Oscar Wilde: The Tragic Story Oscar Wilde was a distinguished author and playwright born in 1854. Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published in July 1890 in the Lippincott's Magazine and received a tremendous amount of criticism. Wilde’s novel was a reflection of Aesthetics and was sadly also a literary one-hit wonder. Oscar Wilde was a one-hit literary wonder with his book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, because of the fact he only wrote one novel, his homosexuality in the 1800’s, and his imprisonment and social fallout. Oscar Wilde was a man of many things, and was a very big follower of Aesthetics, but Oscar Wilde only wrote one novel, which is The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde was educated in various colleges …show more content…
In Britain, “Homosexuality was a criminal offense and serious societal taboo” (History.com). Due to this, Wilde’s affairs occurred secretly, but Wilde was not very secretive and soon was put to trial for his actions. Lord Alfred Douglas was “femininely beautiful, aristocratic, rich, homosexual, and poetic” (CliffsNotes), and was very involved with Wilde, intimately. Wilde soon began to be “infatuated, obsessed, and besotted” (CliffsNotes) with Douglas, and soon began to travel with Douglas internationally. As time went on, Wilde was not very discreet about his affairs, and the public did not care much about Wilde’s affairs, but Douglas’s father did. The Marquess of Queensbury, Douglas’s father, left a note after one of Wilde’s plays, accusing him of being a sodomite. Douglas, not taking a liking to his father, supported and urged on Wilde to put Queensberry to trial for “criminal libel” (ProQuest), but Wilde himself was soon put on trial for sodomy and had multiple male prostitutes whom he had had affairs with testifying against him. Although Wilde knew of the storm brewing, and was given the chance to flee to France and escape way from the charges, Wilde stayed. Wilde’s trial was very harshly executed and included many people testifying against him, including when “chambermaids testified that they had seen young men in Wilde’s bed and a hotel housekeeper stated that there were fecal stains on his bed sheets” (History.com). Due to many of these testaments, Wilde was imprisoned without bail, for two years. Wilde was found guilty under the “1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which prohibited acts of 'gross indecency' between men” (ProQuest). With Wilde in prison, Wilde was found with an inability to be writing much except letters, halting any process of him writing any other novel or literary
We know that Oscar is married and has children but these letters he has written to different men strike him as gay to some. During this time period, many disagreed with this act, especially Lord Alfred Douglas of Queensberry, one of Wilde’s partners father. Some may say this lead to the theme of hate for the fact that Lord Alfred Douglas of Queensberry despised Wilde for sending these letters to his son and having these feelings towards him (Polashuk, 2007).
Wilde denied the connection between himself and his art, stating “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.”. He could make this statement due to the nature of fiction; as it is usually considered as false or imagined. This was also the intent of Orwell; using his allegorical novella to push his anti-communist views to highlight the clear manipulation in the class system. Composers can explore taboo topics behind the shield of fiction in literature; allowing them to protect their duality whilst having a mode of expression. Wilde was frustrated with the authoritative suppression of his sexuality and Orwell frustrated with the societal infiltration of Russian propaganda. Literature provided an influential method to express their condemned desires whilst protecting their image. It is in this way that literature is a powerful tool in challenging the status
He was imprisoned due to indecent acts of homosexuality with his partner at the time. On 20 May 1895, Oscar Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol (Varty 31).
Homosexuality in The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray is a well renowned book written by Oscar Wilde. When first published in July of 1880, the novel was edited and many passages were taken out by the British magazine, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. These passages that were deleted, included an explicit homosexual relationship between two of the three main characters, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray. During the 1880’s, the subject matter of the book was not acceptable to society’s standards. At the time, only men and women married and even the thought of the same sex marrying was detestable.
Baselga, Mariano. “Oscar Wilde: The Satire of Social Habits.” In Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, England: Colin Smuthe, 1994: pp. 13-20.
Criticism of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde, originally appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. It was then published in 1891, in book form, containing six additional chapters with revisions. The first reviews of Dorian Gray were mostly unfavorable.
