Oscar Wilde: Life, Works, and Literary Theory in 'Dorian Gray' and 'Being Earnest', Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Oscar Wilde: Life, Works, and Literary Theory in 'Dorian Gray' and 'Being Earnest' e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Oscar Wilde Life and works: He was born in Dublin in 1854. He became a disciple of Walter Peter, accepting the theory of Art for Art’s sake (only art could prevent the murder of the soul and the artist is an alien in a materialistic world). After graduating he moved to London, where he soon became a celebrity for his extraordinary wit and his characteristic style of dress as a dandy. In 1881 he published a collection called Poems and was invited to undertake a spiking tour in the United States. 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 between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were simply different forms of the same truth. The tour was a great success for Wilde, who became famous for his irony, his attitude and his posing. After his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, he developed an interest in drama and revived the comedy of manners. In the late 80s he produced a series of plays which were successful on the London stage and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest. The novel damaged his reputation because it was considered immoral. His intimate association with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality, then illegal in Britain. He was sentenced to two-years’ hard labour. When he was released he went into exile in France, where he died in 1900. The Picture of Dorian Gray 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, that decided to paint his portrait. Dorian then throws himself into a life of pleasure. While the young man's desires are satisfied, including that of eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear not on Dorian but on the portrait. He makes use of everybody, even letting people die because he doesn't care about anyone but himself. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later he decides to free himself of the portrait and so he stubs it but in doing so he kills himself and the paint, after his death, returns the way it was when it was painted the first time. The preface: In the preface Wilde provides readers with key points of the 19th-century aesthetic movement and his views on beauty, the roles of the artist and critic, and the interrelationships between them. He believes that artists (and writers) should create art not for their own fame but simply to display the beauty in the world. Critics on the other hand should experience the beauty of the work without seeking to interpret or analyze it. People for whom Wilde believes "there is hope" are "the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty." Critics who attempt to "go beneath the surface" or to "read the symbol" of artworks "do so at their peril" because in doing so they may attribute meanings to the work that were not intended by the artist. While artists can paint, sculpt (scalpt), or write about virtue or vice, their works are neither moral nor immoral. A book, for example, is merely "well written, or badly written," and nothing more. This boils down to the ideas of "art for art's sake" and that art need not serve any practical or moral purpose— in fact the concluding epigram, "All art is quite useless." The preface offers one of Wilde's most famous aphorisms: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." (r11) According to Wilde, the artist might consider the moral or immoral lives of people as part of the subject matter of a work, but art itself is not meant to instruct the reader. The true artist is not out to prove anything and makes no judgments of right or wrong. What people call "vices" or "virtues" are merely materials for the artist. Those who attempt to go beneath(binit) the surface of a work, or to read meaning into a symbol, do so at their own risk. Considerable disagreement about a work of art only proves that the work is "new, complex, and vital." The painter’s studio: The passage constitutes the opening of the novel The picture of Dorian Gray. The painter ,Basil Hallward ,just finished the portrait of a young Londoner of particular beauty, Dorian Gray, and the picture is still found on an easel in his studio. At this point Basil receives the visit of the friend Lord Henry Wotton, which, seeing the painting, stays struck by the extraordinary beauty of the work and of the young that is the subject of it, and he starts a vivacious conversation with the painter on the theme of the work. In the passage is reported a conversation that takes place among the two . The passage is composed of two parts. The first part deals with the description of the studio of Basil that serves as background to the conversation. It reflects the typical taste of the decadents for detail: the setting is incredibly well described, we could succeed in drawing it if we will try to and the window represents the connection between the garden and the room. Thanks to this description, in which all the feelings are involved, Oscar Wilde conveys an atmosphere sensuous and decadent. Finishing the description, starts the second part of the passage, that contains the dialogue between Hallward and Lord Wotton: Lord Henry celebrates the job completed and invites the painter to exhibit the picture in the gallery of Grosvenor, with the purpose to gain notoriety. Basil affirms not to want that the portrait is shown, saying that he wants discretion and that he has a special personal bond with the work. The conversation among the two characters, from a side, defines the psychological plan of the character of Lord Henry, from the other position ,gives to the portrait realized by Basil an aura of extraordinariness and mystery. In fact, the characters are presented as they are and through the words used: if it’s not openly said, we know that Basil has feelings for Dorian; Lord Henry says that he’s a talented artist while the narrator tells us he’s mysterious and once also disappeared. From this conversation, we can understand that Lord Henry Wotton will be great but also destructive influence for Dorian; from the character himself we learn that he thinks beauty is shallow, from the narrator we know that he smokes opium and from Basil that he’s cynical. He presents some of the most famous paradoxes of Oscar Wilde like “ There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about” or “ But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins”. Dorian is not physically present in the scene, but is described as young and handsome, so we expect someone naïve. Lord Henry shows to have understood Dorian’s nature when he defines him a Narcissus, even if he has never met him. The story is told by a third-person unobtrusive narrator, as he never intervenes; he succeeds in drawing you into this decadent world in the opening of the book through the use of cynical dialogues. Dorian’s death: In this passage is made clear that Dorian Gray relizes that his life has been currupted by Lord Wotton and his immoral activity, like being the main cause beside the suicide of the chemist and the brother of one of his love interest. Actually he realizes how he has spent all of his life trying to pretend he’s someone he’s not and pretending to be a good person, whether he’s not. He tries to reacquire his previous innocence, reflecting on the fact that despite believing youth and beauty were the only things that mattered, these two things have actually cursed him to live an unhappy and immoral life. He admits that the pursuit of youth