Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts by Anne Markey, and: The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald by Bonnie Gaarden (review)

Anne Markey examines the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Oscar Wilde’s two collections of literary fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). She separates the nationalistic, romantic, and reverent attitude toward folklore of Anglo-Irish literary figures such as W. B. Yeats and Wilde’s folklore-collecting parents from the more detached aesthetic of Wilde, for whom “folk narrative stands at the bottom of the literary evolutionary ladder” (194). Markey clarifies that folklore for Wilde “was valuable, not for its embodiment of spiritual truth or national identity, but for its contribution to the development of higher art forms” (52).

Markey meticulously references literary, folkloric, and artistic sources, especially French, Danish, English, Irish, and German, that Wilde’s work alluded to, integrated, and sometimes directly inverted. About “The Birthday of the Infanta” (1891) (a story of how a dwarfish jester dies broken hearted because of his unrequited love for a princess), Markey asserts that “in his portrayal of the Infanta, Wilde reverses those folktales in which an unlikely suitor wins the hand of a princess by making her laugh” (162). Markey shows not only how Wilde departs from international folklore motifs but also delineates his thematic distinctions from literary precedents. After examining such preceding works as Victor Hugo’s poem on the portrait of Maria Marguerite by Diego Velázquez, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1756), Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Le Dauphin” (1697), and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” (1843), Markey explains how Wilde’s literary fairy tale differs from these other texts through its striking aesthetic exemplification of the cruelty and callousness of rank by Wilde’s inclusion of “the physically beautiful Infanta as a moral monster, and the monstrous Dwarf as the personification of innocence, thereby introducing a disjunction between the beautiful and the good” (161).

Markey’s attention to linguistic detail and subtleties of style enhances her investigation of Wilde’s integration of traditional sources. In “The Selfish Giant” (1888), Markey notes Wilde’s use of the phrase “Years went over” which she explains is a “literal translation of the Irish phrase, ‘Chuaigh blianta thart’” and which “is exactly the type of phrase that Mary Burke, the Wildes’ loyal servant, or any storyteller raised through the medium of Irish but later becoming proficient in English, would have used” (117). Markey refers to Irish folk tales and songs about “Mary and St Joseph and the Cherry Tree,” whose lyrics Douglas Hyde popularized in a 1906 translation, and Markey emphasizes the similarity between some of those lyrics and the phrasing and plot details in “The Selfish Giant” by linking Wilde’s demographic biography to the geographic record of the folk narrative: “the distribution of prose and song versions of the story, collected in both Irish and English during the twentieth century, reveal that its hold was strongest in Connacht, where Oscar Wilde spent time as a child and young man” (117).

Markey relies on statements from other critics (including Jack Zipes, Max Lüthi, Ruth Bottigheimer, Steven Swann Jones, Jens Tismar, and Maria Tatar) contrasting literary and folk styles in general, but skips direct comparisons aside from reference to general features of some Irish religious tales, Irish giants, and folklore collections by Yeats, Hyde, Thomas Croker, and Patrick Kennedy. Neglecting the concrete level of stylistic illustration and demonstrable content weakens such generalizations as “Wilde’s review of Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) offers ample evidence that he was sufficiently familiar with Ireland’s folk narrative tradition to draw on the spiritual values it promulgated in order to highlight...