OSCAR WILDE“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”- From Lady Windermere's Fan

OSCAR WILDE: FAST FACTS

Birthname: Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde

Birth date: October 16, 1854Birth place: Dublin, IrelandDeath date: November 30, 1900Death place: Paris, FranceBurial: La Pére Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France

Hair color: BrownEye color: Grey

High school: Portora Royal SchoolCollege: Trinity College, Magdalen CollegeOccupation: Playwright, novelist, poet, editor

Parents: Sir William Wilde and Jane Francesca ElgeeSiblings: Henry, Emily, Mary, William, IsolaSpouse: Constance LloydChildren: 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 universalthing 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 MOVEMENTaes·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 LiteratureThe 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

From our dark spirits…-John Keats

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

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know."

-From “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (John Keats)

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May (John William Waterhouse, 1909)

Lady Lillith (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868)Ask Me No More (Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1906)

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). Worth continues: "As well as being an existential farce, The Importance of Being Earnest is . . . [Wilde's] supreme demolition of late nineteenth-century social and moral attitudes, the triumphal conclusion to his career as revolutionary moralist" (155).

-Clifton Snider

English Department, Emeritus

California State University, Long Beach

FROM THE GUARDIAN (JEANETTE WINTERSON, 2013)

"Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as I am it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow… "

– Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis"

Oscar Wilde wrote "De Profundis" in Reading gaol where he was serving two years hard labour for being himself; he was homosexual. He was sent to prison in 1895 after one of the most notorious trials in English history. Wilde's fatal amour, Lord Alfred Douglas, was son of the Marquess of Queensberry, who was a bully, womaniser, gambling addict, cycling bore and amateur boxer…In his personal life there was no such thing as fair play. Queensberry was a vicious pugilist detested by his family. A caricature of masculinity, he loathed the cult of art and beauty that Wilde championed, and under the guise of saving his son from sodomy, he set about bringing down Wilde at the height of his fame.

FROM THE NEW YORKER (ALEX ROSS, 2011)

“To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely—it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world.” Oscar Wilde

“Wilde’s aestheticism, his fanatical cult of beauty, was the deepest and most lasting of his passions, and it is now the most radical thing about him. Perhaps only the threat of persecution prevented Wilde from freely expressing his sexuality in his writing; yet he also may have been caught in the modern struggle to inhabit an identity without becoming defined by it. The ghastly ending of “Dorian Gray”—Dorian stabbing his portrait in a frenzy—shows a man losing a battle with his public image…”

“Wilde died in 1900, in a run-down Paris hotel, at the age of forty-six. Almost overnight, a legend was born: Wilde the homosexual martyr, Wilde the moral rebel. A nascent gay-rights movement embraced him as a hero of defiance. When, in 1967, Craig Rodwell opened a gay-and-lesbian bookstore in New York, he named it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, and after the Stonewall riots of 1969 Rodwell used the bookstore’s mailing list to help organize the first gay-pride parade. As recently as the late eighties, you could still find bookish young people coming to terms with their sexuality by way of reading Wilde…Whether or not Wilde saw himself as part of a cause, he did not lack courage. “