‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ contains many of the features we commonly associate with traditional fairy tales: a hero (the Student), a love interest (the Professor’s daughter), a helper (the Nightingale). It was the fact that she gave all of herself to create something beautiful. We would do well to remember one of Wilde’s most memorable aphorisms from his 1891 ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray (a novel we have analysed here): ‘All art is quite useless.’ The fact that the red rose turns out not to be of any practical use, Wilde would doubtless remind us, is not the point. The problem is that, as so often in Wilde’s work, the modern world is too practical-minded to appreciate art for its own sake (‘art for art’s sake’ was the unofficial slogan for Aestheticism, a movement for which Wilde was a prominent spokesperson). The Nightingale is the symbolic and total embodiment of this impulse. Artists often talk about ‘putting a lot of themselves’ into their art, or ‘pouring their heart out’ or ‘giving themselves’ to their art. So, viewed this way, the Nightingale’s sacrifice is not so pointless, since it produced a work of art.
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