The Complete Short Fiction (3 page)
Read The Complete Short Fiction Online
Authors: Oscar Wilde,Ian Small
16, Tite Street,
Chelsea, S.W.
My Dear Bobbie,
The kitten is quite lovely â it does not
look
white, indeed it looks a sort of tortoise-shell colour⦠with velvety dark [patches?] but as you said it was white I have given orders that it is always to be spoken of as the âwhite kitten' â the children are enchanted with it, and sit, one on each side of its basket, worshipping â It seems pensive â perhaps it is thinking of some dim rose-garden in Persia, and wondering why it is kept in this chill England.
I hope you are enjoying yourself at Cambridge â whatever people may say against Cambridge, it is certainly the best preparatory school for Oxford that I know.
After this insult I better stop.
Yours ever
Oscar Wilde.
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Devotion to his children continued through Wilde's disgrace and up to his death. After his release from prison and despite his protests, Constance forbade Wilde to see Cyril and Vyvyan. Wilde persuaded several of his friends, principally More Adey and Ada Leverson, to act as intermediaries, but Constance was never reconciled to Wilde re-establishing contact with the children, and he died without ever seeing them again. In
Time Remembered
, Vyvyan (Wilde's second son) described receiving a
letter from a Frenchman called Ernest Lajeunesse. Lajeunesse recalled an encounter with Wilde in a French hotel in the late 1890s â that is, after the trials, imprisonment and self-imposed exile:
One autumn evening, while putting on my overcoat after finishing my meal, I clumsily upset something, perhaps a salt-cellar, on Monsieur Sébastien's [i.e., Sebastian Melmoth, the pseudonym by which Wilde was known in France] table. He said nothing, but my mother scolded me and told me to apologize, which I did, distressed by my clumsiness. But Monsieur Sébastien turned to my mother and said: âBe patient with your little boy. One must always be patient with them. If, one day, you should find yourself separated from him⦠' I did not give him time to finish his sentence, but asked him: âHave you got a little boy?' âI've got two', he said. âWhy don't you bring them here with you?' My mother interrupted⦠âIt doesn't matter; it doesn't matter at all,' he said with a sad smile. âThey don't come here with me because they are too far away⦠' Then he took my hand, drew me to him and kissed me on both cheeks. I bade him farewell, and then I saw that he was crying. And we left.
While kissing me he had said a few words which I did not understand. But on the following day we arrived before him and a bank employee who used to sit at a table on the other side of us asked us: âDid you understand what Monsieur Sébastien said last evening?' âNo,' we replied. âHe said, in English: “Oh, my poor dear boys!” â
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There is no external evidence to support Lajeunesse's anecdote, but nor is there any reason to doubt its truthfulness. In fact it affirms all that we do know about the constancy of Wilde's affection towards his children, a sentiment which in turn goes some way towards explaining that initial decision to write fairy stories, and why the themes of love and self-denial figure so strongly in them.
There were, however, other, more pragmatic reasons for Wilde's decision to write fiction. One of the most striking qualities of his short stories is that they can be read both as simple and satisfying narratives for children and as self-conscious literary exercises. This combination of naivety and complexity largely derives from Wilde's exploitation of a number of popular sub-genres that had grown up in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to changes in the audiences and markets for
literature. Developments in printing technologies in the 1860s and 1870s had substantially reduced the cost of book production, making it possible to print books relatively cheaply for the first time. Together with a new impetus towards universal adult literacy, formalized in John Forster's 1870 Education Act, and a new focus on leisure brought about through greater prosperity and legislation limiting working hours, this new availability of cheap books led to a dramatic increase in the potential readership for literature. New sub-genres were developed to exploit the interests of these new groups of readers, whose tastes and backgrounds were different from the limited and exclusive readership addressed by writers earlier in the century. The most popular of the new sub-genres included ghost stories, detective fiction, the sensation novel, and the fairy tale. Authors who successfully exploited these new topics and sub-genres â such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and J. S. Le Fanu â became household names; and demand for new kinds of stories was so strong that it fuelled a succession of new monthly and fortnightly magazines, the best known of which included
Temple Bar, London Society, Tit Bits, The Argosy, Tinsley's Magazine
and
Belgravia
.
In the late 1880s, when he had made the transition from writing journalism to writing fiction, a literary reputation was not Wilde's only concern; he also required financial security. Earlier works, such as the
Poems
and his first plays,
The Duchess of Padua
and
Vera; Or, the Nihilists
had failed on both counts. When Wilde tried again to establish a literary career, this time more attuned to the twin imperatives of creative and commercial success, he struck out in a new and altogether more modern direction: that of the short story. In choosing to try his hand at fairy tales, and subsequently at ghost and detective stories, Wilde was no doubt attempting to emulate the fame (and indeed fortune) of popular writers such as Collins, Braddon and Conan Doyle. Moreover, he was not the only âserious' writer to entertain such ambitions; a few years later, Henry James also tried his hand at writing in a popular genre, and the result proved to be one of his most successful works,
The Turn of the Screw
. However, Wilde-was also very keen to keep himself aloof from those writers
who merely pandered to what he would later refer to scathingly as âPublic Opinion'. The result of this dilemma was the emergence of Wilde's most distinctive stylistic device, that of parody. Almost all of his short stories represent parodies of the sub-genres which he appropriated. Sometimes these parodies are overt and witty â in, for example, âSir Ardiur Savile's Crime' or âThe Canterville Ghost'. On other occasions, as in âThe Fisherman and his Soul', they are more subtle and complex, and the line between the parodic and the serious is deliberately blurred. This last kind of story is the most self-consciously âliterary', and it is in this group that we find the strongest prefiguring of the complexity of Wilde's later work.
