[Review of] Chris Foss's The Importance of Being Different (2025)

Both of Oscar Wilde's collections of fairy tales — The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and The House of Pomegranates (1891) — depart considerably from the fairy tale tradition. Critics have described them as ambiguous, sarcastic, sincere, "beautiful and ugly, comic and tragic, complex yet simple, engaging and enraging, personal and political" (Foss 6; 141). Not only have Wilde's fairy tales not received as much scholarly interest as his other works, but as Chris Foss notes, very little of Wilde's oeuvre has been examined closely from a disability studies perspective. His book, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales, seeks to fill this gap. Examining Wilde's "parade of physically exceptional protagonists" (2) in his fairy tales, Foss investigates intersections between children and childhood, Victorian infantilizations of the poor and those with disabilities, and notions of freakery as they pertain to nineteenth-century experiences of non-normative bodies.

Given that Foss approaches these unconventional fairy tales from the standpoint of disability studies, he begins, unsurprisingly, by justifying his use of the phrase "disability-aligned." It is, he writes, "a potentially contestatory move" to describe Wilde's "peculiar protagonists as disabled without some sort of qualification." Foss is careful to note that "I certainly do not intend to use disability-aligned in any way [to refer to] the problematic notion [that] ‘everyone is disabled in some way or at some point.'" Instead, he emphasizes that these characters' physical differences affect how they are viewed and treated. According to Foss, the phrase "disability-aligned" precisely "highlights how, though there is definitely an overlap, an alignment even, between the lived experiences of Wilde's colorful cast of unconventional characters and those of at least some disabled persons today, there is also a gap, a disjunction, between them that, again, bears acknowledgement" (3). Foss employs disability perspectives to argue that Wilde's fairy tales offer progressive possibilities and to link atypical bodies with positive and powerful nuances rather than with the stereotypically negative or pitiful representations that dominated nineteenth-century literature and culture.

The Importance of Being Different situates its discussion of fairy tales, disability, and freakery and enfreaked bodies within nineteenth-century and contemporary conversations in order to demonstrate their continued relevance. That said, Foss positions his study mostly within the conventions of Victorian fairy tales: he cites authors such as Hans Christian Andersen and Madame d'Aulnoy and relies on the scholarly expertise of Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar, whose works are crucial in fairy tale studies.[1] Significantly, the Victorians labeled people with disabilities as unsightly, unwelcome, and unable to contribute to society. As a result, they were marginalized for their conditions, which is key to understanding the political significance of Wilde's depictions of disability. Further, Foss usefully articulates the linguistic shifts that inform disability studies. For instance, while Victorians would have used terms such as afflicted, infirm, crippled, defective, deformed, and invalid to describe these bodies (11), we no longer use these terms. Nevertheless they indicate how physical disability stands in opposition to ideas of healthy bodies, and bodies that perform labour and are independent. Foss also draws attention to discourses surrounding freakshows, P. T. Barnum's circuses that exhibited and exploited atypical human bodies, the exceptional work that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has done to theorize the extraordinary body, and the work of other scholars who have discussed peculiar bodies at length. This contextualization effectively positions readers to understand the debates in which Foss participates and the intervention he makes.

Foss closes his Introduction with a brief analysis of "The Selfish Giant," in which the titular character builds a wall around his garden to keep out children. The following year, winter does not leave the garden until the children return. Ultimately, the giant tears down the wall and learns to love the children. This tale allows Foss to elaborate on several issues raised in the Introduction, namely how Wilde deploys the bodies of freaks and children in tandem, and the ways in which atypical bodies recuperate favourable meanings.

The next four chapters examine, in turn, the following fairy tales: "The Birthday of the Infanta," "The Fisherman and His Soul," "The Star-Child," and "The Happy Prince." Each chapter also compares Wilde's disability-aligned characters with those of Charles Dickens; these productive intertextual moments demonstrate significant parallels and shifts in representations of characters with disabilities. Dickens generally employs disability as a marker of immorality or evil, a form of punishment or reform, a way to engender sympathy and/or pity. Most importantly, his "afflicted" characters almost always occupy marginalized positions or are secondary characters who aid the hero or heroine. In Wilde's fairy tales, however, disability-aligned protagonists occupy central roles; readers are invited to empathize with them and, as Julia Miele Rodas asks, to think, "‘Who or what am I in relation to this other creature?'" (Rodas 59; Foss 14).

