<i>The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales</i> by Chris Foss

For scholars aiming to understand the sociocultural import of various identity categories in the late Victorian period, the life and literature of Oscar Wilde have long been an invaluable resource. His society plays illuminate fin-de-siècle class politics with scathing wit. His geographical and familial ties to Ireland fostered his advocacy of Irish independence during the height of British imperialism. His relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and its infamous aftermath remains a flashpoint in queer history. However, despite consistent invocation of Wilde to apprehend the period’s dynamics of class, nationality, and sexuality, his name is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the most populous marginalized group in society: the disabled community. This oversight is robustly addressed in Chris Foss’s The Importance of Being Different, which, as its subtitle conveys, considers representations of disability within Wilde’s two fairy tale collections, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891).Foss’s dual focus allows him to address dual critical occlusions, writing the first book-length study of disability in Wilde’s work and contributing to the otherwise scant scholarship on his fairy tales. The book analyzes what it refers to as “disability-aligned characters,” a useful coinage that bridges Wilde’s time to our own. The term acknowledges that Victorian conceptions of disability are not interchangeable with contemporary ones without conceding that this discrepancy renders it pointless to use past depictions to engage with present realities. By precisely labeling Wilde’s protagonists as disability-aligned, Foss sidesteps accusations of anachronism while unpacking the narrative trajectories of a giant, a dwarf, a mermaid, a blind statue, and other characters that are stigmatized for their embodiment. As he puts it, “though there is definitely an overlap, an alignment even, between the lived experiences of Wilde’s colorful cast of unconventional characters and those of at least some disabled persons today, there is also a gap, a disjunction between them that . . . bears acknowledgment” (3).Importantly, the book takes the atypical physicality of Wilde’s figures at face value, refusing to read them as allegories for other aspects of selfhood. For example, gigantism or dwarfism are treated not as metaphors for homosexuality, but instead as representations of the experience of inhabiting a nonnormatively sized body. That said, Foss remains invested in approaching disability from an intersectional vantage point, parsing the complex interplay between disability and race, gender, sexuality, and—most frequently—class, tracing, for instance, the reciprocal impacts of poverty and illness or impairment. Put another way, disability is not a stand-in for different subject positions, but it does interact with them in a profound manner. The book’s other ancillary focus is on the realm of affect: it explores the fraught terrain that connects disability and various emotional responses. In particular, it seeks to nuance the “exclusively pejorative perception of pity” common within disability studies (85). Instead, Foss—building on the work of philosopher Kristján Kristjánsson, among others—posits that Wilde’s notion of pity may be a valuable tool for empowering disabled individuals.With a sustained emphasis on intersectional disability representation and the politics of emotions throughout, the chapters gradually broaden out the social configuration under consideration, from an individual to a duo to larger communal mores. The first chapter shows how Wilde invites readerly sympathy and identification with the Dwarf from “The Birthday of the Infanta,” while simultaneously acknowledging that our enjoyment of a story predicated on his exploitation echoes the “freak shows” that were a popular form of entertainment throughout the nineteenth century. The following chapter takes us from the Dwarf’s unrequited affection to the romance between a fisherman and a mermaid, a dyad inhabiting a narrative that insists on “the desirability of peculiar bodies” in virtue of their “difference and diversity” (54, 74). The final two chapters scale up from these interpersonal relations to examine the eponymous disability-aligned protagonists of “The Star-Child” and “The Happy Prince,” who, in various ways, function as agential benefactors to their larger communities, providing rather than requiring aid. The trajectories of these two characters demonstrate that the pursuit of disability equity necessitates “social transformation, not just individual alteration” (75). It is insufficient to empathize with a disabled individual or acknowledge them as an attractive partner in the absence of a concerted rethinking of how to cultivate a more compassionate society. The chapters build upon each other, each fairy tale becoming a generative intertext for Foss’s skillful close readings of their successors. Though it can be tempting to jump around in an academic monograph, The Importance of Being Different rewards a sequential reading for this reason.The fairy tales are united not only by their attention to disability-aligned figures, but also by how this attention serves to refute the sentimentalized didacticism characteristic of Hans Christian Andersen’s work. By contrast, Wilde’s love of satire, irony, and sarcasm yield tantalizingly ambiguous texts. Foss is careful to avoid claims of authorial intention on Wilde’s part; instead, he revels in the “multitudinous, and at times seemingly contradictory, possibilities” the tales offer (22). As such, his readings often resemble a rapid match of table tennis, alternating between viewing a particular character or plot as stereotypical then subversive, exploitative then empowering, monstrous then marvelous, hilarious then sincere, regressive then progressive. This methodological oscillation is, of course, the point: it mirrors the local ambivalence of the stories themselves toward disability and the more global ambivalence of a society that stigmatizes such a common facet of human experience. In short, Foss is uninterested in drawing simple conclusions from complex texts.The book culminates in a welcomely expansive conclusion that turns from children’s literature to Wilde’s prison writing. Wilde’s experiences with incarceration led to his staunch advocacy for prison reform, translating many of the disability-adjacent ideas from his fairy tales into a new context. His epistolary, journalistic, and poetic work on prisons highlights the brutality of the “hunger, insomnia, and disease” faced by inmates (132). Foss underscores Wilde’s attention to the deleterious effects of imprisonment on one’s physical and mental well-being, thereby expanding the project’s focus beyond bodily disability.Though in many ways the book demonstrates the analytical rewards of a monograph devoted to a single writer—an approach less common in literary studies today—Foss incorporates an array of Dickensian interlocutors to juxtapose with Wilde’s characters. Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Little Nell, Quilp, Jenny Wren, Blind Bertha, Mr. Sleary, and others are interwoven throughout the chapters to embody a prevailing discourse from the period that Wilde’s depictions tend to resist, one in which disability is a nefarious, sentimentalized, or miserable state—something that is deplorable or, at best, in need of charitable support. By putting the man behind Boz and the lover of Bosie into dialogue, Foss reminds us that Wilde’s work is not occurring in a vacuum but is a response to prevailing attitudes from his historical moment.Content aside, The Importance of Being Different is also an enjoyable read on a formal level. Appropriately for a book focused on one of the most whimsical literary genres, Foss eschews some of the stuffiness common in academic writing to have a bit of stylistic fun. He has a particular penchant for alliteration as he delves into the fairy tales to interpret the “complex conundrums that are beautifully bewildering and opulently opaque,” ones that refuse “decisive delineation of textual truths” (116). On a more substantive level, though, the verve of the prose is part of the argument. Wilde’s narratives contest the reductive though widespread conceptualization of disability as an unmitigated tragedy, a resistance baked in at the level of Foss’s sentences. The book underscores the powerful potential of disability to serve as a catalyst for intimate connection and social betterment, so why write it in a staid and dour manner?The Importance of Being Different proves of great interest to those interested in Wilde, the history of disability representation, fairy tales in particular, and children’s literature more broadly. One of its assets is that it does not presuppose knowledge on the part of its reader. For Victorianists uninitiated in disability studies, the introduction serves as a clear overview of the field’s central investments; for those working in disability studies but unfamiliar with nineteenth-century literature, comparable guidance is provided. The book also establishes a foundation for future explorations of the nexus of Victorian childhood, disability, and literature. For one, after turning the final page, I found myself eager for Wilde’s tales to be put in conversation with other writers who challenged the moralizing bent of children’s writing and crafted disability-aligned characters, including Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie. Ultimately, Foss’s evident passion for his subject matter imparts to his reader the vital importance of being different—and leads us to assert this sentiment with none of the wryness of Jack Worthing.