Oscar Wilde's rebellion: themes and morality compared to Victorian society

Oscar Wilde, Rebellion of His Themes and Morality in Comparison to the Society of the Time

The objective of this work is to discuss the central image of Oscar Wilde, both conformist and rebel and the extent to which his work contains an inherent contradiction, and specifically in his pointing out the folly of his contemporary society and his expression of values that were contrary to the social norm or that which was expected within society and simultaneously his work being published, performed and appreciated within that society. This work will discuss the central image of Wilde as a figure of contradiction and paradox.

Reality within the view of Wilde is one without a consistent value as he blurs his edges and hides behind a non-alignment with his own utterances. Indeed, he might talk-the-talk but this is evidently not aligned with his walk in life. This work will examine Wilde's inherent hypocrisy in relation to the values of the society in which he lived through a discussion of the probability of his bigotry in relation to certain areas of prejudice, which did and did not relate to his lifestyle. There are areas of Wilde's work, which are particularly significant in the discussion of elitism and specifically in regards to attitudes of learning and intellect and the ability to appreciate art. The attitude of Wilde in regards to women are given little weight in the collection of Wilde primary because his relationship with society was defined by his homosexuality.

LITERATURE REVIEW

I. Introduction

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an author, playwright and was considered brilliant. Wilde was born halfway through the Victorian Age, during the English reign of Queen Victoria 1837-1901. England was undergoing changes of a radical nature and this greatly affected how individuals lived and certainly had an impact upon their way of thinking. The Victorian period is well-known for its narrow thought channels, double standards, repression of sexual desire, hypocrisy, and caste consciousness in society. Wilde's father was a surgeon who had distinguished himself in his field and his mother was a writer. At the age of twenty, Wilde traveled from his home in Dublin, Ireland to Oxford University in England and was considered a brilliant achiever. Wilde was a homosexual and Lord Alfred Douglas became his lover. Wilde's works in writing contained undertones of homosexuality and innuendos and Victorian society was inflamed at this. Evil was depicted by Wild as coming from within instead of being external in nature.

II. The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde's novel entitled: "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was not well received creating a stir and controversy with its implication of homosexuality, which in Victorian society was punishable by prison. Dorian Gray was a young man with dashing looks and spent his time in self-gratifying sensuality. Gray stated, while having his portrait painted by Basil Hallward that he desired eternal youth and vowed he would give everything...even his very soul to be eternally young.

Amazingly, Dorian get his wish however he grows more and more evil with time and the more evil Dorian becomes the older and uglier he appears in the portrait yet Dorian stays young. The story relates that many years go by and Dorian is faced by his conscience which is a bad one indeed and finally in desperation he takes a knife and stabs the horrid portrait and the story goes that his servants find him with a knife in his hand dead and the portrait miraculously restored to picture the younger and handsome Dorian.

Nils Calusson (2003) writes in the work entitled: "Culture and Corruption: Paterian Self-Development vs. Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray" that the story of Dorian Gray has always "provoked contradictory interpretations, but underlying the disagreements about the work's meaning there has persisted a more fundamental debate about what kind of novel it should be read as. This debate is discernible in the early reviews, though somewhat obscured by the hysteria over the novel's alleged immorality." (2003)

The truth is that critics of modernity are at just as much a division about the meaning behind this novel of Oscar Wildes as the original reviewers and their obsession with the morality found in this novel. That which is unchanged is "the role the perceived genre of the novel plays in interpretation. While some critics read the novel as belonging to a single genre and assume that the conventions of that genre provide the key to unlock the text's meaning, others see it as a kind of heteroglossia combining two or more genres." (Claussons, 2003)

Individualism is examined in Oscar Wilde's work entitled: "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" in what is an exploration of the issue of "self-development, or what he calls 'individualism." (Clausson, 2003) Wilde states that he regrets "that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him-in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living." (Wilde: Soul of Man) Clausson relates that Krafft-Ebing stated a belief that the majority of homosexuals "had a mental disease caused by hereditary degeneration, although environmental factors could influence this inborn neuropathic disposition, or "taint" as he repeatedly called it:" (2008) Krafft-Ebing is noted as having stated:

Since, in nearly all such cases, the individual tainted with antipathic sexual instinct displays a neuropathic predisposition in several directions, and the neuropathic predisposition may be related to hereditary degenerate conditions, this anomaly of psychosexual feeling may be clinically called a functional sign of degeneration. This inverted sexuality appears spontaneously, without external cause, with the development of sexual life as an individual manifestation of an abnormal form of sexual life, and has the force of a congenital phenomenon; or it develops upon a sexuality, which in the beginning was normal, as a result of definite injurious influences, and thus appears as an acquired anomaly. Upon what conditions this enigmatic phenomenon of acquired homosexual instinct depends still remains unexplained, and is a mere hypothetical matter. Careful examination of the so-called acquired cases make it probable that predisposition-also present here-consists of a latent homosexuality, or, at least, bisexuality, which, for it to become manifest, requires the influence of accidental stimulating causes to rouse it from its dormant state." (Krafft-Ebing: in Clausson, 2003)

