The Nightingale and the Rose

“The Nightingale and the Rose,” like many stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales, is a melancholy fable about a protagonist who sacrifices herself for love. Initially, the story appears to follow a structure and character arrangement typical of fairy tales. The lovelorn young Student appears to be the typical hero-figure who must fulfill a trial to win his love’s hand. Such “tests” of love are a common narrative device in fairy tales, from “Aladdin” to “Cinderella.” The Professor’s daughter is the maiden-figure whose love is the object of the hero’s desire. When the Nightingale determines to undertake the trial on behalf of the helpless Student, she assumes the role of the helper-figure, like the genie of “Aladdin” or fairy godmother of “Cinderella,” and becomes essential to the hero’s success. The Nightingale then approaches three trees in order to complete the trial—a structural parallel to traditional fairy tales, which frequently feature events or items occurring in threes.

The Nightingale’s sympathy for the Student and idealization of love is the central force moving the story. She has long anticipated an ideal lover, remarking toward the beginning of the story that she sings of such a person “night after night […] [telling] his story to the stars” (58). She sees the Student as the fulfillment of her desires and, alone of the creatures and plants in the garden, “underst[ands] the secret of the Student’s sorrow” (60). Her decision to sacrifice herself for the red rose is the most heroic act of the story, though her justification for doing so—“what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?” (62)—ultimately proves ironic. The Nightingale has a much more powerful heart than the Student and grasps The Nature of Love and Sacrificing Oneself for Love far better. Her speech exalting love over philosophy and power similarly places her at odds with the hyper-intellectual Student. Notably, she anthropomorphizes “Love,” “Philosophy,” and “Power,” capitalizing their names and giving them genders. Her description of love specifically suggests an angel, drawing on biblical imagery of wings, fire, honey, and incense: “[F]lame-coloured are [Love’s] wings, and coloured like flame is his body. His lips are sweet as honey, and his breath is like frankincense” (62). This description gives these abstract ideals tangibility, yet again challenging the Student’s perception of Love as “unpractical” due to its inherently mysterious qualities.

The Student’s remarks on the Nightingale after listening to her sing to the Oak-tree serve as the first indication that the Student is too shallow to deserve the Nightingale’s sacrifice. He pulls out a notebook and pencil, a significant hint in itself that he relies too heavily on intellect rather than feeling. Ironically, it is the Nightingale he accuses of lacking emotion, saying that “she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity” (63). Also ironic is his assertion that “she would not sacrifice herself for others” as she only thinks of music (63). He further laments that it is “a pity […] that [her notes] do not mean anything, or do any practical good” (63). The passage exemplifies dramatic as well as situational irony, as the reader is aware that the Nightingale is not only making a major sacrifice for the Student but informing him through her supposedly meaningless song. The Student’s clearly misinformed monologue critiques the utilitarian thinkers and critics of aestheticism who do not recognize The Value of Beauty and Art in and of themselves but rather believe they must do some “practical good.” The Student’s claim that “everybody knows that the arts are selfish” implies a larger cultural understanding that art without immediate function is worthless and shallow (63), hence clarifying that Wilde is directing this critique at his contemporaries.

Wilde lingers on the Nightingale’s sacrifice, his slow description of the Nightingale’s death and steady formation of the rose allowing the reader to partake in the Nightingale’s pain. The Nightingale’s singing crescendos in both physical and emotional intensity, as she traces the “life cycle” of love from childhood to the grave, climaxing with the “Love that is perfected by Death” and “dies not in the tomb” (65). Notably, the Nightingale is not singing specifically about the Student, but about love as an ideal. Her last burst of music is so glorious that the moon hears it and “forg[ets] the dawn, and linger[s] on in the sky” (65)—a testament to the power of beauty and love to move the world around her.

It is then almost absurd when the Student opens his window and, on seeing the rose, proclaims, “Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! […] I have never seen any rose like it in my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name” (65-66). The dramatic irony of the Student’s total obliviousness as to the origins of the rose and his insistence that the beauty of the rose must warrant a long scientific name contrasts with the visceral description of the Nightingale’s death. It is also significant that while the Nightingale’s song caught the attention of the moon, faraway shepherds, and the sea, the Student apparently did not hear it. This suggests that the Student is completely cut off from his senses and from appreciation for love and beauty, in another indication of The Limits of Materialism and Pragmatism.

Wilde again subverts expectations at the end of the fairy tale; instead of the Student happily dancing with the Professor’s daughter, the girl rejects him due to his lack of wealth. Like the Student’s anticlimactic discovery of the rose, this bitter ending strengthens the tragedy of the Nightingale’s death.

By the story’s end, Wilde associates materialism, rationalism, and cold intellectualism with each other, and frames them as opposing forces to love, beauty, and art. Book-learning is shown to be shallow and self-obsessed; the learned Student cannot understand the Nightingale, but the Oak-tree can. The Student criticizes the Nightingale for singing of nothing, but the Nightingale’s song creates the rose. Wilde’s argument is that beauty does create and give meaning, but not in the “practical” way prized by the Student or by the Professor’s daughter, who prefers the market value of jewels to the more meaningful gift of the rose. This pointed criticism of contemporary cultural norms—the intellectual pragmatism of the Student and the materialism of the professor’s daughter—is unusual in a fairy tale. The protagonist and most sympathetic character of the story, the Nightingale, is a devotee of beauty and love for their own sake, not for any practical purpose.