Response: The Happy Prince

First on my list for queer kids literature to read for school are Oscar Wilde's fairy tales. I'll post my entire reading list up soon, perhaps, but suffice it to say that I wanted to start with a few works like this that were older, and then work my way to the present. And Wilde's works for adults are so clearly gay, and yet so coded, that I thought perhaps his stories for children would offer a similar experience.

I think I had read these stories as a teenager, but if that's the case, The Happy Prince is the only one that stuck with me. I read them all through once this week, and was left puzzled. They were not as fun or juicy as The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Importance of Being Earnest. They seem neither decadent nor homosexual. And there was more Christianity in them than I had expected to find. But I let them bat around in my head for a day or two, and then re-read The Happy Prince to see if anything would emerge on a second pass that had eluded me. And something did emerge.

First, some broad strokes. The Happy Prince is the story of a prince and a male swallow, who start off merely friendly, but eventually end up as a couple, acknowledged by God. The swallow seems to be attracted to the prince out of pity, in the beginning, and it is only the swallow's goodness, or duty, perhaps, that makes him stay with the prince. But by the time the prince is blind, their lives and philanthropy have intertwined so much that they are now clearly in love. The swallow is so in love with the prince that he will not save his own life by leaving for warmer climes, and so he dies, and the prince's heart breaks in two. In their last moments together, the swallow dares to ask to kiss the prince's hand, but that would be insufficient expression of their relationship: "...you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you" the prince insists.

Illustration by Walter Crane

There are plenty of details in the story that enrich the vague relationship of the swallow and the prince. We are given details of the swallow's romantic history that are telling: not only has he failed at heterosexual love, but his choice of opposite-sex romantic object is absurdly inappropriate. She is a reed, and her flaws include being a "coquette" and being too "domestic": qualities traditionally seen as feminine. It is after this failed relationship that the swallow encounters the prince.

The prince stands on a "tall column," "beautiful as a weathercock," the pommel of his sword tipped with a "large red ruby." If the swallow's reed was phallic (her "slender" form attracted him), despite her feminine flaws, the prince on his column is all the more so. Is it worth pointing out that swallow is also a verb...? I don't think we can get too too far on naughty puns and phallic symbols alone, but they are one level at which we can approach the text, and if that interacts with some of the other levels, how can we resist!

A quick survey of the relationships presented in the story is telling, too. These are:

• the (vaguely homosexual) love of the swallow and the prince
• the (defective, unrequited, heterosexual) love of the swallow for the reed
• the seamstress and her sick son
• the matchgirl and her mean father
• the playwright and his play
• the two poor boys, who lie "in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm"
• the girl and her lover in the palace.

There are only two heterosexual relationships here: the swallow and the reed and the palace girl and her lover. We've already covered the problems with the first of these. In the second, the palace girl is shown to be a horrible person when she calls the poor seamstress lazy. Both of the female partners here are objects of ridicule for the reader, in their own ways. And so all of the heterosexual relationships in the world of this story are not only flawed, but flawed on account of the women in them. Meanwhile, we see a man - romantic with his "pomegranate" lips and "dreamy eyes" in his garret, living alone for his art - and the put-upon poor boys who just want to keep warm in each other's arms, like gay urchin-cherubs. And the transcendent relation between the prince and the swallow. So it seems that, at least in The Happy Prince, men do best without women. (It's interesting that we get one good and one bad opposite-sex familial relationship, too. I'm not sure exactly how to read that, except as a zero-sum.)

There are plenty of things to be said about wealth and poverty in this story, and I think these do intersect with the gender and sexuality issues Wilde presents. At the same time as his relationship with the swallow occurs, the prince also goes from happy and golden to sad and leaden (and broken). But for now I think I'll leave things here; perhaps I will be able to engage some of that aspect when I read the Russell adaptation. In the meantime I'm going to work through the rest of Wilde's fairy tales and see what else I can see!