The Nightingale and the Rose

In “The Nightingale and the Rose,” materialism comes in two forms: intellectual materialism and economic materialism. The Student represents the former, which roughly corresponds to both utilitarianism—a philosophy, prominent in the 19th century, that located the moral worth of a thing in its results rather than in the thing itself—and rationalism, which gained prominence as religious belief declined. The Student is an intellectual with no appreciation for what he cannot quantify. Most notably, he cannot appreciate the mysterious powers of beauty and love because he cannot reduce them to physical explanation or concrete valuation. His attempts to do so, as when he concludes a scientific name is necessary to express the rose’s beauty, are comical.

The Student himself seems to realize that he is lacking something when he laments, “I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched” (58), but he fails to change at the end of the story. Instead, he concludes that love is worthless because it does not “prove” anything and (worse yet) “mak[es] one believe things that are not true” (67). It does not occur to him that love might be “true” in a deeper sense that evades rational explanation, so he returns to his “great dusty book” (67)—a symbol of intellectualism. Its obvious disuse is the ultimate representation of the hollowness of materialism and pragmatism; if such philosophies were truly practical, presumably the book would not be dusty.

The Professor’s daughter represents a different kind of materialism (though a related one, in Wilde’s depiction). She is materialistic, caring only for wealth and fine goods, like the silk she is spinning or the “silver buckles” on the shoes of the man she prefers to the Student. What’s more, her appreciation of these objects does not lie even in a sense of luxury, which would at least entail some recognition of beauty. Rather, she bases her opinions on market value, telling the Student that “everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers” (66). This remark links her to the increasingly capitalist and consumerist world of 19th-century England. Like the Student, she fails to recognize the true value of the rose as an expression of love and sacrifice.

The story, therefore, suggests that materialism in all its forms merely distracts from the realities of the world and from life itself. The Student in particular is notably oblivious to his surroundings, misunderstanding the Nightingale when she speaks and not hearing her at all when she sings her last song. The Student’s evaluation that the Nightingale has no “feeling” or sincerity, which recalls Enlightenment theories about animals being mere machines without souls, could not be further from the truth and thus proves the pitfalls of purely intellectual theories.