The Virtuous Complication of Legends in Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant

Even with limited knowledge of Oscar Wilde’s work, one probably doesn’t expect his stories to begin with a “Once upon a time” and conclude with a neat, reassuring “happily ever after.” There is simply no room for such authoritative, didactic lines in his decidedly amoral, but not unethical, fairytales. In fact, it is due entirely to the moral complexity (and sometimes ambiguity) of fairytales like “The Happy Prince,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Selfish Giant,” and “The Devoted Friend” that the ethics of such tales are arguably more accessible and relevant than the authoritative versions most people, and children in particular, are subjected to.

As with all fairytales, the expression of a good/bad, moral/immoral dichotomy is key in Wilde’s fairytales. Where they break with traditional expectations, however, is in Wilde’s portrayal of the extremely good and the extremely bad. Of the four fairytales, this is most evident in the characterization of Hans and his “dear friend” Hugh the Miller in “The Devoted Friend.” A classic tale of commitment and dedication to the preservation of friendship, this tale follows the parasitic Miller, who relies heavily on the good-natured Hans for everything from flowers to fetching doctors but cannot be bothered to return the favors because it might “spoil” Hans’s good nature (38). He admits to his son that he could never allow Hans to even enjoy dinner with the Miller family for fear that the honest working man would see the family’s riches and dare to ask for something as meager as flour. “‘Flour is one thing, and friendship is another, and they should not be confused’” (38).

To the Miller, friendship is established in words, in the act of talking up one’s associations; he is far too self involved to risk losing any of his valued possessions just to be a friend in action as well. The classic fairytale model dictates that Hans, the honest and hardworking of the two, should be the moral center of the story, and in point of fact he may be. Wilde, however, complicates matters by portraying “poor little Hans” as a proper dupe, incapable of asserting himself or perhaps being too stupidly optimistic to realize he is being taken advantage of. To Hans, who “wouldn’t be unfriendly for the whole world,” (41), the Miller’s willingness to give him his most useless wheelbarrow is the height of a selfless act of friendship (40), and every selfless act Hans offers in return is out of proportion to the Miller’s, eventually leading to his dramatic, unearned death. The exaggerated sacrifice exchanged for a useless wheelbarrow suggests that Wilde does not idealize unquestioning devotion and sees it as no justification for someone to be labeled moral or good; rather, this working class passivity is worthy of reprimand.

Likewise, the nightingale in “The Nightingale and the Rose” is so enthralled with the notion of true love that she willingly sacrifices herself for a young man she has idealized as a “true lover” (278). In fact, the “true lover” is quick to dismiss a romanticized version of love when he is rejected, proclaiming that practicality and logic trump love (282). The nightingale sacrifices herself for the idle whims of a young man she has foolishly romanticized. Obviously Wilde is critical both of this typical heavy-handed idealization of “good” in fairytales as well as the Victorian rebuttal of reality or practicality superseding romance.

To further demonstrate moral complexity in these tales, Wilde tends to employ an epistolary form, a mode of storytelling that offers several degrees of separation between the listener and the characters within the original tale. In both “The Happy Prince” and “The Devoted Friend,” the tales finish with suggestions that an outsider beyond the events of the stories themselves is sharing the stories. “The Devoted Friend,” which otherwise might have ended with the moralizing presence (and ensuing rejection of moralization) of the animals, instead ends with a reaffirming voice claiming that telling a story with a didactic agenda is rather dangerous (45). While this first person voice is forceful, it lacks real authority due to its limited power in the actual story. Less obvious than an overt “And I quite agree” is a statement in “The Happy Prince” suggesting an unobtrusive observer: “When I last heard of them [the Town Councillors] they were quarrelling still” (35).

The lack of authority in the narration is vital in the construction of Wilde’s fairytales and is key to his subversion of Victorian assumptions of right and wrong; without a strong moralizing presence, readers and listeners are forced to accept characters’ complexity and focus on the ethical dilemmas of which Wilde is truly concerned: wealth inequality and an unjust characterization of the poor, the futility of charity and sacrifice, the cruel subjugation of a passive working class type, and so on. While perhaps not as overt as the exaggerated dichotomy of good and wicked in his other fairytales, Wilde employs the epistolary form to achieve the similar effect of diminishing the stories’ authority—that is, diminishing the morals these fairytales might suggest, were he not to use the epistolary style.

Rather than going the usual route of reinforcing the traditional norms and mores of the late Victorian era, Wilde critiques the problematic ethics of the period and hints at his own. Even Wilde’s more traditional fairytale, “The Selfish Giant,” has elements of moral complexity: the giant is reformed of his selfishness and is accepted by the Christ-like child, despite his fearsome qualities and past cruelty, for which a traditional tale would likely require the “wicked” giant’s death. Far from presuming to be the arbiter of what is deemed good and bad or pure and evil, Wilde suggests in his fairytales a code of ethics that defies those defined by rule of law and strengthens those most subtle, complex forms of “good” or redeemable that exist in all classes and in all peoples most often characterized as “wicked.”