Oscar Wilde's life and main works, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Oscar Wilde's life and main works e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) Oscar Wilde was born and educated in Dublin, but it was London where he became one of the most celebrated and provocative writers of his century. His father was a surgeon and his mother an eccentric woman who, for some time, because of her vain expectation of a daughter, dressed little Oscar in girl’s clothes (a big mistake because of his future homosexual inclinations). He studied at Dublin Trinity College where he revealed a strange personality, inclined to solitude. He was rather lazy, but he used to read the classics a lot (he also won a gold medal for Greek!). Then he studied at Oxford, having some trips to Italy and Greece but everywhere he was known as an anti-conformist and a brilliant talker. Wilde lived life to the extreme: in Oxford he started to create the image of eccentricity that inspired both disapproval and admiration in the ‘respectable’ Victorian middle classes. He was a Pupil of John Ruskin, who influenced Wilde with his socialist ideas, and of Walter Pater, from whom he borrowed a new concept of art deprived of any moral value. He won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and after taking his degree, he settled in London where he began to attract attention by dressing in an eccentric way. He was a ‘dandy’ walking up and down Piccadilly with a lily or a sunflower or an orchid in his hand! In constant need of money, he accepted an invitation to lecture in the U.S., where he used to answer to officer’s questions «I have nothing to declare except my genius»! Then he moved to Paris where he met famous writers such as Mallarmé, Degas, Flaubert. He got married and had two children; he also worked for the ‘Pall Mall Gazzette’ and was the editor of a magazine. His most successful novels were called the ‘Society Plays’ and brought him richness and fame. Unfortunately, he was charged with homosexuality and spent two years in prison. This episode determined his ruin because the public opinion turned against him, who after his release, went to Paris where he died in 1900, after embracing the Roman Catholicism. ASTHETICISM He joined Aestheticism, a movement that affirmed the predominance of art and beauty in individual and social life and the independence of art from any moral, political or utilitarian purpose. This word comes from a Greek word which means «to perceive», «to feel». In fact the Aesthetic mood stresses sensations as the main source of art. The task of the artist (‘the creator of beautiful things’) is to feel sensations and to live ‘aesthetically’ and then to make the reader see and share his feelings. Aesthetic theory and practice are based on the principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, meaning that art has no aim but its own perfection; it must reach things up to a kind of spiritual and moral perversity. In Painting Aestethicism led to Impressionism in which such painters as Renoir, Monet and Degas chose ‘pure painting’: the subject of it was subordinate to colour and light and shade. In Literature Aestheticism, influenced by Hedonism (whose aim was the search of pleasure) led to Decadence, which after 1890 in France was replaced by the term Symbolism. The Decadents avoided the contact with reality and shut themselves down with the help of drugs into artificial worlds. (G.D’annunzio with ‘Il Piacere’). Wilde theorised this concept in the Preface to the second edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a series of paradoxical aphorisms written in response to the criticism he received about the novel and that is considered the Manifesto of the Aesthetic movement. This Preface outlines his philosophy of art, based on the principles of Aestheticism: art is neither moral nor immoral, it has no moral purpose, but beauty in itself is a supreme value. When the novel was published it was a shock for most Victorian readers as it overtly proclaimed beauty as the unique purpose of art and life and discarded bourgeois morality with contempt. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ reflects the issues of the young generations of the ‘80s and ‘90s against the hypocritical Victorian Middle-Class ones, such as thrift, hard work, puritanism, respectability, family and nation which were triumphant in the second half of the 19° century. A new hero appears on the social scene: the ‘dandy’, who with his eccentric behaviour and way of dressing, with his paradoxes and aphorisms shocks the middle-class conventionality. ‘The Picture’ also criticizes Victorian materialism which reduced everything to objects against beauty, youth and art (celebrated by Lord Henry). Finally, it can be read as a man’s refusal to grow up in the aim attempt to escape reality and death. Dorian’s double life is only a sign of his hypocrisy in order to be accepted in society. The Picture records Dorian’s sins, crimes, old age what he fears most. He at first falls in love with his beautiful images and his narcissism leads him to homosexuality. Now that the picture is deformed, Dorian is no longer autonomous and he’s led by his cult of beauty to destroy the canvas and destroy himself. This means that, though its aesthetic declarations, the novel does teach a moral lesson in the end, as Dorian’s sins and his hedonistic life lead to his own destruction. He has lived his life as a work of art, has felt rare sensations but he hasn’t been able to discipline them with his intellect to reach the spiritualisation of the senses, so he has to pay: he loses life while the picture survives and is immortal. The corrupting picture is also the symbol of Victorian middle class’s immortality hidden under the appearance of respectability. The novel combines the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel (Dorian’s mysterious portrait that is the main symbolic element) with French decadent fiction and it is told by an unobtrusive 3° person narrator, by using dialogues to reveal characters’ personalities. PLOT The painter Basil Hallward has painted a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man of an extraordinary beauty. Impressed by his own perfection, Dorian has expressed the wish that the picture may age while his beauty and youth remain intact forever. Dorian is influenced by the refined art but immoral dandy, Lord Henry Wotton and by his philosophy which is based on the principle of the search of dissolute pleasure, thus also provoking the suicide of his fiancée Sybil Vane and finally killing his friend the painter who criticizes his way of life. Hallward, in fact, is the only person who, besides Dorian, knows the secret of the picture which records Dorian’s age but also his crimes and sins. Finally, when Dorian tries to destroy the canvas with a knife, he is destroyed and the picture recovers its beauty. The servants that hear his death cry find a disgusting old man near the portrait of a perfectly beautiful young man.