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Oscar wilde as an essayist
Literary criticism of Oscar Wilde
Wilde voicing opinion importance of being earnest
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OSCAR WILDE: PHILOSOPHIES ON ART IN DORIAN GREY
Irish writer Oscar Wilde was a major originator of what is called the Decadent movement, a shift in late 19th-century artistic and literary analysis in Western Europe. This art style primarily flourished in France, but also influenced other areas of Europe - Oscar Wilde, for instance, was primarily responsible for the movement’s spread through England. Oscar Wilde, in all of his works, adhered to the ideas of the Decadents. He penned many articles, but his the bulk of his critical work were six essays, published over a period of five years and later compiled together. In this same year, Wilde also published his own novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which put into practice many of the aphorisms
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This collective group was first referred to as “decadents” by hostile critics, as their work seemed to focus on unsavory and taboo topics. However, the Decadents later adopted the name for themselves, to separate themselves from other ideas of the time. Decadent philosophy overlapped greatly with the Aestheticism movement, but at the same time, they had several distinct ideas that set them apart. Overall, the Decadents extoled artifice over nature and complexity over simplicity, defying social norms by instead embracing subjects and styles that their critics considered morbid and over-refined. These writers, which included Wilde, Baudelaire, and others, used elaborate and stylized language even in their writings discussing such things as death, depression, and deviant sexualities. All in all, they aspired to set literature and art free from materialistic preoccupations of society, without any requirement of usefulness or attachment of moral messages to their work. They insisted that art should be made for art’s sake, and that art must be sensationalist or artificial to make an impact lest it blend …show more content…
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” (D.G, Wilde, 17). It seems absurd to declare a form that has been admired and practiced for centuries as “useless”. But the paradox in this statement plays on a cultural assumption: in this case, the presumed positive connection between usefulness and inherent value, especially with regard to art. He disagrees with the seemingly obvious truth that objects that are useful in life would also have more value than what is considered useless. Wilde’s defense, that “all art is quite useless,” in fact exposes the long-standing bias that art is not socially or morally “useful” and thus not valuable – or is only useful to the extent that it does serve society – and shifts the paradigm. In his writings and ideas, Wilde disassociates utility and value, and instead makes them opposites, so that what is ‘useful’ becomes something not to be “admired.” And art’s “uselessness” in turn becomes its essence, admired for its own existence and not because of any social of moral value it inherently
In existential thought it is often questioned who decides what is right and what is wrong. Our everyday beliefs based on the assumption that not everything we are told may be true. This questioning has given light to the subjective perspective. This means that there is a lack of a singular view that is entirely devoid of predetermined values. These predetermined values are instilled upon society by various sources such as family to the media. On a societal level this has given rise to the philosophy of social hype. The idea of hype lies in society as the valuation of something purely off someone or some group of people valuing it. Hype has become one of the main driving forces behind what society considers to be good art and how successful artists can become while being the main component that leads to a wide spread belief, followed by its integration into subjective views. Its presence in the art world propagates trends, fads, and limits what we find to be good art. Our subjective outlook on art is powered by society’s feedback upon itself. The art world, high and low, is exploited by this social construction. Even when objective critique is the goal subjective remnants can still seep through and influence an opinion. Subjective thought in the art world has been self perpetuated through regulated museums, idolization of the author, and general social construction because of hype.
The transgression of moral codes and degeneration are central themes to all three texts. Dorian Gray, also referred to as the decadence manifesto, embodies creeds relative to art, that conflict with Victorian society’s conformities regarding art. Therefore, the book itself would have been deemed degenerate. Wilde adopts Walter’s notion of the art for art’s sake. He addresses the idea of valuing ‘Not the fruit of experience’, but’ the experience itself’ through denying that art should be didactic or morally instruct. (Pater, 1868:152)‘The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame’, thi...
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a rich story which can be viewed through many literary and cultural lenses. Oscar Wilde himself purposefully filled his novel with a great many direct and indirect allusions to the literary culture of his times, so it seems appropriate to look back at his story - both the novel and the 1945 film version - in this way.
Oscar Wilde had that one love that couldn’t let anyone know. He was homosexual and knew that it was illegal. This is why Oscar was popular because of his personal life. Oscar Wilde gains more popularity on his life style than his achievements. “... the author of the The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, has been gaining in popularity and academic respect for his literary achievements (Tucker 1).
"I turned half way around and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself" (7). During the Victorian era, this was a dangerous quote. The Victorian era was about progress. It was an attempt aimed at cleaning up the society and setting a moral standard. The Victorian era was a time of relative peace and economic stability (Marshall 783). Victorians did not want anything "unclean" or "unacceptable" to interfere with their idea of perfection. Therefore, this quote, taken from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, brimming with homosexual undertones, was considered inappropriate. Due to the time period's standards, Oscar Wilde was forced to hide behind a thin layer of inference and parallel. Wilde was obsessed with the perfect image. Although he dressed more flamboyantly than the contemporary dress, it was to create an image of himself. Wilde was terrified of revealing his homosexuality because he knew that he would be alienated and ostracized from the society. Through his works, Oscar Wilde implicitly reflected his homosexual lifestyle because he feared the repercussions from the conservative Victorian era in which he lived.
