SPECIALIZAREA ENGLEZĂ – ROMÂNĂ THE 19th CENTURY FAIRYTALE FROM ITS MISCHEVEOUS FALL TO ITS DELIVERANT RISE Îndrumător ṣtiinṭific Absolvent, As. dr…. [608468]

UNIVERSITATEA „DUNĂREA DE JOS ’ DIN GALAȚI
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
SPECIALIZAREA ENGLEZĂ – ROMÂNĂ

THE 19th CENTURY FAIRYTALE
FROM ITS MISCHEVEOUS FALL
TO ITS DELIVERANT RISE

Îndrumător ṣtiinṭific Absolvent: [anonimizat] – IUNIE, 2018

CONTENTS

ARGUMENT ……………………………………………………………………………………………
INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………………….
SECTION ONE:
FAIRIES AND FAIRY TALES. PREAMBLE ………………………………………
1.1.THE BEGINNINGS……………………………………………………………………………………
1.2.THE FALL……………………………………………………………………….. ……………………..
1.3.THE RISE ………………………………………………………………………………………….

SECTION TWO (A):
REPRESENTATIVE WRITERS. ICONIC FAIRY TALES.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………………….. ……….
A.1. CRITICAL ANALYSIS ………………………….. ………………………….. …………………….
A.2. THE METHAPHOR OF MARKET AND SISTERHOOD ………………………….. ….
A.3. RELIGIOUS ALLEGORIES ……………………………………………………………………..
A.4. FEMININE POWER ……………………………………………….. ……………………………

SECTION TWO (B):
REPRESENTATIVE WRITERS. ICONIC FAIRY TALES.
OSCAR WILDE
B.1 AESTHETICISM AND ITS INFLUENCE………………………………………………
B.2. IRISH IMMIGRANTS……………………………………………………………………….
B.3. RELIGIOUS CONNOTATIONS……………………………………………………………
B.4. A DIFFERENT INTERPRETATION…………………………….

SECTION THREE:
THE DECLINE OF FAIRY TALES AND THE BIRTH OF NEW
GENRE S…………………………..

CONCLUSIONS ……………………………………………………………………………………….
EXPLANATORY END – NOTES. …………………………………………………………………………….
BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………………………….

‘If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.’
(Albert Einstein)

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ABSTRACT

Even though the 19th century was an era of great literary achievement, this didn’t apply to
fairy tales which entered a heartbreaking decline. Nevertheless, despite this sharp decline,
shortstories still played an active role in the readers’s psychological development
(manife sting a didactic role) and in the evolution of the society.
The advent of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of new scientific ideologies
have played a crucial role in challenging old religious beliefs and superstitions which had a
deep impact o n people’s lives years for years .
The current paper looks into the phenomenon of decline (begun since the second half
of the 18th century) and the factors which have lead to the revival of the genre in the second
half of the 19th century.

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ARGUMENT

Embarking upon the study of such a topic as The 19th Century Fairytal e. From its
Mischeveous Fall to its Deliverant Rise means, before anything else, looking into the
mediation process of fairy tales on the literary markets and the role they have played in our
lives, either from an entertaining point of view (reading just for fun) or from a didactic one
(reading to instruct and make a moralizing point).
Either way, one fact remains sure: regardless of their cultural context or the temporal
background they are set in, fairy tales tend to manifest quite a considerable influence upon
readers and their lives, and by extension, upon the evolution of the entire society.
Varied as they are and magical as they may be, our interest in fairy tales is limited to
the 19th century cultural, social and literary co(n)text since this period of sharp contrasts was
also visible within the lit erary tendencies; the evolution of fairytales was marked by a
dramatic fall ever since the middle of the 18th century and up to the second half of the 19th
century when this genre was revived. As such, what becomes of interest are the factors and
the condi tions which have led particulalry to its dramatic fall and depreciation despite its
immortality , to be later on followed by a vibrant revival.

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INTRODUCTION

People’s first contact with literature is through fairy tales , in the period of early childhood
(infancy for some) when parents read their children bedtime stories about magicals worlds
with faeries and dragons and evil witches where Prince Charming saves the day and get s the
girl. As we grow up and become aware that there just might be some core of truth in these
stories that create a mesmerizing world of once upon a time , we relate to those stories,
borrowing subjects from those play pretend games all the children do or start looking for
answers and establish some behavioural patterns in our lives. Unfortunately, most of us lose
their inner child on the way as they grow up and old, until, one day, they find it again, once
they become parents and then start reconnecting once more to this magic al land of fairytales.
As such, we grow up learning that every event in our lives happens for a reason and, in the
end, we fulfil our highest goal in life, no matter which that may be .
Not only do f airytales h elp the young ones enrich their life experience (which is rather
limited in childhood) or stimulate their imagination and, by extension, understand the world
around them , but they also give children a taste of how important reading is and how it can
give them a safe escape from the complicated reality grown ups live in. The main reason why
fairy tales are so loved is not that they tell us about magical creatures but the fact that they
show us that even the evilest witches and the most cunning dragons get their punishment, or,
in the most fortunate cases , decide to make a turn of things for the better in their lives.
As the title suggests it, the current paper focuses on the decline of the fairytale in the
19th century. As such, while looking into the cultural and social factors which have lead to
this d ecline (industrialization being one of them), we’ll also try to establish the literary forms
(more specifically, genre) which replaced fairytales at that time.
The 19th century, also known as the Victorian era, was an age of overwhelming
industrial achiev ement which had its share of positive effects (making people’s lives easier)
but did not come without its negative social aspects (moving away from manual labor, turning
human beings into machines, employing huge numbers of children in factories since this was
a considerable cheap labour force, depriving children of their rights and an increasing rate of
crimes and criminality). As far as the cultural side of the 19th century is concerned, two new
trends became visible on the literary markets (realism and n aturalism) since writers felt a need

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to do away with the exagerated romances written in the previous century and describe reality
mimetically, with all its evils followed into their darkest corners and exposed withour fear!
As it was their only form of en tertainment and as people needed a way to get away
from all the hustle and bustle overshadowing their Victorian lives, increasing numbers of
people w ere eager to read more and more, mainly because of three interrelated factors. One
was that printing had become a lot cheaper and people could now afford to buy a book.
Another was that, in their novels, writers created an entire typology of Victorian characters
who had their counterparts in real life, and, in their novel, authors were exposing them from
behind their curtains they were hiding in reality. And finally, the third one was that, the 19th
century is known to have brought along a new fashion on the literary markets, namely
serialization , which, on the one hand, managed to create a special bond be tween writers and
their readers and, on the other, gave the latter a chance to decide how to revenge on those
characters oppressing their lives in the dimension they dwelled in, by suggesting whether or
not a certain character was to be killed, punished or rewarded.
Accordingly, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, William Makepeace Thackeray,
George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Lewis Carroll are just some of the names
who have become some sort of speaking – tube for the Victorians, exposing the crimes of the
society or portraying it with its varied typology of characters and genuine real – life topics.
Nonetheless, despite the increasing numbers of readers in the 19th century , there was a
dramatic fall which fairytales have witnessed ever since the second half of the 18th century
and which has been continued up to the 19th century, which most probably was determined by
one main factor. Perhaps it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that dehumanization , the effect that
industrialization had on peopl e’s lives, was the factor which extended its tentacles in many
directions, affecting people of all ages, but more specifically so, children.
Sending children to work into factories and using them as cheap labour force from an
early age meant depriving the m of their childhood. Forcing children into growing up, turning
them into responsible adults trapped into dwarfish bodies symbolli cally meant robbing them
off their creativity and eventually killing the ir inner child .
Apparently, relying on the whole idea of Victorian self – help automatically rejected
anything that had to do with good forces (all sorts of magical creatures endowed with
supernatural power) helping people and making their dreams come true.

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Undoubtedly, on the one hand, this had considerable influence on the genre of the
fairy tale, imposing some changes in its purpose (in the 19th century fairytales were gradually
replaced by didactic short stories), while on the other, it forced children into ad ulthood from a
young age.
Since there is quite a generous selection of hybrid 19th century fairytale titles (varying
in purpose) which are part fairytale, part social realism and part religious allegory including
substantial amounts of moralising, we have chosen to embark upon Christina Rossetti and
Oscar Wilde as writers of works which are significant from a literary point of view because
they mirror back the true face of the society.
The current diploma paper is divided into three large sections preceded and followed
by an introductory and a c onclu sive section respectively. Thus, t he First Section attempts to
create a Preamble to Fairies and Fairytales , focusing not only on the origin of fairy tales and
their evolution throughout centuries but also on t he factors that have influenced the
development of this genre a nd its impact on the wide public and on the message fairytales
deliver to the reading markets.
The Second Section is entitled Representative Writers. Iconic Fairytales and is
subdivided into two subsections, each of which deals with Christina Rossetti and Oscar
Wilde as representative writers for this genre. The texts chosen for discussion are C.
Rossetti’s Goblin Market and O .Wildes’ Happy Prince .
While attempting at a comparison between th e 19th century fairytale and its
(post)modern surrogate, t he Third Section follows t he decline of th e magical fairytale while
focussing on the changes that have been marked in time.
The Conclusion summarizes the premises which have been disclosed throught the
three sections of the paper. As such, regardless of the times they were written in and the ir
impact on children’s behaviour (in keeping with their original purpose) , fairytales still
represent the foundation ground of people ’s dreams and imagination. .

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SECTION ONE:
FAIR IES AND FAIRY TALES . PREAMBLE

The second half of the ninetheenth century was marked by two important elements that came
together to create a revolution in comunication . The first was a massive increase in the
amount of material published. The second was a massive increase in the number of people
able to read. Rapid advances in printing techniques made possible for the first time publishing
for a mass market, while the Education Act of 1870 provided a colossal reading public.
Literature of all kinds was a great deal more widely available to Victorians than it had
been before, because books had become cheaper and more widespread. Some publishers
issued novels in instalment s so that the interest in the story to built up as the weeks went by
and sales increased, while for purchasers the cost of the volume was spread in a kind of hire –
purchase arrangement. One result of this was a great increase in professional writers, as
thousands of hacks laboured to satisfy a desire for print that had become insatiable.
The Victorian era was, by any measure, an age of overwhelming literary achievement.
Among novelists it produced Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Thomas Hardy. There were
outstanding and significant woman writers too: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
the Brontë sisters.

