‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ and the Unconscious

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ and the Unconscious

Heather Marcovitch

Red Deer College

‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ is arguably the most difficult of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. Its Biblical diction, decadent Orientalist imagery and often-confusing mystical conception of body and soul makes it less accessible than simpler stories like ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘The Happy Prince’. In fact, it is less of a ‘fairy tale’ in the conventional sense than it is a subversion of some of the more common aspects of the genre. There are no anthropomorphized animals, hero’s quest, or moral epiphany that are present in Wilde’s other fairy tales. Replacing the hero’s quest is the journey of a corrupt Soul. The transcendent moment at the end of the story arises out of physical love rather than spiritual transformation. There is little sentimentality in the story, the primary relationship between the Fisherman and his Soul is a contentious, ambivalent one, and the breaking down of the Fisherman into body, embodied soul and transcendent heart is a process that often eludes critical scrutiny.

One of the difficulties I’ve found in reading ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ alongside his other fairy tales is that the story, despite the apparent Christian imagery that also appears in ‘The Young King,’ ‘The Happy Prince,’ and ‘The Selfish Giant,’ fits in more with Wilde’s decadent Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, not because of any overt plot or character devices (although both texts contain an evil soul, a split individual and the tension between pleasure and corruption), but because both texts provide an aestheticized map of the unconscious psyche. [1] The Soul’s journeys parallel a descent into the unconscious that ultimately leads to the overwhelming question that appears in so many of Wilde’s works: the struggle between the material and the transcendent. In ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’, this struggle is articulated as primarily a psychical one and touches on notions of value and transcendence, and particularly on Wilde’s belief in love as a transcendent force.

Wilde’s conception of the Soul’s influence on the body and the relationship between the magical elements of the disembodied soul and the soulless yet romantic Fisherman have links to the fin de siècle ’s fascination with occult, esoteric and non-material phenomena, a fascination which Pamela Thurschwell argues is the precursor to the widespread acceptance of Freudian psychoanalysis. [2] Thurschwell notes that the acceptance of a relationship between the natural and supernatural allows for conceiving the human psyche as a place where irrational, non-corporeal forces construct the illusion of rationality and that this relationship is explored in the literature of the 1880s and 1890s. Specifically, she writes that Wilde, along with other writers of the period, uses ‘magical thinking as a powerful tool to expand the potential effects of consciousness and the possibilities for intimate ties and identifications’. [3]

In ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’, irrational, often pernicious, forces, namely seduction and influence, shape the narrative. The Fisherman is seduced by the Mermaid’s fanciful tales of life under the sea, he in turn seduces the Witch into divulging her secret about losing one’s soul, and, in the midst of his seductive dance with the Witch, is secretly being watched and, one surmises, possibly influenced by the Devil. The Soul’s journeys reveal the strange influence it exerts over nearly everyone it meets, yet the Fisherman’s heart, which he retains, initially renders the Fisherman immune to the Soul’s influence. Indeed, the narrative which Wilde employs, having the Soul cast such a powerful influence, and having the end of the story concern itself with a struggle between Soul and heart for control over the Fisherman’s body bears a marked resemblance to narratives of mesmerism and its more general counterpart, influence, that were popular in the 1880s and 1890s, including stories which Wilde wrote. The plot of ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ centers around a dubious palm reading and the epitaph of ‘The Canterville Ghost’ reads: ‘A Hylo-Idealistic Romance’. (Hylo-Idealism was a parapsychological movement founded by Constance Naden which purported that the human brain was the creator of all external phenomena.) Wilde uses the idea of influence in both ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost’ as a means to position love (eros and caritas, respectively) as a challenging force against a culture of narrow materialism. In ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’, he continues this dialectic, locating it in the story within the Fisherman’s dissociated psyche.

The story begins in a heavily-determined material world where the Fisherman’s initial desire for the Mermaid he has snared in his net is coded as a blazon of precious metals: ‘Her hair was as a wet fleece of gold, and each separate hair as a thread of fine gold in a cup of glass. Her body was as white ivory, and her tail was of silver and pearl’. [4] Wilde’s tendency to describe scenes or figures as objets d’art occurs throughout his works, from ‘The Young King’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray to the elaborate stage directions in An Ideal Husband; these descriptions are nearly always used critically, foreshadowing some kind of corruption. Carol Tattersall notes, ‘In the fairy tales Wilde puts his theories into practice: he uses them first to help develop his theory of truth revealed through masks, and then to test its validity’. [5] The theory in ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ is one analogous to Freud’s conception of the pleasure principle; in this case, the ego is negotiating a perpetual struggle between the external laws manifested in the superego and the instinctive passions of the id. [6] Beauty is figured materially in this story not only as a source of tangible value but also as a gateway for the intangible erotic — the ivory body and silver and pearl tail arouse desire in the Fisherman.

