Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900)
The brilliant artist and the dandy
Oscar Wilde, the son of a surgeon and of an ambitious literary woman, was born in Dublin in 1854. After attending Trinity College in Dublin, he was sent to Oxford where he gained a first class degree in Classics and distinguished himself for his eccentricity. He became a disciple of Walter Pater, the theorist of aestheticism in England () T120), accepting the theory of 'Art for Art's Sake'; he defined himself as "a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture" of his time. After graduating, he left Oxford and settled in London where he soon became a fashionable dandy for his extraordinary wit and his foppish way of dressing.
In 1881 Wilde edited, at his own expense, Poems, and was engaged for a tour in the United States where he held some lectures about the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes. On his arrival in New York he told reporters that aestheticism was a search for the beautiful, a science through which men looked for the relationship existing between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were simply different forms of the same truth. The tour was a remarkable personal success for Wilde. On his return to Europe in 1883, he married Constance Lloyd who bore him two children, but he soon became tired of his marriage. At this point of his career he was most noted as a great talker: his presence became a social event and his remarks appeared in the most fashionable London magazines. As a tribute to his dandified aestheticism, women wore sprays of lilies and many young men wore lilies in the buttonholes of their coats.
In the late 1880s Wilde's literary talent was revealed by a series of short stories, The Canterville Ghost, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Happy Prince and Other Tales written for his children and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray(1891). After his firsst and only novel he developed an interest in drama and revived the comedy of manners () T118). In the 1890s he produced a series of plays which were successful on the London stage: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No lmportance (1893), An ldeal Husband' (1895), The lmportance of Being Earnest (1895), his masterpiece, and the tragedy in French Salomé (1893). However, both the novel and the tragedy damaged the writer's reputation, since the former was considered immoral, and the latter was prevented from appearing on the London stage owing to its presumed obscenity.
In 1891 he met the young and handsome Lord Alfred Douglas with whom Wilde dared to have a homosexual affair. The boy's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, forced a public trial and Wilde was convicted of homosexual practices and subsequently sentenced to two-year hard labour. While in prison he wrote De Profundis, a long letter to explain his life and to condemn Lord Alfred Douglas for abandoning him; this work was published posthumously in 1905. He also wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898. Wilde's trial brought out all the homophobia that had long been building up in England and America. Even the aesthetic movement in art suffered a setback as a result of the revolt against Oscar Wilde. When Wilde was released from prison, he lived in France under an assumed name as an outcast in poverty. He died of meningitis in Paris in 1900.
A professor of aesthetic
Wilde totally adopted "the aesthetic ideal", as he affirmed in one of his famous conversations: "My life like a work of art". He lived in the double role of rebel and dandy. The dandy must be distinguished from the bohemian: while the bohemian allies himself to the masses, the urban proletariat, the dandy is a bourgeois artist, who, in spite of his uneasiness, remains a member of his class.
The Wildean dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses his wit to shock, and is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. Since life was meant for pleasure, and pleasure was an indulgence in the beautiful, beautiful clothes, beautiful talks, delicious food, and handsome boys were Wilde's main interests. He affirmed in the Preface of his novel "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all". In this way he rejected the didacticism that had characterised the Victorian novel in the first half of the century.
Art for Art's Sake
The concept of 'Art for Art's Sake' was to him a moral imperative and not merely an aesthetic one. He believed that' only "Art as the cult of Beauty" could prevent the murder of the soul. Wilde perceived the artist as an alien in a materialistic world, he wrote only to please himself and was not concerned with communicating his theories to his fellow-beings. His pursuit of beauty and fulfilment was the tragic act of a superior being inevitably turned into an outcast.
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
The Plot
The novel is set in London at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young man whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to portray him. While the young man's desiresare satisfied, including that of eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear on the portrait. Dorian lives only for pleasure, making use of everybody and letting people die because of his insensitivity. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait,Dorian kills him. Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it, but he mysteriously killshimself. In the very moment of death the picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian's face becomes "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome".
Narrative technique
This story is told by an unobtrusive third-person narrator; the perspective adopted is internal since Dorian's apparition in the second chapter and this allows a process of identification between the reader and the character. The settings are vividly described with words appealing to the senses, the characters reveal themselves through what they say or what other people say of them, accordingto a technique which is typical of drama.
Allegorical meaning
The story is profoundly allegorical; it is a 19th-century version of the myth of Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. This soul becomes the picture, which records the signs of time, the corruption, the horror and the sins concealed under the mask of Dorian’s timeless beauty. WiIde plays on the Renaissance idea of the correspondence existing between the physicaland spiritual realms: beautiful people are moral people; ugly people are immoral people. His variation on this theme is in his use of the magical portrait. The picture is not an autonomous self: it stands for the dark side of Dorian's personality, hisdouble, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room.
