Oscar Wilde, Victorian Fairy Tales, and the Meanings of Atonement

Abstract

In 1889 W. B. Yeats was invited to the Wildes's house at Chelsea. The young poet, whose Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) was reviewed that year by Wilde, was asked by Oscar to tell his son a fairy tale. Yeats got as far as Once upon a time there was a giant, when the little boy ran screaming out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was plunged into the shame of clumsiness, the poet recalled in his autobiography (91). This act of storytelling seduction that backfired dramatizes how the verbal formulas of adults can pale before the authorial divinity of the very young. Even as they conjure ghosts of the punitive father, such sensitive listeners seem to determine the fate of adult words at their moment of utterance. As William Blake's Songs suggest, the literal-minded innocent can be a creative visionary as well. Children are never earnest in the way that adults are, Dusinberre states, which is why they became Wilde's most explosive weapon in attacking Victorian earnestness (261). The self-authorizing world of children, like the self-referential work of art, embodied Wilde's esthetic credo that [i]t is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors (17) and that self-realization is the aim of life.