1.1.THE BEGINNINGS
The history of English literature is like a well written novel itself. Events build on one
another, as each new wave of writers impacts both the overall body of work and the
subsequent efforts of other writers. There are unexpected twists and turns, as the styles and
subject matter of English literature have sometimes rebelled against existing conventions or
simply moved in unprec edented directions.
Once upon a time the fairies weren’t welcome in the British nursery. With the coming
of Christianity to the British Isles toward the end of the Roman Era, the Celtic faerie kings

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and queens went underground as ancient local traditions w ere absorbed or transformed by the
country’s new religion.
A wealth of fairy lore still survived in French and English medieval romances and
ballads. King Arthur and his knights consorted with fays, Thomas the Rhymer was spirited off
by the Queen of Elfla nd and fair maidens were deflowered by the Elfin Knight.
The sixteen and seventeenth centuries were a renaissance of fairy literature in
England. The works of Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and William
Shakespeare eagerly explored th e wonders of fairyland. With the exception of Spencer, whose
Faerie Queen was modeled on the old romances, the rest of the poets did not take elfin
tradition seriously.
In opposition to France and Germany, England didn’t experience the flowering of the lit erary
fairy tale until late, towards the second half of the nineteenth century. It is somehow
mysterious why this flowering came so late because Great Britain had been a n innovative
ground for folklore in the Middle Ages. Folk customs, extraordinary characters, superstitions
and pagan rituals had found their way into the early dialect of English works by well know n
authors such as Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe and Shakepeare.
The Industrial Revolution played an important role in the progress of the fabric of the
society, its negative features being noticed and exposed in what is commonly called the
Condition of England Debate . Issues discussed in those debate ha ve influenced th e literary
developments, issues like the nature and possibility of human freedom, the sources of social
cohesion .
Writers like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hood, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and
William Makepeace Thackeray were among the first to criticize the deleterious effects of the
Industrial Revolution. Interestingly, they all employed the fairy tale at one point to question
the injustice and inequalities engendered by the social upheaval in England.
In 1804, Benjamin Tabart began to publish a series of p opular tales, which eventually
led to his book Popular Fairy Tales (1818) containing selections from Mother Goose, The
Arabian Nights, Robin Hood, and Madame d’Aulnoy’s tales. In 1823 John Harris, an
enterprising publisher who had already produced Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales in 1802, edited
an important volume entitled The Court of Oberon or The Temple of Fairies . In the same
year Edgar Taylor translate d a selection from Kinder – and Hausmarchen by the Brothers

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Grimm. Taylor made an explicit referen ce to the debate concerning fairy tales in his
introduction, in which he aligned himself with the ‘enemies of the Enlightenment ’:
The popular tales of England have been too much neglected. They are nearly discarded from
the libraries of childhood. Philosophy is made the companion of the nursery: we have lisping
chemists and leading – string mathematicians; this is the age of reason, not of imagination; and
the loveliest dreams of fairy innocence are considered as vain and frivolous. Much might be
urged against this rigid and philosophic (or rather unphilosophic) exclusion of works of f ancy
and fiction. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise, as our
judgement or our memory; and so long as such fictions only are presented to the young mind as
do not interfere with the important department of moral education, a beneficial effect must be
produced by the pleasurable employment of a faculty in which so much of our happiness in
every period of life consists. (Harris , Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth -Century British
Fiction , 2008: 42)

1.2.THE FALL

When one says the word fairytale one deliberatly think s of Prince Charming on a white horse
coming to save Snow White from her evil stepmother, or from the curse that was placed upon
our Sleeping Beauty’s life. Even though most of us will not admit it, people are st ill waiting
for their story to start unfold ing, ready to jump right in the middle of the action to save the
day or to escape the day by day routine imposed upon ourselves.
Fairytales equal beautiful love stor ie that conquer all the obstacle s that stand i n the
way but the ir meaning has changed through times with every version of the same tale .
Jack Zipes in The Oxford Companion To Fairy Tales states t hat there is no such
thing as the fairytale and that there are hundreds of thousands of fairy tales that have been
defined in so many different ways that it convice s the mind to think that they can be
categorized as a genre. The confusion is so great that most literary critics confound the oral
folk tale with the literary fairytale and vice versa and it is thought that by dissecting the fairy
tale, one might destroy its magic of the blessed realm of childhood and innocence. (2000:15)
Faerie, or fairyland, is the realm thought to be populate d by fairies. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines ‘fairies ’ as ‘supernatural beings … popularly supposed to have
magical powers, and to meddle for good or evil in the affairs of men. ’ (1965 :185) Whatever
their names, all share certain traits: generally invisible, they have the power of ‘glamour ’, the
ability to make themselves visible or to enchant or hypnotize; they are ordinarily smaller than

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mortals – and they are always somehow ‘other ’ than human. They may be helpful and
compassionate, destructive and malevolent, or simply capricious and mischievous.
It seems that the term ‘fairy tale ’ did not exist in English before to 1699, when
Madame D’Aulnoy’s Contes des Feés (popularly known in En gland as ‘Tales of Mother
Bunch ’) were first translated. It has proved a threadbare phrase to describe so vast a form. It
rarely concerns fairies, what J. R.R.Tolkien dismissed as
that long line of flower – fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child,
and which my children in their turn detested.…Faerie contains many things besides elves and
fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the
moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine
and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted . (Hearn,The Victorian Fairy
Tale Book,1988:13
Perhaps a more accurate translation is ‘tale of enchantment, ’ which ergo embraces
every story in which occurs, according to Joseph Jacobs, ’something fairy’ , something
extraordinary – fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals. ’(Hea rn,The Victorian Fairy Tale
Book , 1988:13)
The origin of fairies is still debated. Traditional Christian religious and popular views
of fairies connected them to the fallen angels, mislead by Satan, who did not have the strength
to choose God or the devil. Thus, they belonged neither to Heaven nor to Hell and so some
fell into the sea, becoming the mer – creatures of the waters, some dropped into the caverns of
the earth and became goblins, kobolds, gnomes, or dwarfs, some fell into woods and forests
becoming elves, pixies, and the like. A similar i dea was that they were the children of Adam
and Eve, whose existence they denied when inquired about by God. Still others suggested that
they were the pre – Adamite inhabitants of earth. In short, these commentators saw them as a
morally indeterminate ‘second race ’ inhabiting the world alongside humans.
Another common belief in Europe was that fairies were a special category of the dead.
In British Fairy Origins (1946), Lewis Spence argued for their connection to a cult of the
dead on the basis of their s izes, similar dwelling places, and the frequently identical tales and
rituals associated with both groups. Some thought them the spirits of the ancient druids or of
the pagans who had died before the possibility of salvation through Christ.
A more contemp orary explanation, offered by modern occultists, is that they are the
souls of the recent dead which await reincarnation or transportation to the astral plane. Yet
another theory holds that fairies are actually diluted versions of the ancient deities of a given

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country or of nature spirits from the early stages of civilization. Gods and heroes – reduced
in stature and importance as new beliefs replacing old ones – become the elfin peoples.
Euhemerists (believers in an historical basis for myth and folklo re) suggest that fairies are
derived from folk memories of earlier or aboriginal inhabitants of a country, long after its
conquest by its present inhabitants.
Modern spiritualists, Rosicrucians (members of a secret order who seek esoteric
knowledge) and t heosophists have added to origin theories by suggesting that fairies are the
elementals (spirits of the four elements) of Paracelsus (c. 1500), and later alchemists and
magicians and the agents present in psychical phenomena. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose
book The Coming of the Fairies (1921) gave photographs of elfin creatures in the glare of
publicity, thought them lifeforms existing on another branch of the tree of evolution – little
nature spirits whose special function was to tend plants and flowers.
Folktales are said to be ‘timeless ’, existing throughout the ages without change. Jacob
Grimm wrote to Achim von Arnim, for example, that he was convinced that ‘all the tales in
our collection were told centuries ago ’ (from a letter dated October 29, 1812 published in
Achim Von Arnim und die nahe standen,1913 ..). Many people still believe that folktales can
give us access to the traditions, customs, hopes, and fears of illiterate people in earlier times.
Literary fairy tales, on the other hand, have a long history that can be traced back at least to
the Middle Ages. Many scholars believe that they began as medieval wonder tales, tales that
stressed marvelous transformations and change.

1.3.THE RISE

Ninetheenth century literary representations of fairy tales, folk legends, and superstitions are
the culmination of attitudes towards the supernatural in general and folklore in particular.
Superstitious thinking in folk tales, religious narrative and literary ghost s tories is an attempt
to delineate the borders of experiential truth by implying the effects and tendencies of
invisible laws that defy reason but not belief.
The fairies which fascinated adults in the nineteenth century were creatures of legend and
supers tition, numinous beings caught in a liminal twilight between imagination and reality.
Fixed, seemingly categorically, in the photographic image, fairies made the bathetic descent to
ridicule and parody, to the saccharine illustrations of the Flower Fairy b ooks. […] By chaining
the photographs to the obligation to speak as evidence, Doyle and Gardner effectively

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destroyed their own case. The ‘coming of the fairies’ they proclaimed turned out to be their
depart ure. (Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in Nin eteenth -Century British Fiction ,
2008:11)
Despite the dominant rational discourses of realism in art, utilitarianism in philosophy,
and pragmatism in industry, the Victorian society revealed a taste for unorthodox forms of
spirituality, most evident in a preoccupation with seances and a general fascination with
ghosts in general, manifest in its literary productions:
ghost stories […] were enormously popular among all classes of readers […] Dickens’
Household Words, begun in 1850, and its successor All the Year Round. The Cornhill
Magazine, St James’s Magazine, Belgravia, Temple Bar, Saturday Review, Tinsley’s, Argosy
and St Paul’s all contributed their share to a readership addicted to the thrill of momentarily
losing rational control over the ordered Victorian world.’( Eve M. Lynch, Spectral Politics: the
Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant in The Victorian Supernatural , Nicola
Bown (Ed.), 2004 : 68.)
During the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, fairy tales gradually
became kn own primarily as children’s literature. Jeanne – Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s
abridged tales in her didactic Le magasin des enfants (1756; translated into English as The
Young Misses’ Magazine in 1759), notably Beauty and the Beast were among the first
designed specifically for the moral education of children. The Kleine Ausgabe (Small Edition,
1825) of the Grimms’ tales, unlike the earlier editions, was primarily intended for children; it
was likely inspired by Edgar Taylor’s success ful translation of selected Grimm tales for
children as German Popular Stories in 1823.
Throughout the nineteenth century, writers like Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark,
Ludwig Bechstein in Germany, Sophie, Comtesse de Segur in France, and Oscar Wilde i n
England wrote and adapted tales to amuse and to educate children. Many collections of fairy
tales designed for children and for reading aloud also appeared, for example Andrew Lang’s
many colored volumes (1889 –1910). The literary fairy tale, once a genre that had permitted
freedom and experimentation, became steadily more regimented and more commercialized, a
trend that culminated in Walt Disney’s fairytale film adaptations in the twentieth century and
in the repetitive republication of the best known tale s, often one by one in expensive picture
books.
At the same time, however, many writers, often women, began creating stories and
poetry that question and reimagine d some of the best -known tales. A group of German
women, known as the Kaffeterkreis ( Coffee Circle ), published the Kaffeterzeitung (Coffee

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Circle News) from 1843 to 1848 that included many unusual fairy tales and fairy -tale plays. In
England, Christina Georgina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market (1862) turns on the encounters
of two young sisters with seductive and threatening creatures who exist on the border between
the real world and a sinister realm; some motifs, like eating dangerous magic fruit or the
sacrifice of a lock of hair, suggest themes of sexual guilt and redemption.
Many English auth ors have written literary fairy tales, whether for children or for
adults. In the Victorian period, they were often regarded as useful tools for teaching moral
lessons to the young. John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River (1851) and the stories of
Mary Louisa Molesworth and Juliana Horatia Ewing are relevant examples. Ewing’s work is
brighten ed up by a good sense of humor.
Others used the genre in more personal and less simplistic ways. These include
William Makepeace Thackeray’s farcical The Rose and t he Ring (1855); George
MacDonald’s fantasies with strong allegorical and spiritual subtexts ( At the Back of the North
Wind , 1871; The Princess and the Goblin , 1872; and The Princess and Curdie , 1883); Charles
Kingsley’s chaotic but intermittently entertain ing The Water Babies (1863); and Oscar
Wilde’s elegant, melancholy tales in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888).
From the early twentieth century, one can pick out as particularly successful E.
Nesbit’s lively blend of fairy tale and adventure story i n Five Children and It (1902), The
Phoenix and the Carpet ( 1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906); and from the 1950s, C. S.
Lewis’s six books set in the imaginary world of Narnia, full of magical adventures and quests,
with strong religious themes.
They represent remnants of the original fairy tales and form a small sub -genre of the
aphorism and might be labelled as fairytale aphorisms. One of the earliest aphorisms of this
type is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's somewhat paradoxical text ‘Fairy tale: ind icating to us
the possibility of impossible occurrences under possible or impossible conditions ’.
The reactions of later authors to fairy tales in general or specific motifs reflect this
ambiguity between the wishful world of the fairy tale and the reality of everyday life. The
dreams, hopes, and fulfilments expressed in fairy tales appear impossible i n an imperfect
world, but by relating our problems and concerns to the possible solutions in fairy tales, we
tend to be able to cope with our sometimes desperate conditions. Gerhart Hauptmann
expressed this thought quite similarly to Goethe's statement in his aphorism 'The teller of fairy
tales gets people used to the unusual, and it is of great importance that this happens because