In her reading of Wilde’s treatment of commodities, Carolyn Lesjak argues that Wilde uses pleasure as a way of critiquing the commodity fetishism of fin de siècle culture. Lesjak writes, ‘Oscar Wilde provides a counter-narrative to Victorian conventions by imagining, also through Art, an expanded notion of needs and use which privileges pleasure and the imagination over utility’. [7] Materialism and eroticism are inseparable at the beginning of the story. The bargain the Fisherman strikes with the Mermaid, that she come to sing for him so that he may catch more fish, marks the beginning of their romance. When the Fisherman wants to get rid of his soul so that he can enter the Mermaid’s undersea kingdom, he finds, to his dismay, that his soul has no material value in the world, least of all to himself: ‘Of what use is my soul to me’? the Fisherman muses. ‘I cannot see it. I may not touch it. I do not know it’. [8] The duality between body and soul at this point is actually a duality between a pleasure principle forged in eros and a reality principle forged in economics. The Soul is not yet a material object, but the Fisherman desires to sell or give it away like an unwanted article of clothing. More importantly, the Soul, in the religious world of the story, is seen by both the Priest and the Witch as a bargaining chip in the market of eternal rewards or damnations. Jarlath Killeen notes that the Fisherman’s Soul is ‘the product of rationalistic dualistic theologies. It can be split from the Body physically as it has already been split from it metaphysically since modernity has split the integrated personality’. [9] Following the theologies Killeen notes, the body is the Fisherman’s physicality; as Naomi Wood suggests, Wilde, following Walter Pater, ‘emphasized physical sensation as an integral part of the spiritual and moral aspects of humankind’. [10] Through his physical attraction to the Mermaid, the Fisherman experiences life and, Wilde argues later, develops his capacity for love. The Soul, on the other hand, is, in its metaphysical split from the body, the antagonist to such physicality. If, in the Priest’s religious terms, the soul is figured as divinely ordained and is positioned against the sinful physical body, in psychoanalytic terms, the body’s id is set against the soul’s superego and subverted so that it is the superego which is amoral and the id which contains aspects of the good. [11]

The Priest denounces the relationship between the Fisherman and the Mermaid because, as John-Charles Duffy notes, it has no reproductive and therefore no use value. [12] But Wilde is describing a Priest who cannot see past the narrowly material, whose comparison of the soul to gold and rubies, no matter how Biblically orthodox, comes close to describing the soul as a marketable commodity. The Priest’s viewpoint is understandable given his repressed nature; he shuts himself away from the pleasures creatures such as the Mermaids and the Fauns offer him and will not countenance the Fisherman’s declarations of love. As a result, the Priest does not recognize that there is a close relationship between the beauty of sensual pleasure and love that the Mermaid represents and the value he ascribes to the soul and that this relationship is expressed in the description of beautiful things. Aesthetics, or the phenomenology of beauty, is the bridge that links the pleasure of the erotic drive and the repressive elements of the material world.

Both the Mermaid and the Witch, the two women figured in the Priest’s narrowly-conceived morality as evil, understand aesthetics’ importance. The Mermaid’s seductive songs of life underneath the sea, ‘of the palace of the King which is all of amber, with a roof of clear emerald, and a pavement of bright pearl’ [13] link the idea of beautiful things to the Fisherman’s desire for her. The Witch reductively echoes this technique by acting like a barker in a manner reminiscent of Christina Rossetti’s goblins in Goblin Market. Her sales pitch echoes the Mermaid’s song; the only difference is that while the Mermaid describes beautiful things for their own sake, the Witch describes the use value of the beautiful goods: ‘I know a flower that grows in the valley, none knows it but I. It has purple leaves, and a star in its heart, and its juice is as white as milk. Shouldst thou touch with this flower the hard lips of the Queen, she would follow thee all over the world’. [14] That the Witch seems to reduce the Fisherman’s desire to a crass mode of exchange does not negate the fact that she seems to be the only character in the story who understands the soul’s real value as well as its real cost—she initially resists the Fisherman’s entreaties to tell him how to lose his soul. The soul is the aesthetic object in its essence, both transcendent and material, a good to be exchanged and the ineffable, invaluable part of the self.

