The longest and perhaps most adult of Wilde’s fairytales, The Fisherman and his Soul, like The Star-Child, seems, aside from its alarming and slightly sinister story, to be deeply influenced by the cult of what was in Wilde’s time called Orientalism—much to the displeasure of later scholars like Edward Said. Stories from Persia (now Iran) and the Middle East swept across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reaching the zenith of their popularity in the English-speaking world with the publication of the translations in the 1860s by Edward Fitzgerald of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and in 1885 by Richard F. Burton of the One Thousand and One Nights. The latter, often referred to as the Arabian Nights, is a series of tales, some comic, some fierce, some romantic, all fantastic, as apparently told to the Shah by his Queen Sheherazade night after night as a way of piquing his interest and sparing her life. It gave our culture Ali Baba and his forty thieves, Aladdin and Sinbad. But to writers like Wilde this Arabic Invasion yielded other qualities too.
The exoticism, the colour, the energetic mixture of civilisation, eroticised romance and what appeared to be wild barbarism appealed to many Victorians. Wilde seems especially taken with the language. His own characteristic recitation of the colours and textures of fruits and jewels and fabrics in this tale more than any other recalls those original Arabic and Farsi tales and poems. When you think of the sober black frock-coated world of high Victorianism in which he lived it is perhaps not surprising that he took refuge, like the artist Frederick Leighton and other like-minded contemporaries, in what was perceived to be the mystery and splendour of the East, revelling in the sensuousness, sensuality and strangeness.
Add to this a hint of Hans Christian Andersen merfolk, a touch of witchcraft and a Faustian bargain and in The Fisherman and his Soul you have the makings of one of the strangest (and most perplexing) of all Wilde’s tales.