In“The Nightingale and the Rose”,the covert progression concentrates on the ironydirected at the Nightingale’s blindness and egotism behind her sacred sacrifice.This tale isWilde’s most elaborate work(Shewan 43).This is its plot development:the Student weepsas the girl he loves will not dance with him at the ball unless he brings her a red rose,butthere is no red rose in his garden.The Nightingale pities him and sacrifices her own lifefor getting him a red rose to fulfill his love affair,yet the girl refuses the Student’s roseand chooses the jewel from the Minister’s nephew.In the end,the rose that carries the lifeof the Nightingale is discarded on the street by the Student.Critics generally consider thetheme of this fairy tale to demonstrate the traditional paradigm of dichotomy,reckoningthe self-sacrificing Nightingale as a divine Christ-like artist(Willoughby 107),celebratingthe beauty she represents,and criticizing the materialism and utilitarianism of theVictorian society that the Student embodies,taking the hypocritical and selfish Student asan object of irony(Widyalankara 3).This is true as far as its plot development isconcerned.However,there is another narrative dynamic behind the development of theplot,namely a covert progression that revolves around the irony against the Nightingale’sblindness and self-centeredness.In this section,we will investigate the covert progressionthroughout the work in order.
2.2 Irony Against Adults Controlling and Alienating Children
In children’s literature,there are different ideological tracks aimed at children andadult readers,often in contradictory narrative tension between the two.In one of Wilde’sletters(1889),he states that his fair tales are“not for children,but for childlike peoplefrom eighteen to eighty”(The Complete Letters of Oscar 388)!In other words,his fairytales are written for dual addressee,i.e.for both children and adults.In this section,theironic covert progressions directed at adults controlling and alienating children would beexamined.
Two pieces of Wilde’s short stories,“The Devoted Friend”and“The Birthday of theInfanta”from one of Wilde’s fairy tale collections The House of Pomegranates,unfoldwith the irony against adults controlling and alienating children as their covert progression.Wilde wrote The House of Pomegranates with upper-class adult audiences in mind,so thiscollection is much more sophisticated than The Happy Prince and Other Tales,and someof its content is only accessible to adult readers.It could be argued that in this collection offairy tales,the adult reader is the real recipient of information and that the child is merelya“pseudo-receiver”(Shavit 94).
In“The Devoted Friend”,the“careful teaching”of children by their parents becomesthe object of irony in one of its covert progressions.As already mentioned above,this taleemploys an embedded narrative with three levels.In the development of the plot,the focusof the work is on the interior level of the narrative-the story of the“friendship”betweenlittle Hans and the Miller.In the covert progression revolving around the irony of thealienation and distortion of innocent children caused by the“careful”teaching of selfishand shallow parents,the focus is on the Duck’s teaching of the ducklings in the framestory and the Miller’s teaching of his son in the interior narrative.
Chapter Three Irony in Spatial Narrative........................29
3.1 Irony in Diachronic Spatial Shifting....................
