Elucidate the presentation of pain and perplexity in the short story 'The Happy Prince', and highlight the pretentious nature of Victorian society.
Answers
Answer:
Elucidate the presentation of pain and perplexity in the short story 'The Happy Prince', and highlight the pretentious nature of Victorian society.
Answer:
The Victorian era's pronounced wealth disparity and the widespread ignorance of misery among many of the wealthy are both depicted in "The Happy Prince." Additionally, it conveys the Victorian belief that as people became aware of the suffering of the poor, they would be moved to act out of genuine emotion or sentimentality.
Explanation:
In "The Joyful Prince," a prince has a happy and carefree existence because he is shielded from any knowledge of the poverty in which his subjects reside. But after passing away, he is transformed into a gold-plated statue with jeweled eyes, which is then erected in the middle of the city. Now that he is aware of the poverty that was previously kept from him, he is distressed by it.
The prince's state perfectly captures how many affluent people lived during the Victorian era: detached from reality with little to no empathy for the plight of the underprivileged. It also portrays a society without a welfare state, like Victorian England, where only the most basic and insufficient safety net could prevent people from suffering.
The prince, like many Victorians, is also moved by the gap between the affluent and the poor and uses his wealth—the gold and diamonds that cover him—to spread charity, in this case through the Swallow.
This demonstrates that kindhearted individuals, once they became aware of the destitute, "seriously and very sentimentally put themselves to the task of remedying the defects that they find in poverty," as Wilde argues in his article "The Soul of Man Under Socialism."
The Happy Prince does respond sentimentally—and with considerable emotion—to the sufferings, he has learned about in this children's novel. Sentimentality has a strong historical connection to the Victorians, who thought that stirring up people's feelings so they would feel empathy for others would inspire action and solve societal problems.
Private generosity, in Wilde's opinion, is inadequate. Although he believed that the social structure needed to alter in order to reduce poverty, he commends the prince for his intensity of feeling and his numerous stop-gap donations as much-needed good actions.
Character sketch of The Happy Prince.
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Why was the prince called the happy prince?
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