The Happy Prince And Other Tales from http://www.csulb.edu/~csnider/wilde.fairy.tales.html

The Prince helps out a struggling playwright by sacrificing one of his eyes, which "are made of rare sapphires" (100). The second eye goes, by means of the reluctant Swallow, to a "little match-girl" (101) whose matches have fallen into the gutter and been ruined. The Swallow, now quite emotionally attached to the Prince, promises to stay with him because he is blind. He thus sacrifices himself as has the Prince. His relationship with the Prince is an example of male bonding and development of the Eros principle of relatedness and connection which I cited earlier. This relationship is far more important and meaningful to him than his flirtation with the Reed who, the other swallows had "twittered," had "no money, and far too many relations" (96). It is an example of the power of agape, a kind of love Wilde is not often associated with. The Swallow is no longer the "natural and capricious egotist" one critic has called him (Shewan 40).

So far we have the typical fairy tale pattern of things happening in threes. Marie-Louise von Franz, perhaps the foremost Jungian authority on fairy tales, writes: "You will always read that the number three plays a big role in fairy tales, but when I count it is generally four. [. . .]" And this is exactly what we have in "The Happy Prince": three parallel steps and what von Franz calls a "finale" (Introduction 64). Here it is the Swallow's distribution of the gold leaves that cover the statue of the Prince to the starving and otherwise suffering poor of the city, for, as the Prince tells the Swallow, again playing the role of senex, "more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery" (101). When the Swallow dies, the Prince's leaden heart breaks in two--and it is the only part of him that cannot be melted down so that the arrogant Mayor and Town Councillors can use the lead for statues of themselves. The fourth step has indeed led to the "new dimension" von Franz speaks of (Introduction 65)--the Prince and the Swallow are united in heaven as "the two most precious things in the city," that God has asked his angels to bring to him. The two males are united, despite their obvious surface differences, as senex and puer. (Wilde could easily have made the swallow a female, as she is in the Greek myth of Procne and Philomela.) What unites them is the Eros principle--a surpassing love of each other and loving service to others. As Hillman says of the senex, "the death which it brings is not only bio-physical. It is the death that comes through perfection and order. It is the death of accomplishment and fulfilment [. . .]" (18).

H. Montgomery Hyde notes: "It has been suggested that the Swallow's yearning for Egypt was openly based on a poem by Théophile Gautier, where the swallows nest in the Temple of Baalbec and at the Second Cataract of the Nile" (Plays, Prose and Poems 107, n. 4). This suggestion accords with J. E. Cirlot's comment about the swallow: "A bird sacred to Isis and Venus. [. . .]" The Swallow, as I have suggested is a kind of puer and hence is associated with the Great Mother, seen here in two manifestations: the mother goddess of Egypt and the Roman goddess of love. Cirlot also says the swallow is "an allegory of spring" (322). The irony, of course, is that both the Prince and the Swallow die in winter. The Happy Prince himself as a supraordinate personality is symbolic of the Self--psychic wholeness. But he does not achieve Selfhood until he has been united and elevated to heaven with the swallow.

Although "The Happy Prince" began as a story Wilde told to students at Cambridge, the published version contains a reference to "Charity Children" (95). These are, according to Hyde, "foundlings and orphans" (Plays, Prose and Poems 105). The story also refers to "two little boys [. . .] lying in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm" beneath a bridge. They are hungry and chased out into the rain by a "Watchman" (102). Here Wilde shows a concern for issues he would discuss in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891). He wrote during a time when a large number of children were homeless and forced to do adult work. The authors of Oscar Wilde's London describe conditions in London's East End:

The degradations, and above all the overcrowding, of the East End slums led to indiscriminate sexuality, incest, and child abuse. Constantly fighting for their existence and inured to pain and brutality, a shockingly large number of women and even children became night house tarts, courtesans, sailors' whores, dolly-mops (promiscuous servant girls), synthetic virgins (whose hymens were repaired), and catamites (boy prostitutes). [. . .]

Furthermore, "London suffered worse working and housing conditions than other British cities, largely because its workers had few, if any, labour unions" (von Eckardt 131). With his match-girl and his allusions to "the old Jews bargaining with each other" in the Ghetto and "the poor house," where the sick boy who receives the Happy Prince's first benefaction dwells (98), Wilde must have had London in mind as the setting for his story, for the descriptions match those of contemporary London.5 All we know, however, is that the Happy Prince stands above a "great city" (101) somewhere "in the north of Europe" (96) and that he had lived in Sans-Souci, the name of Frederick the Great's palace at Potsdam, an appropriate allusion to the Prince's previous carefree life and perhaps a hint that, like Frederick the Great, the Prince may be homosexual, which could be the foundation for his Platonic relationship with the Swallow.6 It is typical of fairy tales not to identify their specific locales: that makes them more universal and more easy to identify with. In any case, Wilde is portraying the shadow side of contemporary civilization--its misery and propensity for evil, its sadistic materialism. We also have negative aspects of the puer--its lack of strength, wisdom, and status which make the child vulnerable to all kinds of victimization. The story demonstrates that these negative aspects can be overcome through charity and the archetype of love, and specifically that these very traits--charity and love--can bind two males into a transcendent achievement of wholeness. The wider implications for the age are that it needs these very qualities Wilde portrays in the Prince and the Swallow.