by Oscar Wilde
[Arthur] recognised none the less clearly where his duty lay, and was fully conscious of the fact that he had no right to marry until he had committed the murder. This done, he could stand before the altar with Sybil Merton, and give his life into her hands without terror of wrongdoing. This done, he could take her to his arms, knowing that she would never have to blush for him, never have to hang her head in shame…
Many men in his position would have preferred the primrose path of dalliance to the steep heights of duty; but Lord Arthur was too conscientious to set pleasure above principle. (pp. 180–81)
This comic discrepancy between manners and morals is a theme that preoccupied Wilde for the rest of his creative life, and it is central to his best-known works, the Society Comedies.
The plot of ‘The Canterville Ghost’ works by means of a similar series of inversions. Once again it is the evil avenging ghost which turns out to be the hero, and the members of the bourgeois family he taunts become the villains. The plot is relatively simple: it concerns the ghost’s varied but failed attempts to frighten a new American family that has recently taken up residence in his house. The problem for the ghost lies in the family’s matter-of-fact sensibilities: they refuse to believe in the supernatural, and always find a perfectly rational explanation for the ghost’s manifestations and the disruption it causes, such as strange noises and stains on the floor. In the dénouement of the story, the ghost is finally laid to rest by the youngest daughter, for she alone has the imagination to understand him, and it is her sympathy with his suffering which finally allows him to find peace. Like ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, the story reserves its censure not for the ghost and the murder he committed, but rather for the family (and by extension the society) responsible for criminalizing him. So when Virginia, the young girl, complains that ‘it is very wrong to kill anyone’, the ghost interjects:
‘Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics! My wife was very plain, never had my ruffs properly starched, and knew nothing about cookery. Why, there was a buck I had shot in Hogley Woods, a magnificent pricket, and do you know how she had it sent up to table? However, it is no matter now, for it is all over, and I don’t think it was very nice of her brothers to starve me to death, though I did kill her.’
‘Starve you to death? Oh, Mr Ghost, I mean Sir Simon, are you hungry? I have a sandwich in my case. Would you like it?’ (p. 224)
The implication is that criminal behaviour is produced by society’s lack of moral imagination and sympathy – a theme Wilde was to take up in his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ and, in relation to his own imprisonment, in De Profundis. There Wilde charges his society with responsibility for his suffering:
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself: that is to say it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irredeemable wrong. I claim on my side that if I realise what I have suffered, Society should realise what it has inflicted on me: and that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.6
Interestingly, very shortly after this passage, Wilde describes the way events in his own life had been ‘prefigured’ in his ‘art’. ‘Some of it,’ he observes, ‘is in “The Happy Prince”: some of it is in “The Young King”.’7
‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ represents the most complex kind of parody. The tale itself is reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ and Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Forsaken Merman’. In both of these examples, the moral of the tale centres on the familiar Christian opposition between the spiritual (represented by the conscience and the soul) and the material (represented by worldly attractions and the body), which is in turn presented in terms of the equally familiar opposition between selfless love and selfish desire. Needless to say, both Andersen’s fairy tale and Arnold’s poem describe the corrupting influence of the material world and sexual desire, and the ultimate triumph of the power of selfless spiritual love whose reward is immortality. In Wilde’s tale, however, these moral dichotomies are not nearly so clear cut. Most obviously, the roles of soul and body seem to be reversed: so when Wilde’s fisherman cuts away his soul from his body, the soul embarks upon a life of dedicated immorality which parodies and inverts the three temptations of Christ. Paradoxically, it is the soul which expresses a fascination with the sins of the flesh and the world, rather than the other way around:
And ever did his Soul tempt him with evil, and whisper of terrible things. Yet did it not prevail against him, so great was the power of his love.
And after the year was over, the Soul thought within himself, ‘I have tempted my master with evil, and his love is stronger than I am.’ (p. 144)
Wilde seems to suggest that the fisherman’s ability to withstand temptation derives from the power of his love. Usually love is considered to be the prerogative of the soul or spirit, but in Wilde’s story, love (and the values associated with it, such as fidelity) reside in the body. The implication is that for Wilde ‘true love’ is exclusively of the body and is therefore (sexual) desire, a conclusion which completely reverses the traditional Christian understanding of the relationship between body and soul, where soul is the regulating conscience of the body.
