Oscar Wilde
Oscar
Finga O’ Flahertie Wills Wilde was certainly one of the greatest English writers of the XIX century but he was also an almost legendary victim of that
Victorian society dominated by strictness and hipocricy. He was condemned not
only as a man but also as the author of writings that upset the traditional
hierarchy of values. During his life he was humiliated and exsalted; infact
there were a lot of people who recognized his greatness as writer. Without any
doubt he can be considered the most rapresentative esponent of English
Decadentism.
Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October
16,1854. He was the second son of sir William Wilde, a
well-knowneye-and-ear-surgeon, and Jane Elgee, a fervent nationalist and
somewhat eccentric woman who, for some time, perhaps to compensate for her
frustated expectations of a daughter,dressed little Oscar in girl’s clothes (maybe
a contributory fact to Wilde’s subsequent homosexual inclinations).She was a
delicious woman who wrote splendid poems that signed with the name of
“Hope”.
Among his teacher at Oxford he was perticulary
impressed by John Ruskin and Walter
Pater, who influenced both his life and
works very deeply. Ruskin attracted him by his socialist ideas and his creed of
the beauty of manual labour (altough it was above all his prose style that Wilde
admired). Pater, while sharing Ruskin’s passion for beauty, taught him a new
conception art, quiete devoid of any moral responsability. Wilde carried both
teachings at extreme, in keeping with his extravagant character.
While at Oxford, he made various trips abroad(visiting Italy and Greece)
with prof. Mahaffy, who taught him to love Hellenism.
Having
inherited from his father, he settled in London. In order to shock the
bourgeoisie and draw attention to himself, he began to dress in a gorgeous,
eccentric way (knee-breeches, black silk stockings, a velvet coat, a strange tie
and exotic flowers in the button-hole): he could occasionally be seen walking up
and down in Piccadilly with a sunflower in his hands. This exibition earned him
frequent caricatures in “Punch”, but also frequent invitations from London
society charmed by his wit and brilliant conversation, as well as by the
sweetness of his temper.
Wilde
landed in the United States in 1882, uttering his famous statement, “I have
nothing to declare except my genius”, in reply to the Customs officer’ s
routine question. On his return to Europe, he spent three months in Paris, where
he met such writers and painters as Daudet, Mallarmé, the Gouncour brother,
Degas and Pissaro, and was impressed by the works of Flaubert and Huysmans.
In
1884 he married Constance Llyod, who bore him two children. Two of
his first works: “The Happy Prince and Other Tales” and “The House
of Pomegranates” are favols that he wrote for them. They are so full of
delicate and deep feelings that also grown up people appreciate them.In 1891
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” was published and
its preface can be considered the “Manifesto” of Aestheticism.
Between 1892 and 1895 he wrote the so called “society plays”. When these
plays appeared they had a good success but the Victorians didn’t like his
witticism, because they refused to
medidate on them and they didn’t like Wilde because he showed to have understood them
too well and to have revealed the false respectability of the Victorian society.
But the wheel of fortune was about to turn. In March 1895, at the peek of his career, he sued the Marquis of Queensberry, who had accused him of a homosexual reletionship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. Unfortunately the accusations were proven, and Wilde was arrested, tried and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.When finally released, he was a broken man. He spent some time in Naples and Switzerland, writing against the brutality of prison life.He died on November 30, 1900, in Paris forgotten by almost of everyone. Britain decided to remember him by a memorial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, on February 14, 1995.
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