Scarica Oscar Wilde: life and works e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! English Osca Wild LIFE AND WORKS Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He attended Trinity College and he was then sent to Oxford. He became a disciple of Walter Pater, accepting the theory of " Art for Art's Sake". After graduating He moved to London where he became a celebrity for his wit, style of dress as a 'dandy. According to him Aestheticism was a search for the beautiful, a science through which men looked for the relationship between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were simply di erent forms of the same truth. The rebel and the dandy Wilde adopted the ‘aesthetic ideal’, as he a rmed in one of his famous conversations: ‘My life is like a work of art". He lived the double role of rebel and dandy. Wilde's dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses his wit to shock and he is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. Wilde's interest in beauty had no moral stance. In the ‘Preface’ to his novel he a rmed: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all’ In this way he rejected the didacticism that had characterised the Victorian novel in the first half of the century. 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, who decides to paint his portrait. Under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian throws himself into a life of pleasure. While the young man desires are satisfied, including that of eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear not on Dorian but on the portrait. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it but, in doing so, he kills himself. In the very moment of Dorians death, the picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian face becomes ‘withered, wrinkled, and loathsome'. Characters All the characters reveal themselves through what they say or what other people say of them. Dorian Gray represents the ideal of youth, beauty and innocence. He is first introduced by what the painter says of him, thus raising the reader expectations. When he first appears in the novel, he is rather immature, but the reader is made aware of his purity and innocence through the narrator's words. Dorian is considerably influenced by Lord Henry and starts to look for a life of pleasure and sensations. In the end, his vanity and selfishness ruin him, and the portrait provides a visual representation of the degradation of his soul. Lord Henry Wotton is an intellectual, apparently superficial but extremely sharp in his criticism of institutions, such as marriage and the Church. He is able to influence Dorian and as the story goes on, Dorian speech seems to mimic Lord Henry' style. Basil Hallward is an intellectual who falls in love with Dorians beauty and innocence. He does not want to exhibit the picture, even if it is his best work, because he is afraid that it reflects the strange attraction he feels for Dorian. He is eventually killed by Dorian because his painting and his passion are considered responsible for the young man tortured existence. Basil becomes a sad example of how a good artist can be destroyed in a sacrifice for art. Narrative technique This story is told by an unobtrusive thirdperson narrator. The perspective adopted is internal. The settings are vividly described with words appealing to the senses. Allegorical meaning This story is profoundly allegorical; it is a 19th century version of the legend of Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In the novel this soul is the picture, which records the signs of time, the corruption, the horror and the sins concealed under the mask of Dorians timeless beauty. The picture is not an autonomous self: it represents the dark side of Dorians personality, his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room. The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and there is no escape from reality. When Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that is, death. The horrible, corrupted picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class, while Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy. Finally, the picture, restored to its original beauty, illustrates Wilde theory of art: art survives people, art is eternal. NOTES -Art is produced just for the pleasure of producing art, with no moral aim -Art=the creation of beautiful things -"ART FOR ART'S SAKE" was a motto of which Keats was the forerunner. -Oscar Wilde was considered to be a rebel.
