29 pages • 58 minutes read
Oscar WildeThe Nightingale and the Rose
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Oscar Wilde
Content Warning: This section references institutionalized anti-gay sentiment—i.e., the criminalization of sexual relationships between men.
Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854 to well-educated Anglo-Irish parents. His mother’s salons attracted well-known artists, writers, and intellectuals from across Ireland, exposing Wilde to a broad range of artists and intellectuals at a young age. He began his undergraduate studies at Trinity College Dublin in 1871 before winning a scholarship to study classics at the University of Oxford in 1874. He graduated from Oxford with First Honors in 1878. He then moved to London, where he quickly became known for his wit and flamboyant style. He published a book of poems in 1881 to mixed reviews and became an international celebrity in 1882 when he embarked on a tour of America, lecturing on aestheticism and the arts. He published essays and short stories throughout the 1880s and 1890s but is best known for his 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his comedic plays, culminating in the 1895 comedy-of-manners The Importance of Being Earnest. In April 1895, Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency,” the legal term for sexual relations between men, and sentenced to two years’ hard labor in prison. After leaving prison his health never recovered, and he died in 1900 in a disreputable Paris hotel. His conviction was a severe blow to his reputation, but he has since regained respect and popularity. The bittersweet depiction of The Nature of Love and Sacrificing Oneself for Love that animates “The Nightingale and the Rose” is sometimes read as autobiographical, reflecting Wilde’s own tumultuous romances.
Wilde wrote The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888 for his two young sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. It was his first collection of short stories and first publication since his 1881 book of poems. He followed The Happy Prince and Other Tales with a second collection of fairy tales, A House of Pomegranates, in 1891. Today, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates are generally combined under the former title.
Literary Context: Aestheticism
Wilde was possibly the most important proponent of the aesthetic movement in England. Aestheticism was an artistic movement that began in the 1860s as a dual response to the Victorian emphasis on moral didacticism in art, as well as to rapidly increasing industrialization and the mass production of goods. Aestheticism and its proponents, called “aesthetes,” advocated “art for art’s sake”: the creation of art not for moral purpose, but for the sake of beauty. The Arts and Crafts Movement, begun by artist and writer William Morris in the mid-1800s, advocated for the creation of artisanal goods over mass-produced goods and was a notable early inspiration for aestheticism. Oxford professor Walter Pater was the first significant literary influence on the aesthetics, and his seminal 1873 work Studies in the History of the Renaissance would later become the aesthetic bible of Wilde himself.
In 1882, Wilde toured America giving lectures on aestheticism, attracting many admirers and critics. Wilde would later lay out the ground rules for aestheticism in his famous preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. There, Wilde declares that first and foremost “the artist is the creator of beautiful things” (Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Barnes and Noble Classics, 2011). He claims that it is a fault to “find ugly meanings in beautiful things” and, most controversially, asserts that artists should never try to “prove anything” or have “ethical sympathies” (Wilde). In direct conflict with his Victorian counterparts, he asserts that there is no such thing as a “moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Wilde). The preface famously ends with the line, “All art is quite useless” (Wilde). With this, Wilde succinctly expresses a major tenet of aestheticism: Art is not, and should not, be “useful” (i.e., used for didactic purposes). Art should be appreciated for its own merits.
This idea of The Value of Beauty and Art permeates “The Nightingale and the Rose” and is central to the miscommunication between the Student and the Nightingale. Because the Student feels that the Nightingale’s song should do some “practical good,” he cannot appreciate or even comprehend it; when she tries to speak to him, he doesn’t understand what she is saying. He likewise fails to grasp the significance of her ultimate artistic creation—the rose—which he has seen from the start as a means to an end.
Cultural Context: Irish Folklore and Fairy-Tale Collection in the 19th Century
Wilde’s parents, Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, were both collectors of Irish folklore. Sir William, an ophthalmologist, spoke fluent Irish and collected stories from his Irish patients, and Lady Jane was a well-known nationalist poet, under the pseudonym “Speranza,” who also collected and published Irish fairy tales.
From childhood, Wilde was highly influenced by his Irish heritage and his mother’s strong Irish pride. Even Wilde’s name is an homage to Celtic folklore: Wilde’s full name, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, contained two references to figures of Irish folklore, as written about in James Macpherson’s 18th-century Ossian poems: Oscar was the son of the titular poet Ossian and his faery lover Niamh, and Fingal, the grandfather of Oscar, was a great poet and king. Wilde grew up hearing stories about Tir na nOg, the Irish land of faeries and beauty. In Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, she describes the Celts of Ireland as “ador[ing] beauty above all things” and being “contemptuous of logic and common sense” (Wright, Thomas. Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde. Henry Holt and Company, 2008). Wilde would later describe himself as belonging to the Celtic “race,” to whom “the intangible delights of the beautiful are the realities of life” (Wright). Wilde’s aestheticism was thus linked to his Celtic literary heritage, motivating him to write in lush prose and emphasize the value of beauty in works like “The Nightingale and the Rose.”
In addition to Irish fairy tales, Wilde might also have been inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale,” which features a nightingale with a beautiful singing voice who is devalued by a materialistic emperor in favor of a golden mechanical nightingale. Wilde would have been familiar with the works of Andersen, and their writing styles resemble each other in the same way, as both write in descriptive prose and include contemporary social commentaries. In addition, many of their stories have melancholy endings that would now be considered unorthodox for children’s stories.
Related Titles
By Oscar Wilde
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