An Analysis of the Harlot's House "The Harlot's House" by Oscar Wilde was written in 1881, towards the latter part of the Victorian era. This genre is a poem containing 12 stanzas. The point of view in this piece is from the narrator's perspective at the beginning, the narrative distance shifts further in the fourth stanza, zooms in, then zooms out again. The narrator is walking along a street and stops, with his companion, "under the prostitute's house" (Wilde, Longman p. 2069: 1.3). In the next two stanzas Wilde moves inside the house describing the atmosphere of a reveler in "Inside, above the din and the fray" (2.1) and the shadows of the figures inside are cast on the curtain (3.3). This movie projector type visual image gives this poem an unstable modified effect. The images in this poem are vivid. The shadowy figures of the occupants of the prostitute's house are described as "mechanical" (3.1). The narrator and his companion observe everything that happens in this house of ill repute. The reader gets the feeling that both of them are under the window for quite some time. Whether out of fascination, or wondering how people live "on the other side of the tracks", there is clearly a certain fascination in standing on this street watching the "ghostly dancers twirl to the sound of horn and violin" (4.1- 2). There are two other dances described, a quadrille in the fifth stanza, a sarabande in the sixth. Wilde shifts the image from a fantastic dream, with dancing and joy, to a marked change in the harsh reality that he influences with words. In the twentieth line, a "phantom lover" is approached by a "mechanical puppet" (7.1-2). The "horrible puppet" comes to the porch to smoke, "after... half of paper... for hours and there was little to celebrate." The British became richer, but it was not the poor who benefited from this revolution" according to the Longman Anthology (Longman p. 1818). "Overcrowded conditions in cities created urban slums of unimaginable misery" (p. 1819). This misery is mirrored in "The Harlot's House". puppet (only more so because he is a hypocrite). He is probably as "dead" as the "dead who dance with the dead" in the house. Works Cited Damrosch, David, et al., ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol B. Compact New York: Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000.