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 sičcle 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.
[ Medio appunti ]