From statues and sculpture, to modern painting and photography, society has revered and treasured art in many forms and styles. Author, Oscar Wilde, begins his novel with, “The Artist is the creator of beautiful things, and those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.” This quote reveals that Wilde enjoys any form of art no matter what the critics say. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” This quote is from the novelist, short-story writer, and poetic genius, Oscar Wilde.
Wilde denied the connection between himself and his art, stating “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.”. He could make this statement due to the nature of fiction; as it is usually considered as false or imagined. This was also the intent of Orwell; using his allegorical novella to push his anti-communist views to highlight the clear manipulation in the class system. Composers can explore taboo topics behind the shield of fiction in literature; allowing them to protect their duality whilst having a mode of expression. Wilde was frustrated with the authoritative suppression of his sexuality and Orwell frustrated with the societal infiltration of Russian propaganda. Literature provided an influential method to express their condemned desires whilst protecting their image. It is in this way that literature is a powerful tool in challenging the status
Oscar Wilde was born in October 16, 1854, in the mid era of the Victorian period—which was when Queen Victoria ruled. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901.While she ruined Britain, the nation rise than never before, and no one thought that she was capable of doing that. “The Victorian era was both good and bad due to the rise and fall of the empires and many pointless wars were fought. During that time, culture and technology improved greatly” (Anne Shepherd, “Overview of the Victorian Era”). During this time period of English, England was facing countless major changes, in the way people lived and thought during this era. Today, Victorian society is mostly known as practicing strict religious or moral behavior, authoritarian, preoccupied with the way they look and being respectable. They were extremely harsh in discipline and order at all times. Determination became a usual Victorian quality, and was part of Victorian lifestyle such as religion, literature and human behavior. However, Victorian has its perks, for example they were biased, contradictory, pretense, they cared a lot of about what economic or social rank a person is, and people were not allowed to express their sexuality. Oscar Wilde was seen as an icon of the Victorian age. In his plays and writings, he uses wit, intelligence and humor. Because of his sexuality he suffered substantially the humiliation and embarrassment of imprisonment. He was married and had an affair with a man, which back then was an act of vulgarity and grossness. But, that was not what Oscar Wilde was only known for; he is remembered for criticizing the social life of the Victorian era, his wit and his amazing skills of writing. Oscar Wilde poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” typifies the Vi...
The elegant, aesthetic, scandalous life of Oscar Wilde is reflected in many of his works, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray. Controversial works that were explicitly differently from the works of his time period. Works such as that of The Picture of Dorian Gray heavily criticized by his fellow peers and even used against him for the morals it implied. Such things as morals and fear of critics held no influence on his creative works or his life choices. Aestheticism, morality, homosexuality, and gothic elements in Oscar Wilde's life serve as an influence to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold would both challenge Oscar Wilde’s assertion, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” First and foremost, they would challenge how a work of literature or art could be rated as good in the first place. Utilizing Ruskin’s “The Savageness of Gothic Architecture” and Arnold’s “The Study of Poetry” to compare the criteria both used to classify something as either good or bad and lastly, considering if morality is completely foreign to defining the quality of something according to their texts.
He also blames all the misery of his life on the hideous painting of him (152). Dorian's hatred towards the two pieces of art mirror how Victorian society looks upon art created by people like Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde's plays, essays and other works of art are looked upon poorly by some in the Victorian era as his work was considered by some to be corrupt. Oscar Wilde, however, uses the book The Picture of Dorian Gray to subtly counter these points. “All art at once” surface and symbol.
Oscar Wilde`s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is written primarily out of the aesthetic movement of the Nineteenth Century. Therefore, the text contains a profuse amount of imagery which reflects the concepts of beauty and sensory experiences. By taking the aesthetic approach, Wilde was able to revive the gothic style through grotesque imagery of the portrait and the character whose soul it represents. Wilde is not using gothic elements to shock his audiences; rather he uses the gothic to capture the hideousness of Gray`s corruptness which leaks out of the painting and into the tone of the entire text.
In "The Critic as Artist," Oscar Wilde writes that literature is superior to the graphic arts, because unlike paintings of sunsets or portraits or other related forms of art, literature is "soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone…but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim" (2289). Wilde goes on to express that graphic art isn't really anything that special. People might try to interpret, for example, the meaning of a sculpture, and think that it has a deeper significance that what it actually does. Wilde thinks that the artists that paint or sculpt simply make their art because it is pleasing to the eye, with colors that complement each other or "simply with certain arrangements of lines and masses" (2290), and that "it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meaning" (2290). He does say that art is very beautiful, but because it has no real meaning and is just open to various interpretations from anyone, it is inferior to Literature, which "shows us… not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and… solves once and for all the problem of art's unity" (2293).
Wilde accomplishes achieving the satirical message that he intended for the readers through his use of exaggeration. He begins by Mrs. Cheveley spitefully telling Lady Chiltern that her “house” is “a house bought with the price of dishonor”
Set in the late 19th Century, Oscar Wilde wrote his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is a story about debauchery and corruption of innocence and well known as a "Gothic melodrama." Violent twists and a sneaky plot make this novel a distinct reflection of human pride and corrupt nature.