Scarica Oscar Wilde, Life and poems e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde Walter Pater is considered as the theorist of aesthetic movement in England. This movement was immediately successful in the 1880’s among young people because of their subversive and demoralising message. He rejected religious faith and said that art was the only instrument to stop time, the only certain. He thought life should be lived in spirit of art and feeling all kind of sensations. The function of the artist was to feel sensations and to be the gracious. Aesthetic artists used: - A language of senses - An excessive attention of themselves - A hedonistic attitude - Perversity in subject matter - Disenchantment with contemporary society Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, and became a disciple of Walter Pater, accepting the theory of “art for art’s sake”. After graduation at the Trinity College in Dublin, he moved to London and he became a fashionable Dandy for his extraordinary wit and his extravagant way of dressing. In 1881 he went to New York and he told reporters that Aestheticism was a search for the beautiful, a science through which men looked for relationship existing between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were simply forms of the same truth. His masterpiece is “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, where there’s the theme of beauty and the theories of Aesthetic movement. This story has some characteristic features: - The story is told by an unobtrusive third person narrator - At the second chapter there’s an identification between the reader and the character - The settings are distinctly described - The characters reveal themselves through what they say or what people say of them Short summary The picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a rich, beautiful and young man who has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward. At Basil’s studio Dorian meets Lord Henry Wottom: he talks to Dorian about the transience of youth and beauty. Dorian is struck by his thought and makes a pledge. He will sacrifice his soul if he can maintain his youth and beauty, while the portrait itself will bear all the sign of time. Under Lord Henry’s influence, Dorian leads a hedonistic life of pleasure, sin, crime and corruption. His scandalous lifestyle is hidden by the fact that he remains young and beautiful, while the image in the portrait, which is hidden away, becomes old and ugly, bearing all the signs of Dorian’s sins. At the end of the story, responsible for the death of an actress and the murder of Basil, killed when he saw the disfigured portrait and discovered Dorian’s secret, Dorian stabs the portrait. Dorian is found dead, now transformed into a horrible old man beside the portrait, which has returned to its original beauty. The story is profoundly allegorical: it’s a modern 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. Wilde plays on the idea of the correspondence existing between the physical and spiritual parts: beautiful people are moral people; ugly people are immoral people. His variation on this theme is the use of the portrait of Dorian Gray. The picture represents the evil part of Dorian: every time he makes a bad action, the portrait changes in a negative way. The moral of the novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped. When Dorian decides to destroy the portrait he cannot avoid the punishment for his action, that’s the death. The corrupted picture can be seen also as a symbol of immortality and bad conscience
