A View On The Contradictory Nature Of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tale

Aestheticism has suffered controversy when it emerged, because the aestheticismthoughts which was rooted in the Victorian Era was too radical for people, meanwhile,it also has many contradictions in itself. In terms of the contradictions, Oscar Wilde,representative figure of Aestheticism, played the most prominent role. This papermakes a probing analysis of contradictoriness of Wilde, taking the fairy tales TheHappy Prince and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranate for example.There are three parts except the introduction and conclusion in this paper.The first part is an introduction, which mainly discusses the overview of Britainin the Victorian Era, the origin of aestheticism, and also the instruction of Wilde’sworks which focuses on Wilde’s two fairy tales. In addition, this paper summarizesthe study on the Oscar Wilde fairy tales done by academic circles at home and abroadin recent years, and also presents the innovations and meaning of this paper.The first chapter analyzes the contradictions of Wilde’s fairy tales in four aspects.The four aspects are: contradictory attitude toward religion, love and beauty, and thecontradiction between the children world and adult world. Oscar Wilde showedcomplex contradictoriness in religious issues in these two fairy tales. For instance, heis attracted by religion and praises the God, but he also unmercifully exposes religiouspeople, such as the superficiality and ignorance of priest and pastors. In terms of theattitude of "love", while Wilde is in praise of "love", he also shows his disdain evendenigration on the "love". As a representative of aestheticism writer, Oscar Wildepursuits of beauty fanatically, from literary work to daily life, all around beauty. Butlooking from Wilde’s fairy tale, he is not entirely optimistic in the beauty he pursuits,such as he created a series of beauty things in his fairy tales, but he also destroyedthem. In the works of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, we also can feel a potential contradiction, that’s the contradiction between the purity, happiness of children worldand the complexity, ugly of adult world.The second part analyzes the contradiction between Wilde’s fairy tales and hisaesthetic theory. This contradiction mainly reflects in two relationships, those are artand ethics, and art and life. Oscar Wilde objects to involve ethics and moral life inliterary works, however, his fairy tale is full of moralization and unmerciful reveal.Chapter III analyzes the reason of contradictions which exist in Oscar Wilde’sfairy tales. The reasons are as follows: the social environment of Britain in VictorianEra, the experience of growing and education of Wilde, as well as the contradiction inWilde’s own aesthetic theory.The conclusion part summarizes the whole thesis, and reiterates the viewpointof this paper.