III. Lady Windemere's Fan (1892) and the Importance of Being Earnest (1985)

Wilde wrote a second novel with the same theme entitled: "Lady Windermere's Fan" in 1892, which was much better received by the Victorian public and was a successful play. Wilde's play entitled "The Importance of Being Earnest" was staged in 1895 and has been called a masterpiece. This play was an attack upon the society of the Victorian age and specifically relating to the moral and social hypocrisy, the system of the social class, the use of marriage as a social tool, and the trivial nature of aristocratic life. (McCauley, 2003; paraphrased) Because ridiculousness of the characters in Wilde's play is so extreme, the Victorian audiences did not understand that it was none other than themselves whom Wilde was making fun of them. Wilde's use of epigrams was also one reason for the success of this play and included those as follows:

Divorces are made in heaven;

The truth is rarely pure and never simple;

In marriage, three is company, two is none. (McCauley, 2003)

The work of Pearce (2003) entitled: "Oscar Wilde and the Politics of Irish Aestheticism" states that readings of Oscar Wilde "...have been burdened by an affliction he struggle against all his artistic and intellectual life: cliche." (2003) Wilde is stated to have provided "the strongest and earliest cliches or stereotypes...in the form of the English aristocratic dandies that populate his society comedies." (Pearce, 2003) There is a subversive edge in the drama of Wilde, which has been most recently recognized as a "modernist challenge that underlies the veneer of Victorian culture." (Pearce, 2003)

Pearce relates that Wilde is recognized more than ever before "a...s one of those who undertook, in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new experiments in language, identity and form." (2003) Pearce states that an alternative to squeezing Wilde into a non-conforming literary model that it would be better to "use him to understand how conscious modernism continues to engage with problems associated with the development of self and society." (Pearce, 2003)

Modris Eksteins (1994) writes in the work: "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age" that during this period in history "Gratification of the sense was suspect, indeed sinful. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tcaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change." (Eksteins, 1994) Additionally Eksteins notes that the sexual rebel "particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment." (Eksteins, 1994)

Eksteins writes that Britain had "in the last century...damned her great poets and writers, Byron had been chased out of the country, Shelley forbidden to raise his children, and Oscar Wilde sent to prison." (1994) Pearce (2003) states that Wilde "was a major symbol of the sexual anarchy that threatened the purposive and reproductive modes of the bourgeois family. Algy mocks the utilitarian nature of modern marriage thus: The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public." (Shoewalter, 1992; in Pearce, 2003)

The narratives of this period were realist in nature and such that centered around "marriage and inheritance were giving way to fantastic 'finde siecle' tales about split personalities. (Showalter, 1992: in Pearce, 2003) Many of Wilde's plays were a "critique of the naturalization of bourgeois relations" and these are stated to have been "particularly evidence in the uncertain or hidden heritage, parentage or filiations that forms the crux of many of his plays." (Pearce, 2003) Pearce states that in Wilde's rejection of the bourgeoisie the association is made with the "modernist attempt to force new affiliations within the aesthetic realm." (2003)

Wilde did not look to art for imitation of life but for seeking out life's expressions of beauty and as well "sought to utilize inversions, ironies and shifts in points-of-view to produce new meanings and possibilities, similarly to twentieth-century modernism." (Pearce, 2003) Wilde was anti-modern and held that for those whom all that exists is the present then those individuals do not know anything about the age in which they live. Wilde is stated to have extended the emphasis of Baudeliairei...on the modern heroism of the artist to include the critic: eit is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings and makes it marvelous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age." (Pearce, 2003)

Simon Conen states, in the work entitled: "Social Criticism in Oscar Wild's Lady Windermere's Fan" that Oscar Wilde held that rebellion was a requirement and that was his reasoning for supporting the women's liberation movement and in fact, was committed to women's struggle for equal rights. The Victorian Era was one characterized by purity, self-discipline, family, sexual morality, work and capitalism." (2000) Additionally a "predominant inequality in the treatment of the genders" (Conen, 2000)

Conen (2000) state that characterizing the Victoria Era was the fact that women did not earn money during the Victorian Era and most particularly those from the upper and middle classes. These women were greatly restricted and their entry to many professions was barred as it was the general opinion that these women were to marry and rear children.

Female occupations in the Victorian Era included:

1) Domestic servant;

2) Dressmaker and milliner;

3) Factory worker;

4) Governess or teacher;

5) Member of religious order;

6) Nurse;

7) Writer; or 8) Prostitute. (Conen, 2000)

During the Victorian Era marriage was not for the sake of love but for the conveniences and securities of family and marriage.

