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| PJ Lynch's illustration for the tale |
I wish I could have recorded what I just witnessed. My little eight year old brother just
finished listening to an audio recording of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and
other Fairy Tales, and he came up to me after finishing the story, and
obviously after having thought about them to himself for a little while and
said, “Jess, there was a story in there that, well, I didn’t really like...” My little brother then proceeded to
recount in a most articulate and engrossing way the tale of “The Nightingale
and the Rose”. I could tell that
despite his assertion that he DID NOT like the tale, it had captured something
in him, captivated him in a way that I don’t think I’ve seen him be by any
other story, and that’s saying something because this little person has heard A
LOT of stories, great ones, many, many more than I had at his age. But I was amazed by how he narrated the
story not only with wonderful attention to plot progression, but also to
detail, and he recounted bits of dialogue almost as if he had memorized them. “And then he threw the rose into the
gutter...” after that last line of his narration, he paused for a bit, a moment
of silence for the trial of the story I guess.
And he then said, “And that’s why I
don’t like the story.”
“Why,” I asked.
“Well because it didn’t have a
happy ending.”
“But not all stories have happy
endings...”
“Well,” he went on, “Most stories
need happy endings to be good, and this one needed it. It just did.”
And a few more things passed
between us, but I can’t remember the specifics, and then he returned to playing
with his knight Legos. But then,
just now, as I was typing this he called out from the family room:
“The bird wasted her life... She
died for nothing!! And that girl
was just so annoying!”
What is it about this story, about Wilde’s fairy tales in
general, and perhaps all fairy tales, that strike a chord within the hearts of
so many, in both adults and children?
But I think this one is doing something different, especially in the
fact that it truly does not have a happy ending. In “The Happy Prince” for example, which I read to him two
nights ago, at least the swallow and the Prince sacrifice themselves but are
then taken up to heaven as the most “precious” individuals the angel could find
to bring to God. But here, as my
little brother exclaims passionately, “She died for nothing!”
What do you make of this scene? Why did the story captivate him so, while at the same time
infuriating him? I just had to record his reaction, at least in words!
