SOURCE: Villegas, Leonara R. “Approaching an Irony of Difference: The Self as an Outsider in the Short Stories of Oscar Wilde.” Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle/Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 29 (autumn 1997): 59-66.

In the following essay, Villegas considers the role of the Outsider in Wilde's short fiction.

In the short stories of Oscar Wilde, compassion underscores the experiences of the characters. The complexity of their emotional awakenings is such that they anticipate a modernist connotation of the word, as illustrated by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As a synthetic emotion, the implications of compassion are determined by its roots: the non-Latinate root that means feeling, as well as the Latin root that means either “sympathy” or “condescension” (Kundera, 1984, 20). Hence, Kundera takes great exception to this emotion, and underscores its suspicious regard: for “it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment...