Oscar Wilde - "The Harlot's House"

This paper wants to examine Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Harlot’s House”. For that purpose, two steps seem necessary to me. Initially, the prosodic, metric and rhetorical elements and figures should be analysed in a sort of “survey” to get a first approach to the poem. Building on these observations, an interpretation will be attempted.

Wilde’s poem is composed of 36 lines, which are arranged in twelve stanzas of equal length, each comprising three lines. The rhyme pattern is regular, each stanza is made up of a rhyming couplet and a single line rhyming with its equivalent in the following stanza (a-a-b c-c-b). All rhymes are true rhymes, eye-catching exceptions are the couplets “blind”-“wind” (9/12) and “false”-“waltz” (31/32). The metre is simple and regular as well, 35 lines are constructed as iambic tetrameters, the final line is shortened by one metric foot (catalexis).

The reader is introduced to a nocturnal setting; a pair of lovers, the male persona and his beloved, is lingering on a “moonlit street” (2) and stopping near “the harlot’s house” (3), which is obviously a brothel. The image of the couple’s solidarity is underlined by the usage of anaphora on the personal pronoun “we” (1/2, occuring again in the first position of line 5 and 10).

In the first few lines the acoustic phenomena predominantly attract the persona’s attention. The couple recognises that a party is occuring in the brothel by the tumultuos noise, which is clearly constrasting the romantic moonlit scenery. They can hear the sound of “dancing feet” (1), as a pars pro toto for the persons dancing inside the house; the hendiadys “din and fray” (4) and the metonymy “loud musicians” (5) (actually the music is loud, not the persons who make it) focus on the acoustic perception. Ironically, the band inside the brothel plays a waltz titled “Treues Liebes Herz” (6), a song suggesting true love, which is just the opposite of what is the custom in such an establishment.

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Attracted by the noise, the couple ventures a voyeuristic glimpse through the blinds at the actions that occur in the “harlot’s house”. They watch inhabitants and guests dancing to the music of the band, but everything which appears is illusion and shadow, mechanical and grotesque, emotionless and deathlike. The bizarre scenery is full of lifeless beings: “shadows” (9), “ghostly dancers” (10), “wire-pulled automatons” (13) and “slim silhouetted skeletons” (14). Every attempt to show real human emotions fails; dancing, singing and laughter can not get beyond mechanical and unemotional action:

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed

A phantom lover to her breast,

Sometimes they seemed to try to sing. (19-21)

Seeing this grotesque scenery, the persona is directly addressing his beloved and condemning the persons and actions inside the “harlot’s house”. Instead of agreeing with his statement, “she - - she” (28), the anaphora contrasts the above mentioned pronoun “we” and clearly dissolves the couple’s solidarity, leaves her lover behind and enters the house because she is enchanted by the music. Her entrance, “she” (28) portrayed as the personification of “love” (30), must have affected the athmosphere in “the house of lust” (30), for the band’s “tune went false” (31) and the dancers, “wearied of the waltz” (32), stop dancing. The dissonance of the music is reflected in the off-rhyme “false” – “waltz” (31/32). Thereupon, the next morning is already dawning, it appears personified as a young girl, who shyly passes the scene on “silver-sandalled feet” (35); besides the persona and his beloved, the “frightened girl” (36) is the only character described as having a human face. The contrast of night and dawn is empasised by the shortened metre of the last line. The poem is ostentatiously permeated by alliterations, all of them beginning with consonants: “harlot’s house” (3), “we

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watched” (10), “slim silhouetted skeletons” (14), “stately saraband” (17), “puppet pressed” (19), “whirling with” (27), “silent street” (34), “silver-sandalled” (35).

One of the most sriking characteristics of the poem is the permanent amalgamation of different types of sensory perception (synaesthesia). While the first two stanzas focus on the acoustic and the third stanza on the visual perception, the concept of synaesthesia is most evident in the forth stanza. Visual perception, expressed explicitly by the verb “watched” (10), is directly connected to the acoustic perception of the “sound of horn and violin” (11).

Another striking aspect is that many nouns, in particular those that are rhyming, are of French origin, as “grotesques” (7), “arabesques” (8), “quadrille” (15), “marionette” (22), “cigarette” (23), which adds an aesthetic, almost musical quality and, as well as the synaesthesia, might be seen as an evidence for the influence of French Symbolism on Wilde’s poem. Furthermore, the French words underline the strangeness of the grotesque scene in the “harlot’s house”.

The occuring words can be assigned to three different semantic fields. As a first group, many words are related to decay and death. The inhabitants are described as “shadows” (9) and “skeletons” (14), and the “ghostly dancers” (10) are compared to “black leaves whirling in the wind” (12), which is supposed to be one of the most common metaphors for the death. Furthermore, the reference to death culminates in the persona’s statement, which is particularly impressive for its parallel construction (“dead – dancing – dead; dust – whirling – dust”):

Then turning to my love, I said,

`The dead are dancing with the dead.

The dust is whirling with the dust.´ (25-27)

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