Ломова Елена Александровна

Ученая степень, звание: Кандидат филологических наук

Место работы, должность: Доцент кафедры русской и мировой литературы

Казахского государственного национального педагогического университета имени Абая (КазНПУ им.Абая), Казахстан, г.Алматы

PROBLEMSE OF DEATH IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Аннотация

В данной статье рассматривается проблема смерти в английской новелле на материале прозы Оскара Уальда.

Ключевые слова: мотифема, трагическое мировоззрение, мастер парадокса, романтизм, романтизация смерти.

Annotation

This article observes the death’s problem in the English novel basically in the prose of O.Wilde.

Keywords: motifeme, tragic world-outlook, master of paradox, romanticism of the death.

The word “motifeme” is usually taken to mean the numerous manifestations of one and the same motif. In undergoing changes, the motif does nevertheless retain its own basic characteristics, but, in so doing, it may exhibit various shades of appreciation, meaning and style, as well as an ability to recur in space and time. [1].

The motif that recurs most frequently after the motif of beauty in Oscar Wilde's fairy tales is that of death, on which he reflected a great deal in his works. For example, he wrote in “De Profundis” that the tragedy of people is that they are only slightly in control of their own soul until they face death [1].

Almost all of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales end in the death of the protagonists. This is a reflection of the writer's tragic world-outlook. He is a realist.

The fairy tale genre simply allows the author greater scope for vivid description: animals, inanimate objects and imaginary beings are personified with human speech and thoughts; strange interiors, towns and palaces appear before us. But this does not alter the overall tone of the fairy tale, which is one of profound grief and sorrow at the imperfect nature of the world and above all of people. [2].

The writer extravagantly defends man's best qualities in his fairy tales, setting them off against evil and merciless death. It is noteworthy that the protagonist in the fairy tale “The Happy Prince”' is a statue of the deceased Happy Prince, that is, one who is in death's power. The statue is an apotheosis of death, a material confirmation of it, but it is continuing its life and struggle in a new capacity now. Moreover, it is only by dying and becoming a statue that the Happy Prince became aware of the value of life and of his own shortcomings. In order to atone for his previous negligence, his indifference to people's suffering, he took off his gold and precious stones with the help of the Swallow and gave them away to the needy, he made the poor children happy and provided them with food.

Some researchers into Oscar Wilde's works regard the endings of his fairy tales as weak, reproaching him for sentimentally philanthropic denouements: “At the same time, Wilde's critical judgments regarding individual aspects of the conditions of his time are lacking in depth, which is also true of his reformist illusions. The weakness of the endings is typical of most of his tales; as a rule the endings are not the integral outcome of all the developments in the plot” [3].

In the fairy stories The Happy Prince and the Selfish Giant the character of God who appears at the end of these tales, regards the noble actions of the Happy Prince and the Selfish Giant highly and consequently takes them to heaven with him.

Oscar Wilde, who is the master of paradox, made the most unreal, imaginary characters into the most human. In the fairy tale “The Nightingale and the Rose” the Nightingale appears to be much kinder, cleverer and more sympathetic than the Student, who only cares about his own feelings. The Nightingale gave its life, colouring the rose drop by drop with its own blood, so that the Student's beloved would respond to his feelings. But the girl and the student displayed amazing callousness, egoism and pragmatism. The Nightingale's efforts turned out to be in vain, and no-one valued its sacrifice. There is a didactic element in all of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales. The author condemns human failings and immediately produces splendid characters worthy of imitation.

There is always a definite element that prevails in Wilde's stories, the arrangement of the forces of good and evil is immediately evident. But not all his fairy tales have a happy ending. This makes their impact particularly artistic. The triumph of death reminds us of the transitory nature of everything earthly and incites the protagonists to seek truth and the meaning of life.

Wilde's admiration of beauty is one of the ways in which he confronts the ugliness of death. The writer extended his cult of beauty to people and things. Wilde's aestheticism is a striving for perfection. And no matter how the author becomes carried away by beautiful people, costumes and adornments in his fairy tales, he demonstrates that beauty represents a unity of form and content, the harmony between the inner and the outer world. One cannot help agreeing with the following statement: "Wilde is striving to discover whether good deeds or beauty are more important to man. The answer is the same in all his fairy tales. Doing good deeds; doing people a service, is perceived as incomparably higher and more important than beauty" [4].