The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped; when Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that is, death. The horrible, corrupting picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience ofVictorian middle class, while Dorian and his pure,innocent appearance are symbols of bourgeoishypocrisy. Finally the picture, restored to itsoriginal beauty, illustrates WiIde's theories ofart: art survives people, art is eternal.
T E S T YOURSELF
1. Test your knowledge about the novelThe Picture of Dorian Gray by answering the following questions.
- Where and when does the novel take place?
- Who is Dorian Gray?
- What does the picture symbolise?
- What narrative technique is
- What is the moral of the novel?
- What narrative technique is employed?
2. This is a self-portrait of A. Beardsley (1872-1898), the art editor of The Yellow Book. The portrait
seems to be divided into halves by a vertical line. What does this make you think of? This picture is
also characterised by the lack of colour. Do you think the artist's use of black and white may symbolise the double nature of man? Look at the hairstyle of the man: what does it suggest as regards his customs and the social class he belongs to?
3. Do you think that the exaggerated cult of beauty of contemporary men in showbusiness is indebted to the ideas ofthe 19th-century Aesthetic movement?
“I would give my soul”
In the following passage Lord Henry Wotton meets Dorian Gray and he finds him to be totally un-self-conscious about his beauty. They are both enthralled by the beauty that the painter Basil has captured in the finished portrait of Dorian.
W
Work on the text –CONTENTS
1. Read the text from line 1 to line 40 and answer the following questions.
1. What does Lord Henry tell Dorian about beauty?
2. What is youth according to him?
3. What does he implore Dorian to do?
4. What advice does he give Dorian?
5. What does their age require?
6. What could Dorian be the symbol of?
2.Read the rest of the passage and say:
1. what Dorian realises looking at his portrait;
2. what feelings the picture has created in his soul;
3. what will happen to the portrait and to Dorian himself in the future;
4. what Dorian wishes.
STRUCTURE AND STYLE
3. State which kind of narrator tells this story, and if he openly intervenes in the narration. Whose point of view is adopted throughout?
4. Focus on the characters presented in this passage, Lord Henry, Basil Hallward, and Dorian Gray.
1. What social class do they belong to?
2. What kind of man is Lord Henry? He speaks through paradox; find some examples in the first part of the text.
3. Say how Lord Henry exerts his influence on Dorian Gray.
4. Lord Henry's speech contains words and phrases conveying the ideas ofyouth, beauty and old age.
Underline them in thetext and collect your data in a table.
YOUTH / BEAUTY / OLD AGE5. What image of youth. beauty and old age are depicted by Lord Henry?.
DORIAN’S DEATH
The following passage is from the final chapter of the novel when the story reaches its climax in an unexpected and
dramatic way with Dorian's dreadful metamorphosis.
Work on the text
CONTENTS
1. As you read find out:
1. what references Dorian Gray makes to his past;
2. how he tries to justify himself;
3. what he thinks about his beauty;
4. what the portrait makes him understand about his recent actions;
5. what he decides to do;
6. why he does this;
7. what happens as a result.
STRUCTURE AND STYLE
2. Concentrate on the character of Dorian Gray.
1. Say what feelings he shows while looking at the picture. How does he judge his own behaviour?
2. What does the portrait mean to Dorian? Does he see it as the reflection of his own soul or as an independent being,extraneous to himself?
3. Read lines 17-111 again. Here Dorian Gray is aware of his sins and crimes. which are reflected on the
picture, as well as of the fact that it is impossible to escape old age and death. In the attempt to
change his reality, he looks back at his .”unstained” boyhood with a sort of nostalgia and wonders if it
is possible to destroy his maturity, which has become hideous to him, and put an end to his life of
corruption. Before reaching the final decision to destroy the picture, Dorian's thought follows different
steps. Link each of them to the corresponding lines in the passage.
a. nostalgia for his pure boyhoodlines . . .
b. awareness of his corruptionlines . . .
c. recollection of his pact to keep eternal youthlines. . .
d. wish for repentance and purificationlines . ..
e. awareness that youth and beauty have caused his ruinlines ..,
f. wish to free himself from the pastlines . . .
g. understanding that repentance was pure illusionlines . ..
h. decision to destroy the picturelines ...
3. Why does Dorian kill himself in stabbing the portrait? What does theportrait
symbolize?
4. Examine the language of the passage.
1. Consider the examples of parallelisms in lines 8-98 and complete the scheme below. An example has been provided for you:
a. wicked people:always very old and uglyline 10
b. his beauty:line 41
c. his youth:line 42
d. his youth:lines 42-43
e. the picture:lines 92-93
f.the picture:line 101
2. The first parallelism is the creed that has inspired the whole life of Dorian Gray, which seems to be
contradicted by the otherstatements. Why?
3. Which sentences are used to express Dorian's doubts about his salvation? Underline them.
4. Find the references to the mirror. Comment on the meaning of this suggestive detail in the story.
5. Circle the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs which describe the picture in lines 70-83. Which
semantic area do theybelong to?
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