Rafael Nunes Ferreira

Oscar Wilde was born on 16 October 1954, in Dublin, Ireland, and became one of the most important English writers. He was an eminent personality from the nineteenth century due to his work and also his extravagant behavior. The Irish writer lived in the Victorian age and suffered injuries due to the fact that he was homosexual, being imprisoned and humiliated by the society at the top of his notoriety and success. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde’s brilliance affronts the moralists from his time, but always with great intelligence. During his life, he wrote poems, short stories, plays, essays and his masterpiece – the novel The picture of Dorian Gray. According to Oscar Wilde, art should guide life and in order to it happen art should concern itself only with the pursuit of beauty, disdaining morality. He died at the age of forty-six in Paris, on November 30, 1900.
In the short story The model millionaire, a note of admiration, Oscar Wilde suggests a pessimistic point of view of Victorian society and its values. This short story narrates Hughie Erskine’s love story. Hughie was “wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his grey eyes” (p.219). However, he was poor. Hughie met Laura Merton and fell in love with her. Laura was the daughter of a retired English Colonel. He was a rude man that “had lost his temper and his digestion in India, and had never found either of them again” (p.219). Nevertheless, the Colonel liked Hughie very much, but the poor man was not engaged to her daughter and did not have money. So, Laura’s father said that Hughie could talk to him about the weeding when he got ten thousand pounds. Hughie looked very glum because of that.
One morning, Hughie visits his good friend, a painter named Alan Trevor. When Hughie arrived at Trevor’s house, he was painting a beggar. “Poor old chap!”, “how miserable he looks!”, Hughie said to Trevor. However, this beggar was the Baron Hausberg, one of the richest men in Europe. The Baron was grateful to Hughie because the man had slipped one sovereign into his hand. So, he decided to present Hughie’s philanthropic spirit giving a check for ten thousand pounds to the poor man. In such case, Hughie Erskine and Laura Merton could get married.
This narrative exposes a dreadful condition of the human values: “Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic” (p.219). It shows us how the humanity can be inhuman and greedy, such as Laura’s father when he doesn’t permit the wedding between Hughie and his daughter because of Hughie’s financial condition. The social criticism is the main focus of Oscar Wilde’s story. Analyzing this narrative, we may conclude that the Irish writer seemed to demonstrate an aversion for the hypocrisy, arrogance and cruelty of the Victorian society, especially when we observe characters like the Colonel and Alan Trevor.
On the other hand, it is important to realize that Oscar Wilde also seems hopeful in relation to the human actions. We can see this feeling in Hughie’s actions towards the poor beggar: “He looked so forlorn and wretched that Hughie could not help pitying him”… “‘Poor old fellow’, he thought to himself, ‘he wants it more than I do, but it means no hansoms for a fortnight’; and he walked across the studio and slipped the sovereign into the beggar's hand (p.220 and 221). Another important character in the narrative is Baron Hausberg. Just as Hughie, he is a generous man that decides to help an unknown person that had put aside its own comfort to help one who was in needy. These two characters deserve “a note of admiration”. And it is what Oscar Wilde did in his short story.
The model millionaire is a narrative that shows us the contradictions of the human being – the tightfisted and the generous, the hypocrisy and the sincerity, the cruelty and the goodness. In other words: aspects and ways of feelings and thinking that we can perceive in characters like the Colonel, Hughie Erskine, Alan Trevor and Baron Hausberg. So, Oscar Wilde’s narrative may perhaps be seen as the voice, or wisdom, of society, in which “millionaire models… are rare enough” and “model millionaires are rarer still!”