Life and main works

Oscar Wilde, the son of a surgeon and of an ambitious literary woman, was born in Dublin in 1854. After attending Trinity College (Dublin), he was sent to Oxford where he gained a first class degree in Classics and distinguished himself for his eccentricity.

He admired the art historian and writer John Ruskin, from whom he took his interest in art, and : became a disciple of Walter Pater, accepting the theory of "Art for Art’s Sake". After graduating, he left Oxford and settled in London where he soon became a fashionable figure of dandy for his extraordinary wit and his foppish way of dressing. He was parodied as such by Gilbert and Sullivan (writers of comic operas including social satire, in one of their works.

In 1881 Wilde edited, at his own expense, Poems, which reflected the influence of models, such as John Keats and D.G. Rossetti and, in the same year, he was engaged for a tour in the United States where he held some lectures about the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes. The tour was a remarkable personal success for Wilde, who made himself known for his irony, his attitudes and his poses. On his coming back to Europe in 1883, he married Constance Lloyd who bore him two children, but he soon became tired of his marriage. At this point of his career he was most noted as a great talker: his presence became a social event and his remarks appeared in the most fashionable London magazines. In the late 1880's Wilde’s literary talent was revealed by a series of short stories, The Canterville Ghost, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, The Model Millionaire, The Happy Prince and Otber Tales written for his children, The Portrait of Mr W.H. on the mysterious person to whom Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets, and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). After his first and only novel he developed an interest in drama and revived the comedy of manners. In fact, in the 1890s he produced a series of plays which were successful on the London stage: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his masterpiece, and the tragedy in French Salomè (1893). However, both the novel and the tragedy damaged the writer’s reputation, since the former was considered immoral, and the latter was prevented from appearing on the London stage owing to its alleged obscenity. In 1891 he met the young and beautiful Lord Alfred Douglas, whose nickname was "Bosie", and with whom Wilde dared to have a homosexual affair. The boy’s father forced a public trial and Wilde was sent to prison for homosexual offences. While in prison he wrote De Profundis, a long letter to Bosie published posthumously in 1905. When he was released, he was a broken man; his wife refused to see him, and he went into exile in France, where he lived his last years in poverty. There he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), dedicated to a man executed in Reading Gaol for the murder of his wife, and interested himself in the rights of the artist and, in the pamphlet "The Soul of Man under Socialism", he made a plea for individualism and artistic freedom. He died of meningitis in Paris in I900.

The rebel and the dandy

Wilde totally adopted "the aesthetic ideal", as he affirmed in one of his famous conversations: "My life is like a work of art". He lived flamboyantly and ostentatiously, dividing his time between high society and "bohemian" circles, in the double role of rebel and dandy. The dandy must be distinguished from the "bohemian". while the bohemian allies himself to the masses, the urban proletariat, the dandy is a bourgeois artist, who, in spite of his uneasiness, remains a member of his class. The Wildean dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spiri: he uses his wit to shock, and is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. Wilde took on the figure of the dandy because it embodied much of what he wished to express, but he added to it elements linked to sensation, which are peculiarly Wildean: the more sensations the dandy could absorb, the richer and nearer perfection his personality would be. Since life was meant for pleasure, and pleasure was an indulgence in the beautiful, beautiful clothes, beautiful talks, delicious food, and handsome boys were the main interests of Wilde. He affirmed "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all".

Art for Art’s Sake

The concept of "Art for Art’s Sake" was to him a moral imperative and not merely an aesthetic one. He believed that only "Art as the cult of Beauty" could prevent the murder of the soul. Wilde perceived the artist as an alien in a materialistic world, he wrote only to please himself and was not concerned in communicating his theories to his fellow-beings. His pursuit of beauty and fulfilment was the tragic act of a superior being inevitably turned into an outcast.