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mankind suffocates from the usual’. (Zipes, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales ,
2015:16)
Fairy tales carry important messages t o the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious
mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time. By dealing with universal human
problems particularly those, which preoccupy the child's mind, these stories speak to his
budding ego and encoura ge its development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and
unconscious pressures.(Bettelheim , The Uses of E nchantment , 1976 6).
The literary fairy tale has been of scholarly interest since the nineteenth century and it
has been discussed from a range of conceptual viewpoints using a variety of methodologies.
Conceptual approaches to literary texts are always underpinned and shaped by ideological
assumptions about relationships between language, meaning, narrative, literature, society, and
literary audiences; and, to some extent, varying approaches to the fairy tale reflect the critical,
cultural, and historical contexts in which the y have been formulated.
No single approach or methodology is able to arrive at a 'correct' interpretation of the
fairy tale; instead, different methodologies suit different critical and ideological purposes. The
main conceptual approaches to the literary fairy tale to have emerged in the 20th century are:
folkloricist, structuralist, literary, psychoanalytic, historicist, Marxist , and feminist
approaches.
Jack Zipes has pointed out that the Victorians initially frowned on fairy -tales as
primitive and dange rous. They were not considered appropriate in the education of children in
civilised values ( Introduction to Victorian Fairy Tales , 1988 : xiii).
In the mid -Victorian period the middle class changed its mind. The fairy tale became
seen as a means of ‘entertaining’ the masses, and distracting them from their subordination.
Likewise, middleclass morality was increasingly written into both bowdlerised versions of
classic tales and newly composed works:
Middleclass writers, educators, publishers, and pare nts, began to realise that the rigid, didactic
training and literature used to rear their children was dulling their senses and creativity. Both
children and adults needed more fanciful works to stimulate their imagination and keep them
productive in the s ocial and cultural spheres of British life. Emphasis was now placed on fairy –
tale reading and storytelling as recreation. (Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde ,
2007:27)

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The Monthly Review noted in 1788,
Fairy tales were formerly thought to be the proper and almost the only reading for children; it
is with much satisfaction, however, that we find them gradually giving way to the publications
of a far more interesting kind, in which instruction and entertainment are judiciously blended,
without the intermixture of the marvelous, the absurd, and things totally out of nature . (Hearn
1988: 14)
Almost all the fairy tales of the 1840’s and 1850’s use allegorical forms to make
statem ents about Christian goodness in opposition with the greed and materialism that were,
and still are, the most dangerous vices in the English society (and not only) .
The fairy tale at mid -century was consequently a manifesto for itself and a social
manifest o to blend the regressive urges with progressive social concerns, without succumbing
to overt didacticism. Even the boring allegorical fairy tales were an improvement on the stern,
didactic tales of realism that English children had been obliged to read du ring the first part of
the nineteenth century.
Knoepflmacher points in his essay The Balancing of Child and Adult (1983) that the
Victorian writers’ ‘regressive capacity can never bring about a total annihilation of the adult’s
self -awareness ’: (153)
Torn between the opposing demands of innocence and experience, the author who resorts to the
wishful, magical thinking of the child nonetheless feels compelled, in varying degrees, to hold
on to the grown – up’s circumscribed notions about reality. In the better works of fantasy of the
period, this dramatic tension between the adult and childhood selves becomes rich and elastic:
conflict and harmony, friction and reconciliation, realism and wonder, are allowed to
interpenetrate and coexist. (Zipes, When Dre ams Came True , 2006:153 )
Fairy tales for profit and fairy tales of conventionality were overlooked by English
writers of the utopian direction, their tales revealing a profound faith in the power of the
imagination as a potent force that can be used to determine gender relations and sexual
identity, and to question the value of existing social relations.
This decline of the old nursery lore in favor of contemporary moral stories was
promoted by such pious journals as Sarah Trimmer’s Guardian of Education (1802 –1806),
arguing that ‘there is not a species of Books for Children and Youth…which has not been
made some way o r other an engine of mischief ’ (14) and that none was more mischievous
than the fairy tale. As the century progressed, the war against the fairy tale found a formidable
ally in an American , Samuel Griswold Goodrich.

15
When a boy in Connecticut, Goodrich was given a collection containing Little Red
Riding Hood, Jack the Giant -Killer and Some other tales of horror he found ‘calculated to
familiarize the mind with things shocking and monstrous ’ and ‘to make criminals of a large
part of the children who read them ’. (Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tal e, 1988:14) To combat such
nursery stories, Goodrich began in 1827 to publish, under the pseudonym ‘Peter Parley ’ a
serie s of ‘reasonable and truthful ’ books for boys and girls. Designed ‘to enlarge the circle of
Knowledge, to invigorate the understanding, to strengthen the moral nerve, to justify and
exalt the imagination ’ (Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tale , 1988:14 ) these books became
internationally successful.
Clearly , juvenile literature was expected to be as wholesome as a breakfast food. But
there were also powerful defenders of the fairy tale in this age of unbelief. Charles Lamb was
outraged to find that moral and educational stories had all but ‘banished the old classics of the
nursery. ’ (Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tale , 1988:14 ) ‘Damn them! ’ he wrot e Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in 1802 about the instructional tales’ authors,
‘those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child…Think what you would have
been now, if instead of being fed Tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been
crammed with geography and natural history’ Coleridge himself avowed that ‘from my early
reading of fairy tales … my mind had been habituated to the Vast.…I know of no better way of
giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole’ . (Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tale ,
1988:14 )
And his fellow poets, Blake, Shelley, Keats and others paid the tales they had known
in their own childhood the great compliment of making free use of fairy lore in their verse.
The coronation of Victoria in 1837 marked the arrival of a golden age for the literary
British fairytale. Even though initially there was still considerable resistance to these innocent
amusements, by the queen’s fiftieth jubilee, fairy tales were no longer regarded as the engines
of mischief Mrs.Trimmer had called them, but rather, as Edward Salmon declared in Juvenile
Literature As It Is (1888), ‘as engines for the propulsion of all virtues into the little mind in an
agreeable and harmless form ’ (Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tale , 1988:16 )
The new fairy tales were striped of the savagery that had characterized many
traditional stories: there were no ogres who cut off children’s heads, as there were in
Perrault’s Hop o’ My Thumb and no rewards for the liar, as in Puss in Boo ts. Even when not
overtly moralizing, these tales were always moral. Good always triumphed over Evil in these
optimistic fantasies. By the time of Victoria’s death in 1901, hundreds of new fairy books had

16
been published, a surprising number of which have become classics, re markable for their
abundant invention, literary distinction, and philosophical depth.
The first Victorian fairy tale of lasting importance was a youthful work by John
Ruskin. He fell in love with German Popular Stories at ten years old, and his admiration did
not dim with the years. He later praised the Grimms’ tales for children for
animating for them the material world with inextinguishable life, fortifying them against the glacial cold
of selfish science, and preparing them submissively, and with no bit terness of astonishment, to behold,
in later years, the mystery – divinely appointed to remain such to all human thought – of the fates that
happen alike to the evil and the good (Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tale ,1988:16)
This high purpose Ruskin retaine d in the fairy tale he himself wrote, The King of the
Golden River , which was (he admitted) ‘a good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with
a little Alpine feeling of my own .’( Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tale,1988:15 )Composed in 1841 to
amuse twelve -year-old Effie Gray, his future wife, it was not published until 1851, and then
anonymously. He later scoffed at this early effort in his autobiography, Praeterita (1889),
judging it ‘totally valueless.… I can no more write a story than compose a picture .’ Yet, of all
his many writings, The King of the Golden River may ensure Ruskin’s immortality.
Unquestionably, the master of the Victorian fairy tale was George MacDonald. His
stories, like those of the Pre -Raphaelites, were moral yet more symbolic than didactic or
allegorical, as were many of his contemporaries’ efforts. His adult fantasies, Phantastes
(1858) and Lilith (1895), marked the beginning and the end of his distinguished literary
career.
His children’s books include several of the most extraordinary works of the
imagination in juvenile literature: Dealings with the Fairies (1867), At the Back of the
North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie
(1883), all illustrated by Arthur Hughes. ‘For my part,’ MacDonald explained, ‘I do not write
for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy -five.’ Hearn, The
Victorian Fairy Tale,1988:16) His stories contain a mysti cal resonance rare in books for boys
and girls, and he never wrote a more beautiful fairy tale than ‘The Golden Key ,’ from
Dealings with the Fairies . Just as MacDonald reached the pinnacle of the Victorian fairy
tale, the form entered its decline.
‘At the present moment ,’ Mrs. E. M. Field reported in The Child and His Book
(1889), ‘the fairy tale seems to have given way entirely in popularity to the children’s story of
real life .’ But she immediately amended this statement by acknowledging in a footnote the

17
popularity of Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book (1889). This collection of classic folk
and literary fairy tales has proved to be so successful, that it gr ew to be merely the first
volume in a successful series of ten big books of the world’s fairy lore. Lang was lean ing on
British legends, but another folklorist, Joseph Jacobs, found enough to fill English Fairy
Tales (1890), More English Fairy Tales (1894), Celtic Fairy Tales (1892), and More
Celtic Fairy Tales (1894).
Jacobs’ research was enlarged by William Butler Yeats’ fine early collections, Fairy
and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892), and The Celtic
Twilight (1893), as well as his celebrated verses taken from folklore. The Decadents entered
the fairy sphere as quickly as they did the rest of British life and art, with the publication of
Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tale s (1888) and The House of
Pomegranates (1891). The design of these magnificent volumes, the first enrich ed by Walter
Crane and Jacomb Hood, the second by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, beautifully
reflects the artificiality of their texts. What Wilde admired in ancient art, ‘the Greeks’ joy in
the visible aspect of things, all the Greeks’ sense of del icate and delightful detail, all the
Greeks’ pleasure in beautiful textures, and exquisite materials,and imaginative designs, ’(
Hearn, The Victorian Fairy Tale,1988:19 )is everywhere evident in these elegant stories.
In spite of being in decline, the 19th century fairy tale genre brought to the readers ’
attention names that had a great impact on the litera ry market s and also offered them a
mixture made of various principles, perspectives and referenceses to other’s nation’s history.

