the birthday of the Infanta

September 25, 2010

2^nd Journal

- The Birthday of the Infanta -

Oscar Wilde

This is the second short story I read from “The Young King and Other Stories”. Honestly, I got difficulty in interpreting the idea that wanted to be expressed by the author. According to me this story has such an implicit meaning. For example, there is an interesting and memorable quotation says,

The Infanta was angry, “In the future’, she cried, “I will only play with people who have no heart”.

In my own interpretation, this sentence has two meanings. First, it expresses the immature Infanta (who was the daughter of the King of Spain and was celebrating her 12^th birthday) who was really disappointed with her father’s cold attitude (after his wife passed away due to giving birth of Infanta) and also because of the dead of the ugly dwarf (whose heart was broken of realizing his ugliness). So Infanta said the above sentence because she lost a friend and even worse a toy. Second, it is a rare to hear a twelve-year-old child of sating those words. So, I think the author here wanted to say that we should have “heart” as a human in everything we do.

My comment:

I think this story delivers good moral message, too. For example, not to mock other people despite of their deficiencies, to care and love our children, etc. Unfortunately, according to my opinion this story is too heavy for the readers, especially the young ones. In other word, it is quite difficult to be understood literally.