Wilde and Aestheticism

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Wilde and Aestheticism
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Characteristics of Aestheticism

• Reaction against
• Realism, Didacticism, and Morality that
  characterised earlier and even concurrent
  cultural fashions
• The monotony and vulgarity of bourgeois life
• Belief in Art for Arts Sake
• Unconventional lifestyle
• Appreciation of Beauty at the expense of utility
  and social value
• Pursuit of Pleasure Worship of the Senses
  (Hedonism)
• Evocative Use of the language of senses
• Excessive attention to the self
• Typical representative dandy
• Anti-Natural belief in the ornate, extreme
  artifice, performance, and exotic
• Walter Pater to burn always like a hard gemlike
  flame, filling each passing moment with intense
  experience, feeling all kinds of sensations

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Art for arts sake in Wilde

• All art is quite useless (Preface to DG)
• Rejection of Victorian didacticism and realism
• Wrote only to please himself
• Moral imperative
• Soul can be cured only by the senses only by Art
  as the cult of beauty
• The artist an alien in materialistic world
• Superior being social outcast

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Wildes dandy

• Aristocrat (vs. Bohemién)
• Pursuit of pleasure Indulgence in the
  beautiful (language, clothes, food, boys)
• Elegance symbol of spiritual superiority
• Uses wit to shock (and criticize)
• Individualist absolute freedom

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• Oscar or Harry? 
• I have nothing to declare except my genius. 
• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as
  nothing can cure the sense but the soul. 
• I have put my talent into my works. I have put
  my genius into my life.
• The first duty in life is to be as artificial as
  possible. What the second duty is no one has yet
  discovered.
• Being natural is simply a pose, and the most
  irritating pose I know.
• A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a
  great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
• The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong
  romance.
• Men marry because they are tired women, because
  they are curious both are disappointed.
• My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the
  death. One or the other of us has to go.
• Modern morality consists in accepting the
  standards of the age. I consider that for any
  man of culture to accept the standards of his age
  is a form of the grossest immorality.
•  

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• Oscar or Harry? 
• I have nothing to declare except my genius.  W
• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as
  nothing can cure the sense but the soul.  H
• I have put my talent into my works. I have put
  my genius into my life. W
• The first duty in life is to be as artificial as
  possible. What the second duty is no one has yet
  discovered. W
• Being natural is simply a pose, and the most
  irritating pose I know. H
• A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a
  great deal of it is absolutely fatal. W
• The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
  W
• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong
  romance. W
• Men marry because they are tired women, because
  they are curious both are disappointed. H
• My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the
  death. One or the other of us has to go. W
• Modern morality consists in accepting the
  standards of the age. I consider that for any
  man of culture to accept the standards of his age
  is a form of the grossest immorality. H
•  

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Credits

• www.sfu.ca/ccolliga/Eng330--WildeAestheticism.pp
  t
• Spiazzi-Tavella, Now Then, Zanichelli