Oscar Wilde riassunto (vita e opere) PDF

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Oscar Wilde ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all’

Life • Born in Dublin in 1854. He studied at Trinity College and then at Oxford University. Already as a young man he gained a reputation as a dandy, as well as for being a master of witty conversation. • He became a disciple of Walter Pater. Around 1878 he started to establish himself as a popularizer of Aestheticism. - 1882: lecture tour in America on Aestheticism. • In 1884 married Constance Lloyd. In 1885 he had his first son, Cyril. In 1886 He met Robert Ross. • In 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray was accused of “immorality” and “unhealthiness”. • In 1891: relationship with Lord Alfred Douglass. • In 1895 public trial forced by Lord Queensberry, Wilde was condemned for indecent behaviour and sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment with hard labour . • 1897: “De profundis” • 1898: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. He moved to Paris where he died in 1900. On his death bed he was baptised into the Roman Catholic church. His tomb was designed by Sir Jacob Epstein, the famous sculptor, and sits in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

 hapter XIX) Art is...simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations” ( C

The dandy • A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the cult of self. Dandyism was marked by artificiality and excessive refinement. • He could be a self-made man who chose to emulate the aristocracy opposite to the bohemian (lived in poverty). • Like bohemians, dandies rejected bourgeois values, had a similar, carefree, indolent lifestyle and seemed to belong nowhere in society. • Elegance as a reason for life and ‘life as a work of art’. • Interested in beauty and literary works opposite to the didacticism of the Victorian writers of the first half of the age. DANDYISM Vanity, extravagance and refinement were linked to the more positive idea of the dandy. Dandyism developed thanks to the figure of George Bryan Brummell (1778- 1840) who became the leader of early 19th-century fashion for his attention to grooming and dressing. (It’s said that Brummell took up to five hours to dress each day, though he prided himself on appearing as though it took no time at all.) For 20 years he had the Prince Regent (later George IV) as a friend and admirer. A quarrel and gambling debts forced him to flee to France. In France it was connected to artistic movements, such as Symbolism and Aestheticism. Reinforced by the French influence, dandyism reappeared in England towards the end of the 19th century with the figure of Oscar Wilde. Brummell created dandyism as a lifestyle.

A famous dandy, Baudelaire, commented that the dandies had "no profession other than elegance...no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons....The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror." Oscar Wilde had no doubts: “One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art”

A clever talker Some famous quotations of Wilde’s: • ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius.’ • ‘Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.’ • ‘A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.’ • ‘One should always be in love. That is the reason why one should never marry.’ • ‘Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known’. • “Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often”

Works • Poetry: Poems (1891), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). • Fairy tales: The Happy Prince and other Tales (1888), The House of Pomegranates (1891). • Novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). • Plays: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of no Importance (1893), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Salomé (1893). Wilde’s AESTHETICISM Oscar Wilde adopted the aesthetical ideal: he affirmed ‘my life is like a work of art’. His AESTHETICISM clashed with the didacticism of Victorian novels. • The artist the creator of beautiful things - Art used only to celebrate beauty and the sensorial pleasures employed by the . artist as raw material in his art: • Virtue and vice ‘No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style’ ‘The Preface’ to The Picture of D.G

The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890 first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. 1891 revised and extended (6 chapters) - The Preface • It reflects Oscar Wilde’s personality. • It was considered immoral and unhealthy by the Victorian public.

Plot • Set in London at the end of the 19th century • East End vs West End .

• The painter Basil Hallward makes a portrait of a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray. • Dorian’s desires of eternal youth are satisfied. • Experience and vices appear on the portrait. • Dorian lives only for pleasures. • The painter discovers Dorian’s secret and he is killed by the young man. • Later Dorian wants to get free from the portrait; he stabs it but in doing so he kills himself. • At the very moment of death the portrait returns to its original purity and Dorian turns into a withered, wrinkled and loathsome man.

Main characters • Dorian represents the ideal of youth, beauty and innocence. • Lord Henry Wotton, a brilliant talker, sharp in his criticism of institutions.> pushes Dorian to adopt a hedonistic style of life • Basil Hallward, an intellectual who falls in love with Dorian’s beauty and innocence. He becomes an example of how a good artist can be destroyed in a sacrifice for art.

Narrative technique The story is told by an obtrusive third-person narrator. The perspective adopted is internal since Dorian’s apparition is in the second chapter. a process of identification between the reader and the character. The language of the senses is used to describe the settings.

Issues this work deals with ● The role of Art and its relation to morality ● Censorship and interpretation ● Deception and revelation ● Culture and corruption (“I have known something of both” c hapter XIX) ● Good and evil ● Mortality and the corruption of innocence

The THEME of the DOUBLE ● DOUBLE LIFE of outward respectability, or, ate least, caring about one’s reputation while secretly transgressing society's social codes ● CULTURE AND CORRUPTION ● Blur of the distinction between high and low, respectable and outcast ● The theme of Doppelgänger and differences with Stevenson’s The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ● - Difference > Wilde does not clear up ● - The theme of Doppelgänger ● Setting: London “Not of two persons, in this case, but of the man and his portrait, the latter of which changes, decays, is spoiled, while the former, through a long course of corruption, remains, to the outward eye, unchanged, still in all the beauty of a seemingly immaculate youth- the ‘devil’s bargain” (W. PATER, “A novel by Mr Oscar Wilde, in “The Bookman” October 1891)

A modern version of Dr. Faust "I would give everything. I would give my soul for that!" • A temptation is placed before Dorian: a potential ageless beauty. • Lord Henry’s cynical attitude is in keeping with the devil’s role in Faust. • Lord Henry acts as the ‘Devil’s advocate’. • The picture : - stands for the dark side of Dorian’s personality - is a vehicle for a fantastic plot device - stands for a metaphor or mask for erotic desire - works as the alibi of a life of secret vices “They will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. The painter Basil Hollward, worshipping physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it. Yes, there’s a terrible moral in “Dorian Gray”- a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all those whose minds are healthy” From a letter written by Oscar Wilde to the editor of St. James’s Gazette, 26th June 1890

The moral of the novel STRONG MESSAGE: Every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped. • When Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins death. • The horrible, corrupting picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class. • The picture, restored to its original beauty, illustrates Wilde’s theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol • The author’s name C33, Wilde’s prison reference number. • Plot: the dramatic story of an outcast. • Poetic form: a ballad. • Themes: the alienating life in prison, death penalty, the problem of collective and social guilt....