Oascar Wilde

OSCAR WILDE OSCAR WILDE (1854 - 1900) Was born in Dublin in 1845. He was influenced by aestheticism and even more by decadentism. From aestheticism he took the cult of beauty, which must be associated with art. In particular the concept take "Art for Art's Sake", taken from Pater, led him to believe that only "Art as the cult of Beauty" could prevent the murder of the soul. Role of the artist: Wilde perceived the artist as an alien in a materialistic world. He wrote only to please himself and not to communicate his theories to his fellow beings, in fact he doesn't believe, on the contrary of the writers of the Enlightenment, in a didactic and moral aim for art. His pursuit of beauty is the tragic act of a superior being, inevitably turned into an outcast. The Wildean man-ideal is the dandy, which is an aristocratic whose elegance is a symble of the superiotity of his spirit and he is an individualist, who demands absolute freedom. Dorian Gray, the protagonist of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is the typical dandy, in fact he thinks that life should be lived in his full and he belives in beauty, elegance and youth, which is synonimous with beauty and happiness. Plot: Dorian Gray is a young man whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to portray him. While Gray's desires are satisfied, including that of the eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear on the portrait. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it, but he mysteriousely kills himself. In the moment of the death the picture returns to its original purity and Dorian's face becomes "withered, wrinkled and loathsome". Allegory meaning: this story is profoundly allegorical and it is a 19th century version of the myth of th Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In this novel the soul becomes the picture, which records the signs of experience, corruption, horror, concealed under the mask of Dorian timeless beauty. The picture stands for the dark side of Dorian's personality, which he tries to forget by locking the picture in a room. The orrible, corrupting picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad coscience of the Victorian middle classes, while Dorian's purity and innocence are symbols of the bourgeois hypocrisy. Finally the picture, restored to his original beauty, illustrates Wilde's theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal. The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped, in fact when Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that is death. The play The importance of Being Earnest is a satire on the hypocritical society of that time. Its plot is based on a lie and the story continues through a series of misunderstandings based on Jack pretend