Some links to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and Oscar Wilde

I have been set the task to identify some ideas/themes;

• dandy-ism
• William Morris
• the aesthetic movement

and then to talk about how each of these have some sort of link or connection with the novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ or possibly the writer himself, Oscar Wilde. Here is some research and ideas I have come up with..

Dandy-ism 

When a man is said to be a ‘dandy’, it means he has excessive concern with elegance of their dress and manners. Historically, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain, a dandy, who was self-made, often strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a middle-class background.

So how does this link to writer, Oscar Wilde?

Well, Oscar Wilde included the use of dandy characters within his writing. In Wilde’s works, the dandy is a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams and paradoxes and ridicules the cant and hypocrisy of society’s moral arbiters. To a very large extent, this figure was a self-portrait, a stand-in for Wilde himself.

Oscar: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” 

Mary Jane: “Oh, Oscar, you’re SUCH a dandy!”

The dandy isn’t always a comic figure in Wilde’s work. In novels ‘A Woman of No Importance’ and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, he takes the form of the villains Lord Illingworth and Lord Henry Wootton, respectively. But in works such as ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, ‘An Ideal Husband’, and ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, Wilde seems to be evolving a more positive and clearly defined moral position on the figure of the dandy. The dandy pretends to be all about surface, which makes him seem trivial, shallow, and ineffectual.

Dorian Gray is the protagonist of Wilde’s novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, and he is seen as the typical dandy,

 who thinks man should live his life in full, realizing his wishes and his dreams; if one checks one’s impulses, life is marred because every repressed impulse and all self-denial remain in one’s mind and poisons it. Dorian believes youth is synonymous with beauty and happiness.

Here are some other examples of a ‘dandy’ character which I found interesting during my research;

• Jay Gatsby – ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Patrick Bateman – ‘American Psycho’ by Bret Easton Ellis
• Lucius Malfoy – from the ‘Harry Potter’ series by J. K Rowling
• Willy Wonka – ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ by Roald Dahl

 

 

William Morris

William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and libertarian Marxist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and English Arts and Crafts Movement. As an author, illustrator and medievalist, he helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, and was a direct influence on postwar authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien. Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include ‘The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems’, ‘The Earthly Paradise’  and the fantasy romance ‘The Well at the World’s End’. He was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with that organization over goals and methods by the end of the decade.

The Aesthetic Movement

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty. The aesthetic movement is an art movement supporting the emphasis of these values more than social-political themes for literature, fine art, music and other arts. The artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages.

The Aesthetic Movement believed that art in its various forms should not seek to convey a moral, sentimental or educational message but should give sensual pleasure. Their aim was “to exist beautifully”: Art for Art’s sake. It ran from about 1860 to 1900.

In Britain, Oscar Wilde is famous as one of the best representatives of the aesthetes. He believes that art represents nothing but itself, and that art has its own life just as thoughts do. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ is often read as an explicit proclamation of the worthiness of living life in accordance with aesthetic values. This is due in part to the flourishing Aesthetic Movement of Victorian England at the time of the novel’s publication, as well as Oscar Wilde’s association with the movement itself. The Aesthetic Movement, which coincided with the Industrial Revolution at the end of the nineteenth century, emphasized the artistic aspect of a man’s work in producing a variety of goods, from furniture to machines to literature. Oscar Wilde, however, proposed that the principles of the Aesthetic Movement extend beyond the production of mere commodities.

In his exposition of aestheticism, Wilde applies the philosophy in a more universal sense, stressing the positive influences of aestheticism in one’s life beyond the craftsmanship. Just as the machines that produce materials with the intervention of human thought are labelled “evil,” Wilde similarly condemns men who act as metaphorical machines, programmed to behave in accordance with society’s ideas of decency rather than allowing themselves to act freely and achieve the greatest amount of happiness. Wilde’s expressive advocacy of an aesthetic lifestyle is paralleled in his depiction of Lord Henry in the novel. Lord Henry lectured to the impressionable Dorian,

“We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. . . . Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself”

Wilde, through Lord Henry, laments the stifling nature of his contemporary Victorian society and how the supposed morality it boasts necessitates self-denial and rejection of life’s most beautiful aspects.

 

– I hope some of this information has been of some use to your further understanding of Oscar Wilde and his views and ideas at the time whilst writing ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ –

Thanks for reading 

 

 

 

My W. B. Yeats & Oscar Wilde research

At home I have just completed some background research on both writers Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. Hopefully this information may be of some use to you for better understanding of their backgrounds before we begin to look at their novel/poems in greater depth..

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 

Wilde was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he became involved in the aesthetic movement. After he graduated, he moved to London to pursue a literary career.

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde. In a letter, Wilde said the main characters were reflections of himself:

“Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps”.

It appeared as the lead story in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine printed as the July 1890 issue. The magazine’s editors feared the story was indecent as submitted, so they censored roughly 500 words, without Wilde’s knowledge, before publication. But even with that, the story was still greeted with outrage by British reviewers, some of whom suggested that Wilde should be prosecuted on moral grounds, leading Wilde to defend the novel aggressively in letters to the British press. He later revised the story for book publication, making substantial alterations, deleting controversial passages, adding new chapters and including an aphoristic Preface which has since become famous in its own right. The amended version was published in April 1891. Some scholars believe that Wilde would today have wanted us to read the version he originally submitted to Lippincott’s.

His greatest talent was for writing plays, and he produced a string of extremely popular comedies including ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ (1892), ‘An Ideal Husband (1895)’ and ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1895). ‘Salomé’ was performed in Paris in 1896.

Drama and tragedy marred Wilde’s private life. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884 and they had two sons, but in 1891 Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. In April 1895, Wilde sued Douglas’ father, the Marquis of Queensberry, for libel, after the Marquis had accused him of being homosexual. Wilde lost and, after details of his private life were revealed during the trial, was arrested and tried for gross indecency. He was sentenced to two years of hard labour. While in prison he composed a long letter to Douglas, posthumously published under the title ‘De Profundis’ .  Wilde was released with his health irrevocably damaged and his reputation ruined. He spent the rest of his life in Europe, publishing ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in 1898. He died in Paris on 30 November 1900.

William Butler Yeats 1865-1939

Yeats was born in Dublin and educated there and in London.

His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats’s debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, Yeats’s poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. So after 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; experimenting with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it.

In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as:

“inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”

Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929)