Analysis On Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism In His Fairy Tales

Oscar Wilde has been known as a prose writer with unusual talents since he started to write fairy tales.Thus,his nine fairy tales,collected in the two volumes:The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates,have been taken as the best ones in the fairy tale genre and the most outstanding aesthetic works during the aesthetic movement.Therefore,without a serious and systematic study of his tales,it is impossible to have a complete knowledge of Wilde’s literary achievement.As the initial stage of his writing career,his fairy tales offer a compelling outlet for his aesthetic thoughts which have been elaborated quite systematically in his later literary critical writings.Therefore,it is necessary to make a concentrated study of his nine fairy tales in the context of his aesthetic theories.However,the Wildean scholars are generally unfamiliar with the fairy tale genre and can not consult the studies of fairy tale scholars.Besides,the fairy tale scholars are uninformed of Wilde’s aesthetic theories and can not draw insightful and pertinent conclusions about his fairy tales.In order to remedy the limitations of the two camps,this thesis examines his nine fairy tales in the context of the fairy tale genre and Wilde’s aestheticism.Through the comparison of Wilde’s fairy tales with the traditional ones of the fairy tale genre,it is discovered that Wilde deliberately subverts or diverts from some elements of the traditional fairy tales.While examined against his later critical literary writings,these subversions or diversions in his fairy tales are exactly designed to give a full expression of his aestheticism which are primarily reflected in the autonomy of art and the most intense realization of individualism in art.Firstly,the autonomy of art in his fairy tales mainly casts light upon four aspects.The first aspect is his critique of realism because of its direct imitation of life,which greatly constraints the individuals’ different experience of life and their imaginative space.Consequently,there is no essential distinction between art and life.Therefore,Oscar Wilde’s anti-realism in fairy tales is manifested in his pursuit of external beauty and imagination in art which can keep certain distance from the realistic life.The second aspect claims that art is amoral.Although Oscar Wilde insists that the morality can be taken as the subject-matters of art,the art should not have the obvious purposes of moralization.In his fairy tales,he puts more emphasis upon the experience of morality or immorality.The third aspect states that art is useless,which attach much importance to the sensory or emotional enjoyment in the course of the appreciation of art.The fourth aspect deal with the aestheticization of religion,which refers to that some elements of art can be adopted by art,but art does not serve religion at all.This point has been revealed in his emphasis on the superiority of body over soul and the deprivation of the fairy tales heroes’ glorious transcendence in his fairy tales.He gives much priority to the feeling of body and less to the soul and he values the subjectivity of the individuals more and depreciates the authority of God.On the whole,the autonomy of art-"Art’s for Art’s Sake"-places more emphasis on the individual’s sensory experience and imaginative space that art should offer.However,the fulfillment of this ideal state is built on the achievement of the individual freedom which forms a part of his individualism.Secondly,the most intense mode of individualism which can only be realized through art is chiefly shown in the individual freedom created by socialism through the abolition of private property and in the individual development built upon the realization of the former.Thus,this individual development refers to the increase of individual artistic experience expressed through the multi-sensory experience and the realization of individual contemplative life in his fairy tales.Finally,Wilde’s fairy tales have implicitly yet comprehensively envisaged the more systematic aestheticism proposed in his later critical writings,which fully expressed his canonization for art and his advocate of art’s shaping influence on individual aesthetic ability.