Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage.
In case anyone is wondering why people study Oscar Wilde’s writings more than a century after he stopped writing, this one line from his reverse engineered version of “The Little Mermaid” might clear up things. Few writers in the history of English literature can construct a sentence with the dazzling style and panache of Oscar Wilde. His entire approach to writing was devoted to the concept of “art for art’s sake.” Above all else—plot, characterization, theme—Wilde’s writing is a testament to the glory of the written word. Not every sentence he wrote is a singular work of art like that quoted above, but most readers would probably be shocked to realize just how many actually are.
“My dear Gerald, women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
That the narrator of this story remains unidentified only benefits the sense of irony that is embedded within this observation spoke to another character. If one takes the “I” in the first-person perspective in which this story is written to be a surreptitious means of stating the author’s own opinions, then this assertion is very ironic. Wilde, though not without a solid foundation of heterosexuality in his younger days, is usually regarded in homosexual terms: thus the irony women not meant to be loved. What is beyond any complications is that in his literature, Oscar Wilde strove to understand women perhaps more than any male author of his age.
Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic.
Oscar Wilde is known as one of the great wits of literature. He is perhaps as famous for his epigrams—short remarks exhibiting an ingenuously satirical sense of humor—as he is for any of his stories, plays or novels. This opening lines of this story are epigrammatic in nature and a natural display of that inherent talent for expressing in a single sentence a wealth of insight into the human nature.
“All my pianists look exactly like poets, and all my poets look exactly like pianists; and I remember last season asking a most dreadful conspirator to dinner, a man who had blown up ever so many people, and always wore a coat of mail, and carried a dagger up his shirt-sleeve; and do you know that when he came he looked just like a nice old clergyman, and cracked jokes all the evening?”
Often underrated is Wilde’s handling of dialogue. Actually, this is a rather stranger oversight considering his reputation as a playwright. Of course, the characters in his plays and his stories often speak in much the same fashion and it goes without saying that he is not exactly what you would call a master of realistic dialogue. Spoken on stage by a talented comic actress, the above quote almost certainly would sound better than it sounds in the heads of the average reader. The point is that Wilde is a fun writer to read and his dialogue can be made all the more entertaining by trying to really put yourself into the character.