18
SECTION TWO ( A):
REPRESENTATI VE WRITERS. ICONIC FAIRY TALES

As already mentioned in the previous chapter, while confronting with the changes brought by
the Industrial and the French Revolution, representative names of writers became popular on
the n ineteenth century literary stage where they used their works to either debat e or expose
pressing social problems or religious concept s, foreground ing thus, although in an oblique
manner, their doubt s which had lead to an evolution of perspective.
This section proposes a selection of two writers only as representatives of their social
background, religious formation, gender or poetics of the text. As such, following a quite
rigorous selection, the first part of Section Two focuses on C hristina Rosse tti’s famous Goblin
Market for its outstanding puzzling possible interpretation s while the second one brings Oscar
Wilde and his work, The Happy Prince , into focus.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Christina Georgina Rossetti, was born in London on December 5, 1830, to Gabriela and
Frances Rossetti. Both parents were of strong religious temperament. Her father was an
Italian living in exile, and her mother was of Italian and English origin. The house she was
born into was quite live ly, playing host to visiting Italian revolutionaries and writers, but she
was also subject to the teaching and religious devotion of her mother Frances. Her father
Gabriele was a poet and translator, and her uncle John Palidori was Byron’s physician and
author of The Vampyre.
Christina is said to have been a very spirited child, there being wild reports about her
youthful temper. These anecdotes stand in contrast to the descriptions of the poet made by her
brother William in the biography he wrote, which gi ves us an image of a restrained, almost
docile poet with self -discipline to spare. Her early childhood was influenced by visits to her
maternal grandfather’s country home, which was surrounded by fruit trees and fields.
Eventually, this same grandfather wo uld move to the city and set up a printing press, which
would then print Rossetti’s first volume of poetry, Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother .

19
The Rossetti children worshiped their mother, but Christina was especially close to
her. Due in part to her bad health, her mother served as both confidant and nurse, and all of
Christina’s books of poetry were dedicated to her. Both women shared a clear and strong
sense of spiritual devotion. Rossetti herself was influenced by the Oxfo rd Movement , which
wanted to restore a sense of Catholic Grandeur to the Anglican church, reinforcing the
ritualistic elements of the Catholic service. Later in her life, Christina would write extensive
commentaries on parts of the bible, and she was a str ict observer of fast days and the liturgical
calendar.
Christina was also a member of a group called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ,
formed in 1848 by her brothers. Even though she was not allowed to attend their late night
meetings, her early poems were p ublished by the brotherhood’s journal, The Germ . Her first
publicly printed book of poems was Goblin Market and Other Poems , published in 1862 to
widespread acclaim and popularity.

A. 1. CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Goblin Market is without doubts, Christina Rossetti’s masterpiece, a narrative poem noted for
its vivid descriptions and intense, possibly sexual, depictions of love, but also for its hybrid
form, a narrative poem with fairytales features . Rossetti furthermore created several fantastic
tales in verse and prose, including The Prince’s Progress (1866) and Speaking Likenesses
(1874).
However, Goblin Market , first published in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862),
remains her best -known tale. Goblin Market tells of two maid en sisters, Laura and Lizzie
who, e ach evening in summer, hear the calls of goblin fruit vendors. Lizzie avoids the goblins
as evil, but Laura decides to visit them and sees exotic beings with traits of both humans and
anim als. She is amazed by the variety of fruit they sell, all ripe at the same time. Laura
complains that she has no money, and in exchange the goblins request a curl of her hair.
Laura weeps but yields to the goblins’ demand, and then gorges herself. Later, she craves
more fruit, but she is no longer able to see or hear the goblins. She weakens and ages rapidly.
To save Laura, Lizzie goes to buy fruit from the goblins, but gives them a silver penny
rather than her hair. The goblins will not let Lizzie leave with the fruit. When she refuses t o
eat with them and demands her money back, they attack her and try to force fruit into her

20
mouth. She shuts her mouth until the goblins return her coin and flee. With her face dripping
with juice, Lizzie returns to Laura. While kissing Lizzie, Laura consum es the juice and suffers
greatly throughout the night.The goblins’ spell is broken, and Laura is fixed. The poem ends
with the adult Laura telling both her children and Lizzie’s about their experiences.
A poem such as Goblin Market offers a variety of pos sible interpretations because of
its narrative form, the characters that animate the story and the set ting in which the events
happen. The se characteristics include the poem in the fairy tale genre, transforming it into a
hybrid, a less used type of lite rature.
Critical interpretations of Goblin Market vary greatly. The goblins are seen as
metaphors for sexuality, danger, or sin. Lizzie’s passive resistance to the goblins’ attack is
compared to both rape and the passion of Christ. The fruit is related to the forbidden fruit in
Genesis as well as to other supernatural fruits, such as the pomegranate eaten by Proserpina.
Scholars find many other parallels to folk traditions, including the goblins’ glamour when the
maidens first approach, the influence silver ha s upon them, and the timelessness of their
existence (neither sister knows the time after their goblin encounters).
Since the age of the sisters is vague, they are discussed variously as youth or adults.
They seem to be girls in Rossetti’s text, yet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations show
relatively mature women. Since many passages may seem to suggest sexual feeling, the
maidens are sometimes seen as only symbolically sisters but actually lovers, or else as women
victimized by men. The poem appeals to many readers by evoking the imagination while
eluding efforts to assign it specific meanings.
Goblin Market remains one of the most persistently perplexing poems of the
nineteenth century. The poem has been treated without too much reference to the rest of
Christina Rossetti’s work and especially to her other writing for children.
This narrative poem can be compared to a treasure chest, b eing protected by lots of
locks, each of them representing a different interp retation of the allegories it uses . With each
layer being uncovered, a new one appear s, and a whole new perspective upon the poem
revealed.

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A. 2. THE METHAPHOR OF MARKET AND SISTERHOOD

When Christina Rossetti hinted that in Goblin Market she hadn’t written an allegory soliciting
deep exegesis, but a poem to be taken just as it came, she might have meant to wave the
hermeneutic white flag. On recent examination it appears to be a poem about communal
sorority and also about patriarchal domi nion; about free actualization; about anorexia nervosa,
the adulteration of foodstuffs and absinthe addiction.
The seductions in Goblin Market were early warnings and exploitations of Victorian
styles of market penetration that they ventured to influence behaviour by reorienting desire
throught language and had every claim on the attention of contemporary poets.
The whole story of Goblin Market in a sense flows, and it goes like this: Laura and
Lizzie, two look -alike alliterative sisters, live together alone taking care of cows, chickens,
and bees in a rural neighborhood that happens to be visited by goblin men selling domestic
and imported fruit in the open air around breakfast and supper time. The sisters, young
maidens, are old enough to be independent of any parental supervision, and to know a
cautionary tale or two about those goblin costermongers, and to qualify for illustration as
stunners.
One evening Laura falls into temptation to the goblins’ sales pitch and, though
penniless, manage s to barter a lock of her hair for all the fruit she can eat. Coming home in a
high bulimic buzz, she brushes aside her sister Lizzie’s scolding with a promise to go out
again the next night and get more fruit for both of them. As that next night falls, Laura goes
searching for the goblins and frustrated at first because she couldn’t find no goblin on the
scene, she then learns that, while Lizzie can hear the vendors as usual, she herself has gone
stone -deaf to their cry. Sick with desire, Laura wastes away to the point where Lizzie
overcomes her reluctance and decides to act as her sister’s delegate, taking a penny in her
purse and letting the goblins know she’s ready to deal.
But when Lizzie orders a pennysworth of fruit on a takeout basis, the goblins insist
that she feast on the spot like her sister. Lizzie declines and demands her money back, and
that’s when the goblin team really gets down to business. They initiate a hard sell that
escalates from courtesy and advice to insult and threat, resorting to outright perso nal violence,
becoming pushers , crushing fruit against her mouth – which will not open either to protest or
to taste – and drizzling juice down her chin and neck. Finally, the goblins take no for an

22
answer, reject the penny, and vanish underground or into thin air. Lizzie races home and
invites Laura to ‘Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices ’ … Eat me, drink me, love me. Amazed at
Lizzie’s apparent sacrifice, yet obedient to an addict’s need, Laura ingests the p ulpy juice,
only to have it work as a homeopathic antidote kicking her into a high – speed delirium, from
which she recovers completely cured.
An epilogue fastforwards to later years: both sisters now being married, Laura makes a
habit of summoning her da ughters and nieces – nephews, sons, and husbands somehow need
not apply – to hear her tale of trespass, waste, and redemption and to learn its lesson that
‘there is no friend like a sister ’.
The phrase ‘Come buy ’ is found more than a dozen times in the tale as the ‘iterated
jingle ’ of a straightforward sales pitch. The listener in the poem knows what’s up, right away
and beyond any doubt: the first thing said by either of the maids who hear the goblins cry is
that ‘We must not buy their fruits ’. That the maids therefore know just what they are hearing
is as sure a sign as any in the poem that they are conscious denizens of a market economy,
where the way to come by a nice piece of fruit is to come and buy it; where ‘Come buy ’
betokens not hospitality but trade.
The verbal confusion belong s to the virtual listeners; this happens because Rossetti
wants us to read verbal confusion as cultural confusion. Embedded (or endeared, as John
Keats might say) within the reigni ng order of contract and purchase, she invites us to
recognize an older order of invitation and gift, which mercantilism has on one hand
superseded as clearly as literacy has superseded orality, yet which on the other hand
mercantilism has less abolished t han engrossed, for rhetorical purposes, as a hidden
persuader.
About this kind of subliminal promotion Rossetti’s market – wise maids seem clueless:
Lizzie means to reinforce her sister’s ‘We must not buy ’ when she declares, ‘Their offers
should not charm us, / Their evil gifts would harm us ’ ,but the way her declaration confounds
purchase with donation, confounds the boughten with the given, would do a politician proud.
And this confusion discloses something about the promotional strategy that underwrites the
goblins’ deceptively straightforward ‘Come buy. ’ (Christina Rossetti, Comprehensive
Research and Study Guide , 2004:25)
In this early and most famous work , Christina Rossetti creates her essential characters
– Laura and Lizzie – and moves them through a drama that leads from innocence and

23
integration to sickness and fragmentation back to a newer and more mature balance,
represented in part by the marriage of the sisters and their assumption of marital
responsibility. One doesn’t n eed to identify the two sisters and the goblins too precisely in
order to recognize the resolution that occurs.
That the two sisters are aspects of one self is evident when they are described as being
‘like two blossoms on one stem ’ (Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems , 1865 ) and
‘locked together in one nest ’ (Rossetti, 1865) yet that they are different from one another is
evident in their very actions. Laura, whose ‘restraint is gone ’ (1865) and Lizzie, who is ‘full
of wise upholdings, ’ (1865) respond in their different ways to the goblins who parade before
them.
The goblins represent some state of mind, some mental experience that is both
attractive and destructive, both exotic and visionary , something which, at the same time , is
immensely real. One would not go too far astray, it seems, to recognize in the goblins and
their wares a kind of imaginative, fanciful, visionary – even hallucinatory – state of mind that
is escape from reality ; beautiful escape is intellectually destructive. To see in the goblins
simply the sexual or the sensuous is to limit their role in Christina’s myth and limit their
function.
No doubt sex and sensuality are presented, but other mysterious regions of the min d
and of the self also exist that lure one to psychological death. The whole fairytale set up and
the animal shapes of the goblins suggest what a bizarre nature the goblin experience was to
Christina herself suggesting some whole inexplicable areas of deta chment from reality.
An association can be made between characters and Nietzchean terms such as
Apollonian and Dionysian. The different phases of the human nature which Laura and Lizzie
represent are similar to those Nietzsche recognized, principally in The Birth of Tragedy , as
eternal polarities of self, the Dionysian, leading to tragedy, the other, the Apollonian, leading
to survival. The Dionysian aspect of self is thrust strongly toward the ritualistic fulfillment
that Laura experiences with the goblins , while the Apollonian self holds back from the
visionary and ritualistic ‘reality ’ in preference for a more logically -oriented reality, a more
objective, exterior world. It’s not excluded that Lizzie is aware of the goblins and that
potential state of min d.
The whole self is aware of the goblins. But whereas one part of self surrenders to
illusion and an essentially intensional accommodation to life, the other part of self struggles to

24
maintain a distance from the archetypal, even primordial freedom and m akes an essentially
extensional accommodation to existence. Laura comes near her death in surrendering to a
myth that can be imagined from afar but which cannot be accepted as a replacement for
reality.
Stepping into that state of mind which the goblins r epresent, Laura finds herself in that
pathological state which modern psychiatry has dealt with so extensively and which is,
indeed, a deep illness. All of Laura’s symptoms following her purchase of the goblin fruit are
those of the mentally ill. Withdrawi ng from reality into that illusion of the goblins, Laura
finds herself in that pitiful trap of having lost contact with one reality only to find its supposed
replacement to be air and vacancy.
Lizzie, the remaining fragment of the whole self, must now str uggle to integrate
again, to become one whole person again, and to do this she must face up to the very illusory
state of mind – the goblin market – that is the ‘snake pit ’ for Laura. In sound psychiatric
fashion, Lizzie re -enacts the goblin experience, me ets it face to face in a kind of therapeutic
recognition, without actually succumbing to it, and by doing so is able to pull Laura back
from the brink.

