. Douglas insisted upon flaunting his relationship with Wilde, possibly with the intention of hurting his father, and he cared little how his behaviour affected any of the parties concerned. Matters were further complicated by the mysterious death in 1894 of Viscount Drumlanrig, Douglas’s half-brother, and by the rumour that he had been involved in a homosexual scandal implicating prominent members of British public life, including perhaps the Prime Minister himself, Lord Rosebery. Partly as a consequence of the death of Drumlanrig and partly because of the public nature of the affair with Lord Alfred, Queens-berry prosecuted what amounted to a vendetta against Wilde. He tried to create a public scene on the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest, but was thwarted by the timely intervention of the theatre’s management. Two weeks later, on 28 February 1895, he left at the Albemarle Club a card that carried the inaccurately spelt but mortifyingly exact inscription ‘For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite’. Despite the advice of most of his friends, Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel. Under cross-examination Wilde made a number of compromising revelations, and the case went against him. He was soon arrested on charges made under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which made both private and public homosexual relationships between men illegal. The specific accusations concerned acts of gross indecency with young, lower-class male prostitutes. The jury at what was effectively Wilde’s second trial failed to agree. A retrial took place, and on 25 May 1895 Wilde was convicted, receiving a sentence of two years’ imprisonment with hard labour, one which could involve a regime of both solitary confinement and repetitive, debilitating manual tasks. Wilde movingly described this prison regime in letters on prison reform written to the Morning Chronicle and in a long bitter letter of recrimination written to Douglas which was later published under the title of De Profundis. During his time in prison Wilde was declared bankrupt and his possessions were sold. After his release he led a nomadic existence on the Continent. Constance died in 1898, leaving him a small annuity of £150 a year, but he was denied access to his children. In November 1900 Wilde grew ill and underwent an operation to his ear. This last illness was diagnosed at the time as cerebral meningitis; a more recent account has suggested tertiary syphilis. Whatever the cause, Wilde died in obscurity and poverty in Paris on 30 November.

  The stories in Wilde’s volumes The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates are fairy stories – they are stories written for parents to tell to their children. Moreover filial and parental relationships – particularly, the idea of adult responsibility to children – form an important theme within the stories. So, for example, in ‘The Selfish Giant’, the role of the child is to educate the giant into the art of good parenting, and the giant’s reward for learning the values of tolerance and altruism is a divine death-bed revelation: the child he has cared for becomes mysteriously and magically transformed into an image of Christ offering His hand to lead the giant to heaven. It is also significant that in the early stories Wilde always sees parenting from a child’s point of view; so the narrative focus is always the child’s perception of a good parent, and not the parent’s perception of a good child. Wilde goes further by suggesting that to be a good parent – that is, to show tolerance and kindness towards children – is a moral education for the adult, and as such, is as necessary for the adult as for the child. All of this represents a thoroughgoing if simple reversal of the conventional fairy tale form, for Wilde’s stories run directly counter to the nineteenth-century tradition of moral tales for children that emphasize the role of parents in educating recalcitrant children into the norms and values of adult culture. Good examples of this tradition are to be found in the characters of Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-done-by and Mrs Be-done-by-as-you-did, both of whom are agents in the moral re-education of the chimney-sweep Tom in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1862–3), a work which had as its subtitle ‘A Fairy Story for a Land-Baby’. In fact the strategy of reversal is a key to understanding the whole of Wilde’s work, and in the stories it can be seen in both their thematic concerns and formal structures.

  The sympathy and tenderness with which Wilde describes the child’s world was unusual in Victorian Britain, and it obviously derived from his own experience as a son and a father. Here it is worth noting that he had a particularly close relationship with his mother, Lady Jane Wilde. From the moment he left Ireland for Oxford right up to her death in 1896, Wilde was in regular contact with her; over a hundred of her letters to him survive. Most are familiar, conversational accounts of friends and neighbours and of common interests. Some reveal Lady Wilde to be in what she describes as trouble, and not infrequently she asks Oscar for financial support. So, for example, in 1894 she can be found writing to him that ‘You are always good & kind & generous, & have ever been my best aid and companion’. 3 That Wilde should have preserved such a copious correspondence from his mother is in itself revealing; more significant, however, is that after his father’s death Wilde willingly took on a protective filial role. Interestingly, though, in this role-reversal Lady Wilde did not relinquish all of her maternal authority, for there is some evidence that Wilde’s refusal to flee to France to avoid arrest after the failure of his prosecution of Queensberry was made at the insistence of his mother who wished him to stand trial to clear his name.