Oscar Wilde is perhaps one of the most pretentious people to which I have ever been exposed. Like a lot of pretentious authors, he even uses a fake pen name. His book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, does not only contain homosexual undertones, but it also provides some pretty ostentatious quotes. My favorite in the novel so far is “all art is quite useless” (Wilde, 1890). This, coming from an artist, is an embodiment of pretension. Not only does this criticize his craft, but also anyone who has ever created
Oscar Fingal O' Flahertie Wills Wilde is one of Birtain's most well known authors. What many people do not know is that "the life story of Oscar Wilde has become...one of the tragic legends of the ages" (Broad v). Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland to Sir William Wilde, a distinguished surgeon specializing in opthalmology, and Lady Wilde, a poet who ran a literary salon in Dublin. Being an excellent student, he won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1874. Wilde soon adopted his parents' talents for ostentation always dressing flamboyantly and speaking in a wry, ironic matter when pertaining to subjects that he held in distaste. He graduated with honors and became a very distinguished man, but even his high stature could not prevent him from the tragedies of life. The Picture of Dorian Gray "is very much the author's autobiography" (Belford 170). In 1883, after he moved to London, he married Constance Mary Lloyd and had two sons. Wilde is thought to have married Constance "in order to quell rumors about his possible homosexuality, as well as to provide him with a regular income" (Holland 113) because it was not looked upon kindly in England in the 1800's if one was a homosexual. In 1891, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in book form, and ...
When hearing 'Fast and Furious' the first thing that comes to mind is an overdrawn movie series about fast drifting cars, but the other 'Fast and Furious' was mainly in the news, it was about a gun walking program that was led by a government agency known as Alcohol Tobacco Firearms & Explosives (ATF). Gun walking is when Border Patrol agents would let firearms knowing they were illegally obtained go into Mexico. The Border Patrol agents would get the order to do this directly from the ATF. This operation started around 2009 under the name 'Project Gunrunner' which eventually changed to 'Fast and Furious' when officials in the program learned a suspect in the operation was formally a part of a car club. ' Fast and Furious' ended around the year 2012.
Woodcock, George. The Paradox of Oscar Wilde. London-New York: T.V. Boardman and Co., Ltd., 1950.
Wilde accomplishes achieving the satirical message that he intended for the readers through his use of exaggeration. He begins by Mrs. Cheveley spitefully telling Lady Chiltern that her “house” is “a house bought with the price of dishonor”
Oscar Wilde is arguably one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking poets, writers, and playwrights of the Victorian Era. Oscar Wilde was born an exquisite and brilliantly creative person, who wrote some of the most well known plays and poems of the Victorian Era. Most of Wilde’s critically acclaimed works have been centered on certain pivotal principles he credited in his artistic ways, and in his personal life. The most important of these central views is, “the critical and cultured spirits…will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched. For Life is terribly deficient in form” (Ericksen 8).
Oscar Wilde liked people to think he was right. He had the uncanny ability of saying something that sounded good and then doing the exact opposite. Some would call that hypocrisy, but the more popular term for it seems to be “genius” judging by his status as a renowned writer and still-popular celebrity. Genius or not, Wilde knew how to put together a sentence. His life was one for the books, and his book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is one ripe for the analysis. Many parallels resonate between the novel and his—to put it gently, extraordinary—life.
Oscar Wilde was born in October 16, 1854, in the mid era of the Victorian period—which was when Queen Victoria ruled. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901.While she ruined Britain, the nation rise than never before, and no one thought that she was capable of doing that. “The Victorian era was both good and bad due to the rise and fall of the empires and many pointless wars were fought. During that time, culture and technology improved greatly” (Anne Shepherd, “Overview of the Victorian Era”). During this time period of English, England was facing countless major changes, in the way people lived and thought during this era. Today, Victorian society is mostly known as practicing strict religious or moral behavior, authoritarian, preoccupied with the way they look and being respectable. They were extremely harsh in discipline and order at all times. Determination became a usual Victorian quality, and was part of Victorian lifestyle such as religion, literature and human behavior. However, Victorian has its perks, for example they were biased, contradictory, pretense, they cared a lot of about what economic or social rank a person is, and people were not allowed to express their sexuality. Oscar Wilde was seen as an icon of the Victorian age. In his plays and writings, he uses wit, intelligence and humor. Because of his sexuality he suffered substantially the humiliation and embarrassment of imprisonment. He was married and had an affair with a man, which back then was an act of vulgarity and grossness. But, that was not what Oscar Wilde was only known for; he is remembered for criticizing the social life of the Victorian era, his wit and his amazing skills of writing. Oscar Wilde poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” typifies the Vi...
...argues that lying is a requisite of art, for without it there is nothing but a base realism. The ordeal in which the novel in England, Wilde claims, is that writers do not lie enough; they do not have enough imagination in their works: "they find life crude, and leave it raw." In this particular essay Wilde makes his apparently outrageous statement that "life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life." Though perhaps and obviously overstating the fact, Wilde convincingly discusses the many ways in which our perceptions of reality are affected by the art that we have experienced, an idea adapted from poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the other earlier English romantics. But in all he feels poetry can be expressed easier and much more widespread than art it self, art can only be art and be seen as it is but poetry can be expressed in many other ways.