My Well-Worn Copy Of Wilde’s Short-Stories.
Snacking With Panthers; The Short-Stories Of Oscar Wilde
by Jeff Baker
One of my very favorite short stories is Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant,” which I read as a children’s book in about third grade. The book included most of the text and the story was definitely there. I have since re-read the original many times and it was a few years later (also in Grade School, during those blissful days when a month stretched on for half a year) that I read Wilde’s famous novella “The Canterville Ghost.” That starts off as a spoof of ghost stories with the ancient specter trying unsuccessfully to scare off the Americans, the Otis Family, who are now living in his ancestral estate. While the opening is quite funny with the Otis twins turning the tables and playing pranks on the ghost, it gradually becomes something else; a well-done tale of redemption.
Irish-born Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was actually better known as a wit, poet and lecturer until he began writing the plays which made him a sensation during the late Victorian era. His shorter prose works were not as well known at the time but they have since been republished and are even available online.
Oh, yes. As for those short-stories.
Published in magazines and Wilde’s original collections, many of them are fairy tales, often with sad endings. Don’t look for a Disney musical version of “The Nightingale and the Rose” anytime soon. The real surprise to many readers in Wilde’s fairy tales is how they are driven by the morals and mores of Christianity. This comes as surprising given what was done to Wilde by the moralists of his day. And while fairy tales of that era can be full of boring pounding in of “lessons to be learned,” Wilde’s have none of that. They come across as entertaining literature for all ages.
I had not read “Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime” (certainly not a fairy tale) before last year. All I knew about it was that the plot concerned a man predicted by a fortune teller to commit murder. That sets the reader up to read a tragedy but I did not expect the story to be as funny as it was! When Lord Arthur realizes becoming a murderer is his destiny, he sets about to do away with someone who never would be missed; and he is just terrible at it! During his unsuccessful attempts I could imagine sound effects and music from Roadrunner cartoons.
Of course you have to read between the lines to get even a whiff of an LGBT character in these stories. Being Gay was against the law in the England of Oscar Wilde but knowing what we know now we can detect some “Gay sensibilities” in a few of the stories. Those sensibilities are just under the surface in Wilde’s only novel “The Picture Of Dorian Gray.”
My book of Wilde’s short stories is the 1979 Oxford University Press “Oscar Wilde, Complete Shorter Fiction” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19398.Complete_Shorter_Fiction edited by Isobel Murray which may have been the first book to publish all of his short stories.
Over a hundred and twenty years after his death, Oscar Wilde’s literary legacy is assured. So is his legacy as a wit; his witticisms adorn posters, t-shirts, web pages and tote bags. And Wilde is almost as famous for being a celebrity as he would be if he was appearing on the talk show circuit trading wisecracks with Colbert or Fallon or Carson or Cavett. (Wilde was MADE to appear on Cavett!)
And for eleven years, Lethe Press’ annual anthology of best Gay speculative fiction short stories was called “Wilde Stories.”
Jeff Baker writes about reading and writing sci-fi, fantasy and horror and other sundry matters on or around the thirteenth of every month. He lives and writes in Wichita, Kansas and when he once tried to write a sequel to an Oscar Wilde story, he found he’s no Oscar Wilde! He has (as Mike Mayak) a story in the upcoming anthology “Five Seconds Of Power.” He posts weekly fiction on his blog https://authorjeffbaker.com/ and wastes time on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jeff.baker.524042 and Blue Sky https://bsky.app/profile/jeffbakerauthor.bsky.social as well as Mastodon (as “Mike Mayak”) https://mastodon.otherworldsink.com/@MikeMayak