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The Commodified Happiness: The Only Established Source of Meaning in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose

The Commodified Happiness: The Only Established Source of Meaning in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy... AbstractOscar Wilde’s fairy tales are not as well-recognised as his novel or his dramatic works. This paper circles around two of his tales, The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose. Through a postmodernist outlook, this study postulates the vigorous diatribe of Wilde against the consumer culture which was dominant within Victorian society. Wilde asserts that the Victorian mind-set claims that happiness is attainable through accumulating signs of affluence and he ironically mocks this notion of happiness which is entitled to commodified objects. To him, happiness is defined through a strict sense of Christian morality and Christ-like love and kindness. His aesthetic views are entangled with morality and he fails to celebrate art for art’s sake. Moreover, this study asserts that Wilde is aware of the dominant language games, and his application of the technical language game for the Prince, the Nightingale, and the Swallow is in debt to his monolithic morality or his opportunistic character. At last, Wilde refuses to celebrate beauty if morality is absent and in this way, his aesthetic concerns become rather contradictory. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Prague Journal of English Studies de Gruyter

The Commodified Happiness: The Only Established Source of Meaning in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose

Poorghorban, Younes
Prague Journal of English Studies , Volume 11 (1): 15 – Jul 1, 2022
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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Younes Poorghorban, published by Sciendo
eISSN
2336-2685
DOI
10.2478/pjes-2022-0003
Publisher site
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Abstract

AbstractOscar Wilde’s fairy tales are not as well-recognised as his novel or his dramatic works. This paper circles around two of his tales, The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose. Through a postmodernist outlook, this study postulates the vigorous diatribe of Wilde against the consumer culture which was dominant within Victorian society. Wilde asserts that the Victorian mind-set claims that happiness is attainable through accumulating signs of affluence and he ironically mocks this notion of happiness which is entitled to commodified objects. To him, happiness is defined through a strict sense of Christian morality and Christ-like love and kindness. His aesthetic views are entangled with morality and he fails to celebrate art for art’s sake. Moreover, this study asserts that Wilde is aware of the dominant language games, and his application of the technical language game for the Prince, the Nightingale, and the Swallow is in debt to his monolithic morality or his opportunistic character. At last, Wilde refuses to celebrate beauty if morality is absent and in this way, his aesthetic concerns become rather contradictory.

Journal

Prague Journal of English Studies – de Gruyter

Published: Jul 1, 2022

Keywords: Victorian Happiness; Oscar Wilde; The Happy Prince; The Nightingale and the Rose; Victorian Consumerist Society; Victorian Morality

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