A. 3. RELIGIOUS ALLEGOR IES

If we place Goblin Market within the larger context of Rossetti’s thoughts on religion, poetry,
and symbol, we will discover that certain fundamental habits of thought evident throughout
her writing can help us understand Goblin Market as a paradigm of the kind of symbolic
interpretation in which Rossetti wanted her readers to engage.
The importance of Lizzie and Laura’s attempts to interpret their experiences in the
poem can be better appreciated by reading Goblin Market in light of Rossetti’s own
statements on the ways in whic h the individual should respond to the beauty and temptations
that the world offers. In this regard, it is crucial to recognize that one of the most fundamental
assumptions underlying Rossetti’s narrative poem is her theologically based belief that the
created world is capable of communicating moral and spiritual meaning, or, in her own
words, that ‘All the world over, visible things typify things invisible. (Bloom, Christina
Rossetti , Comprehensive Research and S tudy Guide , 2004:35)

25
There were several influences in Rossetti’s life that would have encouraged this belief,
but by far the most important was the impact of the intense incarnationalism and
sacramentalism of the Oxford Movement . Critics have often noted that Rossetti first came
under the influence of the Oxford Movement in 1840, and that by 1843, when thirteen years
of age, she had begun regularly attending the High Church services at what Canon Henry W.
Burrows calls ‘the leading church ’ in the Oxford M ovement at that time – Christ Church,
Albany Street.
The Tractarians saw the incarnation as the vital core of the Church, its sacraments, and
God’s plan for humanity’s redemption. In addition to this intense incarnationalism, the
Tractarians were known fo r their sacramentalism, a term which refers both to their reverence
for the sacraments of the Church and to the broader concept of their awareness of the
transcendent as sacramentally and analogically present in the material world and in human
life.
This belief was not lost on Rossetti: as Raymond Chapman observes, the Oxford
Movement deeply affected Rossetti’s habits of thought by teaching her that ‘the visible and
invisible worlds were not sharply separated ’. (Bloom, Christina Rossetti Comprehensive
Research and Study Guide, 2004:36)
In Rossetti’s poetry and prose this belief is manifested in her consistent emphasis on
the need to read things and events in a spiritual light. The Oxford Movement ’s influence on
Rossetti extended beyond the strictly theological.
In Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode , G.B. Tennyson examines the
wide influence that Tractarian poetry and poetics had on the sensibilities of the Victorian age,
and in his postscript he delineates briefly the necessity and advantages of seeing Rossetti as
an inheritor of Tractarian poetics. Indeed, there is ample evidence that she was familiar with
the poetry of such prominent Tractarians as John Henry Newman, Isaac Williams , and John
Keble; but by far the most important evidence of Rossetti’s contact with Tractarian poetics is
a copy of John Keble’s extraordinarily popular and influential volume, The Christian Year .
In her copy of this book Rossetti marked certain titles in the table of contents,
highlighted numerous passages with vertical lines in the left margin, underlined individual
lines, and drew in the top margins a pencil illustration to accompany each poem. Given this
evidence, it is imperative that we consider what Rossetti might have absorbed from her study
of Keble.

26
According to Keble, God had originally created human beings as belonging at once
both to the natural and supernatural worlds. However, as a result of original sin, the direct link
between the human an d the supernatural world was severed; the world ceased to be an image
of the supernatural and became instead a mere shadow of it. According to Keble,
postlapsarian nature was restored by the incarnation and by Christ’s sacrifice, which made
nature a sacram ental symbol of the divine. Christ’s incarnation is thus the source of the
analogy which is central to Keble’s poetic. However, in the time since the incarnation, the
material world has become ‘much more alluring for its own sake ’ (Beek, 78), and the resul t is
that people have been blinded to the symbolic meaning of the material world.
Through God’s gift of grace, the moral sense, which has been clouded by sin, is
restored. This moral sense is inseparable from the ‘symbolic sense ’ in Keble’s philosophy; the
moral sense leads the individual to God, but only because the symbolic sense enables him or
her to see the symbolic representations of the supernatural world within the physical world
that God has created. As her copy of The Chr istian Year demonstrates, Keble’s sacramental
aesthetic was noted by Rossetti. Diane D’Amico states that ‘the most obvious distinction
between marked and unmarked stanzas is that the marked ones could all be spoken by
Rossetti herself ’; but more importantl y, an examination of Rossetti’s copy also reveals that
she often marked passages describing the emblematic, educative, and sacramental qualities of
creation.
The natural world plays an important part in Rossetti’s theology and aesthetics,
because she recog nizes it as a lesser good than the heavenly reward to which she aspires, this
world remains an important avenue to God. Rossetti, like Keble, is also extremely wary of the
physical world, worried that the attractions of the material and sensory can distrac t the
individual from the higher purpose of achieving salvation.
Rossetti often explicitly tells her readers to search for spiritual messages in the natural
world, but in a more ‘reserved ’ way her highly symbolic use of natural images also acts as a
model of how necessary it is to read all natural things for the deeper symbolic meanings they
convey. The harvest image is typical of Rossetti’s symbols in its effortless wedding of the
natural image with religious meaning; in doing this it embodies the meaning and method of
Rossetti’s symbolism.
In Goblin Market , the sisters Lizzie and Laura both hear the goblin men’s tempting
offers of luscious fruit. Lizzie rejects the fruit as ‘evil,’ while Laura is tempted and indulges.
After eating the goblin fruit, Laura ’s health and peace of mind deteriorate; and Lizzie realizes

27
that she must procure some of the goblin fruit in order to save her sister’s life. Lizzie goes to
purchase the fruit; she refuses to eat with the goblin men who torment her and try to force her
to eat, but she manages to withstand and then runs home to Laura, who is cured by tasting the
juices smeared on Lizzie’s face.
Any symbolic and moral reading in and of Goblin Market necessarily must grapple
first with the meaning of the goblin fruit. Many critics have seen the goblin fruit as the
forbidden fruit of sexual sin; however, as D’Amico points out in ‘Eve, Mary, and Mary
Magdalene: Christina Rossetti’s Feminine Triptych ,’ when Rossetti considers the first human
sin, Eve’s eating of the forbidden f ruit, she does not interpret it in sexual terms: ‘For Rossetti,
Genesis was primarily a warning against disobedience, not lust. ’ The passage from Letter and
Spirit that D’Amico cites shows that Rossetti considered Eve’s sin to be in her preferring
‘various prospects to God’s will ’ and diverting her ‘‘mind’ … from God Almighty ’ (179).
Bearing this in mind, we may do well to look in Goblin Market, not for evidence of a sexual
fall, but for evidence of a turning away from God.
Sandra M. Gilbert remarks that the poem pictures the woman writer who wishes to
experience the full fruits of her imagination, but as Rossetti, too much bound by conventions,
is unable to let herself or her female characters have this freedom. The biblical story of the
Fall in Genesis, the New Testament narrative of Christ’s temptation, Milton’s version of the
Fall in Paradise Lost are distinguished as underlininig the poem’s moral message about
temptation and redemption.
Gilbert’s allegory identif ies the goblins with the male precursors:
the goblin men … are of course integrally associated with masculinity’s prerogatives of self – assertion,
so that what Lizzie is telling Laura (and what Rossetti is telling herself) is that the risks and
gratificati ons of art are not ‘good for maidens,’ a moral Laura must literally assimilate…. Young ladies
like Laura … and Christina Rossetti should not loiter in the glen of imagination, which is the haunt of
goblin men like Keats and Tennyson —or like Dante Gabri el Rossetti and his compatriots of the
PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. (Bloom, Christina Rossetti Comprehensive Research and Study Guide ,
2004:44)
The allegory given by Gilbert associates the goblin fruits with the literary imagination:
‘ works of art – the fruits of the mind ’. The fruit is directly identified as goblin produce, its
flesh and juice , described as ‘ Goblin pulp and goblin dew ’ and suggest that is a synecdoche
for the goblins own fleshly and masculine and potent juices.

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The most fundamental ref erences are biblical. The forbidden fruit eaten by Eve, this
fruit which confers knowledge of good and evil, has the capacity to make the partaker
intellectually powerful like God. Even in the Old Testament Song of Solomon , the fruit and
the male body are to be found in. The biblical texts form a web of associations which connect
fruit with ale authority and knowledge as well as with the male body and its potency.
Milton’s emphasis on the superior powers of articulation bestowed by the fruit, powers
exercis ed by Eve immediately after eating, strengthen the links between fruit and verbal
artistry for that impressed by the evidence that the fruit ‘Gave elocution to the mute ’ sursaaa
Eve succumbs to temptation and eats the ‘intellectual food ’. Like Eve who retu rns home to try
out her persuasive speech on Adam, fallen Laura returns to Lizzie, meeting her sister’s
reproachful warnings with a paean in praise of the banquet she has just consumed.
Yaeger, starting from Monique Wittig’s statement about the those fruit s ‘like honey to
the throat/ But poison in the blood ’ (Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems,1865:8) uses in her own
treatment of Goblin Market , but her discussion is brief and marred by the fact that she
confuses Lizzie with Laura. She uses the poem as a personal allegory of the dangers and
pleasures experienced by the woman critic drawing upon male theory: ‘I would like to argue,
as Laura imp licitly does, that this gathering of male texts can also represent a feminist
harvest ’ (Bloom, Christina Rossetti Comprehensive Research and Study Guide, 2005:47)
While this is true, Yaeger misses the opportunity of seeing the whole poem as a commentary
on women’s dangerous yet necessary relation to the male literary tradition.
The goblin fruits are also the fruits of experience, Rossetti showing the women to
learn to control that experience in order to maintain their own fruitfulness.Women poets need
to de velop different strategies to avoid being overpowered by male influence to the extent that
they can no longer write poems of their own. Trying to buy the goblins’ fruit, Laura
compromises herself by giving away part of her female identity -her golden curl. When she
subsequently dines on the goblins’ fruit; she loses all taste for her home – produced food, and
from this we might infer that an exclusive diet of male texts seems to starve the female
literary imagination. But Lizzie, like a woman poet who realiz es she cannot simply buy into
the male tradition, is resistant to the blandishments of the goblins, refusing to swallow their
sales pitch.

