Your Oscar Wilde for the Day
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde (1888)
Alright, so since I'm in a 400 level Oscar Wilde class you might end up hearing quite a bit more about him because he is one of my favorite authors and a fascinating historical figure on top of that, not to mention smack dab in like, one of my top three historical periods to study and he pretty much dominates that era.
So, this story. It's from his first collection of fairy tales which were supposedly aimed for kids (Though he said he wrote to please Britain's children just as much as he wrote to please it's public--which was not at all).
There are so many amazing things in this story it it mind boggling how it managed to fit in like, five pages in the book I have. There's critiques on Victorian society, the use of charity, socialism, elements of the aesthetic movement, women, and also a very powerful story of homoerotic romance and love.
I mean, damn.
I really honestly want to write my 12 page final paper on the class on this story, I really do.
There's so many subtle and fascinating things in this story, but two of the most interesting to me, especially in terms of that homoerotic romance is where the prince is from and when his heart breaks. He tells the Sparrow he was born in Sans-Souci. "I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans- Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about me was so beautiful." That's the palace that Frederick the Great of Prussia built in Postdam. Thing of course being, dear Frederick is pretty much known for being if not flat out just homosexual, certainly having very strong leanings that way. He stopped the death penalty of sodomy in the army (instead just demoting them) and many other such acts, and there are quite a few people that historians point to as being his very male lovers. Placing the Prince there then implies very heavy things about him.
The second bit that's fascinating is when the Sparrow dies after kissing the prince, and the prince's heart breaks into two pieces. "And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet. At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost."
Okay, besides the fact of course my own heart just about broke right there, what we have is a very moving homoerotic romance in the story. However, at the end there, that last line about the frost seems to try and slide that by the readers, almost saying, no, his heart didn't break for love, it was this frost. It's almost like it's disguising that love under something else that might be more acceptable, though I wonder how many readers actually bought that.
There were a lot of interesting things to come out of our class discussion as well, but my personal favorite was when I asked the class if anyone else had been bothered that the Sparrow and Prince had ended up in different parts of heaven because that was just unfair! After the teacher finally stopped laughing, she said she was sure they could visit each other.