The Contrast between the Nightingale and the Student in Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose

The veteran writer, Oscar Wilde, in his short fairy-tale The Nightingale and the Rose, places at the centre of the story two characters whose surfaces are similar but whose moral substances are opposed. The Student and the Nightingale both invoke love; both weep for a red rose; both believe themselves serious. Yet the Student loves at the level of declaration, while the Nightingale loves at the level of cost; the Student abandons love the moment it requires sacrifice, while the Nightingale dies in the act of producing it. Wilde uses the careful counterpoint between them to define what he means by true love. This essay argues that he constructs the contrast through the Student's eloquent self-absorption set against the Nightingale's reflective seriousness, through their opposed responses to the cost of love, through their separate fates at the close of the story, and through the way the contrast forces the reader to side, against the world of the story, with the bird who dies unnoticed.

Point — Wilde first establishes the contrast through the Student's eloquent but self-absorbed grief, in which sorrow speaks loudly without committing to anything. Evidence — The Student weeps in the garden because the Professor's daughter will not dance with him without a red rose, and cries, "Why, indeed, am I miserable? — because I cannot find a red rose." Technique — The writer uses dramatic monologue and a register of self-referential lament. Explanation — The Student is sincere but small; his sorrow is mainly about his own state, and the absence he laments is the absence of a flower at his hand rather than the absence of love in his life. Wilde uses the soliloquy to expose how easily the language of love can be borrowed by self-pity, and how unaware the borrower can be of the distinction. Link — The Student's self-absorption therefore prepares the contrast: he has the vocabulary of love but none of its substance.

Point — The contrast is sharpened by the Nightingale's reflective seriousness, in which love is not declared but reasoned. Evidence — Hearing the Student weep, the Nightingale meditates: "Here at last is a true lover… What I sing of, he suffers; what is joy to me, to him is pain." Technique — Wilde uses indirect free speech and a register of philosophical observation. Explanation — The Nightingale's response is not noise but thought; she examines the Student's situation, weighs the cost of the rose, and decides for herself whether love is worth her own life. Where the Student speaks, the Nightingale considers; where he registers what he wants, she calculates what she will give. The first contrast between them is the contrast between vocal grief and considered commitment. Link — The Nightingale's seriousness therefore establishes the standard of love against which the Student will fail, even though, in the story, she has chosen him as the truer lover.

Point — Wilde deepens the contrast through the opposed ways the two respond to the cost of love. Evidence — The Nightingale presses her heart against the thorn through the long night, paying for the rose with her body; the Student, when the Professor's daughter rejects the rose, throws it "into the gutter" and concludes that "love is a silly thing… and not half as useful as Logic." Technique — The writer uses narrative juxtaposition and an ironic reversal of register. Explanation — The Nightingale's response to the cost of love is to pay it; the Student's response to the failure of love is to retire to logic. Wilde does not need to call the Student shallow — his action calls him so — and the contrast with the bird's costly silence makes the Student's declaration into the very evidence of his unseriousness. Link — The contrasted responses therefore deepen the thesis: where the Nightingale pays in her own life, the Student pays only in disappointment, and the difference between them is the difference between love and sentiment.

Point — The contrast is sealed by the separate fates the two are given at the close, and by the moral asymmetry these fates expose. Evidence — The Nightingale lies dead in the long grass, "her heart pierced by the thorn"; the Student returns to his attic, reaches for a book of metaphysics, and resolves not to be bothered with love again. Technique — Wilde uses parallel ending and ironic anti-climax. Explanation — The bird's end is dignified, costly and unwitnessed; the Student's end is comfortable, undisturbed and entirely unaware that anything has been paid for him. The world of the story does not notice the contrast — the rose is discarded, the bird forgotten — but the reader is made to notice it, and Wilde's entire moral argument is the refusal of the reader's noticing. Link — The closing fates therefore advance the thesis decisively: the Nightingale's love is shown to be real because she has paid for it, while the Student's is shown to be sentiment because he has not.

This study probes to analyse how Wilde, through the Student's eloquent self-absorption, the Nightingale's reflective seriousness, their opposed responses to cost, and the asymmetry of their fates, builds a contrast that defines what the fairy-tale calls true love. The weeping Student, the considering bird, the night-long song against the thrown-away rose, and the dead Nightingale beside the untroubled scholar together build a story whose comparison is its argument. The deeper insight is that Wilde does not ask the reader to identify with the Student's eloquence or with the Nightingale's pain in equal measure; he insists on the side of the one whose love the world ignored. The Nightingale and the Rose endures, therefore, in part because the contrast it draws between two kinds of love continues to be visible in every later discussion of what people mean when they use the word.