The Aesthetics of Altruism in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

Abstract

This chapter focuses on two aspects of Wilde’s fairy tales. First, it will take up the cult of beauty promoted in them—the alluring objects that participate in a decorative regime of fin-de-siècle aesthetics and bring the fairy-tale world to life with their gleaming surfaces. I will draw on Elaine Scarry’s work on beauty and justice to show how these objects work like wands, enlivening the constructed world while at the same time enabling readers to breathe the air of story worlds and participate in a miniaturized universe of sensation. Then I will turn to the grotesque aesthetic that competes with and in some cases undermines and demolishes the floral and metallic beauty on display in the tales. In Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, beauty vies with what Susan Sontag has called repulsive attractions—sights that invite us to stare with horror rather than gaze with awe. Attractions both beautiful and repulsive have the power to move readers, though each with its own emotional vector, one moving in the direction of animation and generosity, the other in the mode of empathy and action. How do Wilde’s fairy tales shuttle between these two competing aesthetic regimes and how do those regimes take an ethical turn in ways far more subtle and compelling that the “morals” often attached to fairy tales? Or is that turn more intellectual than ethical, leading us to think more and think harder about the stakes in the fairy tales?