A merit of Foss's book is that although he makes a case for the progressive possibilities in Wilde's fairy tales in relation to disability, he also acknowledges Wilde's use of stereotypes and damaging tropes. In "The Birthday of the Infanta," an ugly Dwarf performs at the beautiful Infanta's birthday celebrations. In love with the Infanta, the Dwarf does not realize that he is a source of mockery and laughter for the Infanta and her guests until he sees his hideous reflection and dies in despair. Foss suggests that this tale interrogates ideas of internal and external beauty and ugliness, and the spectacle of the freakish body of the Dwarf as he performs. This fairy tale, Foss argues, communicates an important difference between the freak of nature and the freak of culture, and he cites Tatar in highlighting Wilde's interest in "grotesque aesthetics" in these stories (40; 50). For Foss, Wilde rewrites oppressive rhetorics that align physical deformities with internal evil and indicates that ableism invites responses of disgust and repulsion by positioning the disability-aligned body as "other" (52). The second chapter turns to "The Fisherman and His Soul," an inversion of Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" that focuses on love of and by extraordinary bodies. Hybrid embodiment renders the mermaid a freak in this story, and the fisherman's love for her is also figured as transgressive, especially when he severs his soul from his body to be with her. Foss argues that Wilde moves away from prejudice by showing the positive potential of their love, suggesting that even though ableism prevents the fisherman and mermaid from being together, the tale encourages positive emotional responses to freakery and to disability-aligned bodies.

While Chapters 1 and 2 concentrate on the stigmatization of characters with disabilities, Chapters 3 and 4 pivot to social justice. In Chapter 3, the titular protagonist of "The Star-Child" behaves cruelly to animals, the poor, and those who are disability-aligned until he undergoes a "freakish mutation" himself (86). "The Star-Child" articulates not only the importance of individual change in attitudes to physical impairments, but also the necessity of collective change, which is achieved through acts of kindness in this tale (77; 80). While Foss acknowledges that Wilde problematically deploys disability as a way to punish the Star-Child's cruelty, he also suggests that the author re-envisions the possibilities available to the disability-aligned characters (a freak, a leper, and a beggar) by having them rise into majestic positions, producing a potentially revolutionary response (91; 93). Chapter 4 builds on these ideas in "The Happy Prince," in which the Happy Prince, a statue, gives away his sapphire eyes, the ruby on his sword, and the gold leaves covering his body in order to alleviate poverty in his city. In his analysis, Foss posits that Wilde depicts disability-aligned characters who, rather than necessarily being recipients of charity, are powerful agents who effect change through compassion and acts of benevolence (98). Inspired by genuine compassion rather than performative charity, the Happy Prince's acts of self-maiming expose the city's blindness to the suffering and exploitation of the poor.

In the book's conclusion, Foss reminds his readers that Wilde's fall from grace parallels, in many ways, that of the disability-aligned characters in his fairy tales; as he transformed from a celebrity into a criminal, he experienced no shortage of ridicule, derision, and cruelty (118–9). Using the fairy tales as a segue, Foss investigates how Wilde was treated as a freak and figure of spectacle during his trials in the 1890s, discussing his distressing experiences in jail and the prison literature he produced. Following his release, Wilde advocated for children in prison and wrote about the inhumane conditions of imprisonment and treatment of prisoners, which, Foss argues, was a manifestation of the lessons of "The Happy Prince" and the other fairy tales. At this point, Foss rushes through his analyses of the remaining fairy tales in Wilde's two collections: "The Remarkable Rocket," "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Young King," and "The Devoted Friend." Instead of offering cursory interpretations of these tales, it would have been more effective to integrate a few of them into the earlier chapters, and to scrutinize them there in depth.

Ultimately, Foss identifies a clear gap in the scholarship and makes a persuasive case for reading Wilde's multidimensional fairy tales through a disability lens. Moreover, his continual acknowledgement that Wilde's depictions of disability are at times problematic strengthens his analysis by revealing that understandings of disability and impairments were in flux at the end of the nineteenth century. Foss aptly sums up Wilde's fairy tales as "complex conundrums that are beautifully bewildering and opulently opaque" (116). The Importance of Being Different invites scholars to approach Wilde's oeuvre from perspectives aside from aesthetics, gender, sexuality, and queerness, and to generate new conversations.

Notes

[1] Foss makes no mention of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales—a troubling omission.

Links to Related Material

Bibliography

[Book under review] Foss, Chris. The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Rodas, Julia Miele. "Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability." Dickens Studies Annual 34 (2004): 51–97.

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales: Expanded Edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019.

Zipes, Jack. Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms' Folk and Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014.

---. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012.

Last modified 7 August 2025