Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”
The selflessness of mercy (from the journal Children’s Literature)
In an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (October 1973), Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the virtue of children’s literature lies in the lessons it teaches about sacrifice. Bettelheim endorses Aesop’s “Ant and the Grasshopper,” “The Three Little Pigs,” and “Cinderella” because these tales advocate the repression of impulsive desires and show a child that pragmatic intelligence can plan for compensatory rewards. A clear understanding of the idea of sacrifice as a kind of self-discipline that provides for future rewards is essential to a critical reading of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” because the tale deliberately advocates mercy as an alternative to sacrifice. The compassion of the characters of the story radically juxtaposes the selflessness of mercy against the kind of utilitarianism that Bettelheim subscribes to where every sacrifice wins some personal benefit. In one sense, Wilde’s tale is an elucidation of Christ’s most frequent comment to the Pharisees: “Go learn the meaning of the words — What I want is mercy, not sacrifice“; and the similarities between the Happy Prince and Christ, we shall see, are abundant and specific.
Wilde’s theme of “mercy, not sacrifice” appears at several levels in the story and we can see it best if we divide the…
