Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Oscar Wilde
1. Life
• Born in Dublin in 1854.
• He became a disciple of Walter Pater, the theorist of
Aestheticism, accepting the theory ‘Art for Art’s Sake’.
• He became a fashionable dandy.
• He was one of the most successful playwrights of late
Victorian London and one of the greatest celebrities of his
days.
• He suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned after
been convicted of ‘gross indecency’ for homosexual acts.
• He died in Paris in 1900.
Oscar Wilde
2. A clever talker
Some of Wilde’s famous quotations:
‘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 mode of individualism Oscar Wilde, 1889.
that the world has known’.
Oscar Wilde
3. Works
• Poetry: Poems (1881), The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(1898), originally published under his prison identity,
C.3.3.
• Fairy tales: The Happy Prince and other Tales (1888),
The House of Pomegranates (1891), written for his
children.
• 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).
Oscar Wilde
4. 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.
used only to celebrate beauty
• Art
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 Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray
1890 → first appeared in a magazine.
1891 → revised and extended.
• It reflects Oscar Wilde’s
personality.
• It was considered immoral
by the Victorian public.
Oscar Wilde
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Plot and setting
• Set in London at the end of the
19th century.
• 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.
Oscar Wilde
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray
• 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 himself from
the portrait; he stabs it but in so doing 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.
Oscar Wilde
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Main characters
• Dorian represents the ideal of youth, beauty
and innocence.
• Lord Henry Wotton, a brilliant talker, sharp
in his criticism of institutions.
• 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.
Oscar Wilde
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray
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.
Oscar Wilde
6. A modern version of Dr Faust
• 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.
Oscar Wilde
7. The moral of the 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 → 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.
Oscar Wilde
8. The Importance
of Being Earnest
Wilde’s most enduringly popular play.
Oscar Wilde
8. The Importance
of Being Earnest
Plot
• Set in the fashionable Mayfair of London’s West End
during the late Victorian era.
• The protagonists: two young aristocratic men, Jack
Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff.
• Jack was adopted at an early age by Mr Thomas Cardew.
• Jack has invented an alter ego, a younger brother called
Ernest who lives in the City. Algernon has invented
another alter ego a friend, Bunbury whose invalidity
requires frequent visits to the countryside.
• Humour comes from the characters’ false identities.
• Witty dialogues and satire of Victorian hypocrisy.
Oscar Wilde
8. The Importance
of Being Earnest
Characters
• They belong to the aristocratic society.
• They are typical Victorian snobs.
• They are arrogant, formal
and concerned with money.
• They are interested only in a
materialistic world.
• Lady Bracknell embodies the
stereotype of the Victorian English
aristocratic woman.
Oscar Wilde
8. The Importance
of Being Earnest
Wilde’s new comedy of manners
• A new sort of Restoration
comedy of manners.
• The problems of Wilde’s age
are reflected in witty remarks.
• This comedy is a mirror of the
fashionable and corrupted
world of the Victorian audiences.
Alana Brophy and Luke Barats in The Importance of Being
Earnest, April 2005.
Oscar Wilde
8. The Importance
of Being Earnest
The nature of marriage
• Marriage is one of the main
concerns of the characters in the
play.
• Wilde makes fun of the institution
of marriage.
• Marriage is seen as a
hypocritical and absurd practice,
a tool to achieve a social status.
Oscar Wilde
8. The Importance
of Being Earnest
Irony and appearance
• The play’s central plot – the man who is both and is not
Ernest / earnest – presents a moral paradox.
• Earnest, a deliberate misspelling for ‘Ernest’, means
earnest, honest.
• None of the characters are really truthful.
• Characters are used to criticise Victorian prudery.
• What Wilde wants us to see as truly moral is really the
opposite of earnestness: irreverence.
