Oscar Wilde: A Life of Art and Scandal, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Oscar Wilde: A Life of Art and Scandal e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Life Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 and grew up in Dublin, the son of an influential Anglo-Irish family. His father was a famous doctor and his mother was a translator and poet. After graduating in classical studies from Trinity College, Wilde went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became familiar with the Aesthetics of Walter Pater and John Ruskin. He settled in London and became a spokesman (portavoce) for the school of 'Art for Art's Sake'. He was a popular and eccentric dandy, and was famous for his witticisms (clever and humorous observations) and aphorisms (short phrases which express a general truth). In 1882 Wilde gave a lecture tour in America, famously saying on his arrival in New York: "I have nothing to declare but my genius": He then spent several months in Paris, where he met Mallarmé, Verlaine, Hugo, Zola and Balzac. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and they had two children. In 1895 Wilde was arrested and imprisoned in Reading Gaol for homosexual offences. After his release from prison, Wilde moved to France, where he lived in poverty and obscurity under an assumed name. In 1900 Oscar Wilde died and was buried in Paris. Literary production • In 1881, Wilde published his first volume of poems. • These were followed in 1891 by the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism, the collection Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories and his famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. • The climax of Wilde's success, however, were his witty comedies, which were staged from 1892 to 1895. These included Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. • During his two years in prison Wilde wrote the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and his prose confession De Profundis (1905) which describes the extravagant lifestyle which eventually led to his imprisonment for indecency. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a manifesto of the Aesthetic movement, and it expresses Wilde's ideas on art in general. Here are some of its main principles: - The artist is a creator of beautiful things. - To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. - The critic can translate his impression of beautiful things into another matter or a new material. - There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. - No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. - No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. - Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for art. - It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. - Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital. The story Basil Hallward is an artist, fascinated by the youth and beauty of a young man, Dorian Gray, whose portrait he decides to paint. When it is finished, he shows it to Dorian, who sees in it something he had never been fully conscious of before, his own beauty, and he understands with horror that the beauty of the portrait will last while he himself will grow old and horrible. At this point, and under the influence of Basils friend, the amoral aesthete Lord Plenry Wotton, who believes youth to be the supreme value, Dorian expresses a wish that the reverse were true. He also says that he will kill himself when his youth fades. Alarmed by Dorian's reaction to his painting, Hallward tries to destroy it, but Dorian stops him and takes the picture home with him. Dorian and Lord Henry become friends. Dorian begins to frequent the theatre, where he meets a brilliant actress called Sybil Vane, who falls in love with him. But Dorian cruelly rejects her when she gives up acting to be with him, saying that it was only on stage that she fascinated him. Dorian then notices that an expression of cruelty has appeared on the face of the portrait, and he resolves to return to Sybil, but it is too late. Sybil has killed herself. Aided and encouraged by the diabolical reasoning and corrupting influence of Lord Henry, Dorian embarks on a life of vice and sensual gratification, letting his portrait assume the consequences of his corrupt and corrupting soul. Years later, Dorian, by now totally corrupt and evil, but still as youthful as ever, lets the elderly Basil Hallward see the now hideous face of the portrait and then kills him to prevent him from revealing his secret. But this is only the beginning. For Dorian to keep his secret, several other people have to die. But as the portrait of his sinful soul becomes more and more ugly, Dorian realises the horror of his acts. He decides to destroy the portrait and begin a new life. But in doing so, he kills himself. The portrait is restored to its original image of Dorian's youthful perfection, while the real Dorian's teatures in death become those of a hideous, disgusting old man. OSCAR WILDE The exchange of art and life The Picture of Dorian Gray begins with a playful dialogue on the nature of art in the modern age. For Basil Hallward and his friend Lord Henry Wotton, beauty and appearance have become the ultimate values. Art can be judged on an aesthetic basis, reflecting the motto of Aestheticism, 'Art for Art's Sake'. This discussion forms the prologue to the story itself, which moves from typical Wildean comedy into a nightmare world of Gothic horror, as Dorian makes a Faustian pact with an absent devil: his own life becomes an