Student Question
How does "The Remarkable Rocket" convey virtues and flaws of Victorian society?
Quick answer:
In "The Remarkable Rocket," Oscar Wilde conveys the virtues of Victorian society through the reactions of sensible characters such as the Cracker, the Roman Candle, and the Duck to the silly and self-absorbed Rocket. Wilde conveys the flaws of Victorian society through satirizing or poking fun at the snobbish, pretentious, and useless Rocket, who is not as "remarkable" as he believes.
Oscar Wilde's "The Remarkable Rocket" is a satire, a story that pokes fun at the failings of certain types of people in Victorian society. The focus in this story is on the moral weaknesses of the "remarkable" Rocket, who is, ironically, far less remarkable than he wants to believe. Wilde uses him as a representative of a certain type of middle-class Englishman who is self-absorbed, snobbish, and pretentious. Good characters in the story become a foil to him.
The Rocket wants to build himself up by constantly asserting his superiority to those around him. He asserts, for example, that he is more sensitive than the other fireworks. He expects everyone to listen to what he has to say and believes he can rudely say whatever he wishes, but when anyone pushes back against him, he characterizes them as "rude." He defines selfishness as everyone in the world not...
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catering to him, stating to the Cracker:
What right have you to be happy? You should be thinking about others. In fact, you should be thinking about me. I am always thinking about myself, and I expect everybody else to do the same. That is what is called sympathy. It is a beautiful virtue, and I possess it in a high degree.
When anything happens to upset the Rocket's ego, he simply rearranges the facts to aggrandize himself. For instance, when one of the workmen calls him a "bad" rocket, the Rocket can't accept this true evaluation (he is "bad" because he has gotten wet). Therefore, he decides he must have misheard and that, in reality, the workman must have called him a "grand" rocket.
Against the self-absorbed and egotistic Rocket, Wilde shows the virtues of solid, sensible Victorians who don't take themselves too seriously. When the Cracker asks the Roman Candle, for instance, what a "sensitive" person is, the Roman Candle wisely and dryly retorts,
A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes.
In other words, the Roman Candle is saying the Rocket's version of "sensitivity" means that because the Rocket has been hurt, this gives him the right to hurt others—a definition the Roman Candle and the Cracker find ridiculous.
Another example of a sensible, sober-minded Victorian is the Duck. Although the Rocket looks down on her, she shows herself to a be a practical-minded woman who has given up politics to tend to her family. She is very unimpressed with the Rocket, thinking being a firework is a useless occupation. She says:
Now, if you could plough the fields like the ox, or draw a cart like the horse, or look after the sheep like the collie-dog, that would be something.