In this sense, the character of the Nightingale is that of an ideal hero. It is itself beautiful, has created beauty with its warbling and has sacrificed its life so that love can triumph, since it is a grateful and unselfish devotee of beauty, love and art. One has to agree with the critics who wrote that, in doing this, Wilde was not afraid of edification: "Unafraid of edification and cleverly avoiding it, the writer Wilde confronts the child reader with serious moral problems, questions of life and death, good and evil and offers the reader his own solution to these problems, proceeding from a humanist concept of human nature, feelings and morals" [5].

Although they did not pay much attention to his fairy stories in England itself, moreover they threw Wilde into prison on accusations of immorality, researchers believe that it was precisely his fairy tales, on an equal footing with "The Picture of Dorian Grey", which made Wilde world famous: "In continuing to portray people in a mask of languid idealness which pleases them so much and to support the self-created myth that he was a rampant hedonist, for eight years he was working diligently and creating almost all the works which have provided him with a place of honour in the history of world literature. This applies to the two books of fairy tales "The Happy Prince" and "House of Pomegranates" [6].

Consequently, even Wilde's very talent, his fairy tales, are a kind of negation of death with its consignment to oblivion. With his works the writer has challenged death, which has occupied his mind, simultaneously frightening and interesting him with its mysteriousness and inevitability. Death is present and frequently predominates in Wilde's fairy tales. The author gives death its due, but it is not the aim of his protagonists, they do not strive after it. In Wilde's stories death forms a kind of line, beyond which a new life begins in another capacity, either in the form of a statue or in heaven, in paradise. But there are no rewards for the other characters, and nothing is mentioned about what happened to the Nightingale, the Dwarf and Little Hans after death.

Wilde asserts that beauty always covers up something tragic. G.B. Anikin regarded Wilde's fairy tales as romantic: "Wilde largely overcomes his own aesthete's views in his romantic fairy tales. His, aestheticism is only evident in the impressionistic and decorative nature of his style, in the refined nature of his characters, in the melodiousness of their words and in the exotic picturesque ness of the scenes depicted" [7].

While paying tribute to aestheticism, Wilde romanticized death. He even fried to find beauty and greatness in it. He did manage to do this in many fairy tales. However paradoxical as it might be, the death of the Nightingale is beautiful. It sets a kind of example, provides a lesson for soulless, dull-witted people, who are only busy with their own petty problems.

But even with all the romanticism of the little Dwarf dying of love for the Infanta, death is terrible and frightening in its senselessness and cruelty. In the freak's unrequited love for the beautiful Infanta, there is a tragic inevitability, an antagonism between beauty and the ugliness rejected by her, which resulted in the death of the little Dwarf. There is a particularly symbolic element in this work. In Wilde's works the Rose is usually a symbol of beauty and love, but here the rose is a symbol of death and disappointment.

The death of the Fisherman in "The Fisherman and His Soul" is also surrounded by a romantic aureole. The author points out directly that the Fisherman died through the fullness of his love for I the little Mermaid, whom he did however betray, when he gave in to the persuasion of his Soul.

In this fairy tale the human Soul of the Fisherman lived separately from his heart and was therefore cruel. It was precisely his Soul that deceived the Fisherman, enticing him with stories of a beauty who dances with white feet.

The little Mermaid did not have any feet, so the Fisherman was seduced by these stories about the beautiful dancer, whom they did not manage to find anyway. But because the soul because embittered without the heart, being hardhearted, it incited the Fisherman to commit crimes: he smote the child, killed the merchant and took from him his gold. The Fisherman rejected Wisdom and riches, believing that Love means more than anything else.

But the little Mermaid perished because of his betrayal. He died of grief at the same time as she did. His love for a fantastical; being was the reason why the Fisherman sent away: his Soul, since the little Mermaid, who was the only daughter of the King of the sea, could only fall in love with the Fisherman if he sent away his Soul. Because of this, on the orders of the Priest, they were buried in the Field of the Fullers, where; strange beautiful flowers grew. The Priest was' troubled by the beauty of the flowers, so he gave his blessing to the Sea-folk. Here the flowers were a. symbol of death, beauty and love all at the same time.

