The Devoted Friend
THE DEVOTED FRIEND By Oscar Wilde
As it is known, Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and writer who became popular because of his different forms of writing style, remembered as one of the greatest playwrights in the early 1890s. His work is characterized by two concepts of aesthetic: the moralizing aestheticism and the art for art’s sake, the second one being more prominent. Therefore, the stories action develops in the area of English high society with prototypes characters such as aristocrats, artists belonging to a mask rather than to a specific portrait. His tales can be easily recognized through the formal elements of irony, secret and causality and often by the symbolic elements such as numbers that it is believed to have biblical meaning. In terms of his short stories, sometimes he wrote beautiful tales for his own children to tell them before sleeping, but sometimes he wrote them to express the meaning of his statements or to show his great capacity of inventiveness. The tales were published in several magazines, in three collections entitled The Happy Prince and other tales, A House of Pomegranates and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and other stories. Each tale included in these collections has a certain moral derived from the content expressed by the simple style of text, as for the short story The Devoted Friend written in 1888 as a part of the first collection for children headed The Happy Prince and other tales. The tale of The Devoted Friend can be considered a story frame as far as there are two different narrative lines including two types of characters. On the first hand, there are anthropomorphic characters represented by the green linnet, an old water-rat and a mama duck who is teaching her ducklings to swim. On the other hand, there are human characters represented by Miller, Hans, the wife of Miller, the
As it is known, Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and writer who became popular because of his different forms of writing style, remembered as one of the greatest playwrights in the early 1890s. His work is characterized by two concepts of aesthetic: the moralizing aestheticism and the art for art’s sake, the second one being more prominent. Therefore, the stories action develops in the area of English high society with prototypes characters such as aristocrats, artists belonging to a mask rather than to a specific portrait. His tales can be easily recognized through the formal elements of irony, secret and causality and often by the symbolic elements such as numbers that it is believed to have biblical meaning. In terms of his short stories, sometimes he wrote beautiful tales for his own children to tell them before sleeping, but sometimes he wrote them to express the meaning of his statements or to show his great capacity of inventiveness. The tales were published in several magazines, in three collections entitled The Happy Prince and other tales, A House of Pomegranates and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and other stories. Each tale included in these collections has a certain moral derived from the content expressed by the simple style of text, as for the short story The Devoted Friend written in 1888 as a part of the first collection for children headed The Happy Prince and other tales. The tale of The Devoted Friend can be considered a story frame as far as there are two different narrative lines including two types of characters. On the first hand, there are anthropomorphic characters represented by the green linnet, an old water-rat and a mama duck who is teaching her ducklings to swim. On the other hand, there are human characters represented by Miller, Hans, the wife of Miller, the
Bibliography: 1. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/owilde/bl-owilde-defr.htm (read online) 2. http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde .