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Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde: Fast Facts “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - From Lady Windermere's Fan OSCAR WILDE OSCAR WILDE: FAST FACTS Birthname: Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde Birth date: October 16, 1854 Birth place: Dublin, Ireland Death date: November 30, 1900 Death place: Paris, France Burial: La Pére Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France Hair color: Brown Eye color: Grey High school: Portora Royal School College: Trinity College, Magdalen College Occupation: Playwright, novelist, poet, editor Parents: Sir William Wilde and Jane Francesca Elgee Siblings: Henry, Emily, Mary, William, Isola Spouse: Constance Lloyd Children: Cyril and Vyvyan MORE ABOUT OSCAR WILDE • Regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era, Wilde wrote and produced nine plays. • Although a proficient and versatile writer, Wilde only wrote one novel during his lifetime: The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891. • Wilde went on a lecture tour throughout the United States, London and Canada to teach aesthetic values in 1879. • Nine biographies have been written on Wilde since his death, one of them by his grandson, Merlin Holland, in 1997. • Several biographical films, television series and stage plays have been produced on the life of Oscar Wilde since 1960. THE WIT OF OSCAR WILDE "Women give to men the very gold of their lives. But they invariably want it back in such very small change." -- “The Picture of Dorian Gray” "I prefer women with a past. They're always so damned amusing to talk to." -- “Lady Windermere's Fan” "Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood." -- “The Sphinx Without a Secret” "The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner of later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature." -- “The Decay of Lying” "The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing." -- “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” "Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification." -- “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime” "It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true." -- “The Picture of Dorian Gray” THE WIT OF OSCAR WILDE, CONTINUED "Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it." -- Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I "Life is never fair...And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not." -- “An Ideal Husband” "You must not find symbols in everything you see. It makes life impossible." -- “Salome” "We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell." -- “The Duchess of Padua” "The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast." -- “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime” "Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman - or the want of it in the man." -- “A Woman of No Importance” "One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry." -- “A Woman of No Importance” "To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance." -- “An Ideal Husband” THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT aes·thet·i·cism (esˈTHedəˌsizəm/noun) the approach to art exemplified by (but not restricted to) the Aesthetic Movement. Not to be confused with: as·cet·i·cism (əˈsedəˌsizəm/noun) severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons. From Wikipedia: Aestheticism (also the Aesthetic Movement) is an intellectual and art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes for literature, fine art, music and other arts. It was particularly prominent in Europe during the 19th century, but contemporary critics are also associated with the movement, such as Harold Bloom, who has recently argued against projecting social and political ideology onto literary works… Aesthetic Literature The British decadent writers were much influenced by the Oxford professor Walter Pater and his essays published during 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, with an ideal of beauty. His text Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was very well regarded by art-oriented young men of the late 19th century. Writers of the Decadent movement used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour l'art)… The artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages…Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed a cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor of art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the style were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, great use of symbols, and synaesthetic\ Ideasthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music. Predecessors of the Aesthetics included John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and some of the Pre- Raphaelites. In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, both influenced by the French Symbolists, and James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. OPENING LINES OF ENDYMION (BOOK I) A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall -John Keats From our dark spirits… ART FOR ART’S SAKE “The phrase 'art for art's sake', or l'art pour l'art, first surfaced in French literary circles in the early 19th century. In part it was a reflex of the Romantic movement's desire to detach art from the period's increasing stress on rationalism. These forces, it was believed, threatened to make art subject to demands for its utility - for usefulness of one kind or another...When the phrase reached Britain it became popular in the Aesthetic Movement, which encompassed painters such as James McNeill Whistler and Lord Leighton, and writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde…” “…The phrase 'art for art's sake' condenses the notion that art has its own value and should be judged apart from any themes which it might touch on, such as morality, religion, history, or politics. It teaches that judgements of aesthetic value should not be confused with those proper to other spheres of life...Although the phrase has been little used since, its legacy has been at the heart of 20th century ideas about the autonomy of art, and thus crucial to such different bodies of thought as those of formalism, modernism, and the avant-garde…” -From www.theartstory.org The designs of William Morris (1834-1896) JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER Symphony in White, No. 3 (1867) Symphony in White, No. 2 (1865) Symphony in White, No. 1 (1862) THE PEACOCK ROOM (WHISTLER, 1877) LADY LILLITH (DANTE ROSSETTI, 1867) FLAMING JUNE (LORD LEIGHTON, 1895) THOUGHTS ON BEAUTY AND AESTHETICISM, FROM THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY "But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face." Chapter 1, pg. 3 "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them." Chapter 1, pg. 12 Ask Me No More (Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1906) Lady Lillith (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868) Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May (John William Waterhouse, 1909) "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." -From “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (John Keats) Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf: Kindred Spirits? From “Modern Fiction” (Woolf): “Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers…” “…if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose…if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no tragedy or love interest in the accepted style…Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end…” INQUIRY QUESTION: IN WHAT WAYS DOES THE FARCICAL COMEDY OF THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST ILLUMINATE THE HUMAN CONDITION FOR ITS AUDIENCE? “The Importance of Being Earnest is most obviously a comic critique of late Victorian values. Some sixty years ago, Eric Bentley wrote that the play "is about earnestness, that is, Victorian solemnity, that kind of false seriousness which means priggishness, hypocrisy, and lack of irony" (111; emphasis Bentley's).1 As a work of art, Wilde's last play has been recognized from its first performance on 14 February 1895 as a masterpiece of comedy,2 one of the supreme examples in English of the genre, and consequently it has been interpreted from a variety of critical points of view. Although Richard Aldington, writing about the same time as Bentley, claimed the play "is a comedy-farce without a moral, and it is a masterpiece" (40), Katherine Worth does see a moral in her Freudian/existential/New Critical analysis. In Earnest, she writes, "the pleasure principle at last enjoys complete triumph" (153; this triumph is an aspect of the Trickster archetype).
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