Wilde and Aestheticism

1. Wilde and Aestheticism

2. Characteristics of Aestheticism • Reaction against • Realism, Didacticism, and Morality that characterised earlier and even concurrent cultural fashions • The monotony and vulgarity of bourgeois life • Belief in Art for Art’s Sake • Unconventional lifestyle • Appreciation of Beauty at the expense of utility and social value • Pursuit of Pleasure & Worship of the Senses (Hedonism) • Evocative Use of the language of senses • Excessive attention to the self • Typical representative: dandy • Anti-Natural: belief in the ornate, extreme artifice, performance, and exotic • Walter Pater :“to burn always like a hard gemlike flame”, filling each passing moment with intense experience, feeling all kinds of sensations

3. “Art for art’s sake” in Wilde • “All art is quite useless” (Preface to DG) • Rejection of Victorian didacticism and realism • Wrote only to please himself • Moral imperative • Soul can be cured only by the senses only by “Art as the cult of beauty” • The artist: an alien in materialistic world • Superior being social outcast

4. Wilde’s dandy • Aristocrat (vs. Bohemién) • Pursuit of pleasure Indulgence in the beautiful (language, clothes, food, boys…) • Elegance: symbol of spiritual superiority • Uses wit to shock (and criticize) • Individualist: absolute freedom

6. Oscar or Harry?  • I have nothing to declare except my genius.  • Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the sense but the soul.  • I have put my talent into my works. I have put my genius into my life. • The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered. • Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know. • A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. • The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. • To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. • Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed. • My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go. • Modern morality consists in accepting the standards of the age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standards of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

7. Oscar or Harry?  • I have nothing to declare except my genius.  W • Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the sense but the soul.  H • I have put my talent into my works. I have put my genius into my life. W • The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered. W • Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know. H • A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. W • The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. W • To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. W • Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed. H • My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go. W • Modern morality consists in accepting the standards of the age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standards of his age is a form of the grossest immorality. H

8. Credits • www.sfu.ca/~ccolliga/Eng330--Wilde&Aestheticism.ppt • Spiazzi-Tavella, Now & Then, Zanichelli