The young fisherman fell in love with the mermaid who was caught by his net and put back into the sea. The mermaid flatly rejected the fisherman's love, because the fisherman is different from the mermaid and has a soul. The fisherman who couldn't extricate himself embarked on a difficult journey to find the exiled soul. After a series of futile pursuits, he found a witch.

After accepting the harsh conditions put forward by the witch, the fisherman finally sent his soul away. A year later, his soul came to the seaside to call his master, but was flatly rejected. A year passed and the soul came back with wealth, but the fisherman said, "Love is more important than wealth."

The third year passed, and the soul came to the sea from the land. He described to his master a beautiful girl who danced barefoot with a veil. The young fisherman thought that the little mermaid had no feet and could not dance with him. Feeling a little lost, he promised to have a look and then go back to his lover. The ecstatic soul quickly entered the fisherman's body.

Lured by the soul, the fisherman did many evil things along the way. However, when the young fisherman returned to the seaside, the mermaid had disappeared.

Two years later, the fisherman living by the sea heard the cry from the ocean. He rushed to the shore and saw the little mermaid, but she had died at his feet. The miserable fisherman held the little mermaid in his arms, ignored the plea of his soul, let the black waves approach little by little, and was finally swallowed up by the sea.

The Fisherman and His Soul is Oscar Wilde's masterpiece. Its language is beautiful and its content is magnificent. It depicts and constructs a dreamland of ethereal beauty, which makes people intoxicated when reading, and the senses are satisfied and enjoyed by people's desires, which brings aestheticism to the extreme.

On the other hand, it shows all kinds of puzzles that a throat aesthete encounters when facing the society. This fairy tale touches the aesthetic dilemma, and modern aestheticism based on perceptual monism has its inevitable limitations.

Extended data:

Creative background:

Victorian era is an era of multiple contradictions, and the conflict between old and new fashions in British upper class is fierce. People of all colors in society, some pursue aestheticism and heroic career passionately, while others become vulgar and materialistic. From Wilde's fairy tale The Fisherman and His Soul, we can see that the social ideology of mainstream Victorian society tries to impose its values and moral system on the whole society.

Among them, there are two vivid and powerful social mainstream consciousness figures, priests and businessmen. In addition, we can clearly feel the pressure brought by the mainstream ideology and the pressure faced by social individuals in the pursuit of personal value from the reflection of the thought of witch exiled from society on fishermen giving up their souls and giving up the moral value system advocated by the whole mainstream society.

"Soul" represents the sociality imposed on this person by society, which aesthetes have always chosen to escape. Of course, within the limits of different people, the sociality of the "soul" they agree with is very different. For example, the priest chose God and its matching morality, the businessman chose the benefits of money philosophy, and the witch chose the pagan worship that she followed physically and mentally.

However, one thing is common, and that is the sociality of the "soul". In contrast, people's "body" is born of fear and evolved from nature. Understanding art is a natural nature. When the "soul" successfully merged with the "fisherman" again, he induced innocence.

"To degenerate, to walk into the dirty social life of the fisherman. When they walked through the jeweler's street, the soul asked the fisherman to pick up the silver cup and hide it; Seeing the child, the soul asked him to hit the child; A businessman stayed to entertain them out of kindness. At ten o'clock in the middle of the night, the soul asked him to kill the businessman and take his gold.

Wilde spent a lot of time describing the evil of the soul. As a contrast with the beautiful things mentioned above, on the one hand, he revealed his understanding of society, on the other hand, he also expressed his helplessness and rejection of the decadent society when aestheticism encountered life. The double structure of this fairy tale contains rich connotations.

Traditional fairy tales, represented by Grimm's fairy tales, usually have a happy ending, a happy ending and a harmonious ending. The hero of the story is a poor boy or girl. As long as you are smart and kind, you will eventually become a prince or a princess. "All's well that ends well for lovers."

Finally, "live happily ever after"; If the story does not set the premise that the protagonist is "good", as long as he is brave, it can even be said that as long as he is the protagonist of the story, he will be brave. No matter how hard the middle process is, he will eventually get rid of the control of the vicious witch or overcome many difficulties with the help of magic, and finally win and succeed.

In contrast, Wilde's whimsical fairy tale The Fisherman and His Soul broke the happy ending of the traditional fairy tale engraving model. By using the "whimsical" literary form, the story ends with the death of the hero and heroine, leaving readers with a meaningful ending.

Through these unhappy endings, Wilde created another imagination for fairy tales, created another scene in readers' fantasies, more specifically reflected many social phenomena and human characteristics, and stimulated readers' different imagination and creativity. From this point, we can also see the differences between Wilde, which is also a challenge and subversion of Wilde's traditional fairy tale model.

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