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 Here are some excerpts from my talk about the aesthetics of empathy in Wilde’s fairy tales:

I will focus today on two aspects of Wilde’s fairy tales.  First, I want to take up the cult of beauty promoted in them—the auratic objects that participate in a decorative regime of fin-de-siecle aesthetics.  Then I will turn to the grotesque aesthetic that competes with and in some cases annihilates the floral and metallic beauty on display. Wilde’s fairy tales remind us that aesthetics , even in fin-de-siecle art, is deeply implicated with ethical questions. The cult of beauty begins to crumble in Wilde’s work under the pressure of economic realities in which abject misery becomes a moving picture with its own aesthetic power.

 Barnett Newman once told us that “the impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty,” and Wilde’s fairy tales, while not destroying beauty, insist on hollowing out its power by investing its opposite with a powerful emotional and empathetic charge. 

Empathy and compassion have their own pleasures,  and it was to Wilde’s credit that he recognized their short-lived value and understood that we need not only to “think more” (and his fairy tales made that possible) but also do more in order to effect lasting social change.

There were many great talks at the conference, and Joseph Bristow, who organized the event, hopes to publish the papers soon.