Between Intellect And Emotion: A Freudian Analysis Of Repression And Rationalization In Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale And The Rose

Abstract

This paper analyzes Oscar Wilde's short story The Nightingale and the Rose (1888) through the psychoanalytic lens of Sigmund Freud, examining how the Student's purported love reveals unconscious mechanisms of repression, projection, and displacement. The narrative presents a young Student who believes he can win a girl's affection by presenting her with a red rose. After a Nightingale sacrifices her life to create the rose, the girl rejects the gift in favor of material jewels, prompting the Student to renounce love entirely and retreat into intellectual rationalization. While previous scholarship has explored the moral and social dimensions of Wilde's tale, insufficient attention has been paid to the psychological complexity of the Student's character. This study demonstrates that the Student's love is not genuine emotion but rather a projection of repressed desires masked by intellectual superiority. Through Freudian analysis, we reveal how Wilde critiques Victorian rationalism's suppression of authentic feeling, illustrating the psychological cost of privileging intellect over emotion.