Love and Compassion Theme Analysis

Many of Oscar Wilde’s works contain allusions to homosexuality, in large part due to his own sexual preferences—he was famously put on trial and imprisoned in 1895 for his homosexuality, as Victorian society at the time was still notoriously conservative. In “The Happy Prince,” love—arguably including homosexual love—forms the central motivations for the protagonists. In contrast, narcissism drives the story’s main antagonists and leads people to make judgements about others—judgements that benefit their own worldview but cause moral impoverishment. Love and compassion, in turn, combat the devastating consequences of the status quo. As the story presents an extremely positive perspective on love and compassion, it also defends homosexuality as a positive form of love.

The Happy Prince’s compassion for the townspeople and the Swallow’s love for the Prince motivate their heroics. When the Prince initially describes his transformation into a statue, he outlines the feeling of compassion that seeing the townspeople’s suffering awoke in him. As he says, “they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep.” Seeing suffering leads him to weep, a clear proof of the compassion that will come to motivate him.

Although the Swallow starts out with more selfish motivations, the Prince evokes a similar sense of compassion in the bird. The Swallow at first expresses the desire to leave for the warmth of Egypt, but the Prince looks “so sad that the little Swallow” ends up promising to stay and act as messenger despite the cold. The allusion to the cold foreshadows the scale of sacrifice that remaining will demand from the Sparrow—it will eventually grow so cold that he will perish. However, the Sparrow’s compassion pushes him to overcome his fears in the name of helping both the Prince and those the Prince cares about.

Actions born of compassion also notably lead to personal feelings of pleasure. When the Swallow returns to tell the Prince about his success in helping distribute his jewels to those in need, he remarks, “It is curious […] but I feel quite warm now, although it is so cold.” The Prince replies, “That is because you have done a good action.” The story draws a direct connection between seeing suffering to compassion and from acts of compassion to feeling good about oneself.

The Swallow’s love for the Happy Prince also alludes to homosexuality, ultimately affirming it as a positive form of love and catalyst for compassion. Non-human characters throughout the story are gendered. For example, the Swallow had initially delayed his trip to Egypt for “he was in love with the most beautiful Reed,” yet he soon “felt lonely and began to tire of his lady-love.” Though the two characters are not human, their relations match a traditionally heterosexual pairing and present the Swallow as a creature in search of a romantic partner. When the Swallow initially meets the Prince, he sees him weeping and is “filled with pity.” He continues to delay his trip to Egypt to help the Prince, and ultimately promises “I will stay with you always” once the Prince is left blind. The extremity of this dedication and lifelong promise exceeds the bounds of platonic love—it also shows the ways that compassion can result in and harmonize with love.

The scene of the Swallow’s death, in turn, exposes the reciprocal love between the Prince and the Swallow. As winter comes and the Swallow begins to freeze, “he would not leave the Prince, he loved him too well.” He bids farewell and asks to kiss the Prince’s hand, but the Prince replies, “you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you.” In the end, he kisses the Happy Prince and “[falls] down dead at his feet,” after which “a curious crack sounded inside the statue […] the leaden heart had snapped right in two.” Not only does this death scene include a confession of love—the heartbreak that the Prince undergoes resembles similar conclusions in other heterosexual fairy tales, where love and heartbreak take on a mythical scope. Their love forms the heart of their ethical actions, which leads to a deep defense of the moral purity of homosexuality (in stark contrast to the strict homophobic norms popular at that time in Victorian England).

In the end, Wilde uses this story both as a subtle defense of homosexuality and a more direct proclamation of the centrality of love and compassion in human affairs. Love trumps all other values in this fairytale universe, from materialistic to artistic. Whereas beauty generates shallow pleasures, love leads directly to the eternal—to the kinds of actions that warrant praise from God, in this case. These conclusions, while quite optimistic on the surface, carry real nuance in the context of the difficulties that Wilde faced for his own sexuality—homosexuality would not have been seen as a theme appropriate for children, let alone a subject of proper morality.