"Self-destructive Love" In Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

Oscar Wilde’s two fairy-tale collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales(1888)and A House of Pomegranates(1891),with nine stories in total,have displayed various types of love,all of which directly lead to or nearly cause the death of the protagonists.This thesis,through the analysis of self-destructive love,focuses on the written emotions in Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.The body can be divided into three parts.The first part is about the concepts and forms of love in the two collections.It includes nine forms of love: romantic love,homosexual love,friendly love,familial love,divine love,unrequited love,cross-species love,self-love,and universal love.The second part probes into the factors for the self-destruction of love in the nine stories.Three main factors are listed: illusive ideals and irrationality of love;desperation and obsessiveness for love;vulnerable humanity and worldly orthodoxy in love.The third part tries to explain the origin of self-destructive love from the author’s creation view.Oscar Wilde is not only an aesthete but also a humanist.“Inconsistency” exists in his aestheticism:On the one hand,he advocates the autonomy of art,and through the written emotions of self-destructive love,he endeavors to avoid moral education of traditional fairy tales;on the other hand,aestheticism itself can lead to self-destructive love which not only reveals the social reality but also introduces new moral teaching in his fairy tales.Meanwhile,Oscar Wilde’s humanism is subversive: “Self-destructive love” sharply points to the harshness and hypocrisy of Victorian morality and to universal human sufferings;Oscar Wilde also notices the conflicts between reason and emotion,and its great influence on people,thus reevaluating the value of human beings as unique individuals.