Video + expression

 

Oscar Wilde’s Role in Literature’s “Aesthetic Movement” 

from the Lecture Series: Victorian Britain , February 27, 2019 
adapted from an article by By Patrick N. Allitt, Ph.D., Emory University

The Aesthetic Movement was an artistic expression of “art for art’s sake.” Disavowing notions of literature’s societal necessity, Oscar Wilde wrote in opposition to Dickensian literature—and influenced generations. 
One of the English literary exponents of the Aesthetic Movement was Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde was one of the first great celebrities who was famous for being famous. He was already a famous person before he had any literary achievements at all. He was a deliberate debunker of Victorian gravity and solemnity. He was Irish, born in Dublin in 1854. He made a great success of his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, and won a scholarship to go to Magdalen College, Oxford. When he was there, he got a first class degree in the classics and won a Newdigate Prize for poetry. While he was at Oxford, he joined up with a lot of aristocratic young men who helped him get an entrée into London society.
He went into London society wearing the most outrageous clothes he could possibly find, the sort of things everybody else would wear at a costume party. He would be wearing clothes that were already 90 years out of date…This kind of dandyism, especially his great talking, made him famous. […] 

He loved literary paradox. Listen to the preface to his book, The Picture of Dorian Gray in the 1890s. Actually, the preface is really just a series of little aphorisms, but they are all contradictory to the standard wisdom of the time. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” And, “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” You could hardly imagine a more flagrant violation of the Dickensian idea what literature was for […] 

One of the reasons he was writing all his plays, a great burst of creativity, was because he had a very expensive boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he called Bozie. They met in 1890 and became very close friends... Bozie’s father, the Marquis of Queensberry, knew what was going on and hated Oscar Wilde bitterly, whom he regarded as perverting his son. So, the Marquis sent a series of insulting letters to Wilde... In reaction, Wilde sued him for criminal libel. This is in 1895, the year The Importance of Being Earnest had come out. Wilde apparently didn’t realize the seriousness of a prosecution of this kind. The Marquis of Queensberry hired a very high-powered legal talent, a man called Edward Carson...This trial had been going on for many days before Wilde’s own counsel said to him, “You must drop this case because evidence is now accumulating which is going to lead to your conviction, not his.” Sure enough, Wilde was arrested and charged with “Gross Indecency Between Males.” That was the charge. 

He has often been depicted by his sympathizers as a martyr. In a way, that is true, but in a way, it is not, because the legal system was a little bit reluctant to hold a trial of this kind and notified them in advance that they were going to arrest him. Then they gave him some time to escape to continental Europe... He didn’t. He stayed. He was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison at hard labor…He got out of prison after two years and spent the remainder of his life living in France in exile and died young, in 1900.