Conen states that the normal process involved the parents finding a partner that was suitable for their child. In the case of an undesirable match, the parents intervened. These parents quite simply, made their daughter's decisions for them. Parents during the Victoria Era "...thought mainly in commercial terms; the social status or the institution 'marriage' itself seemed far more important than the husband-to-be as a person. Society marriage could be seen as a mere mercenary affair:

People did not marry for love so much as for the conveniences of the families concerned; all marriages were in this sense arranged. Marriage is here seen as an economic transaction: the woman acquires security, and the wealth to maintain a conspicuous social position; in return, the man's sexual infidelities are condoned, or at least overlooked." (Conen, 2000)

As one can easily see the good old 'double standard' for the genders was alive and well in the Victorian Era.

The Victorian Age has its own distinctive ideas concerning marriage and marital loyalty and believed that the family was "...patriarchal, based on a double standard of sexual morality according to which fidelity was demanded of the wife while the husband pursued his extra marital career of sexual escapades among prostitutes or expensive mistresses, depending on his social class. Even the law supported these different moral principles that granted men the right to have sexual relationships with other partners." (Conen, 2000)

Conen relates that the 'Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857' made it legal for a man to bring about a dissolution to his marriage if the wife committed adultery however, the wife could only seek a divorce in the event she was able to prove her husband was guilty of unfaithfulness and cruel. Either way: "the children became the man's property and the mother could be prevented from seeing her children." (Conen, 2000) Additionally all the property and money of the women actually belonged legally to her husband. The woman in the Victorian Era has few rights and the double standard was fully accepted so women had to tolerate much

IV. Wilde and Beauty

The concept held by Wilde of the beautiful is one that "encompassed all aspects of humanity, evil and sin included." (Pearce, 2003) Wilde is connected with the post-colonial concern in his construction "of himself as saint and sinner in De Profundis" though it "refuses the kind of mutually exclusive positions that reduce choice and agency." (Pearce, 2003) Pearce states that Wilde held more value in "the deliberateness and self-consciousness of lying, as opposed to the careless habits of accuracy because of its association with creativity." (2003) primary component of later modernism is stated to be observation of the movement between light and dark. Wilde held that the spheres of Art and Ethics "are absolutely distinct and separate." (Wilde,'Critic,' p.393) Pearce states that one need not wonder where Wilde stood "in the debate between the ancients and the moderns because it is noted by Josephine Guy that "if Pater reworked tradition as a cover for new emphases, Wilde reworked it so as to set the new itself in greater relief." (Pearce, 2003) From the view of Wilde there is no authority in tradition because "contemporary purpose authorizes tradition." (Pearce, 2003)

Wilde held that the classics "had become degraded in being used as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms." (Wilde, Oscar, 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' in Richard Ellmann, Artist as Critic. p.273; as cited in Pearce, 2003) Wild held that "the old believe everything: the middle -aged suspect everything and the young know everything." (Green, R.J. 'Oscar Wilde's Intentions: An Early Modernist Manifesto' British Journal of Aesthetics 13.4 (Autumn, 1973): 397-404. p.402; as cited in Pearce, 2003)

Wilde looked completely over the past even a return in brief form to the past in his search for beauty that is not formerly proscribed within society but that is impulsive and spontaneous in nature. Wild found great novelty in both art and individuality and characterized art that was contemporary to his generation "in terms of its seeking for new subjects in poetry, new forms in art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments." (quoted in Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985).p.151; as cited in Pearce, 2003)

Wilde was completely in contrast "...to the maturity of Victorian culture.." (Pearce, 2003) Wilde responded to the restrictions of Victoria society and sought utopia in physical artistic creation and production and managed to do as what Adornois conceived as the "...utopian impulse within modernism" the art is stated to be subversive and of the nature that illuminates that which 'is'. (Pearce, 2003)

Wilde's conception of art is the belief that utopia represents a world in which life imitates art: the utopia represented in "The Importance of Being Earnest" is one in which double lives are not so much exposed, as in conventional Victorian drama, but revealed as true Hidden lives repressed by convention, are, in the utopian moment, allowed realization. This is a world turned upside-down." (Pearce, 2003)

In this world, there is reversal of hierarchies and transcended oppositions and is a world in which 'Truth in art is that whose contrary is also true. The dialogic form of his essays employ shifting and dislocated viewpoints to rework inherited forms, categories and language Through this form the thinker is able to reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood." (Pearce, 2003) Pearce holds that the very strong links between later modernisms and Wilde's work "allow changes in our understanding of both. " (Pearce, 2003)

