The Life of Oscar Wilde
The year is 1884 and many things have taken place in the life of our literary giant, Oscar Wilde has been married years and his touring of the United States and other countries have shown his of success in his writing all over the literary world. Some of his most recent writtings are "The Picture of Dorian Gray"(1891), "A Woman of No Importance"(1894) and his most resent essay known as "The Decay of Lying" is Oscar’s story of his outrage about the current style of writing that is going into the art society. What has happened to the spectacularness of this art, it has come down to being as horrid as what is being published in the local newspapers.
Is it true that " The Decay of Lying" has fallen to its deepest shadow of shame? It seems that in the words of Oscar Wilde, that is the shameful truth. How could this type of atrocity take place. It seems that the Victorian society in still under the belief that the Romanticism of life is still coursing through their veins, dead veins to be more specific. Wilde's views romanticism as a crude, childish and yet passive thing of the past and that it should remain there in the past. The romantics ideas of nature and realism need to be brought up-to-date.
Wilde has criticized the likes of as Wordsworth and other writers of the Romantic Era, they would send us out to nature and say "The solutions to societies problems and can best be remedied out here, within the confines of nature, this is where you need to be. Walking, talking, being out in the great airy open and embrace what nature has to offer. Only here can you expect to amend and resolve any personal and troublesome problems." Wilde's interpretation of this remedy: outlandish, extreme and insane, society has e...
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...t about a man, his character, morals and beliefs as a whole. At this moment, Jack becomes distressed about this problem his lady love had let him know that she could never marry a man that has the name other than Earnest. As a result of this occurrence our main character find that he must be christen with the name of Earnest in order for Gwendolyn to consider him as a husband. This situation is one of many that Wilde has created as a form of lying. When this play was first, performed and seen, people were outraged at this type of story.
Wilde continues to explain in more plays, poems and other forms of writing that his plays and other forms of writing are just to be observed as entertainment. His goal was not to be a moralist and instill morals for the masses. That was the furthest thing from his mind, Wilde intent is to create art that is for what it is Art’s sake.
These critics were known as anti-federalists. Anti-federalists opposed the constitution and the idea of a central. Anti-federalists believe that the nation’s central government should be equal or lesser to its sub-national states. Anti-Federalists main points included the policies that relate to settlement issues of the western lands. These issues within the Treaty of Paris’s new limits but past the old Proclamation Line of 1763. Anti-Federalists believed that if the constitution were to be ratified that it would take away the states critical powers. They were also concerned that their rights, which were newly receive by the victory of the revolution, would also be taken away without a bill of rights. Federalist, supporters of the constitution, thought differently. Federalist obtained their support directly from the Continental Army veterans and the citizens who were greatly impacted by the trade depression. Due to the damage committed by the trade depression, the general reputation of the United States, and the owed international debts to our allies from Europe, the Federalist wanted a change. One particular Federalist, had the most significant impact on the public’s opinion of the constitution. This distinct federalist was recognized as George
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is, at first glance, a novel about a young, handsome man’s demise as he travels into a world of self- indulgence, immorality, and evil. Though the predominant motif of beauty versus ugliness is the main take-away point, Wilde’s use of symbols, particularly flowers cannot go unnoticed. From characterization to depicting religious allusions, flowers are frequently used in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Clearly, the novel’s use of roses, orchids, lilacs, and the like has an underlying meaning, which will be explored and analyzed in this essay.
In ‘Wilde’s Fiction’ written by Jerusha McCormack, the author starts her essay examining Oscar Wilde’s life and origins. The Artist, born and schooled in Ireland became a writer in England where he lived as a queer kind of Irishman. He studied in Oxford where he challenged himself beating the great scholars he met; later on, he acquired the title of an English aristocrat and made himself over as a dandy, a fine well-dressed man, who can also be known as a quite self-concerned person. Oscar Wilde, was also particularly famous for his quips, examining the drafts of his plays in fact, he used to open his works with jokes and witty phrases, his aphorisms became popular very soon and this could happen especially because he used the language of his audience, the language of common double-talk.
The following extract presents Dorian Gray’s chilling self-destruction through the use of language, structure and form. Filled with gothic suspense, Oscar Wilde presents the mental and physical effects of an opium addiction.
Is it true that lying has fallen to its deepest shadow of shame? In the words of Wilde it is shamefully true. How could this type of atrocity take place, it seems that the Victorian society is still under the belief that the Romanticism of life is still coursing through their veins, dead veins as Wilde might best put it. Oscar views romanticism as crude and childlike, and something that should remain in the past. Wilde has criticized the likes of Wordsworth and other writers of the Romantic Era, if they had their way they would continue to send us into nature and recommend the following advice: "The solutions to societies problems can best be remedied here, within the confines of nature, this is where you should be. Walking, talking, and embracing the great outdoors and receiving all that nature has to offer. Here is where you can find yourself." Wilde's view of this remedy is outlandish, extreme and insane.