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A. 4. FEMININE POWER

Goblin Market is a poem that explore s women’s relation to perception: whatching someone
and being looked at. Rossetti’s initial title for the poem , A Peep at the Goblins , focuses on its
scopophilic themes. While the word ‘peep ’ may evoke innocent playfulness , in the context of
the narrative itself it becomes overlaid with the connotations of furtive looking, stolen glances
at the forbidden. Both the feminine desire to look at the world and the prohibitions against it
are established in the sisters’ opening speeches.
‘We must not look at goblin men, ’ (Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems , 1865)
says Laura, even as she is ‘pricking up her golden head ’ to get a better view. ‘You should not
peep at goblin men, ’ replies Lizzie, as she ‘cover[s] up her eyes, / … lest they should look. ’
(Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems , 1865 ).
The goblins and their fruits became objects of Laura’s gaze and her desire. She falls
into temptation first because of what she sees and imagine and then secondarily because of
hat she tastes. When she no longer hear s the goblins’ cries and is prohibited to bu y more fruit,
her first reaction was to feel ‘blind ’, not hungry.
Unlike Laura, Lizzie looks without succumbing to temptation. Having a clear -sighted
vision, Lizzie is able to see that the goblins ‘looks were evil ’. (Rossetti, Goblin Market and
Other Poem s, 1865 ) And so, although the goblins violently pummel her with their fruit, Lizzie
resists them and victoriously brigs home the restorative juices in syrupy streaks upon her face.
When Laura kisses her, she tastes the goblin juices, and falls into a fit that looks like
death, Lizzie watches over her until Laura revives at dawn with her eyes clear and full of
light, ready to see the world in new ways and to picture her experience for others in the
language of story.
One of the lessons of Goblin Market is the visual/spiritual one of learning how to
interpret correctly, to distinguish between fair and foul: attractive goblin men betray;
delectable fruits equal poison. Certainly, this is the lesson Laura learned, and the one she
passes on to the children at the end of the narrative. Lizzie learn s something too; she learns
that a woman cannot live in the world without looking and being looked at.
This lesson learned by Lizzie is an impulse for the female reader to self analysis and to
formulate alternate visio ns of female subjectivity. Also , Rossetti invites her readers to observe

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the ways in which Lizzie has the power to be both spectator and spectacle without yielding
her individual subjectivity. This invitation can be taken as an encouragement to break the
rules imposed upon the women and to make them start gaining self confidence.
Goblin Market is one of the many Victorian fairy tales whose alternate visions staged
a social protest against the status quo by expressing a utopian desire for a better worl d. As
Jack Zipes suggests, these utopian tales had a characteristically ‘feminine,not feminist ’ angle
because of their emphatic suggestion ‘that utopia will not be just another men’s world ’ (Zipes,
When Dreams Came True , 2007:161) The feminism of these fantasies – and Zipes
specifically cites Goblin Market in this instance – involves ‘an intense quest for the female
self.’ (Zipes, When Dreams Came True , 2007:161)
Many other that have read Goblin Market have seen precisely this kind of qu est in the
poem. Yet at the same time that Rossetti struggled to envision a female subjectivity
encompassing action, desire, knowledge, and power, she was also constrained by the
conventions of Victorian society, which constructed the feminine as passive, innocent,
beautif ul, and helpless.

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SECTION TWO (B):
REPRESENTATIVE WRITERS. ICONIC FAIRY TALES.

OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) is a Dublin – born poet, playwright and aesthete. He is the child of
two parents who had both contributed to the collection of Celtic folklore, him being the author
of two important collections of literary fairy tales. Oscar's father, Sir William Wilde, had
retold tales of the Irish Sidhe in Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), while his mother, the
patriotic poet Lady Jane Wilde or 'Speranza', had used materials collected by her husband and
herself to write what Yeats considered one of the most important books on the Cel tic fairy
faith, Ancient Legends, Mystic – Charms, and Superstitions of Irelan d (1887). She also
wrote on Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages in 1890.
The name Oscar Wilde has almost become a synonym for humour, wit and for
scandals. It is forgetten by many readers that he was not only a writer of plays and
controversial books, he also wrote essays on art criticism and was well know for his first
collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
Wilde's two volumes of fairy tales, The Happ y Prince (1888) and A House of
Pomegranates (1891) were written, according to a letter of 1888, 'partly for children and
partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy'. (Killeen, The Fairy
Tales of Oscar Wilde, 2007:10) Their cre ation may have been influenced by his wife,
Constance Lloyd, who published two volumes of children's fantasies in 1889 and 1892, by
Wilde's desire to tell his own two young sons tales, by his mother's publications of collected
folklore, and perhaps by Yeat s's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1889), a
collection that Wilde admired and favourably reviewed.
Wilde's first volume, illustrated by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood, contain s five
tales, The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted
Friend , and The Remarkable Rocket and was a great success. Most critics still consider The
Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant the finest of the fairy tales. Four more stories, The Young
King, The Birthday of the Infanta, The Fis herman and his Soul, and The Star Child' were
collected as A House of Pomegranates , in an elegant volume designed and decorated by

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Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon in 1891. Wilde's literary fairy tales are influenced by
the Brothers Grimm and especiall y by Hans Christian Andersen, whose moralized and
sentimentalized versions of Scandinavian folk tales are sometimes amplified and sometimes
subverted by him.
Wilde's son reminded readers that his father spent much time in his childhood in
Connemara, and I rish materials also contribute to Wilde's tales. For example, The Young King
and The Star – Child may be read as accounts of changelings, while tales of undines and
fishermen are particularly popular in Ireland, though common in all IndoEuropean lore. What
makes Wilde's tales uniquely compelling is the elegance of their language combined with the
strangeness of their content. Stylistically, they are perfectly articulated studies in artifice and
surface, sometimes biblical in tone ( 'The Star – Chil), sometim es filled with sensuous and
mannered description ( The Birthday of the Infanta and The Fisherman and his Soul), most
often prose – poems in feeling. Yet this highly decorated prose is used to convey parables of
Christian self – sacrifice, of selfishness and altruism as in The Happy Prince , The Selfish
Giant , and The Young Kin g , or of the Christlike artist, as in The Nightingale , or to produce
cautionary tales of selfishness and narcissism as in The Devoted Friend and The Remarkable
Rocket .
The social i njustice and inequality protest, the sympathy with the poor and the
oppressed are directly or indirectly expressed in The Happy Prince, The Devoted Friend , and
The Selfish Giant, and later in The Young King and The Birthday of the Infant' , while Wilde's
anti-puritanism and anti -conventionalism are reflected in The Nightingale and the Rose and
The Fisherman and his Soul.
Wilde's fairy tales are also notable for their unhappy or unresolved endings; some are
simply sad, others ironic, many are deeply cynical. A House of Pomegranates is even more
sombre than The Happy Prince ; three of its four tales conclude with the demise of the
sympathetic protagonists as the Dwarf, Star – Child, Fisherman, and Mermaid die. None of the
tales has a conventional happy ending.
Wilde's tales are less designed as works for children rather than as attempts to mirror
late Victorian life in a form remote from reality and to embody the problems of the era in an
ideal mode. Furthermore, the creation of a fairy world enables Wilde to d eal symbolically
with social taboos and to reveal his repressed feelings and desires. The tales have been read in
different ways at various times. They have been viewed as studies in homoerotic relations (the

33
Prince and the Sparrow in The Happy Prince ). Ne vertheless, they remain memorable and
haunting additions to the genre of the literary fairy tale.
‘The mind of a child is a great mystery . . . who shall divine it, or bring it its own
peculiar delights? ’ Wilde remarked to Richard Le Gallienne about fairy tales. (Killeen, The
Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 2007:10 ) Before it ‘You humbly spread . . . the treasures of
your imagination, and they are as dross ’. (Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde ,
2007:10) Sanctifying and flirting with this impressionable subject beyond the generation gap,
he embraced the Shavian irony that youth is wasted on the young. A flagrant cross -writer, he
ignored conventional boundaries between juvenile and adult literature when he spun out tw o
volumes of literary fairy tales in the 1880s and early 1890s, persuading many like Swinburne
that turn -of-the-century writing for children – works like Graham's The Golden Age (1895)
and E. Nesbit's Bastable stories – provided the best reading for adults .
But when asked by a reviewer about the ‘suitability ’ for the young of A House of
Pomegranates (1891), Wilde remarked in a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘I had about as
much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public ’. (Beckson,
The Critical Heritage Oscar Wilde, 1974:10 )

B.1 AESTHETICISM AND ITS INFLUENCE

Oscar Wilde is seen as one of the biggest promoters of aestheticism in English literature. At
the age of seventeen, Wilde won a scholarship to Trinity College Dulin, which brought him
into contact with John Pentland Mahaffy, a professor of Ancient History that induced in the
young Wilde a profound love fo r aestheticism.
As mentioned beforehan d, the first collection of fairy tales that Oscar Wilde published
was The Happy Prince and Other Tales . Amongst these stories were The Happy Prince and
The Devoted Friend , two stories that revole around the value of fr iendship and charity.These
tales were published explicitly as fairy tales.
Wilde's best – known story, The Happy Prince (1974), gives voice to the two main
characters, as well as to a narrator. It concerns a bejewelled and gilded statue, the Prince, who
is befriended by a Swallow on his way south for the winter. Seeing ugliness and misery all
around, the Prince persuades the Swallow to peck out his jewels and peel off his gold leaf to
distribute to the destitute people of the town. Thus delayed, the Swallow misses his chance to

34
go with the other birds to Egypt; later, though there is still time to go, he chooses to stay with
the Prince, till in the depths of winter he dies of cold. The Prince, who now looks shabby, is
pulled down. God summons an angel to bri ng the two friends to Paradise. Oscar Wilde
apparently have come up with the story of The Happy Prince on a visit to Cambridge in 1885,
when he was asked to entertain some students friends.
The fairy tale of The Devoted Friend , in which a linnet tells the story of the friendship
between a gardener and a miller to a water – rat, is a rather negative story. The story begins
with a duck trying to teach her children a lesson, which the water – rat observes and sneers at.
The water – rat claims that the duck ’s lesson is useless and says that he values a devoted
friend over anything else in the world. The linnet happens to overhear this conversation and
asks the water – rat what he would expect from such a devoted friend. The water – rat’s answer
does not plea se the linnet, so he, in return, tells a story also called The Devoted Friend, which
relates the tale of Hugh the miller and Hans the gardener. Hans is a poor gardener and he is
forced to sell his wheelbarrow during the winter, so he can eat. When spring r eturns, Hugh
comes over to Hans and, after hearing of Hans’ hardship, tells Hans he can have his old
wheelbarrow. The old wheelbarrow is in need of repair though, but Hans has a plank he can
use to mend it. Hugh, however, says that Hans should give him the plank, because he needs it
and he is giving Hans the wheelbarrow. Eventually, Hugh has Hans doing all kinds of chores
for the wheelbarrow he was initially going to give him for free, as he already had a new one.
One night, Hugh’s son falls ill and Hugh s ets off to Hans, to make Hans get a doctor.
Hans then goes out to get the doctor, but falls in a hole and drowns. At the funeral of his
friend Hans, Hugh only remarks that Hans’ death is such a shame because now he is still left
with his old wheelbarrow wh ich he cannot sell. The water – rat, who identified himself with
Hugh, is dissatisfied with the story, as the moral of the story does not comply with his view
on devoted friendship, sneers at the linnet that the story does not have a moral and leaves. The
linnet then remarks that ‘he is afraid that he has rather annoyed the waterrat ’ (Wilde,The Happy
Prince and Other Tales,1888 :62)as the linnet thinks the story does contain a moral. The duck then
replies that ‘telling a story with a moral is always a very d angerous thing to do ’. Closer
inspection of the moral contained within the story the linnet tells reveals that it illustrates the
nature of charity and friendship, giving rise to two interpretations: either , if one claims to be
selfless, such as the miller , one should act on that basis, or , at the base of charity, there is
always a form of selfishness. The miller’s conclusion that ‘one certainly suffers for being
generous ’ then becomes a satire of the moral, which offends the water – rat, who identified
with the miller. ((Wilde,The Happy Prince and Other Tales,1888 :60)

