Research On Appreciating Of The Beauty To The Death Theme Of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

"Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and deaths like autumn leaves", those beautiful words had ever been used by Tagore to express the calm of life and death. While actually, death still shocks people a lot. Death is the ultimate destination of all the living things, and only because of which can people understand the short of life.What is death? This question has been speculated by thousands of philosophers from the ancient. We can see from the huge number of literatures that death is so mysterious that many writers choose it to be the topic of their works. During their study, people try to remove the mystery of death and feel it by heart. And usually after that, they will have a new perspective of life.In the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde also put his attention on death and created some fairy tales about this topic. In the pass studies on Wilde’s works, there was more praise than criticism. In this thesis, the author will expound the aesthetic value of death based on Wilde’s fairy tales.In chapter one, the author is going to mainly give a discussion about the beauty of death in philosophy. Always, death is more mysterious than life. So many philosophers have tried their best to explore the mystery of death. Schopenhauer said,"If there is no question of death, philosophers will not call death a kind of philosophy." Usually, there are two sorts of definition about life and death. Some people say that they love to be alive and hate to be dead, while others hold the opposite opinion. They insist that they are willing to die and life is disgusted. Besides, philosophers tried to express their statements of death with their owe views. For example, Martin Heidegger put forward an otology-based idea that the purpose people live with is for death. In most of the literatures, death is full of some value orientation. And when people pursue the morality they are always leaded by the truth, the good and the beautiful. Therefore, death is worth to be appreciated because of the resonance of people’s aesthetic standard.In the second chapter, the beauty of death in Wilde’s fairy tales will be well expounded. Actually, Wilde had not many works. But death is really a common topic in his limited literatures. In this thesis, the beauty of tragedy, nobility and transcendence will be considered to explain the topic of death in Wilde’s fairy tales. In his works, Wilde tried to reveal the evils in the society. At the same time, he described a series of death in an artistic way. In this way, he wanted to warm people’s heart towards death. In other words, death would be well accepted and profoundly understood.The author will analyze the source of Wilde’s awareness of death in the third chapter. Wilde was a writer who was full of a prodigy. In his whole life, he had been celebrated, and also, he was ever thrown into prison. It was a multi-source that why Wilde had such a kind of death awareness. There were both family and society reasons. Wilde’s Childhood experiences had profound effects on his life. Together with the social factors, Wilde formed his awareness orientation of death. Importantly, it was his aestheticism that provided him a supreme stage for his awareness orientation of death. In other words, when aestheticism was taken into account in death analysis, death had been very different and taken into a world of beauty.In the last chapter, the author will end this thesis mainly with the aesthetic value of death. What Wilde wanted to do was not to discover or describe death but to ask people to find the value of death. In his fairy tales, good things always ended with death. The purpose of this tragic results was to try to find the value of death, in which way it showed a challenge to the world of matter. All in all, Wilde tried his whole life to find a habitat of the human spirit, to save human soul, and to show people a lovely and beautiful world.