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For Art's Sake

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For Art's Sake GHENT UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY 2008-2009 FOR ART’S SAKE COMPARISON OF OSCAR WILDE‘S THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY AND OUIDA‘S UNDER TWO FLAGS Hanne Lapierre May 2009 Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial Dr. Kate Macdonald fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of ―Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels-Spaans‖. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Kate Macdonald who oversaw the building up of the main body of the text. Her remarks were very helpful for writing the final version of this paper. I also thank Dr. Andrew King for giving me access to some of his interesting books on Ouida and for his remarkable enthusiasm on the subject. Contents Acknowledgements 1. Introduction ..............................................................................................1 2. On Ouida…………………………………………………………………4 3. Aestheticism……………………………………………………………..13 3.1. Introducing Aestheticism 13 3.2. The Origins of Aestheticism 15 3.3. Aspects of Aestheticism 17 3.3.1. Aestheticism as a View of Life 17 3.3.2. Aestheticism as a View of Art 21 3.3.2.1. The extraordinary status of the artist 21 3.3.2.2. An unlimited devotion to art 23 3.3.2.3. Rejection of conventional moral values 24 3.3.2.4. Superiority of form over content 30 3.3.2.5. Conclusion 33 4. Consumer Culture……………………………………………………...34 4.1. The Rise of Consumer Culture 34 4.2. Advertising 42 4.3. The Commodity 49 4.3.1. Use Value and Exchange Value 49 4.3.2. Being vs. Having 52 4.3.3. Having vs. Appearing 53 4.4. Criticism on Consumer Society 55 4.5. Commodification of Everyday Life 60 5. Gender and Sexuality…………………………………………………...64 5.1. Cross-gendered Characters 69 5.2. Homoeroticism 72 6. Conclusion……………………………………………………………....76 Works Cited 80 Attachments 1. INTRODUCTION The nineteenth-century author Oscar Wilde hardly needs an introduction. Famous for his frequently-cited witty epigrams, his eccentric appearance and audacious manners, and his homosexual relationship with the student Lord Alfred Douglas, which led to his imprisonment in 1895, the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, among many others, has built up a notorious reputation in literary history. Though in his day his work was frequently ridiculed and morally disapproved of, today his novels are still widely read. After his education at Oxford, where he first became familiarised with the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, a man who would deeply influence his later artistic career, Wilde used his talent as a brilliant conversationalist to enter the world of the British artistic elite. Wilfrid Blunt, a contemporary of Wilde, wrote: ―The fine society of London and especially the ‗Souls‘ ran after him because they knew he could always amuse them, and the pretty women all allowed him great familiarities‖ (Blunt cited in Fortunato, 4). After a lecture tour in the United States, Wilde started his writing career. His famous society stage comedies (for example, Lady Windermere‘s Fan), were hugely popular with the Victorian audience but his collections of short fiction written earlier were less successful (Dowling 2001, iii). Although his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) earned him a reputation as a serious artist (Dowling 2001, iii), the scandal it provoked is as legendary as the novel itself. In his book The Eighteen-Nineties, Holbrook Jackson states that ―[t]he Eighteen Nineties were so tolerant of novelty in art and ideas that it would seem as though the declining century wished to make amends for several decades of intellectual and artistic monotony‖ (18). This is a typical reaction of Victorian journalists and literary critics who examined a fixed canon of high-standard authors. However, when crossing the boundaries of this literary canon and looking at less famous authors, it becomes clear that the years leading up to the 1890s were not as monotonous as Jackson claimed. One such author who has, until very recently, been neglected by literary criticism is Ouida. Her novels have often been condemned as mere popular fiction without any originality. In Victorian Wallflowers (1934), Malcolm Elwin criticises Ouida‘s novels by saying that: The type of mind which could be entertained by Ouida‘s novels, without feeling impatience at their artificiality and indignation at the author‘s estimate of the reader‘s intelligence, was the type of mind for which the circulating libraries ordered their supplies and the cheap monthly magazine was created in the final decades of the Victorian era. (311) Nevertheless, when comparing her fiction to Wilde‘s novel the striking similarities between both cannot be overlooked. The main intention of this thesis is to study the similarities as well as the differences between Ouida‘s novel Under Two Flags (1867) and Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)1. Through