Prof. Waller Hastings
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401

Oscar Wilde

“The Happy Prince”

             This story was first told in 1885 to a group of Cambridge undergraduates (Wood 161) and subsequently dedicated to one of Wilde's American (male) friends (Goodenough 340).

Three Views of "The Happy Prince":

            Goodenough:  Wilde’s fairy tales mingle “spirituality and sensuality” (339) in a revision of Victorian religious authority, offering “strikingly sad and graphic portrayals of expiation and renunciation” (340).  The prince’s story connects salvation to penance, to “Christ as the Man of Sorrows” and emphasizes “feeling others’ pain as prelude to self-sacrifice” (348).

            Wood:  A homosexual aesthetic discourse is included in Wilde’s fairy tales, with key features including “the tragic liebestod endings, the aesthetic appeal of the exquisite, artificial, and bejeweled, the ‘exquisite poison’ of alternate sexualities” (160-61).  His stories replace traditional happy endings with “strikingly beautiful, albeit often painful climaxes, with somberly ironic endings” (161). 

            “Wilde draws on biblical genres such as parables and allegories.” (164)  Wood describes the alternation of images of suffering in the surrounding city with African beauty as a dialectic mechanism through which “the Prince dialogically teaches the Swallow to care for misery, and the Swallow consoles the Prince” (165).

             Hastings dissertation: “‘The Happy Prince’ proposes to reform superficial material society through self-sacrifice and personal transcendence following a moral awakening . . . . ‘The Happy Prince’ combines a story of individual transfiguration with a plea for social change.  The efforts of the statue and the swallow do have a social impact; while the upper classes remain just as selfish and blind to social needs after the dual sacrifice, the poor have become happier through the equitable distribution of otherwise useless wealth. . . . Where traditional fairy tales often end with an individual member of the lower classes attaining a significant fortune, ‘The Happy Prince’ details the distribution of a hoard to the poor as a group, significantly improving the condition of a large mass of sufferers. . . . transfiguration only follows a real practical effect on society.”

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