  Given Wilde’s attachment to his mother, it should be unsurprising that he took his own role as parent equally seriously: indeed the evidence suggests that he was a loving and devoted father. For example, in a letter to Robert Ross (reputedly Wilde’s first homosexual lover, certainly a lifelong faithful friend and his painstaking literary executor) Wilde reveals the importance of his children in his life – so much so that even his gay relationships had to be accommodated to them: in this instance Wilde’s lover (and as such, interloper into his family matters) becomes a friend to his children, Cyril and Vyvyan, here through the present of a kitten:

  16, Tite Street,

  Chelsea, S.W.

  My Dear Bobbie,

  The kitten is quite lovely – it does not look white, indeed it looks a sort of tortoise-shell colour… wit
h velvety dark [patches?] but as you said it was white I have given orders that it is always to be spoken of as the ‘white kitten’ – the children are enchanted with it, and sit, one on each side of its basket, worshipping – It seems pensive – perhaps it is thinking of some dim rose-garden in Persia, and wondering why it is kept in this chill England.

  I hope you are enjoying yourself at Cambridge – whatever people may say against Cambridge, it is certainly the best preparatory school for Oxford that I know.

  After this insult I better stop.

  Yours ever

  Oscar Wilde.4

  Devotion to his children continued through Wilde’s disgrace and up to his death. After his release from prison and despite his protests, Constance forbade Wilde to see Cyril and Vyvyan. Wilde persuaded several of his friends, principally More Adey and Ada Leverson, to act as intermediaries, but Constance was never reconciled to Wilde re-establishing contact with the children, and he died without ever seeing them again. In Time Remembered, Vyvyan (Wilde’s second son) described receiving a letter from a Frenchman called Ernest Lajeunesse. Lajeunesse recalled an encounter with Wilde in a French hotel in the late 1890s – that is, after the trials, imprisonment and self-imposed exile:

  One autumn evening, while putting on my overcoat after finishing my meal, I clumsily upset something, perhaps a salt-cellar, on Monsieur Sébastien’s [i.e., Sebastian Melmoth, the pseudonym by which Wilde was known in France] table. He said nothing, but my mother scolded me and told me to apologize, which I did, distressed by my clumsiness. But Monsieur Sébastien turned to my mother and said: ‘Be patient with your little boy. One must always be patient with them. If, one day, you should find yourself separated from him… ’ I did not give him time to finish his sentence, but asked him: ‘Have you got a little boy?’ ‘I’ve got two’, he said. ‘Why don’t you bring them here with you?’ My mother interrupted… ‘It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter at all,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘They don’t come here with me because they are too far away… ’ Then he took my hand, drew me to him and kissed me on both cheeks. I bade him farewell, and then I saw that he was crying. And we left.

  While kissing me he had said a few words which I did not understand. But on the following day we arrived before him and a bank employee who used to sit at a table on the other side of us asked us: ‘Did you understand what Monsieur Sébastien said last evening?’ ‘No,’ we replied. ‘He said, in English: “Oh, my poor dear boys!” ‘5

  There is no external evidence to support Lajeunesse’s anecdote, but nor is there any reason to doubt its truthfulness. In fact it affirms all that we do know about the constancy of Wilde’s affection towards his children, a sentiment which in turn goes some way towards explaining that initial decision to write fairy stories, and why the themes of love and self-denial figure so strongly in them.

  There were, however, other, more pragmatic reasons for Wilde’s decision to write fiction. One of the most striking qualities of his short stories is that they can be read both as simple and satisfying narratives for children and as self-conscious literary exercises. This combination of naivety and complexity largely derives from Wilde’s exploitation of a number of popular sub-genres that had grown up in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to changes in the audiences and markets for literature. Developments in printing technologies in the 1860s and 1870s had substantially reduced the cost of book production, making it possible to print books relatively cheaply for the first time. Together with a new impetus towards universal adult literacy, formalized in John Forster’s 1870 Education Act, and a new focus on leisure brought about through greater prosperity and legislation limiting working hours, this new availability of cheap books led to a dramatic increase in the potential readership for literature. New sub-genres were developed to exploit the interests of these new groups of readers, whose tastes and backgrounds were different from the limited and exclusive readership addressed by writers earlier in the century. The most popular of the new sub-genres included ghost stories, detective fiction, the sensation novel, and the fairy tale. Authors who successfully exploited these new topics and sub-genres – such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and J. S. Le Fanu – became household names; and demand for new kinds of stories was so strong that it fuelled a succession of new monthly and fortnightly magazines, the best known of which included Temple Bar, London Society, Tit Bits, The Argosy, Tinsley’s Magazine and Belgravia.