this comparison I intend to investigate whether Ouida has influenced Wilde to a great extent, or whether the differences rather outnumber the similarities and the resemblance between the two novels can be understood as a similar reaction to the revolutionary changes take took place in Victorian society. In the first chapter I investigate how it is possible that an author such as Ouida, whose fiction shared so many characteristics with Wilde‘s, has been almost completely ignored by literary criticism. The next three chapters will be dedicated to the comparison of Under Two Flags and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Similarities can be found first of all in their views on art and their alliance to the theory of aestheticism. Their lives and their works were centered upon a complete devotion to beauty and art. Secondly, their reactions to the development of the growing consumer society were comparable. An anxiety that literature would soon 1 A plot summary of both novels can be found in the attachments. be subjected to consumer culture‘s laws of demand and supply can be detected in both novels. Finally, resistance to traditionally prescribed gender roles from the middle of the nineteenth century also characterised their novels. Ouida‘s novel Under Two Flags resembles Wilde‘s both in the portrayal of characters, major motives and use of language: in evaluating Ouida‘s novel as work of literature we can observe significant literary responses to aestheticism and social criticism within the genre of popular fiction that was commercially highly successful, even if critically ignored. 2. ON OUIDA Ouida is the pen name of the English novelist Marie Louise Ramé, born in 1839 in Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk. With twenty-four novels, two volumes of essays and a great number of short stories to her name, she was one of the first British female best-selling authors. Abandoned as a child by her father, she lived alone with her mother and grandmother and supported her family with the profit from her writing. In times where women were supposed to remain in the private domestic sphere of their husband‘s home, her self-sufficiency was regarded as scandalous. In her maturity she had an eccentric and independent lifestyle that stood in sharp contrast with conventional Victorian moral codes for women: she lived a life that others could only fantasise about for themselves. As well as supporting her mother, her literary earnings were necessary to cover the costs of her extravagant lifestyle. In Ouida: The Phenomenon (2008), Schroeder and Hodges Holt state that: [T]he young author moved to the luxurious Langham Hotel, where she spent money recklessly, behaved outrageously, and hosted elaborate dinner parties and evening receptions, often smoking cigars with the men. […] She demanded to be addressed as Madame de la Ramée or Madame Ouida, and her voice was unpleasantly rasping and her appearance eccentric. (16) Also in her writing career, she did not conform to Victorian moral principles. In Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1973), Martha Vicinus explains that ―The cornerstone of Victorian society was the family; the perfect lady‘s sole function was marriage and procreation […]. All her education was to bring out her ―natural‖ submission to authority and innate maternal instincts‖ (x). Ouida attempted to expand the subject matters for women writers beyond these themes of marriage and domestic work. Schroeder and Holt affirm that ―[Ouida] was similar to contemporaries as Flaubert and Zola in her bold depiction of explicit sexual scenes and her use of sexual metaphors‖ (13). However, in order to be able to write about what they want, women should first of all be emancipated from the authority and oppression of men. In her plea for the sovereignty of women, Ouida stood not alone. Already in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women: Ah! why do women, I write with affectionate solicitude, condescend to receive a degree of attention and respect from strangers, different from that reciprocation of civility which the dictates of humanity and the politeness of civilization authorise between man and man. (64-5) She insists on the fact that women‘s dependence on their husbands is a form of ―legal prostitution‖ (165) and that they should demonstrate their capability of acting as a rational and intellectual being rather than cultivating the stereotype of the woman as a weak, vulnerable and sentimental person. According to Wollstonecraft, women should at all times strive to reach equality with men: Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses. […] Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner […] Women would not then marry for a support, as men accept of places under government, and neglect the implied duties; nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence […] sink them almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution.
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