unchanging and untouchable work of art, while his portrait becomes the mirror of his 'real' inner soul. This split between 'appearance' and 'reality’ forms the central core of the novel. To seduce Dorian into this inverted world, Lord Henry gives him a copy of an unnamed yellow book, possibly Huysmans's À rebours (Against Nature) (1884), a key text for the Aesthetic movement. Its central character Des Esseintes, bored with reality, surrounds himself with an exotic world of precious objects, rituals, strange sounds and perfumes. Lord Henry's book could also be a more obvious reference to The Yellow Book, a notorious British journal of the time. Dorian's own tastes and ideas are heavily influenced by the book, but go beyond a love of simple exoticism and pleasure-loving sensuality to embrace evil desires and passions, including murder and human sacritice. However, Dorian considers his fascination with evil as part of a larger project to spiritualise the senses. He embodies many aspects of Wilde's own philosophy, in particular his rejection of the utilitarian values of industrialised mass society through the cult of art and beauty for its own sake. In this, Wilde was much closer to the ideas of French symbolist poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé than he was to his Victorian contemporaries in English literature. His Aestheticism had a profound influence on the work of others, including Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938). Truth and beauty In some ways, The Picture of Dorian Gray can be seen as an extended meditation on the final words of John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all/ye know on earth and all ye need to know’. For Wilde, a work of art is neither simply true nor false. Its superior value resides in the way it acknowledges and incorporates what is false or deceptive as a part of the truth. Wilde was fascinated by the art of the Pre- Raphaelites for the way its visible beauty simultaneously suggested spiritual purity and unspeakable pleasures. As Lord Henry notes early in the novel, beauty is a thing which 'cannot be questioned’, it is 'one of the great facts of the world’, and has ‘its divine right of sovereignty’. In it, the customary oppositions of good and evil, true and false, moral and immoral don't exist. When, at the end of the novel, the picture of Dorian Gray is restored to its original condition, we find ourselves asking whether it is in fact the same picture of youthful innocence we saw at the beginning. There is no way of answering this question, because a work of art, unlike a life, is not a history but a mystery. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People was first performed in 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London. The title contains a play on words: the word earnest, an adjective meaning serious or sincere, is pronounced in the same way as the proper name Ernest. The protagonists of the play are John (Jack) Worthing and his friend Algernon (Algy). Both men lead double lives. When Jack visits the city, he is known as Ernest, but to protect his reputation, he convinces his ward, Cecily Cardew, that the dissolute Ernest is in fact his brother. However, on one of his visits to London, Jack (in his disguise as Ernest) meets and falls in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, whose mother, the formidable Lady Bracknell, opposes their marriage on the grounds of Jack' unknown origins. Algy, meanwhile, has invented a fictitious friend, the sickly Bunbury, whose illness provides him with the excuse to escape tedious family engagements with his aunt (again Lady Bracknell). During a visit to the country, Algy falls in love with Cecily who thinks that he is Jack's brother, Ernest, and has already fallen for him because of his name. After many comic complications and confusions of identity, it eventually transpires that as a baby, Jack was left in a handbag at Victoria Station by Cecily's governess, Miss Prism. We finally discover that Jack and Algy are in fact brothers, and Jack's name is indeed Ernest. Now that all the obstacles to both matches have been overcome, Jack may finally assume his real name, Ernest, and so become truly earnest, while Gwendolen can marry Ernest and thus satisfy her addiction to the name. Features and themes Wilde gave new life to the spirit of comedy, combining linguistic paradox and farce. Although he worked within the existing conventions of Victorian theatre, he pushed these conventions to a limit which revealed their inherent absurdity. The Importance of Being Earnest works on different levels: it is a farce which plays on mistaken identities and misunderstandings, and which ridicules the conventions of Victorian melodrama. It is also a parody of romantic love which makes fun of the idea of love at first sight - the two women are both in love with a name: Ernest. The characters of the play typically speak in paradoxes. They contradict themselves, but these contradictions reveal a deeper kind of truth about them, which Wilde uses to criticise the world of false appearances they live in - and our certainties about social class, education, love and the family are shaken by the absurdities shown on the stage. The play can therefore be read as an existential comedy of identities. As the structure of social relations is reduced to a question of names, The Importance of Being Earnest can be read as a social satire on the value placed on appearances, which mocks the morals of the upper classes and the hypocrisy of Victorian "earnestness”.