  In the late 1880s, when he had made the transition from writing journalism to writing fiction, a literary reputation was not Wilde’s only concern; he also required financial security. Earlier works, such as the Poems and his first plays, The Duchess of Padua and Vera; Or, the Nihilists had failed on both counts. When Wilde tried again to establish a literary career, this time more attuned to the twin imperatives of creative and commercial success, he struck out in a new and altogether more modern direction: that of the short story. In choosing to try his hand at fairy tales, and subsequently at ghost and detective stories, Wilde was no doubt attempting to emulate the fame (and indeed fortune) of popular writers such as Collins, Braddon and Conan Doyle. Moreover, he was not the only ‘serious’ writer to entertain such ambitions; a few years later, Henry James also tried his hand at writing in a popular genre, and the result proved to be one of his most successful works, The Turn of the Screw. However, Wilde-was also very keen to keep himself aloof from those writers who merely pandered to what he would later refer to scathingly as ‘Public Opinion’. The result of this dilemma was the emergence of Wilde’s most distinctive stylistic device, that of parody. Almost all of his short stories represent parodies of the sub-genres which he appropriated. Sometimes these parodies are overt and witty – in, for example, ‘Sir Ardiur Savile’s Crime’ or ‘The Canterville Ghost’. On other occasions, as in ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’, they are more subtle and complex, and the line between the parodic and the serious is deliberately blurred. This last kind of story is the most self-consciously ‘literary’, and it is in this group that we find the strongest prefiguring of the complexity of Wilde’s later work.

  Whether overt or subtle, Wilde’s parodies are never simply playful: to appreciate their serious and subversive edge we need to understand the social dimension of the popular genres which he was exploiting. Ghost stories, detective fiction and fairy stories all deploy a number of stock literary devices, the most important of which include an emphasis on plot, rather than character; the use of character types such as heroes and heroines, villains and cads; and the adoption of a simple moral framework in which good and evil are rigidly and unambiguously defined, so much so that the qualities constituting good and evil are not in question. These elements are most visible in the endings to such stories where the most important function of plot is to reward good and punish evil: so princesses marry their princes, detectives catch their villains, and ghosts are finally and successfully laid to rest. All these actions represent a restoration of the social order, and through it, a reaffirmation of the status quo. In this sense the tendency of ghost stories, detective fiction and fairy stories is always towards a conservatism: they dramatize the triumph and cohesiveness of society’s values when they are threatened by an outside evil force, whether it comes in the shape of a wicked witch, criminal, or malevolent ghost. Here it is worth remembering that fairy stories were originally told to children, and so their primary social function was to educate children into the values of a culture, in particular its moral values.

  The effect of Wilde’s stories could not be more different. While they seem to adhere to the stock literary devices of a genre – the simple plotting, the use of given character-types, the deployment of a rigid moral framework, and so on – they nevertheless invest those devices with a very different significance. Evil and the threats which it poses are certainly present in Wilde’s stories: they come as the vengeful Canterville ghost, or in Lord Arthur’s attempts to commit murder, or in the fisherman’s decision to
cut away his soul (and so his moral conscience). But the threat that evil presents typically functions to expose the corruption and poverty of society’s values, rather than – as with the conventional moral tale – to reaffirm their intrinsic rightness. In this way Wilde subverts the traditional moralizing function of such fiction; or, as he says rather more forcefully in the ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’ Indeed, rather than socialize readers into the given values of a culture, Wilde’s stories subtly criticize the nature of those values, and the ways in which they bring about social cohesion in the first place. Some examples will make this strategy a little clearer.

  ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ parodies elements of both detective and sensation fiction. The story is set in the fashionable salon of Lady Windermere, and it concerns a visiting palmist’s prediction to the young Lord Arthur Savile that he will commit a murder. Savile, who is engaged to be married, decides that, out of gentlemanly duty to his future wife, he must fulfil his destiny before his marriage takes place, and the story relates his various attempts to find a suitable murder victim. After a string of failures, one night by chance he comes across the same palmist leaning over the railings of the Thames. Lord Arthur seizes his opportunity and pushes the palmist into the river. The murder committed, and his destiny fulfilled, Savile returns home in relief, marries his bride and lives happily ever after. The whole plot represents a comic inversion of the traditional devices of moral justice, for here it is the act of murder (rather than the unmasking of the murderer) which brings about the restoration of social order: the murderer becomes the hero (and ironically is rewarded through a happy marriage) and the victim becomes the villain (and equally ironically is punished by death). The consequence of this inversion is that the reader’s attention is focused not on the traditional triumph of good over evil, but rather on the kind of society where murder is justified on the grounds of right conduct, where ‘right’ means observing the codes of gentlemanly behaviour. So Wilde’s narrator ironically muses on the nature of duty: