Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was born in
1854 and grew up in an intellectually bustling Irish household. His mother was
a poet who wrote under the pen name Speranza and who had a considerable
following; his father was a renowned physician with an interest in myths and
folklore. At Oxford he won a coveted poetry award and came
under the influence of the late nineteenth century aesthetic movement. He found
its notions of 'art for art's sake' and dedicating one's life to art
suitable to his temperment and talents. Oscar had a desire to make himself famous and set off to London to do just that. From 1878 to 1881 Oscar Wilde became well
known for being well known despite having any substantial acheivements to build
on. He insinuated himself into the class of people he labelled as 'the
beautiful people', wore outrageous clothes, passed himself off as an art
critic and aesthete, and built a reputation for saying shocking things and
doing ammusing ones. If one tells the truth, one is sure sooner or later to
be found out. His natural wit and good humour endeared him to the art and
theatre world and through his lover Frank Miles he found easy entry into the
cliques that frequented London's
theater circuit and drawing rooms. He
became a much-desired all-purpose party guest and, with his velvet coat, knee
breeches, silk stockings, pale green tie, cane, shoulder-length hair, loose
silk shirts and the lily he occasionally carried through Piccadilly
Circus, much talked about and satirized. His popularity and
flamboyance led to his being chosen as an advance publicity man for a new
Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Patience, that spoofed aesthetes like
himself, and which paid him one third of the box office receipts. In 1882 he arrived in New
York City and began a year long tour of North
America. When a customs inspector asked him if he had anything to
declare he replied, 'Nothing but my genius.' At 28 he lectured in 70
American and Canadian cities on the arts and literature. His performances were
as wildly popular as his audiences were varied: he spoke to Mormons in Salt Lake City, silver miners in Colorado,
West Coast literati in San Francisco, farmers in
Kansas, and swung through Ontario
and Quebec. When he returned from America he had
tired of being the Great Aesthete and returned to more conventional dress. He
toured, wrote two unsuccessful plays and a well received collection of
children's fairy tales, married, fathered two sons and took a position as
editor of Woman's World, a monthly magazine for which he wrote literary
criticism. Two years later he tired of journalism and journalists and returned
to sparkling at parties and spending much of his time with friends and lovers, often stepping beyond the bounds of what was
considered morally and socially proper for the time. From 1890 to 1895 Oscar Wilde reached the
peak of his career, both as poet-playwright and social gadfly. His novel, The
Picture of Dorian Gray raised a storm of indignation to thinly veiled
allusions to the protagonist's homosexuality. In the same year he came out with
a well received volume of children's stories, The House of Pomegranates
and followed with a succession of enormously successful plays that reintroduced
the comedy of manners to the English Stage: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman
of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Ernest, the latter
being hailed as the first modern comedy in English. Wilde's plays served as a catalyst in
creating the modern era. Collectively they 'forced Victorian society to
re-examine its hypocrisies and delineated with wit and humour, the
arbitrariness of many moral and social taboos which, to the unreflective
Victorian eye, appeared to be eternal. In 1895 the eight Marquess of Queensberry, considered
quite mad by even members of his immediate family, culminated his
persistent public harassment of Wilde for his off-and-on sexual relationship
with his son Lord Alfred Douglas. A libel suit filed by Wilde against the
Marquess backfired; the Marquess was acquitted and Wilde's not too well
camouflaged desire for men landed him two years of hard labour. Wilde resisted
the urgings of his friends to leave for the Continent, where more tolerant
sexual mores prevailed, saying he should accept with dignity the consequences
of his actions. The supreme vice is shallowness. While in prison he wrote a 30,000 word letter
to Douglas, published after his death with the title De Profundis, that
is regarded as possibly being his most important and mature statement on life
and art in general and his own life and art in particular. In concluding, he
tells Douglas, You came to me to learn the
Pleasures of Life and the Pleasures of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you
something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. After his release from prison, Wilde left England and wandered around Europe
for the last three years of his life. He was a broken man who sank deeper into
a reckless life of sex and absinthe which neither he nor long-time friends
could extricate him. His one noteworthy piece from this period is The Ballad
of Reading Gaol, a gripping account of prison brutality based on his own
harrowing experiences with a plea for prison reform. He endured his final days in poor health and
living on borrowed money and the kindness of sympathetic friends and hotel
managers. In 1900, in Hotel d'Alsace in Paris,
he died of cerebral meningitis.
The
Picture of Dorian Gray.
