But in a career spanning some twenty years, Wilde created a body of work which continues to be read an enjoyed by people around the world: a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray short stories and fairy tales such as ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘ The Selfish Giant’ poems including The Ballad of Reading Gaol and essay-dialogues which were witty revivals of the Platonic philosophical dialogue. The life of the Irish novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is as famous as – perhaps even more famous than – his work. The gift represents not a dowry which will guarantee that the hero can ‘keep the daughter in the manner to which she has become accustomed’, as the old phrase has it, but a token of affection. (We have analysed the tale of Aladdin in a separate post here.)īut in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ it is the girl herself, rather than her father, who rejects the hero’s gift when he is outbid in her affections by someone with a more expensive and impressive present for her. So Aladdin, for instance, has to convince the sultan that he is fit to marry the sultan’s daughter by producing platters of gold and beautiful, precious jewels if the vizier’s son can produce a more valuable gift, the sultan will allow him, instead of Aladdin, to marry the princess. In earlier fairy tales, the hero often has to produce a special gift to win the heart (and hand) of the heroine but usually this is because he has to impress the girl’s father, rather than the girl herself. But Wilde subverts these common character types, making the Student unromantic and boorish, and the love interest fickle and materialistic. ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ contains many of the features we commonly associate with traditional fairy tales: a hero (the Student), a love interest (the Professor’s daughter), a helper (the Nightingale). It was the fact that she gave all of herself to create something beautiful. We would do well to remember one of Wilde’s most memorable aphorisms from his 1891 ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray (a novel we have analysed here): ‘All art is quite useless.’ The fact that the red rose turns out not to be of any practical use, Wilde would doubtless remind us, is not the point.

The problem is that, as so often in Wilde’s work, the modern world is too practical-minded to appreciate art for its own sake (‘art for art’s sake’ was the unofficial slogan for Aestheticism, a movement for which Wilde was a prominent spokesperson).

The Nightingale is the symbolic and total embodiment of this impulse.

Artists often talk about ‘putting a lot of themselves’ into their art, or ‘pouring their heart out’ or ‘giving themselves’ to their art. So, viewed this way, the Nightingale’s sacrifice is not so pointless, since it produced a work of art.

The nightingale and the rose synopsis