Fantasy And Reality

Oscar Wilde is a representative writer of Aestheticism in the 19th century. He has a high reputation in literary history and has written nine fairy tales in his life. Wilde's two collections of fairy tales,The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates, have long been considered as a model which represents his Aestheticism.The richness showed in Wilde's fairy tales is worth deeper and further thinking. Nearly all those who read Wilde's fairy tales would admire and cherish his aesthetic language. Then people would wonder if there is a correspondence between Wilde's Aesthetic Theory and his fairy tales. This thesis has four chapters altogether, including an introduction and a conclusion. This thesis starts from Wilde's family, cultural and social backgrounds, and then applies his Aesthetic theory to analyze the text of fairy tales in details. It tries to demonstrate that the fairy tale is a perfect expression of Wilde's aesthetics in the field of fairy tales and the forceful criticism of the Victorian society.The social conflicts in the Victorian era are going to extremes. The poor people who lived at the bottom of the society indulged themselves in drinking and made a living by pilferage, begging and prostitution. The upper class claimed that greed and hypocrisy is the biggest crime openly, but lived a dissolute life stealthily. Wilde elevated art and advocated"Life imitates Art","Art is properly the aim of itself"and"Art should alienate from Life", because he detested the Victorian reality. He held the view that eternal beauty only existed in art and that life was only full of vulgarity and ugliness. So seen from another angel, Wilde's aesthetics is like a criticism to the Victorian reality.Fairy tale, as a literary genre, is like an imaginary kingdom far, far away from reality. Wilde's fairy tales are full of imagination. Setting the real world as the background, Wilde's novel created a lot of charming illusionary worlds and characters which still retained their realistic features. People's poverty, slave's hunger, politician's shamelessness and female student's superficiality in the real world are all incarnated vividly in Wilde's fairy tales. With realistic approach, Wilde depicted poverty, sufferings and the situation that beauty and love are hard to obtain. Only in the illusionary world can beauty and love ultimately achieve perfect harmony and unity. To create a world of duality is to vividly embody the conflicts between beauty and ugliness, between kindness and evilness, and between love and desire in a special format. The protagonists in the fairy tales who devoted themselves in the pursuit of beauty and love are practitioners of the Aesthetic theory.Wilde opposed art imitating reality and built up his narrative literature through imagination which is the soul of fairy tales; the sharp contradictions between beauty and ugliness, between soul and flesh which are utmost romanced in the fairy tales exactly fit children's world of duality; the romance and the poetic atmosphere which Wilde tried hard to create match the style of fairy tales. The correspondences of Wilde's aesthetics and his fairy tales show that fairy tale is the carrier of his aesthetics; his paradoxes and contradictions show that he still can not escape from the reality into the world of fairy tales but use fairy tale as a means to criticize the Victorian society.