35
The ending of both tales is different and, according to Norbert Kohl, each story falls in
separate categories: one in which there is an ending with a reward for the prota gonist and one
in which the egoistic nature of some of the main characters is reinforced. In The Happy
Prince , there is a reward waiting for the protagonists, as they are taken into Heaven by God,
whereas in The Devoted Friend the water – rat’s reaction to the linnet’s story only reaffirms
his egoistic nature. However, in spite of this not just The Devoted Friend can be said to be a
negative story: both tales have a significantly negative tone. In The Happy Prince , the
protagonists are eventually rewarded for their good deeds, but only by God. For the world
they leave behind, they are nothing but a dead bird and a shabby statue. The mayor, upon
seeing the dead bird, even says that ‘we really must issue a proclamation that birds are not to
be allowed to die here’(Wilde,The Happy Prince and Other Tales,1888:19) as if the place where the
statue stands is a holy place for the people. The Prince’s statue is taken down because it is no
longer beautiful and therefore no longer useful, whereas its beauty has been us ed to give the
poor a better life, giving it an immense value next to beauty. This situation presents a problem
with regards to Wilde’s own philosophies on art. On the one hand, Wilde promotes the idea
that art is merely art, the l’art – pour – l’art princ iple that was also demonstrated by his mentor
Walter Pater. This can be seen in the fact that the people of the city only enjoy and value the
statue of the Prince when it is beautiful. The value of the statue then becomes merely
superficial, only the way i t looks matters and it has no use in any way. The moment the statue
has lost its superficial value, it is no longer art and has to be taken down.
In The Happy Prince Wilde sees a certain important connection between life and art,
in which art is the example for life. The tale becomes more of a personal gain through the
proper creation of art – the statue of the Happy Prince is only truly art when it has shed its
outer layer of gold and precious stones, as only then it becomes original – than a fairy t ale that
propagates friendship and charity. This is also seen in the disregard of the poor for the source
of their sudden wealth: the benefactor is ignored, showing that the social value of art is
ignored and that it is merely appreciated when it is useles s and beautiful.

B. 2. IRISH IMMIGRANTS

Critics have pointed out that the story is best read as an attack on the utilitarian and pragmatic
mentality which governed public and political dealings with the poor in nineteenth century

36
London and an attempt to find a more compassionate and effective means of dealing with
what seemed to be an intractable problem.
Philip Cohen claims that the story ‘looks outward on human suffering and ponders the
problems of economic inequality and injusti ce’, (Killeen,The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 2007:21) an
analysis echoed by Jack Zipes, who claims that Wilde’s intention is ultimately to expose the
actions of the Prince as wrongheaded: ‘though Christlike behaviour is laudable, it is not
radical enough … Wilde uses the fibeha of Christ in the Prince to show the need to subvert the
Christian message’. (Killeen,The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 2007:21) Zipes is here influenced by a
straight reading of Wilde’s later article on The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), which
denounced philanthropy, arguing that ‘it is immoral to use private property in order to
alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property’. Rodney
Shewan, too, worries that the Prince’s sacrifice has been for nothi ng as ‘the beauty of the acts
of self – sacrifice seems marred by the obtuseness of their objects ’.(Killeen,The Fairy Tales of
Oscar Wilde, 2007:22)
Guy Willoughby points out that ‘in concrete terms’ the sacrifice of the Prince is ‘quite
futile ’: society co ntinues on in exactly the same way after the Prince’s sacrifice as before.
These critics are disturbed by the fact that the self – immolation of the Prince ultimately
appears to change nothing in the political or economic establishment. His gifts of gold an d
jewels have merely provided a local and temporary respite for some from the full rigours of
the capitalist system which inevitably marginalises so many. Either Wilde’s tale exposes
private charity as a misguided, though understandable, activity or it has no answers to the
problems of economic exploitation it poses.
Wilde himself was clear enough on his intentions in writing the story. In a letter to
Leonard Smithers he explained that ‘the story is an attempt to treat a tragic modern problem
in a form that aims at delicacy and imaginative treatment: it is a reaction against the purely
imitative character of modern art’. ( Killeen,The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, 2007:22)
This tale is not only concerned with the economic problems of Victorian London, but
also the dynamics of Irish immigrant life there. Apparently, when the Irish poor fled an
impoverished existence to work in England, tales has it that they believed they would find the
streets of London paved with gold because the British economy was such a pape r success.
Oscar Wilde uses a language and meaning that required analysis through a form less
obvious than the realist novel: the problem of poverty needed ‘delicacy and imaginative
treatment’ rather than a merely fictional version. A journey into the world of fantasy, where

37
statues and birds communicate freely and reeds take an anthropomorphic qualities,it must
begin within the normative , the dominant order , which for Wilde was the political and social
economy of Victorian London.
The story is populated with ‘Charity Children’, destitute seamstresses, poor artists and
the generalised masses who congregate in the back alleys and lanes. In The Happy Prince
Wilde sets up a disruption of the ‘real’ London – the London of Charles Booth – so as to
facilitate a more interrogative position and enable him to posit some type of potential solution
to the issues he raises.
In between 1841 and 1911 over one million Irish immigrants took up residence in
Britain. The number of immigrants was so great that by 1850 it was estimated that around 3.5
per cent of the population of England and Wales had been born in Ireland. Many of t hese Irish
immigrants arrived in their new homes with nothing, and were sent straight to the least
attractive areas, living and working in the centre of the cities where there was a pressure on
housing.
The Prince singles out the seamstress as being in pa rticular need, ‘her face is thin and
worn, and she has coarse, red hands, all pricked by the needle’ . (Wilde, The Happy Prince
and Other Tales , 1888:9) Of the female Irish immigrants 17 per cent became seamstresses,
and Irish women dominated the trade in L ondon. It was considered to be one of the most
difficult trades in the city, involving very long hours at very low rates. Many earned less than
five shillings per week for work of more than 15 hours a day, so the help given by the Prince
would have been welc ome. One historian notes that the trade of seamstress in London was
‘less a skilled occupation that brought pride in craftsmanship than oppressive labour at
subsubsistence wages’. (Killen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde , 2007:29 ) The match – girl
in the story too is typical of the child – labour the Irish were forced into in an effort to survive.
Wilde also exploi ts one of the chief symbols of the Irish for the Victorians: that of the
child. The Victorians utilised the discourse of childhood in speaking a bout the Irish in an
attempt to infantilise them. Declan Kiberd points out that British imperialism notioned the
association of colonised peoples with children very early in its imperial history:’ Within
British writing, there had long b een a link between c hildren’s fib riti and the colonial
enterprise, which led to an identification of the new world with the infantile state of man …
All through the nineteenth century, the Irish had been treated in the English media as
childlike ’. (Killen, The Fairy Tales of Os car Wilde , 2007:32)

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B.3. RELIGIOUS CONNOTATIONS

Critics have noticed the Christian message central to the tale. Philip Cohen points out that the
Prince and the Swallow must learn to ‘reject lower forms of pleasure as they come to realise
that the highest happiness results from Christian love’ (87 –8), wh ile Jerome Griswold has
noted the modelling of the Prince on Christ (103). However, Christianity is crucial to the
entire structure of the story which enacts narratively what Paradise Walk performs
typographically: both suggest a possible methodology for t ransforming the real city of
London into the mythic New Jerusalem, both suggesting that what stands in the way are forms
of egotism.
Wilde’s tale attempts to take in all levels of the English society in which he now lived,
from the exalted aristocracy to the immigrant periphery. The upper class is isolated and
distant, the monarchy has become reified, ignorant of the social realities existing outside its
ivory towers. When the Prince was alive he lived in the Palace of Sans -Souci, ‘where sorrow
is not allow ed to enter’ . (Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales , 1888:8) Thus
mummified, the Prince can possess no information with which to make qualified judgements
about the world as a whole. His Garden of Eden contains no Tree of Knowledge and is
isolated from all things by a ‘very lofty wall’. Epistemologically, the Prince cannot but have
been ignorant of even the meaning of the name of his home: only ever having access to
pleasure (later suggesting that he and the entire court had mistaken pleasure for happine ss –
‘happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness’ ) (Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales ,
1888:8) , the logic of its opposite can have had no phenomenological reality.
In The Happy Prince , English desires are articulated in the form of religious ritual .
The Swallow wants to visit ‘the tomb of the great King … wrapped in yellow linen, and
embalmed with spices’. (Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales , 1888:9) He imagines
that the ‘riverhorse couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne sits the
God Memnon’. (Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales , 1888: 9) These images are
primarily metaphors for the God – in – the Tomb of the New Testament and the God – on – the
– Throne of the Old. This Christian vision is mingled with exotic and erotic religious ritual
that would have meant only one thing to a late nineteenth century Anglican in the midst of
debates over Tractarianism and Ritualism: Roman Catholicism.

39
In The Happy Prince Wilde deconstructed the orthodoxies of Victorian middleclass
hegemony and reconstructed an argument which suggests that the periphery can only hope to
achieve some version of empowerment through the doctrines and discourses of the Catholic
religion, which many of them (i.e. the Irish immigrants) have brought over with them from a
foreign land. Diaspora critiques empire from within. In The Nightingale and the Rose
senational and religious issues would be approached in a much more symbolic manner.

B. 4. A DIFFERENT INTERPRETATION

Wilde's unorthodox mingling of spirituality and sensuality, framed in moral guise, turned the
Evangelical on its head in a darker, more disturbing way than MacDonald and Rossetti had
done. Celebrating self – discovery and transfor mation over self – denial and obedience, he
proclaimed in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young that ‘the first duty in life is
to be as artificial as possible ’ (1205).
Blending biblical language with homoerotic imagery and Protestant discours es of
heroic martyrdom, subverting the Victorian pathos of broken hearts and the cult of dying
children, his tales are strikingly sad and graphic portrayals of expiation and renunciation,
failure and death.Although they may be read like Rossetti's and MacD onald's tales as an
alternative religious discourse, or what Ellman calls ‘sacraments of a lost faith ’ (299), Wilde's
fairy tales also reveal why the child embodied the creative spring of his tragic sense of life.
From this imaginative construct, he drew not only his flamboyant style and fatal
boyish lover, but also his figure of Christ and the social conscience that compelled him to
write on behalf of incarcerated juveniles. The Wildean child finally explains the
mythologizing of his own public shaming and affliction in prison as a discovery of his Soul.
‘Praise makes me humble, ’ he said, ‘but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars ’
(Redman 249).
‘At every single moment of one's life one is what one is go ing to be ’ Wilde wrote in
De Profundis (Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis , "Epistola : in
carcere et vinculis, 2005:109) Not surprisingly, the sadness and grief of the fairy tales, which
launched his great years of creative production, have been read as allegories of homosexual
oppression.