Wilde constructs the dialectic between the material and the immaterial as the disembodied Soul’s journeys into a set of fictional landscapes. The geography he describes here constitutes an overall journey into Lacan’s Real, the unconscious desires around which individuals construct a reality in order to avoid confrontation with that which is repressed. [15] And, indeed, in the Soul’s journeys Wilde conflates dream imagery with the most conventional fairy tale aspects that appear in the story. There are three journeys, and Bruno Bettelheim argues in The Uses of Enchantment that the number ‘three’ in fairy tales ‘often seems to refer to what in psychoanalysis is viewed as the three aspects of the mind: id, ego, and superego’. [16] Bettelheim also suggests that the number ‘three’ symbolizes repetition and specifically the repetition involved in a search for personal identity. [17] This reading of the number three in terms of fairy tales follows Freud’s model in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a constant tension between the coherent ego and the repressed, a tension which manifests itself in an individual’s compulsion to repeat certain behaviours. [18] The number three is also present in the split between body, soul, and heart. Critical interpretations of the soul usually follow a dualistic rationale, one which sees the soul as the spiritual or transcendent aspect of the self. [19] Wilde, though working within the same basic framework, describes the Soul’s journeys and its development in terms at once both psychological and aesthetic.

The Soul’s journeys lay bare the unconscious desires that cause the Fisherman to initiate the split of his unified self. The three journeys represent the search for knowledge (I make the distinction that, contrary to the Soul’s assertions, it is knowledge—the accumulation of useful information—rather than wisdom that the Soul actually acquires in the first journey), wealth, and lust, respectively, all pursuits that represent worldly success. The Fisherman willfully abjures these pursuits when he cuts away his Soul and leaves the world to live in the sea with the Mermaid. It is therefore the Soul who cannot leave the material world for a life of blissful desire, and it is also therefore the Soul who travels in a psychic landscape where beauty and brutality, pleasure and death, exist alongside one another.

The first journey takes the Soul into a heavily Orientalized East, where the figures he meets are dreamlike personifications of unconscious drives. The Soul encounters ornately dressed Tartars and Muslims, as well as the Tower of Apes and the Tower of Serpents, both representations of animal cunning in Western legend. It fords the river Oxus three times, thus underscoring the pattern of repetition, and finds itself in a Darwinian world of animal struggle, where a hippopotamus and a camel improbably fight. This first world is one of overall primitivism and brutality, where the Soul’s non-embodiment is mistaken for divinity. Wilde’s irony is palpable when he puts the Mirror of Knowledge in the heart of this superstitious world. The Soul presents the Fisherman with a litany of battles against these primitive peoples and moreover describes his acquisition of the Mirror of Wisdom as one which has been obtained by force. The first journey underscores the replacement of wisdom by violence, superstition and cunning, and serves as a counterpoint to the Fisherman’s actions at the beginning of the story, when he deliberately ignores the knowledge both the Priest and the Witch have about the nature of his soul, both of whom, despite their limitations, have at least a better sense of what the soul was worth than the Fisherman’s admittedly confused understanding. Wisdom here is a violent activity and brings with it not greater tolerance but greater power: ‘And they who possess this mirror know everything, nor is there anything hidden from them. And they who possess it not have not Wisdom. Therefore it is the god, and we worship it’. [20]

The second journey ends with the Soul acquiring the Ring of Riches, another ironic token since the Fisherman’s myopic inability to see the real value of his Soul provides him with a justification for casting it off. This journey takes the Soul to an Arabian bazaar where it becomes a mercenary. Here, the ring is located in a centre for slave trafficking, which the evocative Street of Pomegranates echoes by referring to the myth of Hades and Persephone, specifically where Persephone is indentured to the underworld because of her consumption of seven pomegranate seeds. [21] Bodies and goods in the bazaar are indistinguishable—the Soul catalogues the gilt and jewels that comprise the architecture of the city and the Emperor of the fictional land is an androgynous and artificial creation, his hands and beard dyed garish colours. Unlike the warfare of the first journey, the Soul spends most of its time in the second journey in various languorous poses, reminiscent of popular parodies of aesthetes in the fin de siècle. But there are some notable similarities between the two journeys. Like his acquisition of the mirror, the Soul only receives the Ring by passing through a series of ostentatious chambers, traveling deeper into the heart of temple or palace where each token rests and manages to acquire it by cleverly avoiding a splendid decoy in favour of the unadorned real thing—a mirror in place of an idol and a lead ring in place of a room of jewels. The objects of unconscious desire not only lie deep within their respective structures but are closer to their essential natures, natures which are cast in particularly vulgar forms. Wisdom, as a mirror, is nothing more than narcissism and Riches is an ugly mineral whose value lies in its ability to enable corruption. If Wisdom moreover is a product of brutality in the first journey, Riches are a product of slavery and exploitation; in this world, the rich loll and the only active members of the society are the slaves. Both bring power but not transcendence.