One’s pursuit of the good life can be altered by how much we allow ourselves to be influence by different ideas, groups, or individuals. We can suffer the dangers of egocentrism, which we see in God in America: The New Adam through the Spanish colonists and the Puritans. The other extreme we could suffer is complete conformity to someone else’s vision of the “good life” which is shown in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly” (Bible Psalm 1:1). It is ironic that both Oscar Wilde and his fictional character Dorian Gray both fell victim to bad counsel. Wilde refused to listen to his close friends when they insisted that he ignore the accusation made by Marquess Queensberry. Instead Wilde sided with his close friend and possible lover Lord Alfred Douglas, who instructed him to fight the accusation. Because of Douglas’s advice and Wilde’s pride he ended up in jail, which eventually led to his early death. Douglas advised Wilde to fight something that they both knew to be true, if only they had humbled themselves. Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray should have given him some foresight into what it meant to be corrupted by vanity. There are so many parallels when comparing writer and character. Dorian Gray fell victim to Lord Henry Wotton just as Oscar Wilde was encouraged by and in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. Both writer and character believed that they were above the law, biblical and social. In the novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray, both good and evil are represented and clearly evil prevailed, in the sense that Dorian Grey died unrepentant.
When the Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, first showed up with his loving association with art it was seen by many as almost “unhealthy” and dangerous, “Wilde himself was accused of corrupting a young man (Lord Alfred Douglas), and his writings (including The Picture of Dorian Gray) were help up as evidence of his dangerous ideas” (Boilard). Some of his writings were frowned upon because they focused on subjects of sensual love, lust and cruelty. It was said that Wilde did not...
...ed to a bigger controversy. Instead he wrote about it and made everyone noticed the unfairness of the punitions in the prison life. The repetition in the poem is seen to show the harsh labor in the Reading Gaol. It is evident that Oscar Wilde hated the Victorian era and was against the cruelty of their morality.
Art. It's Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Art can be so beautiful or so hideous. So monotonous or poignant. So imaginative or clichéd. So right or wrong? Art really has no moral, does it? Although the book, The Picture of Dorian Gray has no ethical stance, it was not Oscar Wilde's intention to have a moral. It was to show the splendor of art for art's sake.
Oscar Wilde’s novel, Picture of Dorian Gray, portrays the dichotomy of the double life led by Dorian Gray.1 The contrast between the portrait and Dorian personifies the universal battle of sin versus morale and ultimately serves as a moral compass for society.2 Dorian’s development of a double life identifies with the results of sociological oppression leading to confinement.3 The development of this contrasting lifestyle inevitably influences a fatal deterioration of his soul and heart.4 Oscar Wilde’s exaggeration of the effects of the double life of Dorian Gray within his novel Picture of Dorian Gray ultimately conveys the degradation due to a confinement of the soul, and personifies the dualism between private and public lives.5
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian Gray reads a yellow book given to him by mentor-friend, Sir Henry Wotton. In the years after reading the book, Dorian Gray transforms from the pure and innocent young man he was into a two-faced immoral man. The reason behind the Dorian's degradation is never explicitly mentioned in Wilde's novel, which begs the question of whether literature has the ability to degrade a person. The influence of literature has the potential to corrupt one’s mind, but whether it does is dependant on the state of the reader.
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.
...argues that lying is a requisite of art, for without it there is nothing but a base realism. The ordeal in which the novel in England, Wilde claims, is that writers do not lie enough; they do not have enough imagination in their works: "they find life crude, and leave it raw." In this particular essay Wilde makes his apparently outrageous statement that "life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life." Though perhaps and obviously overstating the fact, Wilde convincingly discusses the many ways in which our perceptions of reality are affected by the art that we have experienced, an idea adapted from poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the other earlier English romantics. But in all he feels poetry can be expressed easier and much more widespread than art it self, art can only be art and be seen as it is but poetry can be expressed in many other ways.
Oscar Wilde’s ‘The picture of Dorian gray was based on the importance of Beauty and aesthetics. Lord Henry claims to value beauty and youth above all else. “But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.” Here Henry talks about his belief that everything that matters shows itself in appearance. According to him, a person's thoughts and personality have influence over the alignment of their features. It is this very logic, which Lord Henry transfers to Dorian that drives him to make the wish that ultimately damns him. The moment Dorian Gray realizes that he would get to keep his beautiful appearance regardless of the sins he indulges in, he thinks himself free from the bounds of morality and righteousness. He values his physical appearance more than the state of his soul, which is openly displayed by the ever-increasing degradation of the portrait. This superficial faith in the ultimate value of youth and beauty is therefore the driving mechanism behind the protagonist's damnation. It is important to bear in mind that the beauty that Dorian incessantly pursues is a beauty defined by a purely artistic sensibility, as opposed to a humanitarian one. When faced with the news of his fiancé’s suicide,