The Selfish Giant

As a story written for children, “The Selfish Giant” employs a straightforward style so that even the youngest readers can understand its basic moral, which stresses the importance of charity. The Giant’s selfishness, for example, furnishes the story’s title and attracts frequent and explicit commentary from both the narrator and other characters. His character arc emerges from this context, and as he learns to share with and help others, his relationship to his garden likewise changes; he learns to love it not as his property, but for the happiness it brings to others.

This message unfolds within a Christian framework that would also have been familiar to young Victorian readers, and the story is one of Wilde’s most unambiguously Christian texts, employing relatively uncomplicated biblical allusions. The Giant’s garden in spring, with its lush vegetation and abundance of flowers, resembles the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. Like Adam and Eve, the children who play in this garden are characterized by their innocence, as the Victorians believed children were born innately good; the children’s connection to spring, which disappears when the Giant evicts them, underscores their purity.