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Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Society
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Oscar Wilde's literary criticism
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Recommended: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Society
Mirroring his own life, Oscar Wilde’s witty plays explore the concept of truth and its role in shaping Victorian society. A vague question faced by readers is whether Wilde believed in untruth or supported the importance of truth. Oscar Wilde examines themes of truthfulness through the use of character deception in his social comedies The Importance of Being Ernest and Lady Windermere’s Fan. Both plays exploit situations shaped through secrecy and ultimately seeds a statement on social life, albeit a satirical one. Wilde’s plays hold greater meaning with knowledge of Wilde’s own personal life.
Oscar Wilde was born in Dubin, Ireland in 1854 and after a successful a stint in a local college Wilde enrolled at Oxford in 1877 (Gale, 1998). Wilde’s academic success may be a product of his social environment; his mother also being a poet, under a pseudonym, exposed Wilde to numerous other writers, undoubtedly shaping his future writing aspirations (Gale, 1998 and Edwards, 2004). The death of Wilde’s sister in 1867 also may have developed a personal 'template for his frequent portrayal of young innocent females in his works. Oscar Wilde was able to amass a moderate fan club while in Oxford and gradually grew as he published several poems until 1882 where he ventured to America for a year. Wilde married in1884 and produce two children. According to Edward’s article (2004), financial problems resulted in abstinence with his wife to prevent more children. Wilde, at this point, then turned to homosexual activities to relieve his building sexual frustrations. Wilde’s most successful works, probably inspired by his active homosexual double life, were released during this period in the early 1890’s; ironically plots revolved around secrecy ...
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... twists, and objects to scrutinize the morals of Victorian society. Nevertheless, he refrains from noticeably injecting his own philosophical point of view to pollute the overall quality of his work.
Works Cited
Edwards, Dudley Owen, “Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854–1900).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2010. Web. 5 Nov. 2011.
Wilde, Oscar, “The Importance of Being Ernest” The Importance of Being Ernest and Other Plays. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd. 2000. 295-358. Print.
Wilde, Oscar, “Lady Windermere’s Fan” The Importance of Being Ernest and Other Plays. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd. 2000. 5-64. Print.
“Wilde, Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900).” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale World History In Context. Web. 14 Nov. 2011.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Peter Raby, ed. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1995. 247-307.
Ruddick, Nicholas. "'The Peculiar Quality of My Genius': Degeneration, Decadence, and Dorian Gray in 1890-91." Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World. New York: AMS, 2003. 125-37. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 164. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.
AThe Importance of Being Earnest a play written by Oscar Wilde is set in England in the late Victorian era. Wilde uses obvious situational and dramatic irony within the play to satirize his time period. According to Roger Sale in Being Ernest the title has a double meaning to it and is certainly another example of satire used by Wilde. With a comedic approach, Wilde ridicules the absurdities of the character’s courtship rituals, their false faces, and their secrets. (Sale, 478)
The Importance of Being Earnest is regarded as one of the most successful plays written by Oscar Wilde, a great 19th century playwright. Oscar Wilde deals with something unique about his contemporary age in this drama. It addresses Victorian social issues, French theatre, farce, social drama and melodrama. All these factors influenced the structure of the play in a large scale. This play is basically a Victorian satirical drama showcasing the social, political, economic and religious structural changes that affected 18th century England. It was the time when British Empire had captured most part of the world including Oscar Wilde’s homeland, Ireland. The aristocrats of England had become dominant over the middle and poor class people and Wilde wrote plays with the motivation to encourage people to think against the English aristocracy and artificiality.
Throughout The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde plays around with the standard expectations along with the absence of compassion of a Victorian society in the 1890’s, he demonstrates this through several genres of comedy such as Melodrama, Comedy of Manners, Farce, dark humour and Irony, as well as portraying the themes, death and illness, in this play in a brilliance of unusual amount of references.
In Oscar Wilde's play, “The Importance of Being Ernest,” we see a satirical prodding of the
Foster, Richard. “Wilde as Parodist: A Second Look at The Importance of Being Earnest” In College English, Vol. 18, no. 1, October, 1956: pp. 18-23.
Wilde, Oscar. "The Importance of Being Earnest." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt.
Woodcock, George. The Paradox of Oscar Wilde. London-New York: T.V. Boardman and Co., Ltd., 1950.
Throughout the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde wrote plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest- his most famous play. Earnest is a comedic work that focuses on a pair of wealthy men. They have been leading double lives so that they can go off for periods of time and enjoy living without responsibility while still maintaining their aristocratic reputation. Because of Wilde’s invlovement in the aesthetic movement, it is not uncommon (or unfair) to believe that his work, Earnest included, is nothing more than fluff. That being said, it is also fair to argue that this particular play does have meaning in it. Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest as a commentary on the hypocrisy of the ideal Victorian character. Earnestness is sincerity- which most Victorians believed themselves to be- and so Wilde uses the word ironically. In his eyes, people who considered themselves sincere were actually smug, self-righteous, and pompous. He expresses these opinions clearly through the play’s over-the-top and frustrating characters.
3rd ed. of the year. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. Wilde, Oscar. The.
A very intelligent novelist, Oscar Wilde, catches his reader’s attention in his satirical play, An Ideal Husband, through a humorous drama filled political scandal and blackmail. Wilde sucks his audience into the romantic comedy by placing the reader with the characters throughout all their battles—in which he points out their bad habits and their faults. Wilde accomplishes drawing readers in by creating the satirical message of his play through satirical elements such as exaggeration, sarcasm, and irony.
Wilde’s criticism of high society and manners are explored through the characteristics of Lady Bracknell; the dialogue between Gwendolen and Cecily; and the characteristics of Jack in the country. Wilde’s criticism of high society and manners is shown by creating absurd situations and characters whose lack of insight causes them to respond in an inappropriate manner. An example is shown in Lady Bracknell’s preoccupation with her own parties and that the lack of sympathy for invalids makes her react to the news of Bunbury’s illness in an exaggeratedly cold manner. “I think it is high time that Mr Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or die. I should be much obliged if you would ask Mr Bunbury, from me, to be kind enough not to have a relapse on Saturday, for I rely on you to arrange my music for me”.
‘Vénus Anadyomène’ is a fourteen line sonnet, made up of two quatrains and two tercets, written by Arthur Rimbaud towards the end of 1870. He gives his interpretation of the eponymous painting which portrays Venus rising from the sea. Rimbaud aimed to confront the quotidian forms of alienation: repetitiveness, apathy and boredom. To this end, obfuscation would become key to his poetic strategy along with allegorical descriptions, bursting with loathing for conventionalism and inertia . Despite Rimbaud providing the conventional, beautiful representation of the goddess in "Invocation to Venus" and "Sun and flesh,” ‘Venus Anadyomene’ is a complete contrast.
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...