The society and its values which Wilde implicates in his stories (and in his other works, including the comedies and De Profanáis) is always fashionable Society, with a capital ‘S’ – that is, the world of privilege, of rich salons and country houses. London ‘Society’, as this group was more formally known, was composed of the upper middle-class or the aristocracy, that Victorian and Edwardian group which Max Beerbohm later called the ‘upper ten thousand’ of British society. In Wilde’s work this group is characterized in terms of its philistinism and materialism: they know, in the words of Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’. The group is represented in the stories by characters such as the daughter of the professor in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, who prefers material objects – the Chamberlain’s nephew’s gift of jewels – to the rose created at the cost of the nightingale’s life; or the Town Councillors in ‘The Happy Prince’ who, unlike the swallow (and, finally, unlike God), can recognize only the material worth of the prince, and who ensure that when his statue is stripped of its gold and its precious jewels it is discarded for scrap; or the spoilt Infanta and her entourage who value the faithful dwarf only in terms of his ability to entertain them. In all these stories the worldly materialism of society is set against the values of selfless love and fidelity. That opposition is not in itself unusual; what marks out Wilde’s tales is that such values are always vulnerable to society’s vulgar self-interest. In traditional fairy tales, love and constancy are rewarded in this world; in Wilde’s tales love and constancy lead generally to the destruction of the individual (the one possible exception is ‘The Model Millionaire’). Some of the tales compensate for this destruction with the reward of a Christian afterlife: so the Happy Prince and the swallow are taken to ‘God’s garden of Paradise’; and the Selfish Giant dies after being vouchsafed a beatific vision of Christ. But in general terms the most striking feature of the tales is the impotence of good – a conclusion which is again reiterated in the Society Comedies. For example in a play such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, selfless love (couched in terms of maternal devotion) is powerful enough to ‘save’ the reputation of Lady Windermere, but impotent in the face of the hypocrisy of London Society. Similarly, in A Woman of No Importance, the selfless charity of Mrs Arbuthnot is only a source of humour for the social circles that ultimately reject her. In the stories the most forceful statement of the impotence of selfless love
occurs in the final sentence of ‘The Star-Child’, where the child’s realization of the value of selflessness is followed by a death which renders that love ineffectual:
Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly. (p. 164)
It is also worth noting that the society Wilde describes is always recognizably Victorian, and that the archetypal themes of suffering that he appropriates are given a specific Victorian character. So the temptation of the Soul in ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ is described in terms of the lure of the Orient, a favourite motif in late Victorian culture, strikingly articulated in works such as Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights and Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. (Indeed the exoticism of the East figures in other stories by Wilde – in ‘The Young King’, and ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, for example.) Similarly, suffering in ‘The Happy Prince’ is given a specific Victorian cast. The Swallow notices
the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. Under the archway of a bridge two little boys were lying in one another’s arms to try and keep themselves warm. (pp. 9–10)
The pattern is repeated in ‘The Young King’, where the misery which the King witnesses is reminiscent of Victorian social-problem novels – those novels, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, written in middle years of the nineteenth century and which dwell upon the misery of the urban poor:
The meagre daylight peered in through the grated windows, and showed him the gaunt figures of the weavers bending over their cases. Pale, sickly-looking children were crouched on the huge crossbeams. As the shuttles dashed through the warp they lifted up the heavy battens, and when the shuttles stopped they let the battens fall and pressed the threads together. Their faces were pinched with famine, and their thin hands shook and trembled. Some haggard women were seated at a table sewing. A horrible odour filled the place. The air was foul and heavy, and the walls dripped and streamed with damp. (p. 87)
In these ways the stories are topical, and they point to a potential audience more sophisticated and knowing than the child desiring to be told a good story. In letters to The Speaker and The Pall Mall Gazette in 1891 Wilde ridiculed the idea that ‘the extremely limited vocabulary at the disposal of the British child’ should be ‘the standard by which the prose of an artist is to be judged’. Indeed, it is the simultaneous appeal to both child and adult that explains what is perhaps the most striking and modern element in all the stories – those themes to which their subtexts allude.
In the last decade there has been a trend among critics of Wilde’s work to see submerged concerns in his fiction and drama, particularly that of nineteenth-century sexual politics. So some critics read the representation of marriage and sexual ethics in the Society Comedies in terms of a covert discussion of the politics of male–male desire. For example, the plot of A Woman of No Importance appears to be concerned with a familiar tension between child and parents: Lord Illingworth, the father of the illegitimate Gerald Arbuthnot, competes for his affections with his mother. However, cancelled drafts of the play confirm the suspicions of some gay critics that Wilde’s original concern was with plotting the dynamics of male-male desire between an older and powerful man (here Lord Illingworth) and a younger, attractive ingénu (Gerald Arbuthnot). Vestiges of this concern remain in the stereotyped character of Mrs Arbuthnot, whose emotions have little interest in the play, despite the fact that in terms of the plot, she is the central character. More tangible evidence for the existence of this submerged gay politics exists in a scene maintained throughout the drafts of the play. It concerns a group of middle-aged women discussing their ‘ideal man’. In their conversation the dowagers emphasize qualities such as physical beauty, idleness and fecklessness, thereby selfconsciously overturning Victorian stereotypes that value duty, work and protectiveness. It is significant that precisely these qualities are attributed to Dorian Gray and are features of the way in which Wilde describes the object of desire in homosexual relationships. Equally significant is the fact that these qualities are attributed to an ideal man, and not an ideal husband. By divorcing the terms ‘man’ and ‘husband’, Wilde resists the Victorian practice of defining men by means of their relationships with women.
