The main content of the Chinese version:

The young fisherman falls in love with a mermaid whom he catches in his net and then releases back into the sea. The mermaid flatly rejects the fisherman's love, because the fisherman, unlike the mermaid, has a soul. Unable to extricate himself, the fisherman embarks on a difficult journey to find out how to banish his soul. After a series of futile searches, he finds a witch.

After accepting the witch's harsh conditions, the fisherman finally sent his soul away. A year later, his soul came to the beach to call out to its owner, but was flatly rejected. One year passes and the soul returns with riches, but the fisherman says, "Love is more important than riches."

A third year passed, and the spirit came again from the land to the sea, and he described to his master a beautiful maiden who wore a veil and danced barefoot. The young fisherman was a little lost in thought that the Little Mermaid had no feet and could not dance with him, so he promised to go and see it before returning to his beloved. The ecstatic soul rushed into the fisherman's body.

Tempted by the soul, the fisherman does many evil things along the way. However, when the young fisherman returned to the beach, the mermaid had long since disappeared.

Two years passed, and the fisherman, who lived by the sea, heard a wail from the ocean; he rushed toward the shore and saw the little mermaid, who lay dead at his feet. The pained fisherman held the Little Mermaid in his arms, and, despite the soul's agonizing pleas, allowed the black waves to close in a little, and was finally swallowed up by the sea.

"The Fisherman and his Soul" is a far-reaching masterpiece of Wilde, its language is beautiful, the content is magnificent, depicting the construction of an ethereal beauty of the illusion, so that when reading the people are intoxicated by it, the senses to get the human desire for a variety of fulfillment of hope and enjoyment of the aestheticism of the interpretation of beauty and art to the extreme.

And from another aspect, it shows a laryngeal aesthete facing various confusions encountered by the society. This fairy tale touches upon the dilemma of aesthetics, and the modern trend of aestheticism based on sensual monism has its inevitable limitations.

Expanded Information:

Background:

The Victorian era was a time of multiple contradictions, with a fierce clash between the old and the new in British high society. Some people of all colors in society passionately pursued aesthetic and heroic causes, while others fell into vulgarity and pragmatism. From Wilde's fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Soul", it can be seen that the social ideology of the dominant Victorian society attempted to impose its system of values and morals on the whole society.

The most typical of them are the priest and the merchant, two vivid and powerful characters of the dominant social ideology. In addition, one can clearly feel the pressure on individuals to pursue their personal values in the face of the pressure brought by the mainstream social ideology from the reflection of the witch, a banished trend of consciousness in society, on the fisherman's abandonment of his own soul and the abandonment of the moral value system advocated by the whole mainstream society.

The "soul" represents the social nature imposed on the person by the society in which he or she lives, and this is what the aestheticists have always chosen to avoid. Of course, the social nature of the "soul" varies greatly from one group of people to another, such as the priest who chooses God and the morality that goes with it, the businessman who chooses the philosophy of money, and the witch who chooses the pagan cult that she follows in body and soul.

What is common, however, is the social nature of the "soul". In contrast, the human "body" is born, evolved from nature, and the knowledge of art is a natural instinct. When the "soul" succeeds in becoming one with the "fisherman" again, he induces innocence.

The "fisherman" goes down to the dirtier side of society. When they walked through the street of jewelers, the spirit told the fisherman to pick up the silver cup and hide it; when he saw a child, the spirit told him to beat the child; when a merchant stayed and entertained them out of kindness, in the middle of the night, the spirit told him to kill the merchant and take away his gold.

Wilde spent a lot of time describing the evils of the soul, as a contrast to the beautiful things in the previous text, revealing his social and incomprehension, on the other hand, when aestheticism meets the life of the corrupt society of the helpless and spurned. The dual construction of this fairy tale is rich in connotations.

The traditional fairy tales represented by Grimm's fairy tales usually end happily, satisfactorily, harmoniously, and with a happy ending for all. The main character of the story is a poor boy or girl, as long as he or she is smart or kind, will eventually become a prince or princess, and "lovers will be happy".

In the end, "they lived happily ever after"; if the story does not set the premise that the main character is "good", as long as he or she is brave, or even say, as long as he or she is the main character of the story, he or she will be brave, no matter how hard the process is, he or she will end up being brave. No matter how hard the process is, he will eventually get rid of the evil witch's control or overcome all the difficulties with the help of magic, and finally get the victory and success.

In contrast, Wilde's whimsical fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Soul" breaks away from the happy ending of the traditional fairy tale stereotype and utilizes the literary form of "whimsy" to end with the "death" of the hero and heroine, leaving the reader with a truly meaningful ending. The story ends with the "death" of the hero and heroine, leaving the reader with a truly meaningful ending.

Through these non-happily-ever-after endings, Wilde creates another kind of imagination for fairy tales, and opens up another field of vision in readers' fantasies, which more specifically reflects many social phenomena and human qualities, and evokes another kind of imagination and creativity in readers. From this point of view, we can also see the difference of Wilde, which is also a challenge and subversion of the traditional fairy tale mode proposed by Wilde.

Baidu Encyclopedia - The Fisherman and His Soul