Oscar Wilde 

Born in Dublin in 1856 (his father was an ear and eye specialist, his mother was an intellectual, wrote poems and was interested in politics, she was a supporter of the Irish Nationalist Movement).

Studied in Trinity College Dublin - won a scholarship for Oxford University where he graduated in classical studies.

While at Oxford he created an image of eccentricity for himself which on the one hand inspired bewildered admiration in London society and on the other bigoted disapproval amongst the most radical Victorians.

He used to dress extravagantly and was very concerned with elegance and beauty. 

He maintained that the artist's task was to give aesthetic pleasure, cultivate beauty and never have any moral or didactic aim.

In 1881 published a collection of poems.

In the late 1880s he published some short stories and fairy tales (The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and Other Tales)

Settled in London.

Married Constance Lloyd

had 2 children

in 1891 published The Picture of Dorian Gray (the story of a 'fallen' dandy who leads a dissolute life seeking pleasure in all forms to the point of self corruption, murdering the friend who voices his own consciousness and who finally commits suicide). The book caused a scandal but reached popularity. In it a combination of Gothicism and Aestheticism can be found.

Between 1891 and 1894 he wrote 4 plays which made him the most admired playwright of the age. The plays which satirize against the mannerism of the Victorian upper classes: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of no Importance (1893), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Salomé (1893). 

In 1895 he was imprisoned for homosexuality. While in prison he wrote De Profundis an epistole to Lord Alfred Douglas. There Wilde openly criticizes society for its meanness, bigotry and unfairness.

He finally died in Paris alone and in poverty.

His plays are famous for the brilliant dialogue and the creation of characters who are caricatures of upper class society and ridicule many Victorian values. 

In his plays, language is often artificial, humor is obtained through exaggerated remarks, ("Many a woman has a past, but I am told she has at least a dozen, and they all fit" to have a past is a reason enough to be ostracized in high society, and to have a dozen is an exaggeration which sounds funny, especially with the subsequent remark) incongruous sentences ("He never gave away large sums to anybody. He is too far high-principled for that" = to be high principled is associated with generosity and here it is quite the contrary), by juxtaposing serious and trivial subjects (some comic characters often jump from important topic to unimportant ones, from profound matters to futile questions in such a casual way so that the effect is hilarious)

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.’

• ‘I can resist anything except temptations’

• ‘Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known’.

His AESTHETICISM clashed with the didacticism of Victorian novels.

He thought that art shouldn’t have any moral aim, but should only celebrate beauty.

- The role of the artist is that to create beautiful things

- Art has the only purpose to celebrate beauty and the sensorial pleasures

- Virtue and vice are to be considered as raw material used by the artist in his art: ‘No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style’ ‘The Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

The main themes in the picture of Dorian Gray are:

- the cult of beauty and art, and rejection of the utilitarian values of industrialised mass society.

- The theme of the double: the picture represents the dark side of Dorian, his soul, his bad consciousness.

- The horrible, corrupting picture could be also seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad consciousness of the Victorian middle class, while Dorian represents their hypocrisy, with its pure, innocent appearance.

- The Faustian theme: a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires can be satisfied. Even if Oscar Wilde believed that art shouldn’t have any moral aim, there is a moral in this novel: every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped. When Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that is, death.

- The picture, restored to its original beauty, illustrates Wilde’s theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal.

 

Narrative technique: Third person narrator, with an internal perspective (Dorian’s), so that it creates identification between reader and character.

The setting is vividly described by many words appealing to the senses. Large use of dialogue (typical of drama).