The Selfish Giant

The Selfish Giant ( engl. The Selfish Giant), also known as The selfish giant translated into German, is a literary fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. It appeared in 1888 in the prose collection known mainly for its cover story The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales.

Content

In the fairy tale a giant children playing scared away from his garden and built a wall around his property. This means that there exists an eternal winter:

" The only ones who still liked the garden, were the Snow and the Frost. [ ... ] The snow covered the grass with its thick white coat and the frost had all the trees appear silvery. [ The ] North Wind [ ... ] roared incessantly through the garden, and blew down the chimney plates. "

Only when the children gain through an opening in the wall access to the garden, nature awakens to new life. The giant observed the children from the window of his house and recognizes only now the reason for the absence of spring. He steps outside to a little boy who is not big enough to - to help to climb one of the trees in the ascent - as his playmates. All children run away except the little boy who has to tear-stained eyes to see the Giant coming. He lets him help her up the tree and kisses the giant, whereupon the other children return to the Garden:

"And when all the other kids saw that the Giant was no longer angry, they came back in a hurry - and with them came the Spring. , From now on, kids, this is your garden, 'said the giant, took a huge ax and tore down the wall. "

The children play henceforth regularly again in the garden of giant, but among them the little boy who had once kissed him missing. The children know the boys do not, for years, he is not seen. One winter morning looks the giant, which has now become old and frail, out of the window:

"In the remotest corner of the garden, a tree was covered all over with beautiful white flowers. Its branches were gold-plated and silver fruit hung down from them. And under the tree stood the little boy whom the Giant had so much in his heart. "

He rushes out into the garden and needs to realize that the boy bears the stigmata on the hands and feet. When the giant asks him who had inflicted these wounds, the little boy, this is referred to as " the wounds of love" and invites the giant in his garden paradise. The children find the giant dead at noon under the flowering tree.

Design and interpretation approaches

Oscar Wilde wrote this like other literary fairy tales, which are now among the most popular of their kind, for his two sons, Cyril (1885-1915) and Vyvyan ( 1886-1967 ). Linguistically, in the authorial told tale The Selfish Giant by his stressed artless language with a slight slope to the pathos.

In the foreground content typical for the genre is the moral- didactic aspect. Wilde tries among other things in this story a fusion of art views of his two mentors: the aestheticist l'art -pour- l'art conception of the British essayist Walter Pater and the influenced by the medieval Gothic teaching of John Ruskin, the beauty can only be valid go to the true and the good advantage. Pater's ideas appear in Wilde, in The Selfish Giant, as a stage that must be overcome in order to meet a Christian ideal. Wild avails itself of the traditional fairy-tale motif of the man who recognizes the relatively higher value of charity towards his material possessions in the course of the story. In addition to the allusion to Jesus Christ in the Passion of injuries sustained wounds of the boys are as another Christian peripheral subject the twelve peach trees interpretable that refer to the twelve apostles in the Gospels of the Bible. Not unusual for Wilde, whose works are the fin-de- siècle attributed, is the transfiguring death representation. However missing from this story, the ironic sprinklings of other art fairy tale.

Some aspects can be found in Wilde's essay Socialism and the soul of man (1891 ) again, the author advocates a socialist- libertaristische worldview.

Adaptations

In 1971, the Canadian animated film The Selfish Giant, which was nominated for an Oscar.

Graeme Koehne composed a ballet based on the fairy tale.