Oscar Wilde held that criticism had a very specific function and was for the purpose of interrupting "...the flow of linear time and make it a bid for life on a new basis." (Pearce, 2003) This was the beginning of what would be a program that was utopian and revolutionary in nature and one focused on a world "...that would live up to the promise of aesthetic beauty. " (Wilde in Pearce, 2003) the work entitled: "Oscar Wilde on Beauty" notes the varied statements of Wilde concerning beauty and shows how Wilde did not view beauty or ugliness as stagnant but in a changing state, and this can be connected to the shift from light to dark that existed in modernism. Wilde stated:

No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions...it will not look beautiful; no object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly." (as cited in: Anayara, 2002)

Wilde held that beauty is:

form of genius - is higher, indeed than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark water of that silver shell we call the moon." (Anyara, 2002)

The work of Gallis-Menendez (2008) entitled: "Jose Marti, Oscar Wilde, and Idealist Aesthetics" states of Oscar Wilde's appearance at Chickering Hall where the New York public goes to hear lectures. Marti comments with a smile of the young man's attire, that it is meant to shock and delight (think of the Beatles a century later). It detracts or distracts audience members from his beautiful words. There is a danger that Wilde's aestheticism will become a trendy fashion or "attitude" and nothing more. The carriages crowd about the wide doors of the imposing lecture hall. A lady is carrying a lilly, emblem of the reformers. Everybody has taken great pains to dress with elaborate elegance. Like the aesthetes who are renovating art in England, they strive for perfect harmony in the combination of colors in both dress and accessories." (Gallis-Menendez, 2008)

Gallis-Menendez reports the state of Marti concerning Wilde as follows: "[Wilde] says that beauty needs no definition after Goethe's, that the great English renaissance of this century combines a love for Grecian beauty with a passion for the Italian renaissance and with the desire to avail itself of all the beauty put into its works of art by the modern spirit. He says that the new school has sprung up like a harmony of love in Faust and in Helen of Troy, from the close bond between the spirit of Greece, where all was beautiful, and the burning, inquiring and rebellious individualism of the modern romantics." (Gallis-Menendez, 2008)

V. The Trial of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's work "Impressions of America" (1882) states in relation to America that the first thing he noticed was the fact that Americans were not very well-dressed and that many of the men were wearing "the dreadful chimney-pot hat..." (Miskolci, 2007) Oscar Wilde having made the decision to be openly live his sexual orientation, or that of homosexuality resulted in his being brought to trial. Oscar Wilde met his crossroads in deciding whether or not to respond to his lover's father in the note he left for him stating he knew he was gay and his choice was a slander suit filed in adherence to legal procedures in the court system. It appears that Wilde practically backed his own self into a corner because when he filed this suit he was obliged to prove that the libel had no foundation in truth and the detectives hired in Queensbury adeptly showed proof that the slanderous statement had been right on cue and since this was a crime punishable by law Wilde was adjudicated a condemned man.

Miskolci (2008) writes that in his view "there is absolutely no sign in Wilde's writings that he saw erotic interest in people of the same sex as a sign of pathology. In "Degeneration" (1893), published two years before Wilde's indictment, the German psychiatrist Max Nordau associated the writer with immorality, sin and crime. In 1897, Wilde rejected Nordau's claim with sarcasm: "The fact that in the judgment of several German wise men, I am also seen as a problem of pathology is interesting to those German wise men alone."

Miskolci states that in historical terms Wilde "came to represent the figure of homosexual as criminal." (2008) This representation is one that shadows many artist and writers of the twentieth century and that, in fact "it was Wilde's trial that brought the very term homosexual - which had entered psychiatric discourse in 1870 - into common use in the English language." (Miskolci, 2008) the indictment of Wilde for being a homosexual enabled previous anonymous suffering to be publicly exposed. Miskolci additionally states that the result of this is:

the poete maudit came to contribute to the cultural construction of the homosexual as a category, albeit a negative one, outside the reigning family and moral orders. That form of 'love with an unspeakable name' was brought into the order of discourse, but imprisoned within a normative vocabulary that classified it as a crime and increasingly, as a pathology. " (2008)

VI. Emergence of Pro-Homosexual Discourse

The emergence of the pro-homosexual discourse can be noted as having began with Wilde and it is related by Miskolci (2008) that Michel Foucault, many years later "was faced with homosexuality that had been socially pathologized...In his youth, Foucault was confronted by an environment that was refractive to the way he expressed affectivity. The anguish he experienced because of his "difference" led him as far as two attempts at suicide, between the late 1940s and the early fifties." In contrast the experience of Wilde was that the homosexual was a "socially constructed figure and character on the social state of the world that Foucault lived in."(2008) to be homosexual was the same as to be mentally ill because the "ideal of 'passionate friendship' between young men had - in hegemonic discourse - been declared a crime and a pathology." (Miskolci, 2008)