oscar wilde

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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 figure 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 transfiguration 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.