Paper-104 Assignment: Oscar wilde.
Name: Avani Jani
Batch: M.A. Sem.1 (2022-2024)
Enrollment N/o.: 4069206420220014
Roll N/o.: 04
Subject code & Paper N/o.: 22395-
Paper 104: Literature of the Victorian era.
E-mail Address: avanijani.18@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English- M.K.B.U.
Date of submission: 7th November, 2022
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“ The truth is rarely pure and never simple “
-Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde, his full name was- Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. He was born on 16th October, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. And died on 30th November 1900 in Paris, France. The very name of Oscar Wilde challenges criticism. Conventionality taboos him and decadence claim him. A man who was better in some ways than his defamers and worse than most of his admirers must always be a puzzle too -the average reader of a character who is neither subtle, generous, nor courageous. He was a protest against current ugliness and smugness, a fine -frenzy set against average ideas and commonplace platitudes. He was a poet full of apparent poses, a feminine -artist in the body of a man. He was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Wilde was born to professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore. His mother had Longed for a girl before Wilde's birth. The answer to her prayer was this strange medley of undirected genius, misguided femininity, fascination, and tragedy. One article quotes a critical Irishwoman that -
// “Oscar Wilde was a ruiner of souls.” //
Surely souls can only be ruined by. their possessors and not by outsiders.
After attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College, Dublin (1871–74), and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with honors. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna. He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter’s stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived.
Wilde was a protest against the idea that- luxury and Sinn are necessary, one, or that goodness, ugliness, or drabness must be included in real morality. His passionate Love of beauty, his super sensitive hunger and thirst for the unusual, and his plea for cultured gluttony in pleasure and the art of living and Loving brought their own retribution at last.
In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London, Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles through his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art. And in their comic opera Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems (1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Keats. Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City that he had “nothing to declare but his genius.” Despite widespread hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of a velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.
In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born, in 1885 and 1886.
Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman’s World (1887–89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the formof fairytalese.
In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral ending. Intentions (1891), consisting of previously published essays, restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler. In the same year, two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates. But Wilde’s greatest successes were his society comedies. Within the conventions of the French “well-made play” (with its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theater. His first success, Lady Windermere’s Fan, demonstrated that this wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama. In the same year, rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé, written in French and designed, as he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural passion, were halted by the censor because it contained biblical characters. It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations. A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced 1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde’s plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession, Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were produced early in 1895. He became one of the most successful playwrights of the stylish London upper-class theater scene with the series of - “Society Drama '' including ‘Lady Windermere's Fan’, ‘A Woman of no Importance’, ‘And an Ideal Husband’. In the latter, his greatest achievement, the conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric epigrams—seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies.
In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. In addition, his close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891, infuriated the marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father. Accused, finally, by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. Wilde’s case collapsed, however, when the evidence went against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial. Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial, he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years of hard labor. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.
In May 1897 Wilde was released, bankrupt, and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems, he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that sustained him.
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And he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, later his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. He died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, which he had long admired.
Oscar Wilde is now adored as a sort of fantastic God or despised as a decadent demon. But, He was neither god nor demon, but a reflection of an age that takes its religion as a liqueur, its love as an episode, and beauty as a mere lust of the eye or titillation of the senses. The Hypocrisy of that era was that they were accepting God's every creation but were not accepting Homosexuality things which were also created by god!
Oscar Wilde’s Ideas about Art: Art for Art’s sake :
Oscar Wilde was highly influenced by the ideas of critics John Ruskin and Walter Pater.
Oscar Wilde believed in the superiority of art to nature or reality and in the imaginative power of art to cultivate an aesthetic transcendence in individuals.
He believed art should strive to attain an ideal beauty and freedom, rather than being a mere mirror of life’s dull realities and restrictions.
He used Art as a source of beauty, imagination, and aesthetic pleasure.
Many of Oscar Wilde’s ideas about art can be seen playing out in hilarious and metaphorical ways in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.
Famous Plays of Oscar Wilde :
1] Importance of Being Earnest:
In this brilliantly witty comedy, Wilde used the conventions of social drama to mock the very things society drama had developed to uphold: The morality and values of high society. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy play by Oscar Wilde that was first performed in 1895. The play is often performed in Britain, especially by amateur dramatist groups, and is much loved for its clever humor and comic situations. a
‘Importance of Being Earnest is a story of a young man, Jack Worthing who wants to marry the daughter of Lady Bracknell. But, she rejects him because he tells her that he does not know his parents as he was found in a handbag at Victoria Station.
Jack Worthing is a fashionable young man who lives in the country with his ward, Cecily Cardew. He has invented a rakish brother named Ernest whose supposed exploits give Jack an excuse to travel to London periodically to rescue him. Jack is in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, the cousin of his friend Algernon Moncrieff. Gwendolen, who thinks Jack’s name is Ernest, returns his love, but her mother, Lady Bracknell, objects to their marriage because Jack is an orphan who was found in a handbag at Victoria Station. Jack discovers that Algernon has been impersonating Ernest to woo Cecily, who has always been in love with the imaginary rogue Ernest. Ultimately it is revealed that Jack is really Lady Bracknell’s nephew, that his real name is Ernest, and that Algernon is actually his brother. The play ends with both couples happily united.
