OSCAR WILDE E "IL RITRATTO DI DORIAN GRAY"

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Inglese
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Data:	27.06.2005
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Oscar Wilde
Wilde’s life and art are very closely linked. He was born and grew up in Dublin. He established himself as a spokesman. He had published his first volume of poems collection, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories and his famous novel the Picture of Dorian Gray. These included Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The importance of Being Ernest. When the Marquis of Queensberry accused him of having a homosexual relationship with his sun a scandal ensued and Wilde was convicted for homosexual acts which at time was a serious criminal offence. He spends two years in prison where he wrote the poem “The ballad of reading gaol” and his prose confession “De profundis”. Wilde emigrated to France and lived in poverty and obscurity under an assumed name. He was buried in Paris, in the same cemetery as Charles Baudelaire who had great influence on his work and life.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY.
The preface is considered the manifesto of the aesthetic movement and express Wilde’s ideas on art.
THE PLOT
Basil Hallward is an artist and he’s fascinated by the beauty of Dorian Gray and decided to paint his portrait. When Basil finished the picture, Dorian (influenced by aesthete Lord Henry Wotton) expressed the wish that the portrait would absorb all the signs of age. Alarmed by Dorian’s reaction, Basil decided to destroy the portrait but Dorian stops him and takes the picture with him. Dorian met a very beautiful actress, Sybil Vane, who falls in love with him and renounced her art to be with him. But Dorian rejects her and Sybil killed herself. Encouraged by the diabolic influence of lord Henry, Dorian embarks on a life of vice and sensual gratification. Years later Dorian met Basil and kills him to prevent him from revealing his secret. But sever other people had to die to keep Dorian’s secret. The portrait becomes more and more ugly so Dorian realised the horror of his acts and decided to destroy the portrait and begin a new life. But in doing so he killed himself. While the portrait returned his original image of perfection, Dorian became a disgusting old man.
Dorian embodies many aspects of Wilde’s philosophy, in particular his rejection of utilitarian values of industrialised society through the cult of art and beauty for its own sake. In this, Wilde was much closer to the ideas of French symbolist poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé than he was to his Victorian contemporaries. His aesthecism was to have influence on the work of others including Gabriele D’Annunzio.
For Wilde the work of art is neither simply true nor false . its superior value resides in the way it incorporates what is false as a part of the true.