An Analysis of The Harlot's House
Oscar Wilde's "The Harlot's House" was written in 1881, towards the latter part of the Victorian era. This genre is a poem containing 12 stanzas. The point of view in this piece is from the narrator's perspective early on, the narrative distance moves further distant in the fourth stanza, zooms in, then out again.
The narrator is walking down a street and pauses, with his companion, "beneath the harlot's house" (Wilde, Longman p. 2069: 1.3). In the next two stanzas Wilde transitions to the inside of the house depicting a partygoers atmosphere in "Inside, above the din and fray" (2.1) and shadows of the figures inside are projected onto the blind (3.3). This movie projector type visual picture gives this poem a choppy edited effect.
The imagery of this poem is vivid. The shadowy figures of the occupants at the harlot's house are portrayed as "mechanical" (3.1). The narrator and his companion watch at all that is happening at this house of ill repute. The reader gets the sense that both stand below the window for quite some time. Whether through fascination, or wondering how people live "on the other side of the tracks", clearly there is some allure to standing on this street watching the "ghostly dancers spin to sound of horn and violin" (4.1-2). There are two more dances described, a quadrille in the fifth stanza, a saraband in the sixth.
Wilde moves the picture from a fantasy like dream, with dances and gaiety, to a pointed change of stark reality he affects by wordage. In the 20th line, a "phantom lover" is pulled close to a "clockwork puppet" (7.1-2). The "horrible marionette" comes to the porch to smoke, "upon ...
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...ng hours and there was little to celebrate. "Britian grew richer, but it was not the poor who benefited from this revolution" according to the Longman Anthology (Longman p. 1818). "The overcrowded conditions in the cities created urban slums of unimaginable wretchedness" (p. 1819).
This wretchedness is mirrored in "The Harlot's House." The harlot's marionette is portrayed as alive but not really living, and the narrator who stands on the street thinks he condemns a wretched lifestyle. The irony is that, he is perhaps, just as lifeless as the marionette (only more so for being a hypocrite).
He is probably just as "dead" as the "dead dancing with the dead" at the house.
Works Cited
Damrosch, David, et al., ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. B. Compact ed. New York: Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000.
Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant it has a huge impact on the lives of a drinker . In small quantities, alcohol results in a mild euphoria and usually removes inhibitions, and is relatively harmless. However, when used in excess, it has the power to change many lives in many ways. Alcohol causes a lot of trouble in a lot of peoples lives not just in the drinkers life. . Some ways it effects peoples lives include alcohol poisoning and alcohol-related traffic fatalities by individuals who are problem drinkers but who are not alcohol dependent. Because alcohol has so many negative effects on a person's mental and physical health, people should avoid the consumption of it altogether.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
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In ‘Wilde’s Fiction’ written by Jerusha McCormack, the author starts her essay examining Oscar Wilde’s life and origins. The Artist, born and schooled in Ireland became a writer in England where he lived as a queer kind of Irishman. He studied in Oxford where he challenged himself beating the great scholars he met; later on, he acquired the title of an English aristocrat and made himself over as a dandy, a fine well-dressed man, who can also be known as a quite self-concerned person. Oscar Wilde, was also particularly famous for his quips, examining the drafts of his plays in fact, he used to open his works with jokes and witty phrases, his aphorisms became popular very soon and this could happen especially because he used the language of his audience, the language of common double-talk.
I. Eleanor’s private life was very public. She felt best when she was “busy and useful”, and she was busy most of the time (Thompson 74). These qualities earned her the nicknames “Public Energy Number One” and “Everywhere Eleanor” (Ryskamp 1).
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
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...f accomplishments. She did not want to be like the rest of her family and pass without enduring her life to the fullest. I think Franklin was able to give this full life to Eleanor beside the fact that he could not provide an enriching, loving, and intimate marriage. Eleanor did not express to Franklin her emptiness she felt with their marriage. She hid these feeling by surrounding herself with many people and other relations.
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on A Doll’s House”. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. SparkNotes.com. 20 Mar 2011. http://Sparknotes.com/lit/dollhouse/themes.html.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Isobel Murray. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. Ed. Richard Allen Cave. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Abrams, M. H., et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1986.
Wilde, O. (1945). The picture of Dorian Gray. The Electronic Classics Series, The Pennsylvania State University. p. 3/ Retrieved January 3, 2014 from http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/oscar-wilde/dorian-gray.pdf
Longman. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. B. Damrosch, D. (ed.). NY, LA: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 2000.