‘The Importance of Being Earnest was an early attempt at Victorian melodrama.
It includes Little satire with glimpses of comedy of manners and little intellectual farce, it was the last and greatest of Wilde’s finished plays.
‘The Importance of Being Earnest remains to date one of the greatest comedies in the English Language.
It is a sharp satire of upper-class Victorian Society.
In the ‘Importance of Being Earnest,’ Oscar Wilde is at his best engaging, charming, and wooing the readers and audience with a sharp wit.
Conflicts in ‘Importance of Being Earnest -
In this play, Jack faces many obstacles to his romantic union with Gwendolen. One of them is presented by Lady Bracknell who is Gwendolen’s mother. She objects to Jack’s ‘origins’.
Another obstacle is Gwendolen’s fascination with the name ‘Earnest’ since she does not know Jack’s real name.
Mood :
The play is a comedy and a satire.
Some of the ideas Wilde is trying to make fun of and criticize include :
* Victorian ideas surrounding marriage
* Victorian social expectations.
2] The Picture of Dorian Gray :
Dorian Gray is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist who is impressed and infatuated by Dorian's beauty; he believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for the new mode in his art as a painter. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic worldview: that beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life.
Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than him, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied and amoral experiences; all the while his portrait ages and records every soul-corrupting sin.
3] A Woman of No Importance :
Oscar Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance is a satire on English upper-class morality and society’s double standards for women and men. It is both a comedy of manners and a protest against gender inequality. A Woman of No Importance was first performed on 19 April 1893 at the Haymarket Theater in London. The play was published in 1894.
The play opens in the garden of the Hunstanton estate, where Lady Caroline Pontefract, an overbearing snob, is holding court and patronizing Hester Worsley, a wealthy young American visiting England for the first time. As Hester reveals her admiration of Gerald Arbuthnot, a young clerk, he enters excitedly to tell them that he has been made Lord Illingworth’s secretary. Lady Hunstanton is pleased for Gerald and invites his mother to join their party at the estate. A witty and flirtatious man of means, Lord Illingworth flirts with the quick-witted Mrs. Allonby and accepts her challenge to make Hester fall in love with him. However, when Gerald’s mother, Mrs. Arbuthnot, enters, Lord Illingworth is shocked to discover that she is his ex-lover. It is revealed that Lord Illingworth seduced Mrs. Arbuthnot when they were both young but refused to marry her when she fell pregnant with Gerald. Gerald is frustrated with his mother’s obvious dislike of Lord Illingworth and his job offer, but she refuses to disclose the reasons for her feelings. Knowing that her son is in love with Hester, but also knowing Hester’s puritan views on the sin of an unmarried mother, Mrs. Arbuthnot decides to subtly reveal the story of Gerald’s conception in the third person. When Hester rushes to tell Gerald that Lord Illingworth tried to kiss her, Gerald threatens to attack his new employer, until Mrs. Arbuthnot declares that Lord Illingworth is, in fact, his father. In shock the next day, Gerald writes a letter to his father, asking him to marry his mother. He has also decided to turn down Lord Illingworth’s offer to become his secretary. However, Mrs. Arbuthnot tells Gerald that she will not make a mockery of her life by marrying Lord Illingworth now. Hester overhears their conversation and, realizing that the law of God is love above all things, supports Mrs. Arbuthnot’s decision. She also tells Gerald and his mother that she wants to use her wealth to look after them both. When Lord Illingworth arrives, he offers to marry Mrs. Arbuthnot and accepts Gerald as his son, but he is quickly rebuffed by his former lover. Instead, Mrs. Arbuthnot tells him that she hates him and could never marry him. Lord Illingworth acknowledges that their former relationship meant nothing to him, flippantly calling Mrs. Arbuthnot his mistress and causing her to slap him with his own glove. Left alone, Mrs. Arbuthnot calls for Gerald and Hester and asks her future daughter-in-law to accept her as a mother. Gerald sees the glove on the floor and asks who just visited, but his mother merely replies, “a man of no importance”.
4] An Ideal Husband:
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, tells the story of Sir Robert Chiltern, a well-liked politician who is considered a bastion of morality by everyone he knows, especially his wife. However, an acquaintance of the Chilterns, Mrs. Cheveley, uncovers a secret from Sir Robert’s past that could ruin both his reputation and his wife’s good opinion if they were to become common knowledge. Sir Robert finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place as Mrs. Cheveley attempts to blackmail him into supporting a fraudulent scheme that would leave his good name equally tarnished, and is forced to turn to his friend, the dandyish aesthete Lord Goring, to help him find a way out of this conundrum... Oscar Wilde was one of the most fascinating authors of the 19th century, known as much for his witticisms as for his writing. His most notable works include the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the comic plays An Ideal Husband and Lady Windermere’s Fan.
Conclusion:
Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon of the Victorian era. He has contributed to nearly every genre. He could have been the revolution of the Victorian era but it was like - “ Right person at the wrong time”, not for literary works but for his sexuality.
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