Response: The Nightingale and the Rose

'She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses,' cried the young student, 'but in all my garden there is no red rose.'

Thus begins Oscar Wilde's fairy tale The Nightingale and the Rose, the ridiculous yet sad story of an oblivious lover and the too-earnest bird who helps him. As I mentioned in my response to The Happy Prince, despite Wilde's gay iconicity, it's not necessarily clear at first pass the ways in which his fairy tales might be read as queer. But in this one, there's an interesting tension between what seems to be a satire - or at least a pointed critique - of romantic love, and a valorization of the same, and I think this tension is a good thing to look at in order to see a how The Nightingale and the Rose might be read queerly.

In The Happy Prince, Wilde shows pairs of characters in a variety of relationships: familial, romantic, friendly. And the ones that are the most successful and laudable in that story are the male-male relationships (or the relationship between a man and his Art). One of the negatively portrayed hetero relationships in that story is that of the girl at the palace and her lover. The beloved in The Nightingale and the Rose seems to be almost a reprise of this palace girl (though this girl doesn't actually live in the palace, it's at a ball given by a prince that they might woo, and both girls are terribly oblivious, insensitive people). But unlike in The Happy Prince, in The Nightingale and the Rose Wilde has not created a city of twosomes so that we can see a broad schema of the value he ascribes to various relationships. Instead, we have a chain of relationships all differently problematized: girl/young student - young student/nightingale - nightingale/rose. And all of these are opposite-sex.

It's unconvincing, then, to suggest that the presentation of the relationship between the young student and his beloved is a critique of hetero love in this story. If it's a critique of love, it seems to be a critique of all loves.

I've been reading this book How to Be Gay by David Halperin. I'm only half-way through so far, and I'm not sure how convincing his arguments will turn out for me. That said, he has a lot of interesting and really smart things to say. His book is about gayness as a cultural practice: he is interrogating the stuff of (white, anglophone) gay culture, and asking why, even post-Stonewall, (white, anglophone) gay male culture continues to include divas and interior design. Of course Wilde's oeuvre is canonical - foundational, even - for the culture Halperin is investigating. How to Be Gay will likely merit its own post on this blog at some point, but in the meanwhile I think some of his ideas about melodrama and camp might be useful in reading The Nightingale and the Rose. I'm not sure that Wilde's story would exactly fit into Halperin's definition of melodrama or camp. But The Nightingale and the Rose does share a major similarity to these two modes in its "simultaneous coincidence of passionate investment and alienated bemusement, so typical of gay male culture."

There's nothing good to say about the relationship of the girl and the young student: both are contemptible people, and though we don't exactly wish for his rejection at the end of the story, we certainly aren't surprised that the lover has mis-estimated the situation. There's a mis-estimation on the part of the nightingale as well, of course: she thinks that the young student's love is worth the sacrifice of her life. But she acts out of generosity, and we are on her side.

We relate, and we do not relate. We are better than, we are not as good as, we are just the same. If we asked Halperin, I think he'd say that the gayness of this story inheres in the tension between the involvement and the detachment that the story demands of its readers.

Though there's clearly much more to say on these matters, and though I've left the titular relationship of the nightingale to the rose almost completely out of the discussion, I'm going to wrap up this post and move on to The Selfish Giant, but I suspect some of these ideas will bear coming back to. In the meanwhile, I'm going to offer two passages from How to Be Gay that I will be keeping in mind as I continue to read Wilde.

It is camp's alienated queer perspective on socially authorized values that reveals Being to be a performance of being ("Being-as-Playing-a-Role") and that enables us to see identities as compelling acts of social theatre, instead of as essences. [...] By refusing to accept social identities as natural kinds of being, as objective descriptions of who you are, and by exposing them, instead, as performative roles, and thus as inauthentic, stigmatized groups achieve some leverage against the disqualifications attached to those identities. By putting everything in quotation marks, especially anything "serious" - and thereby opening a crucial gap between actor and role, between identity and essence - camp irony makes it possible to get some distance on "your" self, on the "self" that society has affixed to you as your authentic nature, as your very being. [...] Converting serious social meanings into trivial ones is not only an anti-social aesthetic practice, then. It is also the foundation of a political strategy of social contestation and defiance.

...and...

But to derealize dominant heterosexual or heteronormative social roles and meanings, to disrupt their unquestioning claims to seriousness and authenticity, is not to do away with them or to make their power disappear. It is to achieve a certain degree of leverage in relation to them, while also acknowledging their continuing ability to dictate the terms of our social existence. That explains why gay male culture has evolved an elusive cultural practice and mode of perception, known as camp, which involves not taking seriously, literally, or unironically the very things that matter most and cause the most pain. It also explains why gay male culture encourages us to laugh at situations...that are horrifying or tragic. Just as camp works to puncture the unironic worship of beauty whose power it cannot rival or displace, so gay male culture struggles to suspend the pain of losses that it does not cease to grieve.