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Wilde inscribed The Happy Prince to a special American friend, eleven years his
junior: ‘Faery – stories for one who lives in FaeryLand ’ (Schmidgall 154). Presupposing the
author's inner circle of gay male readers illuminates the existential estrangement pervading
these wintry tales as well as the warm valedictory kisses that liberate and transform such odd
couples as the happy prince and swallow, the fisherman and his mermaid. But while the
homosexual subtext in Wilde's other experiments in popular subgenres crackles with
insouciant drawing room wit and urbane double entendres, the tension between child and
adult reader and the presence of the child as auditor or observer in the fairy tales lend gravit y
to these works that deepen their resonance beyond the recovery of erotic messages from
London's fin de sièclegay subculture.
Not only did the use of a presumably less serious and traditional form generate a
‘willing suspension of disbelief, ’ but this to lerant and looser genre was well – suited to writers
reluctant to interpret their own works. Actuality, MacDonald, Rossetti, and Wilde each seems
to have adopted this mode from a need to express a larger, more personal understanding of his
or her own gende red spirituality than was available through conventional discourses.
Christina Rossetti, for example, was excluded from the preRaphaelite brotherhood that
her brother founded. When William Holman Hunt used her as a model for ‘The Light of the
World ,’ the painter was reviled by Thomas Carlyle for making Christ ‘a puir, weak, girl –
faced nonentity, bedecked in a fine silken sort of gown ’ (Zemka , 103). A lifelong spinster, she
dedicated her life to AngloCatholicism and the writing of poetry, much of it devot ional, in the
Tractarian mode.
Working with her sister, an Anglican nun, with prostitutes at the St. Mary Magdalene
Home, Rossetti dramatized in Goblin Market (1862) the psychological effects of succumbing
to temptation. D. M. R. Bentley has conjectured t hat Goblin Market was read, or was written
to be read, aloud by the author to an audience of Anglican sisters and fallen women at the
House of Charity where Rossetti worked. As U. C. Knoepflmacher points out, it is possible to
read this work as ‘an Anglica n tract, a lesbian allegory, a feminist manifesto ’
Knoepflmacher,Ventures Into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales and Femininity,1998:321) as well as ‘a
children's book attractive to such major illustrators as Laurence Housema n (1893 249), Arthur
Rackham (1933), and Martin Ware (1980) ’ .
As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's study of Goblin Market as a ‘cross – audienced poem ’
suggests, the work cut through many boundaries from the outset: ‘it was written for adults; it
used the form of the children's fairy tale; and it was about sex ’ (183). Yet Rossetti claimed

41
that the title work of her first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), which
established her reputation in literary London, was simply a fairy tale.
In 1904 when her brother William glossed thi s point, he only maintained that its
‘incidents are such as to be at any rate suggestive, and different minds may be likely to read
different messages into them ’ (Goodenough,Oscar wilde,Victorian Fairy Tales, and the
Meanings of Atonement, 1999:6)

42
SECTION THREE:
THE DECLINE OF FAIRY TALES AND THE BIRTH OF
NEW GENRE S

Fairy tales, such beautiful stories charged with so many hidden messages in them. ‘Thus
literature , by refusing to assign to the text a ‘secret’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an
activity which we might call counter – theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to
arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypotheses, reason, science, the law ’.
(Barthes, The Death of the Author , from Images, Music , Texts , 1977:3)
Fairy tales play an important role in the construction of gender roles since childhood .
In these stories beauty is directly related to meekness, good temper and submissiveness. Apart
from this, some fairy tales also establish a ‘commercial advantage ’ (1) of beauty. (Marcia R.
Lieberman, 386) Along with these associations , these tales se t a pattern for the life of women
as well as me n. (2)
The other ‘important ’ message these stories communicate is the notion of ‘suffering ’.
A woman has to suffer in order to attain the ‘happy ending ’. Her suffering becomes the means
to attain the reward. This reward is none other than the Prince, which often comes as a
rescuer. After the attainment of reward, the final resolution happens wit h the marriage
between the P rince and the P rincess. The life after marriage is not a topic of interest in fairy
tales. The idea of ‘happy ending ’ is represented through ceremonial ties of marriage.
From the beginning of the century and closer to its end, the publics favorite genre has
changed from dwarfs and goblins and witches to people who doesn’t let themselves be fooled,
always looking for the logical explanation of the events.
The manipulation used by supranatural beings in fairy tales is as subtle as the one used
by the leaders of this era upon the middle class. Slowly, the message that the fairy stories
conveye d about morals and the society’s prohibitions started being questioned, the people
wanting to understand the ir reasons . As new danger arouses every night, and criminals
roaming among them, the Victorians had to learn to look behind appearances and see the true
face of the one they were looking at.
With criminals like Jack the Ripper, the unknown murder er of the nineteent h century,
detective novels appeared to give citizens a safe feeling and make them be cautious of their

43
surroundings. Arthur Conan Doyle ’s Sherlock Holmes was the first detective novel to be
adored so much by the public by offering them not only mys tery a nd adrenaline, but also
access into the criminals minds, how they operate and clues to look for, rivalling Edgar Allan
Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin .
Fairy tales were not replaced only by the mystery genre but also by science fiction
stories . Alongside Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan
Poe who wrote detective novels, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and others opened the gates of
literature to a new genre know n as science fiction .
The evolution of Victorian literature resembled a tide: with all he economic increase s
and all the changes from the turn of the century, peoples’ thinking was so much influenced
that they stopped retreating in the world of fantasy and started looking for explanations, new
worlds known as utopi a and inventions to simplify their work.
If fairy tales were les sons intended to obliquely criticise that which was hidden behind
the mask of appearance , the detective and science fiction genre encouraged people to s tart
inquiring about the surrounding world, asking themselves all those ‘why s’ which has been left
unanswered up till that moment . Why not go alone in the wood s? Why not embrace the
forbidden? Why wait to be saved when you can save yourself?
Which were the factors which enabled detective novels to rep lace fairy tales? First, it
was the nature of affairs which has changed so much throughout a century that people had to
stop believing that that’s how things were supposed to happen and search for answers in the
logical field.
Christianity was a topic covered by almost all fairy tales , foregrounding for the most
part, the or iginal sin. In the late century , Christianity was still used in the novels but not as
lesson s to teach but as lesson s to question. The rapid growth of science and the Darwinism
atheist theories have accentuated the fears that God did not exist.
The Victorian period in Britain and America may seem to many to be the embodiment
of traditional values, but when this era began in the mid -nineteenth century, they were
anything but traditional. Victorianism was in fact a radical movement that emerged in reaction
to the kinds of social disorder that seemed to be spreading everywhere at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, a mo vement that deliberately sought to create new social rules and instill
virtues in populations that were seen as wallowing in degeneracy.

44
With c riminality being in its blossom , the literary world had to keep up with the events
and so the fictional detectiv e mystery novel came into the public’s reading list. Novels that
debated the dark side of society, the duality of mankind and others.
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes , Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Mary Shelly’s Frankenst ein, Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian
Gray are representative novels of this era because of the opics they approach.
The Victorians had faith in progress, especially that crimes could be beaten. While the
general pattern of crime was one of decline, there were occasional panic attacks generated by
particularly appalling offences. In the 1850s and early 1860s there were panics about street
robbery, known then as 'garrotting'. A virulent press campaign against garrotters in 1862
developed following the robbery of an MP on his way home from a late – night sitting of
parliament; and while the number of 'garrotte' robberies was tiny, the press created sensations
out of minor incidents.
The murders of Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888 were confined to a small area of
London's East End, but similarly provoked a nation – wide panic whipped up by press
sensationalism. Violence, especially violence with a sexual frisson, sold newspapers. But
violent crime in the form of murder and street robbery never figure d significantly in the
statistics or in the courts.
Another criminal that made the history remember its name was Amelia Dyer. She wa s
the most profilic serial – killer in history, murdering infants in her care over 20 year period in
Victorian Britain.
All these murders helped create numerous novels based on tiny starting from them.
While the se novels are included in the gothic horror genre , they also u se fictional elements
that make them part of the science fiction genre.
While Jules Verne ’s novels were more scientific romances, H. G. Wells ’s novels were
science oriented. Wells’s stories use devices from science fiction to make didactic points
about his society. For example, in The Time Machine (1895), the technical details of the
machine are glossed over quickly so that the Time Traveller can tell a story that criticizes the
stratification of English society
The differences between Verne and Wells highlight a tension that would exist in
science fiction throughout its history. The question of whether to present realistic technology

45
or to focus on characters and ideas has been ever – present, as has the question of whether to
tell an exciting story or make a didactic point.
Nowadays , genres have combined so much that more than half of todays’ li teratur e is
a combination of at least two genre s. The stories with supranatural being s and mystery are the
most popular, sometimes being classic f airy tales with changes in them , so that they reflect
another vision on the tales, helping the reader to became more involved in the storyline .
Those type of stories are called fanfiction.
Even though classical fairy tales will always remain with us, it is more exciting to
create new versions of them, where the white horse has became a last model car or even a
spaceship and Prince Charming is a bad boy type with self – esteem issues and danger
following him. Long lost are the fairies, witches and miraculous herbs; they have been
replaced with last generation of gadgets that contain all the information one had to barter for
in the past at considerably smaller costs.

46

CONCLUSION S

‘In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that
fairy tales should be respected.’
(Charles Dickens, Frauds on the Fairies )

This paper dwells on fairy tales and their i nfluence on the nineteenth century literary markets.
Their common themes or topics, their economic, social and cultural background, their
targeted readerships were looked into so as to follow and understand the fall and rise of this
genre.
Starting from the definition of the term fairytale and ending with the similarities and
differences between the oral folk tale and the classic fairytale, new delimitation s of the
literary genre ha ve been emphasized. Oral folk tales were the first kind of imaginary work s
that took shape at the beginning of the Middle Ages; they were created by ordinary people
from the lower class for ordinary people of the lower class. The main goal of folk stories was
to hide people‘s voice behind symbols and metaphors.
In a feudal age with a patriarchal and totalitarian system the only way to talk about
one‘s dreams, desires, political discontent, social frustrations, or about life in general was
through allegory. In a time when people were left with nothing but hoping, magic was the
solution. Such a huge impact had thes e stories on the society that even people from the upper
classes began to show a particular interest in them, in fact the kings themselves have
introduced these folk tales to the rich and educated society, they had them written down and
immortalized. A new literary genre was being born. This was the moment when oral folk tales
started being recorded and became written fairy tales.
Based on the evolution of the society and the activities that were predominant, the
birth of a new genre has been highlighted wi th its representative novels and the repercussions
over this new type of stories.

47

EXPLANATORY ENDNOTES
(1) In her essay Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy
Tale Lieberman explains that ‘ Since girls are chosen for their beauty, it is easy for a child to
infer that beauty leads to wealth, that being chosen means getting rich ’. Hence forth ‘ Beauty
has an ob viously commercial advantage…’ sursa incompleta

(2) Snow White propagate s the ideal of the industrious, submissiv e and obedient woman when
she works in the house of the seven dwarfs. She cleans their house, cook s food for them and
tella them to wash their hands before eating food. Cinderella also depicts the importance of
being submissive, worthy an d virtuous in orde r to marry a P rince.

(3) This motif is also recurrent in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

48

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