Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde and the World Around Him Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was an Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and poet. He was part of the Decadence, a loosely affiliated coterie of writers and artists of the 1890s whose lives and works manifested a highly stylized, decorative manner, a fascination with morbidity and perversity, and an adherence to the doctrine "art for art's sake." After having a hard childhood, where he was dressed as a girl until the age of nine, he viewed life more critically than others. He often focused in on the upper class, and wrote of their absurdity, superficiality, and snobbery. Yet mainly, he wrote of what he felt at the time and what is around him. In The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance, it is evident that the environment, lifestyle, and events in the life of Oscar Wilde has influenced him in writing such one-sided critical satires, in which he reserved none of his strong opinions.
Wilde stated that: "If we are all insincere, masked, and lying, then the artist is prototype rather than exception. Both The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance mainly evolves around the youthful characters . Wilde had a colorful and scandalous social life, and was even jailed for a while. Wilde proposed to speak for the young, with even excessive eagerness at times. Although he was full of strong idealism and human sympathy, his dissatisfaction with the society of the 1880's and 90's caused him to make highly personal and melodramatic attacks on issues which he possibly have never looked close enough to understand. Yet Wilde had a word of warning: "All art is at once surface and symbol. The world of art is "more real than reality itself" (506). self-repressive, and therefore never held anything back. Wilde found criticism and self-consciousness necessary as sin. He believed that people should be self-expressive vs. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril" (Schmidgall 149). It was believed that as an entertainer he was more morally clearsighted (Bryfonski 504). If all the sheep are black, then the artist cannot be blamed for not being white" (Bloom 102). Wilde felt that since man and nature are in constant change, art was more ordered than life, more beautiful. What Wilde was trying to express is that art is so real, that if one dares to go beneath the surface, one may find things that he/she does not want to find.
Common topics in this essay:
Oscar Wilde,
Wills Wilde,
Woman Importance,
English June,
Miss Lynch,
importance earnest woman,
beneath surface,
Earnest Woman,
earnest woman importance,
Importance Earnest,
art real,
woman importance,
importance earnest,
earnest woman,
oscar wilde,
|
Acceptance Essays
