The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and other Stories by Oscar Wilde

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“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

“Any place you love is the world to you”

In these three different collections of stories (The Happy Prince, 1888, The House of Pomegranate and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, 1891) we find Wilde experimenting with several styles and aesthetics but always true to himself and his principles; some of these tales have been considered for children but they deal with very adult questions; others are known as parodies of other genres (Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and The Canterville Ghost) but criticise harshly the society Wilde lived in; some sound like fairy tales but with much more humour and always keeping his poetic style; while reading the tales in The House of Pomegranate you feel as if you were reading parables from The Bible or The Thousand and One Nights with all their structural repetitions, similes, personifications and use of archaic pronouns.

All these stories analyse human vices and virtues. They do not moralise but satirise human vanity and celebrate beauty and love; they explore what being an artist means: a constant fight of ethics versus aesthetics.

LRB

Critical perspective

Wilde published two collections of tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888 and A House of Pomegranates in 1891. The tales did not create the sensation that the novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890) or the subsequent plays did, although the tales were reviewed favorably by The Saturday Review, The Athenaeum, and the Pall Mall Gazette. Wilde himself said little of the two books, but a passing remark of his about one of the tales could be applied to all of them and to Dorian Gray as well: “The Happy Prince,” he wrote in a letter, “is an attempt to treat a tragic modern problem in a form that aims at delicacy and imaginative treatment; it is a reaction against the purely imitative character of modern art.” The “form” Wilde chooses is fantasy, which he clearly prefers to realism or the “purely imitative character of modern art”: Wilde can treat a tragic problem even in a fairy tale that is unconcerned with sordid details or with a fidelity to everyday occurrences, Wilde also said that the tales were not intended for children.

https://www.vqronline.org/essay/moral-prerogative-oscar-wilde-look-fairy-tales 

Victorian moral justice is comically inverted in "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and "The Canterville Ghost," and society's materialism comes under sharp, humorous criticism in "The Model Millionaire," while "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose" are hauntingly melancholic in their magical evocations of selfless love. These small masterpieces convey the brilliance of Wilde's vision, exploring complex moral issues through an elegant juxtaposition of wit and sentiment.

https://sophibooks.com/products/complete-short-fiction-penguin-classics

Biography 

Oscar Wilde, Irish-born writer known for his wry wit, was the chief advocate of the aesthetic movement based on the principle of art for art's sake (L'art pour l'art). Wilde was a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic.

He is famous for his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde's only novel), his long poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol and, of course, his humorous, witty one-line quotations.

Wilde is regarded as one of the most proficient and versatile writers of the English language.

Besides literary accomplishments, he is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for his wit, flamboyance, and affairs with men. He was tried and imprisoned for his homosexual relationship (then considered a crime) with the son of an aristocrat.

https://www.wilde-online.info/

Reviews by our book club members

The Nightingale and the Rose, The Happy Prince, The Famous Rocket, The Young King, The Faithful Friend , The Selfish Giant, The Fisherman and his soul, The Canterville Ghost,...small literary jewels that Oscar Wilde called «prose studies» designed for both children and adults.

The literary mastery of the great Irish writer is evident in all of them. These tales show a rejection of false values such as narcissism, power and social figuration. Instead, modesty, work, social sensitivity and true love are exalted.

If you enjoy these kind of stories and values you must read this book. You won't be disappointed.

JLJG

The first part including greatly poetic stories revel a criticism of the worst human qualities-selfishness, envy, pride, insensitivity, hedonism, which can break our hearts, the only really important element to achieve happiness and love. The best is how he makes talk all the elements in nature-animals, flowers, trees, even some objects, as a way to feel freer or wanting to show that people are not so human.

The second group of stories is more realistic; set in British high society circles, Lord Arthur Savile’s crime depicts notoriety, beauty, richness, taking us through a misty and sometimes sordid London, where human lowest instincts keep hidden. British formalism and American republicanism are confronted in the well-known Canterville Ghost, using sarcasm to criticize vices of old nobility; Virginia’s pure souls saves the Ghost from wicked eternity, winning innocence again. But the reality is then “unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow”.

All in all, the stories are a reflection on Wilde’s personal dilemma, “ethics” or “aesthetics “ always bearing in mind we must not trust appearances too much.

CJ

The Happy Prince is a collection of stories, written in an allegorical and didactic way and ending in a moral. Themes such as Generosity, Selfishness, Hypocrisy, and Inequality between social classes and on the other hand Love, Friendship, Beauty are present and personified. Thus, the Rat and the Miller personify selfishness, insensitivity. There is a criticism of the social reality of his time, of the manipulation by the hierarchies that condemn the humble classes to misery, very present in the Happy Prince. All of this represented in powerful images. For example: selfishness, vanity, egocentrism, insensitivity are represented in the miller and the rocket. Wilde, inverts common logic, is his way of criticizing society. If Andersen's stories have a happy ending, Wilde's characters have no social recognition, the rocket explodes without an audience, the statue of the prince is demolished and the sacrifice of the nightingale is in vain. They are satirical stories, not written for children, but for adults. They are a moral lesson, inviting us to reflect on true friendship and the value of loyalty. The indifference and social injustice of the Victorian era to the most helpless classes is criticized, represented in the Happy Prince, symbolized in the calloused hands of the working women, in the Young Prince. The reading is full of symbolism such as the lead heartbroken due to the pain of the death of the beloved. Values such as humanity, compassion, generosity, etc., appear attributed to non-human characters, while humans show indifference, selfishness, etc. Love, and through love, Beauty, is treated as a treasure more valuable than all the gold and jewels in the world, since it cannot be bought, measured or weighed. Love surpasses Life for Wilde, so in the nightingale. It is a romantic love. Wilde defends “art for art's sake” and its beauty, against utilitarian theories. He takes advantage of his work to criticize artistic theories, defending aestheticism. The student's attitude, which represents the uselessness of love, is contrasted with the romantic love of the nightingale, which defends beauty in loving sacrifice. Irony is present in all the stories and is transmitted through characters who are not even aware of their egocentrism.

PRR

Praise

“Although Oscar Wilde’s literary reputation rests mainly on his plays and essays, he was also the author of a passel of great short stories, ranging from the acerbic ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ to the delicate and heart breaking ‘The Happy Prince,’ which brings tears to my eyes every time I read it…” David Leavitt

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.4159/9780674250390/html

“Academic criticism of Wilde's work has too often dismissed these fairy stories as a minor bit of sentimentalism scribbled off by an iconoclast during a temporary bout of babymania. But since JK Rowling's Harry Potter and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, children's literature has been repositioned as central, not peripheral, shifting what children read, what we write about what children read, and what we read as adults. At last we seem to understand that imagination is ageless. Wilde's children's stories are splendid. In addition, it seems to me that they should be revisited as a defining part of his creative process.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/16/jeanette-winterson-fairytales-oscar-wilde

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