Wilde's Fairy Tales

Despite their popularity with the general reading public, Wilde's fairy tales have received relatively little critical attention compared to the rest of his oeuvre. The reason in what is announced as "the first full-length study" of Wilde's "two collections of children's literature" (in fact there have been several doctoral theses devoted to this topic) is generic and ideological: what Killeen terms a "general" tendency to view children's literature as "a didactic and conservative form" sits uneasily with the way Wilde is "collectively understood" as a "subversive writer" and "amoral aesthete." Put bluntly, in Killeen's view, "such theoretically conformist" works cannot easily be fitted into the Wilde canon. Killeen attempts to resolve this problem, which he refers to as the "mystery" of the fairy tales, by relocating them in relation to an adult context—to what he terms "the complex nexus of theological, political, social and national concerns of late nineteenth-century Ireland." In practice, these concerns centre on the tensions between (English) Protestantism and Catholicism, and the international Catholic Church and (Irish) folk-Catholicism.

Killeen is untroubled by the fact that the "contemporary children's audience" (and, we might say, most critics prior to Killeen) would be unlikely to have "picked up" on the contexts he is positing as "essential to analysing the tales"; the occluded or secret nature of their references is to be explained in terms of Wilde's commitment to "a theory of Gnosticism whereby knowledge is transmitted from the initiated to acolytes through codes and symbols." Granted that this is the case, two questions follow: how does the general reader (then or now) gain access to this esoteric knowledge; and how can such self-referential systems of interpretation be refuted? I shall return to these questions, but for the moment we should note that for initiates, who of course include Killeen himself (though, after what I have just said, problematically perhaps), Wilde's The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates can be seen as displaying a mixture of conservative and radical qualities. This characterisation of Wilde's oeuvre had been offered nearly thirty years ago by the presumably agnostic Norbert Kohl, who is mentioned by Killeen (as an "usually conservative reader") but whose work curiously does not appear in the bibliography.

This brief synopsis clearly locates The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde as part of that larger project, pioneered by figures such as Jerusha McCormack, Declan Kiberd, Richard Pine, Davis Coakley and Owen Dudley Edwards, which is often referred to as the "Irish Wilde." Moreover, a number of the Irish "contexts" which inform Killeen's close readings, and which are elaborated with considerable clarity and detail throughout the course of his monograph, will be familiar to scholars of nineteenth century Irish history. What is innovative about his study is the ingenious way he deploys this information to resolve various interpretive dilemmas in the tales—for example, the "meaning" of the Nightingale's self-sacrifice in "The Nightingale and the Rose" (she bleeds herself to death). His volume has nine chapters, each devoted to a single tale, and the treatment is uniform throughout: chapters begin with a brisk and often combative overview of previous readings, followed by a description of the particular "context" which, in Killeen's view, makes sense of the critical problems that earlier scholars have failed adequately to resolve. It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the density and complexity of Killeen's readings, some of which are more persuasive than others, but the following account of his treatment of two very different stories, "The Selfish Giant" and "The Birthday of the Infanta," will serve to give an indication of his method.

Killeen begins his chapter on "The Selfish Giant" by objecting to interpretations of it as a "moral examination of sexual desire"; indeed he is hesitant to grant any "sexual element" to the tale. More plausible are readings which view it as "a compelling cultural attempt by the Victorians to seek forgiveness for...