When Wilde
published The Picture of Dorian Gray, the
book was received with a lot of protest and criticisms. The suggested
homosexuality, the amoral nature of the story, the description of luxury and
moral indifference shocked 'Victorian' England. The novel is an expression
of anti-Victorian aestheticism, but suffers from Wilde's melodramatic manner of
describing Dorian's crimes, which become more and more excessive as the plot
goes on. The novel was published with Wilde's celebrated Preface, which represents Wilde's Aesthetic Manifesto. It is written to shock and to provoke the
Victorian Philistine, but still contains various interesting and intelligent
reflections on the aims and 'purposes' of Art and the character of the Artist . The plot is a simple description of how a
beautiful, tasteful and cultured young man, Dorian Gray, becomes corrupted by
his friends to the point of becoming a moral 'monster'. When the
painter, Basil Hallward, paints an attractive portrait of Dorian, the latter
express the desire to remain as young and beautiful as the ure in the
portrait, and from this hedonistic desire the plot starts. Lord Henry Wotton,
Wilde's amusing portrait of a Victorian dandy whose cynicism and hedonism
dominates his life style, takes Dorian under his wing and the process of
corruption begins. The first crime happens when Lord Henry persuades Dorian to
abandon his girlfriend, the naive and attractive actress Sybil Vane, who then
kills herself. In true Gothic style, the portrait begins to manifest signs of
the evil and cruelty of Dorian, while Dorian himself remains untouched. As
Dorian realizes what is happening, he abandons himself totally to a life of
excess, which after twenty years culminates in the murder of his friend Basil.
At last, tired of constantly trying to escape from his own cruelty, he destroys
the portrait. This final act of violence destroys the 'curse' of the
portrait and kills him. Immediately the body of Dorian assumes the terrible
transuration of the portrait and the painting resumes its original
appearance. The book is an occasion for Oscar Wilde to speak about his
aesthetic philosophy and to describe beautiful places, objects and atmospheres.
Unfortunately, it sometimes becomes a mixture of styles, lists of expensive
objects and furniture mixed with reflections on beauty, Victorian melodrama and
commonplace Gothic references. The tone is high, the
artist is speaking to the common man from a higher intellectual and aesthetic
level. Wilde's belief in the immortality of Art is represented in the final
scene of the book, when the painting is miraculously restored to its original
beauty while Dorian dies changed by the awful signs of corruption and ageing.
The characters who discover the body can only
recognize Dorian by the rings he has on his fingers, while the portrait is
immediately recognizable. Art is thus more true to life than life itself, and
this is certainly the thematic and aesthetic heart of the book. The character
of Dorian Gray clearly represents the divided self of psychology or the
'double' of Gothic literature. His attempt to hide the Portrait, the artistic
representation of his other self is symbolic of man's attempt to deny and
subjugate part of his true personality. The physical transformation of the
portrait symbolizes the mental and spiritual transformation of the character.
By stabbing the portrait, Dorian stabs himself. The changes that occur to the
painting are not autonomous changes, but again symbolic representations of the
moral corruption of the untrue self. Much has been said of Dorian's
narcissistic self'worship and indeed this theme has been linked with the whole fin de siècle tradition of
Dandyism. Certainly from the first moment we meet Dorian, he appears to be vain
and just as Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in the pool, Dorian
falls in love with himself when he sees Basil's portrait. Like Faust, he then
makes a Devilish pact or bargain, prepared to sell his soul for eternal youth
and beauty , as Faust was prepared to sell his for
ultimate Knowledge. With this mythical/literary reading, Lord Wotton can be
seen as a type of Mephostophilis, encouraging Dorian to continue his wild
existence even in moments of doubt. Dorian Gray is an example of the 'dandy', that was so famous in that period. He physically
expresses Wilde's own ideal of beauty and dedicates himself to the artist's
life of experience. Like Frankenstein, his portrait becomes his 'monster', his
hidden self, or 'id' that is unnaturally separated from the 'ego'. Basil
Hallward is the painter who paints the wonderful portrait. He plays the role of
the true friend who reproaches Dorian for his cruelty and excesses and censures
Lord Wotton. Of course, it is Basil who becomes the last victim of Dorian's
uncontrollable evil. Basil also speaks about the new aesthetic ideals,
obviously becoming the mouth--piece for Wilde. Lord Henry is the
Mephostophilean friend of Dorian; he too is a Dandy and supposed homosexual,
who encourages Dorian to transgress against the bourgeoise 'philistine'
mentality of Victorian society.
