WILDE, OSCAR FINGAL O'FLAHERTIE WILLS
(1854–1900)

Born in Dublin to artistically minded parents, Wilde studied for three years at Trinity College in Dublin, and then at Magdalen College in Oxford, where his tutors included the English art critic John Ruskin and the English essayist Walter Pater. At the age of twenty-four he moved to London, where he very quickly became a conspicuous figure on the social scene, celebrated for his wit, personality, and self-consciously foppish dress sense. He married in 1884, had two children, and then, within a couple of years, noticed that he was homosexual. He fell in love with Lord Alfred Douglas in the early 1890s, was repeatedly and publicly denounced by Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, until eventually Wilde sued for libel, and lost. This led to his trial and conviction for sodomy, and to a sentence of two years' hard labor, which he served first in Wandsworth prison and then in Reading gaol. He was released in 1897, and spent the remaining years of his life as a social outcast in France, cash-strapped and increasingly ill. When he died, he was just forty-six.

Although Wilde is chiefly remembered for his one-liners—not unreasonably, given how good so many of them are—he was a more versatile writer than this fact might suggest. He published prose fiction, including a collection of fairy stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), and a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); he published verse, most notably "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898); he dabbled in social commentary of a utopian bent, as seen in "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891); and he was a highly successful dramatist, with the best of his plays, The Importance of Being Earnest (1894), still being performed regularly in the twenty-first century. He also wrote essays and dialogues on art and art criticism, the most important of which, "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist," were among the pieces that he published in 1891, under the title Intentions.

Wilde was not a philosopher, and it is an interesting question whether, or to what extent, he can be taken to have contributed to philosophy. His most obvious connection to the subject, after all, is the rather unusual one of being, not the originator of a philosophical position, but the emblem or embodiment of one: Wilde stands for aestheticism in much the way that Lord Byron, for instance, stands for Romanticism. And this is a role that Wilde cultivated assiduously.

The term "aestheticism" refers to a cluster of more or less closely related views (often glossed as "art for art's sake"), rather than to a single theory or system; and many of these views enjoyed wide currency in the second half of the nineteenth century, not least through the writings of Ruskin and Pater. Perhaps the most characteristic tenet of aestheticism is the claim that aesthetic value is independent of and/or superior to other kinds of value. From this standpoint, the preeminently Victorian habit of bringing moral values to bear on the assessment of art—of asking, if not first then certainly foremost, whether such-and-such a work is edifying, say, or is likely to deprave—was point missing and philistine. Instead, the aestheticists insisted, the question should be whether a given work is beautiful. As Wilde put it in the preface to Dorian Gray : "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." And this statement means that the artist's task cannot be didactic: "An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style" (Wilde 1949, p. 5).

Taken in its stronger form—that aesthetic value is both independent of and superior to other kinds of value—the aestheticist tenet prompts a view not merely about art, but also about life. It encourages the thought that one should try to turn oneself into a work of art, to understand oneself in aesthetic terms rather than moral ones, say, and this is a project to which Wilde devoted considerable effort, claiming (to André Gide) that he had put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his work. His dress sense, his manner, and above all his style, were carefully calculated for aesthetic effect: "To me," as a character in Dorian Gray says, "Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible …" (Wilde 1949, p. 29). And so successful was Wilde in cultivating his public persona that when Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience was first performed in 1881, no one doubted after whom the dandified aesthete, Reginald Bunthorne, had been modeled.

"A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word," Wilde wrote. "It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless" (Wilde 1907, p. 153). This thought—an outright rejection of the value of disinterestedness in the experience of art—perhaps has a claim to be regarded as Wilde's most original contribution to the philosophy of art, shades of Ruskin notwithstanding. Wilde insisted that "it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others," and even went so far as to accord a higher value to the critic's work than to the artist's (Wilde 1907, p. 127), a relative estimation, incidentally, that proved to be prophetic of much that passed for literary studies in the later twentieth century. Wilde developed some of these thoughts, and they are interesting. But it is hard not to feel that they are, in the end, really only a side product of the much more pressing business of turning his life into art, of striking a stylish pose that should, above all, be effective, even if, as he himself averred, "All art is quite useless" (Wilde 1949, p. 6).

See also Aesthetic Qualities; Aesthetics, History of; Art, Value in; Beauty; Humor; Pater, Walter Horatio; Romanticism; Ruskin, John; Value and Valuation.

Bibliography

works by oscar wilde

The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellmann. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.

Intentions. London: The English Library, 1907.

The Annotated Oscar Wilde: Poems, Fiction, Plays, Lectures, Essays, and Letters, edited by H. Montgomery Hyde. New York: Potter, 1982.

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Holt, 2000.

The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Books, 1949.

The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism, edited by Donald L. Lawler. New York: Norton, 1988.

works about oscar wilde

Bloom, Harold, ed. Oscar Wilde. New York: Chelsea, 1985.

Brown, Julia Prewitt. Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde's Philosophy of Art. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.

Chai, Leon. Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Cohen, Philip K. The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Eltis, Sos. Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.

Freedman, Jonathan, ed. Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

McCormack, Jerusha, ed. Wilde the Irishman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Price, Jody. A Map with Utopia: Oscar Wilde's Theory for Social Transformation. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Raby, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Schmidgall, Gary. The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar. New York: William Abrahams, 1994.

Shewan, Rodney. Oscar Wilde: Art and Egoism. New York: Barnes, 1977.

Aaron Ridley (2005)