It is customary to refer to Edgar Alan Poe, who wrote poetically about death and depicted it as beautiful, as the bard of death. But Oscar Wilde also depicted the peculiar beauty of death which results from love. Death accompanies Love in Wilde's fairy tales just as beauty does. For example, in the fairy story "The Star-Child", death pursued the protagonist right from birth and overtook him at the age of 16. Since the Star-Child was arrogant and cruel, he was as if' already dead, unable to act kindly and to be responsive to others.

The paradox is that his soul only awakened after he lost his Beauty, which he regarded as his main virtue. It was only humaneness that restored his external Beauty to him. But this struggle deprived him of his strength, and Death overcame him in his devastated and weakened state. The shadow of death accompanied him throughout his life in the form of the dangers that beset him, never letting him out of its sights until it finally seized him.

Death also spread its black wings over another protagonist in the fairy tale "The Young King". The parents of the young King were mortified, since the daughter of the old King had given birth to a son in a secret marriage to a stranger much beneath her in station, who had made the young princess love him by the wonderful magic of his lute-playing, and this son had been given to a goatherd. It was only on his deathbed that the old King repented of his sins and iced by declared the young man his heir. Again Death interfered in the fate of the young King, having awarded him power and riches. It was precisely death that he was obligated to for everything, for bad and for good. But he preferred Beauty to Death, collecting all that was rare and valuable. Gradually his palace came to represent the triumph of Beauty. But when he witnessed in his dreams the hard work which went into the beauty and splendour of his royal raiment, he did not hesitate to reject it, arraying himself in his former goatherd's garb at his coronation. It was precisely in this form that he received God's blessing, and as a result his conceited subjects, who had scorned his poor man's outfit, were forced to recognize him.

In Wilde's fairy tales the more picturesque the description of beautiful and expensive things, the greater is the contrast with the decisive rejection of them by the protagonists, who have grasped the truth through kindness, honesty and love. Thus, beauty automatically incites the protagonists to make the right decisions based on humane principles. It is precisely philanthropy that is the main treasure in Wilde's stories, which are full of sadness and sorrow.

In the fairy tale "The Devoted Friend" Death represents first and foremost deliverance for Little Hans, who has involuntarily become the slave of his so called friend, the Miller. The latter has in fact killed Little Hans by working him to death. All the filler did was to take and not give anything in return, although he was rich and Little Hans was poor. Little Hans's nobleness, unselfishness and kindness did him a bad turn. He had faithfully served the greedy, cunning Miller, who had cleverly Manipulated him with his words, Wilde wrote that the word is everything. Naive Little Hans believed the lying Miller's professions of friendship towards ft. The only thing for which Little Hans was to le was that he was too trusting. The Miller Would have continued to mock the simpleton Little Hans, if Death had not released the latter, acting as a saviour, playing a positive role, strange as that might seem.

Death is simultaneously the aim and the triumph of the protagonist in the fairy tale "The Remarkable Rocket". The sole raison d'etre of a rocket intended for a salute is to be destroyed and perish. The Rocket, an eccentric and proud egoist, felt sure that it would go on flying for ever. The thought never occurred to it that its existence was finite. Its extremely high opinion of itself meant it was out of touch with reality. Therefore it only perceived its contemptuous situation in a positive light. The remarkable Rocket regarded itself as better than others, was scornful of all those around it and paid no attention to the success of others, but justified its own failings in every possible way. Its death is a regular humiliation, and its transformation into just a stick is the lamentable end to its career, from which it had expected such a great deal. The paradox is that, in dreaming of itsofflight, it was at the same time dreaming of its death without suspecting it. Only death released, it from its feeling of self-importance and false hopes. The very essence of the rocket is its festive purpose culminating in its immediate death. Flight meant the beginning of death for it. But the rocket had not troubled itself with serious considerations of death.

Literature.

1.Grebnikova N. S. Foreign Literature of the 20th Century. - V., 1999,

p 117.

2. Wilde O. Library of World Literature, - M., 1976, p. 300.

3. History of English Literature, -M., 1958, p. 244.

4. Foreign Literature of the 20th Century, -M., 1973, p. 163.

5. Foreign Children's Literature, -M., 1982, p. 158.

6. Belza S. The Romance of Oscar Wilde's Life.
In the book "Oscar Wilde".– M., 19891 p. 16.

7. Anikin G. B. The History of English Literature. -M., 1975, p. 350.