The third journey, true to the fairy tale format, is what causes the Fisherman to reunite with the Soul. One can argue that the Fisherman is able to reject the Soul’s first two attempts to seduce him into traveling with it because neither Wisdom nor Riches have a direct bearing on his relationship with the Mermaid. But the third journey, in which the Soul encounters a beautiful dancer with naked feet, directly speaks to the non-normative relationship the Fisherman has with the Mermaid. If the Soul’s version of Wisdom is the base aspect of understanding, and its version of Riches the crass side of wealth, then his description of the dancer, meant to evoke feelings of lust, illustrates the most carnal part of love. And if Wisdom begets subterfuge and cunning, and Riches exploitation and slavery, alongside Lust comes betrayal and abandonment, for the Fisherman forsakes the Mermaid in order to reunite with his Soul.

Even though the Soul’s journeys are analogous to a voyage into the recesses of the unconscious, one cannot overlook the moral dimensions of the story, namely that, once reunited with his Soul, the Fisherman realizes that ‘he could no longer get rid of his Soul, and that it was an evil Soul, and would abide with him always’. [22] For Christopher Nassaar, ‘Evil is no longer an external and banished part of the fisherman, it is now a vital part of his nature, one he is intensely aware of, and he must either deal with it effectively or remain forever trapped in the demon universe into which he has stepped’. [23] The evil is figured in the story as an exertion of will, will as configured as an id shaped by the crass materialism both in the Fisherman’s world and the world the Soul encounters. The crimes the Soul enjoins the Fisherman to commit are mostly thefts of some sort: stealing a cup, a merchant’s goods and then his life and stealing a child’s innocence by striking him. It then tries to tempt the Fisherman with theft’s opposite, acts of charity, to no avail.

This is where we see the importance of the heart in Wilde’s schema of the self. The Soul argues that it has become evil since the Fisherman refused to give him his heart. The heart is the seat of the pleasure principle in this story and in a classical sense— eros is not only sexual desire but the regenerative life force, opposed to the death drive the Soul embodies. In addition, the heart not only possesses the redemptive qualities of eros, but also caritas, which is the life force on a wider scale. In a story where evil is figured as a gross overreliance on the material, the heart—the only aspect of the self which is never severed from the body—is the transcendent aspect precisely because of its ability to love. Against the decadent imagery of the Soul’s journeys and the banal materialistic arguments offered in the Fisherman’s world, the heart flourishes in natural beauty, returning the Fisherman to the sea and the locus of his love. After the Fisherman dies and his body buried in unconsecrated ground, flowers bloom after the third year, which recalls the same year in which the Fisherman abandons the Mermaid. True repentance here is not for an offense against a theological dictum, but for a betrayal of love.

The ending of ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ prefigures Wilde’s later poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol where he insists that that the largest crimes sometimes are committed on the smallest scale and that one of the worst offenses is to slowly—through indifference or cruelty—kill the single other person one loves. Unlike the grand gesture of renunciation in ‘The Young King’ or the widespread acts of charity in ‘The Happy Prince’, the moral in ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ is a smaller, though no less important, one. For Wilde, who articulates his skepticism about these grand gestures in his other fairy tales as well as in his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, the Fisherman’s love is transcendent because his heart, unlike his body and his soul, does not engage with the outside world and is thus immune to the material relations that categorize it. The Fisherman’s narrow focus on the Mermaid nonetheless causes flowers to grow, a metaphor for eros transforming into caritas. The fact that the story ends on such a small scale underscores Wilde’s point that it is personal pleasure that can initiate moral transcendence. Wilde, as John Allen Quintus notes, was a moralist at heart, [24] but his morals in this story emphasize eros, both in terms of sexual desire and in terms of a drive towards life, as a force of good.

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