Within many of his works, Oscar Wilde insisted upon the importance and relevance of beauty and the aesthetic in the everyday. The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, opens with a brief reflection on the art and the artist and follows with the infamous phrase “All art is quite useless” – a reflection on the decadence of the arts and their use as expressions of beauty1. Throughout his life, Wilde had romantic and sexual relationships with both men and women. Many of these relationships were documented and alluded to by Wilde himself, allowing modern audiences to analyze and deconstruct what it meant to be a gay man in Wilde’s time2. Beauty and the arts were Wilde’s main form of self expression, and it is through the symbolism and aesthetic descriptors within pieces such as The Nightingale and the Rose that Wilde portrayed his inner self to the public.
The Nightingale and the Rose tells the story of the young Student and the Nightingale; the former fearing the loss of his love due to his lack of a red rose, the latter moved upon seeing the beauty and despair of the Student and his dedication to love. As with the majority of Wilde’s tales, The Nightingale and the Rose ends poorly for the hero and the Nightingale dies in her selfless attempt to please the young Student and provide him with his red rose. Dripping with metaphor and symbolism, The Nightingale and the Rose can be read as an expression of a young Wilde struggling with unrequited love – unrequited by its very nature as socially unacceptable. Wilde is kind enough to make the symbolism of his story quite clear through the use of frequent capitalization, and the reader is given a broad selection of symbols to analyze including the Nightingale, the Oak Tree, and the Rose.
Throughout literary and poetic history, the nightingale has been associated with not only the poet and poetry itself, but with the idea of loneliness, and it was said that the song of the nightingale was a “cry for help from ‘some poor soul in purgatory’” 3. Through this first interpretation it becomes clear that the Nightingale represents Wilde – the poet, Aesthete, and lover of love itself. Going further in this analysis, the cry of the Nightingale – which plays a large part in Wilde’s story – may be a representation of Wilde’s lack of place and sense of self. Wilde kept many facets of himself hidden from the public eye, including his sexuality and nationality. In his youth and early 20’s, Wilde had many relationships with women and later married Constance Wilde, whom he had two sons with. Yet during his marriage he began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (among other men). Torn between his public and private realities, Wilde was living in between worlds – in a sort of purgatory – just as his Nightingale who lived within the life-giving branches of the Oak Tree 3.
Wilde’s Nightingale describes the young Student in detail, “His hair is dark as the hyacinth-blossom, and his lips are red as the rose of his desire; but passion has made his face like pale Ivory, and sorrow has set her seal upon his brow’”4. Though The Nightingale and the Rose was written in 1888, Wilde wrote the following just three years later, after having met and begun an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas:
My Own Boy,
Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days. 5
Though Wilde may have described the Nightingale as female, the similarities in prose are no coincidence – there is more than just admiration implied for the young Student, as there was for Lord Alfred Douglas.
Second in importance only to the Nightingale, the overlying symbol of the Rose within the story represents love itself; it is what the young Student longs for and what the Nightingale dies for in its selfless and poetic sacrifice. However, it is not just any rose that the Student requires, but a red one, a point that is insisted upon frequently throughout the plot by both the Student:
‘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.’…’for want of a red rose is my life made wretched.’ 4
And the Nightingale:
‘One rose is all I want,’ cried the Nightingale, ‘only one red rose! Is there no way by which I can get it?’ 4
Though the rose flower itself represents love, more specific interpretations rely on its color. The language of flowers, which originated in the 18th century, was revived in the mid-19th century during Wilde’s lifetime and received broad use across the art and literature of the era. It is through the interpretation of this language that each rose within the story is given important symbolic meaning. Red roses, the most iconic of them all, represent the “pledge of love and fidelity” – in other words, the purest romantic love 3. White and yellow roses, which the Nightingale encounters on her quest to find the Student’s red rose, represent “the joy of love eternal and pure” and “the jealous gaze of the eye”, respectively 3. For Wilde, however, all flowers broadly represented the same thing, and their existence and constant presence was of great importance to him:
…I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose…There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or in the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. 6
Through these interpretations it becomes clear why the red rose is of such great importance – even worth the sacrifice of life. As the Nightingale herself states, “…love is better than life and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?” 4.
Oscar Wilde was a complex man. A lover of beauty and art, he maintained a romantic rose-colored outlook on life despite the trials he later suffered. In his final piece, De Profundis, Wilde reflects on his tumultuous past with the same poetry that he instilled within his previous works:
I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that…I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came, sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart…I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. 6
Though written twelve years prior to Wilde’s death, The Nightingale and the Rose in some ways predicted it. Though, for a man who worked so hard at self-invention, it’s doubtful he would have wanted it any other way.