Whether overt or subtle, Wilde's parodies are never simply playful: to appreciate their serious and subversive edge we need to understand the
social
dimension of the popular genres which he was exploiting. Ghost stories, detective fiction and fairy stories all deploy a number of stock literary devices, the most important of which include an emphasis on plot, rather than character; the use of character types such as heroes and heroines, villains and cads; and the adoption of a simple moral framework in which good and evil are rigidly and unambiguously defined, so much so that the qualities constituting good and evil are not in question. These elements are most visible in the endings to such stories where the most important function of plot is to reward good and punish evil: so princesses marry their princes, detectives catch their villains, and ghosts are finally and successfully laid to rest. All these actions represent a restoration of the social order, and through it, a reaffirmation of the status quo. In this sense the tendency of ghost stories, detective fiction and fairy stories is always towards a conservatism: they dramatize the triumph and cohesiveness of society's values when they are threatened by an outside evil force, whether it comes in the shape of a wicked witch, criminal, or malevolent ghost. Here it is worth remembering that fairy stories were originally told to children, and so their primary social function was to educate children into the values of a culture, in particular its moral values.
The effect of Wilde's stories could not be more different. While they seem to adhere to the stock literary devices of a genre â
the simple plotting, the use of given character-types, the deployment of a rigid moral framework, and so on â they nevertheless invest those devices with a very different significance. Evil and the threats which it poses are certainly present in Wilde's stories: they come as the vengeful Canterville ghost, or in Lord Arthur's attempts to commit murder, or in the fisherman's decision to cut away his soul (and so his moral conscience). But the threat that evil presents typically functions to
expose
the corruption and poverty of society's values, rather than â as with the conventional moral tale â to reaffirm their intrinsic rightness. In this way Wilde subverts the traditional moralizing function of such fiction; or, as he says rather more forcefully in the âPreface' to
The Picture of Dorian Gray:
âThere is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' Indeed, rather than socialize readers into the given values of a culture, Wilde's stories subtly criticize the nature of those values, and the ways in which they bring about social cohesion in the first place. Some examples will make this strategy a little clearer.
âLord Arthur Savile's Crime' parodies elements of both detective and sensation fiction. The story is set in the fashionable salon of Lady Windermere, and it concerns a visiting palmist's prediction to the young Lord Arthur Savile that he will commit a murder. Savile, who is engaged to be married, decides that, out of gentlemanly duty to his future wife, he must fulfil his destiny before his marriage takes place, and the story relates his various attempts to find a suitable murder victim. After a string of failures, one night by chance he comes across the same palmist leaning over the railings of the Thames. Lord Arthur seizes his opportunity and pushes the palmist into the river. The murder committed, and his destiny fulfilled, Savile returns home in relief, marries his bride and lives happily ever after. The whole plot represents a comic inversion of the traditional devices of moral justice, for here it is the act of murder (rather than the unmasking of the murderer) which brings about the restoration of social order: the murderer becomes the hero (and ironically is rewarded through a happy marriage) and the victim becomes the villain (and equally ironically is punished by death). The consequence of this inversion is that the reader's attention is focused not on the
traditional triumph of good over evil, but rather on the kind of society where murder is justified on the grounds of right conduct, where âright' means observing the codes of gentlemanly behaviour. So Wilde's narrator ironically muses on the nature of duty:
[Arthur] recognised none the less clearly where his duty lay, and was fully conscious of the fact that he had no right to marry until he had committed the murder. This done, he could stand before the altar with Sybil Merton, and give his life into her hands without terror of wrongdoing. This done, he could take her to his arms, knowing that she would never have to blush for him, never have to hang her head in shameâ¦
Many men in his position would have preferred the primrose path of dalliance to the steep heights of duty; but Lord Arthur was too conscientious to set pleasure above principle. (pp.
180
â
81
)
This comic discrepancy between manners and morals is a theme that preoccupied Wilde for the rest of his creative life, and it is central to his best-known works, the Society Comedies.
The plot of âThe Canterville Ghost' works by means of a similar series of inversions. Once again it is the evil avenging ghost which turns out to be the hero, and the members of the bourgeois family he taunts become the villains. The plot is relatively simple: it concerns the ghost's varied but failed attempts to frighten a new American family that has recently taken up residence in his house. The problem for the ghost lies in the family's matter-of-fact sensibilities: they refuse to believe in the supernatural, and always find a perfectly rational explanation for the ghost's manifestations and the disruption it causes, such as strange noises and stains on the floor. In the dénouement of the story, the ghost is finally laid to rest by the youngest daughter, for she alone has the imagination to understand him, and it is her sympathy with his suffering which finally allows him to find peace. Like âLord Arthur Savile's Crime', the story reserves its censure not for the ghost and the murder he committed, but rather for the family (and by extension the society) responsible for criminalizing him. So when Virginia, the young girl, complains that âit is very wrong to kill anyone', the ghost interjects:
âOh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics! My wife was very
plain, never had my ruffs properly starched, and knew nothing about cookery. Why, there was a buck I had shot in Hogley Woods, a magnificent pricket, and do you know how she had it sent up to table? However, it is no matter now, for it is all over, and I don't think it was very nice of her brothers to starve me to death, though I did kill her.'
âStarve you to death? Oh, Mr Ghost, I mean Sir Simon, are you hungry? I have a sandwich in my case. Would you like it?' (p.
224
)
The implication is that criminal behaviour is produced by society's lack of moral imagination and sympathy â a theme Wilde was to take up in his essay âThe Soul of Man under Socialism' and, in relation to his own imprisonment, in
De Profundis
. There Wilde charges his society with responsibility for his suffering:
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself: that is to say it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irredeemable wrong. I claim on my side that if I realise what I have suffered, Society should realise what it has inflicted on me: and that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.
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