It is possible to see the existence of exactly the same kind of subtexts in some of the short stories. For example, when Wilde’s narrator in ‘The Model Millionaire’ describes Hughie Erskine, he does so in a particularly loaded way: Erskine is a ‘delightful ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no profession’. Wilde re-used the terms of the description in an epigram published in ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’:
There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with a perfect profile, and end by adopting some useful profession.8
The same epigram was read out by Edward Carson in court in Wilde’s first trial, and the connection with Wilde’s own homosexuality was thereby made explicit. Lord Arthur Savile shares some of the physical characteristics of Hughie Erskine: he is described as having led the ‘delicate and luxurious life of a young man of birth and fortune, a life exquisite in its freedom from sordid care, its beautiful boyish insouciance’. The motivation for Lord Arthur’s actions is of course his relationship with his fiancée, but the story itself completely disregards her feelings: indeed its interest is firmly with Lord Arthur and not, as might be expected, with the force of heterosexual desire.
However the most elaborate of all of Wilde’s coded references to a gay double life occurs in the ‘Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ There Wilde’s character (once again called Erskine) describes his relationship with Cyril Graham which is reminiscent of Wilde’s representation of male–male desire, and uncannily prophetic of his own relationship with Bosie and Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry:
I don’t think that Lord Crediton cared very much for Cyril… Cyril had very little affection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidays with us in Scotland. They never really got on together at all. Cyril thought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate. He was effeminate, I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital fencer. In fact he got the foils before he left Eton. But he was very languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a strong objection to football. The two things that really gave him pleasure were poetry and acting. At Eton he was always dressing up and reciting Shakespeare… I was absurdly devoted to him… he always set an absurdly high value on personal appearance, and once read a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly was wonderfully handsome. People who did not like him, Philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere prettiness. I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner. He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere. (pp. 52–3)
It is significant that the main theme of this story is forgery and deception: what matters in it is not the distinction between truth and lies, but the ability to sustain a falsehood – a topic which Wilde explored more fully in his critical essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ in Intentions (1891). Other stories provide variations on this basic theme. For example, the plots of both ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’ and ‘The Model Millionaire’ involve a sustained deception. In the first story a widow so desires mystery that she literally invents a secret life; the irony of Wilde’s tale is that the heroine is only
living the appearance of a double life. What matters is not the ‘reality’ behind the secret, but the woman’s ability to sustain a belief in secrecy. In the second story, a millionaire wants to be painted as a pauper. During the course of the story the millionaire fails to keep his real identity secret, but his lie is maintained by the work of art – his portrait. In both these examples the emphasis is not upon truth-telling, for the revelation of truth is seen as a mark of failure; success, rather, is an ability to sustain a deception. At one level this reversal of the traditional truth-telling functions of ghost and mystery stories is part of Wilde’s larger strategy of parody, but the interest in revaluing deception is also part of the sexual subtexts of the stories. The idea of deception in Wilde’s own life was linked to an emerging homosexual consciousness, and the need to maintain secrets, as his trials later revealed, was both urgent and necessary. Indeed nearly all of Wilde’s writing is obsessed with the parallel themes of secrecy, unmasking and love, and an enduring element of many of the stories is the power of a love which society either ignores or sees as illicit: the dwarf’s inappropriate love for the Infanta; the Fisherman’s profane love for the Mermaid; the invisibility of the Prince’s benevolent love of children, and so on. In this way the archetypal themes of the stories, those of love and its vulnerability, are placed in very specific contexts. So, on the one hand, the stories fulfil the demands of their respective genres by being accessible to a very wide audience; but the contexts they use invariably work in a coded way, and are to be recognized only by a coterie audience. This dual function makes for the stories’ paradoxical qualities – their simplicity and complexity, their heterodoxy and orthodoxy, their appeal to adults and children.
