Oscar Wilde's Paradoxical Thesis That Life Follows Art - Essay Example

Running Head: OSCAR WILDE’S PARADOXICAL THESIS THAT LIFE FOLLOWS ART Oscar Wilde Developed the Paradoxical Thesis That Life Follows Art What He meant by this and To What Extent Do You Think That His Views Were Prophetic [Writer’s name] [Institution’s name] Oscar Wilde Developed the Paradoxical Thesis That Life Follows Art What He meant by this and To What Extent Do You Think That His Views Were Prophetic Introduction These days people always want to hide the truth from the eyes of the world. They do not want other people to know about whom they really are, what their real character is, what their nature is, they want to hide their dark secrets and sins from everyone. They hide their true selves and always pretend to be someone they are not. A real artist is one who is who can bring out the hidden truth in his art; he adds a touch of reality to his art. Only art that can show the true reality as it is like a mirror. Oscar wide also thought of something like this when he gave his paradoxical thesis that life follows art. Exactly what he meant by this can be seen in his novel Dorian Gray Analysis To me Oscar Wilde’s book The Picture of Dorian Gray is a wonderful example of his paradoxical thesis that life follows art . As in this book, it is the painter Basil Hallward, who made a Dorian's portrait so perfect like the reflection of him in the mirror. Later in the book, the portrait changed and Dorian found out that it showed something that could never be seen in the mirror. It showed his soul and soul is something that mirror cannot reflect; it is something that you do not even get to see face to face with a person. "...he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and ageing face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass (Wilde 103)." Mirror only caught his outside, it reflected his young beautiful face, but the picture showed his inside, his deepest hidden sins. As it usually happens, people are not able to judge themselves and Dorian thought the picture was the wrong mirror for his soul. "For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at (Wilde 1992 176)." Wilde considered art free from all moral and social concerns; he believed that it must be based on solely on reality (Bashford 1999 p23). The motivation for this kind of art is present in aestheticism, the development of a perfect art, a new type of beauty, which was the extreme pole of Wilde’s theory. Poets were generally concerned with escaping Victorian moral principles. Art does not avoid scandalous or immoral themes: art according to Wilde should be based on all expressions of human emotion, the conventionally suitable as well as the evil and immoral. Wilde's take on the issue of influence is strongly associated with the strategies the writer shares with postmodernists: anti-realism, the creative role of both the writer and the reader, the birth of artistic criticism, and the use of parody (Böker etal 2002 p34.) Postmodernist literature distinguishes itself by the explicit awareness of its own fictionality and its recognition of the reader as a participant in the creation of the literary work. Fiction in the realist tradition, for instance, eliminated the ambiguity of interpretation by claiming a direct relation to a 'reality' outside the literary text. In contrast, Wilde’s literature renders representation of reality (Böker etal 2002 p76)his .a text reflects a part of reality in a direct and impulsive manner, by giving importance to the role of the writer, who alters reality into art, and by paying attention to the role of the readers, who infer the text according to their surroundings and their imagination. Wilde's critical writings discard realism by paying attention to the creative roles, which may interest the writer as well as the reader. In "The Decay of Lying" Wilde accepts the fact that the artist has an extremely creative role. He does not support traditional realism when he defines art as a unique type of "lying"(Nassaar 1974 p361). The concept of the lie implies that the artist does not merely imitate the world (presupposition of realism), but reconstructs a new reality through language with the purpose of charming, delighting, giving pleasure. Like the 19th realism, Wilde's aestheticism realizes the autonomy of art. Wilde clearly understands the fact that art will not in only imitate reality it simply reflects itself. Wilde completely agrees that life imitates art more then art imitates life as art has the ability to change one's view of the world. He ascribes the remarkable increase of fog in London not to changing weather conditions, but entirely to impressionist paintings (Ellman 1969 p1086). Except for the role of the writer, Wilde knew that in art the creative roles of the reader and the critic hold equal importance. He said that art does not in any way reflect reality or its creator; however, it reflects the reader or the critic who infers the work of art. One such example is the preface of Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray states: "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."(Wilde 1992 p3) As art has no reality in itself, it can convey nothing but itself. It is just by the imagination along with interpretation of the reader by which this art is made alive. Due to this, a work of art might contain diverse interpretations, which are based on the reader’s “moods”, and each interpretation is usually relative and short-term. In The Critic as Artist, Wilde states that the reader may discover that there is some kind of hidden importance in the text, which the writer never meant to use (Ellman, 1969 p1127). As for the literary tradition of realism, Wilde lived that art mostly reflected relativist‘s view regarding moral issue (Levine 1970 p360). His writings manifest a hint of rebellion against the whole morality of the bourgeois age, and they show a preference for moral ambivalence to the certainty of moral conventions. Wilde's saying also depicts the so-called innate moral principles of Victorian society as ideological structure and empty mannerisms. His work brings about a transformation of values: he changes negative terms like "sin" and "insincerity" into positive notions for individual development. A very true picture of Wilde’s thesis can be seen in this novel where the main character Dorian Gray, the novel begins with Lord Henry Wotton introducing Dorian Gray, a rich young man of a strange background, and Basil Hallward, a well-known artist. Basil starts to paint an outstanding portrait of Dorian. And when, Dorian sees it he exclaims that he would trade his soul to always stay young whilst the portrait ages instead of him. He gets his wish.” One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time...I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much of myself into it. Then it was that I resolved never to allow picture to be exhibited (Wilde 1992 p92)." After he acted very rudely with Sibyl Vane a young woman who loved him, he realizes that the portrait is changing. Upset, he makes a decision to ask forgiveness and to marry her, however he find outs that she has committed suicide. Thus one can easily see that the fact he hurt Sibyl’s feeling and rejected her love for him caused the painting to change thus is one instance which Wilde used to support his thesis that life imitates art. He now completely becomes corrupted, under the support of a wicked friend. His crimes include murder. At last, he decides to destroy the hideous portrait, which has been long locked away. He stabs it with a knife. Hearing a cry, the servants find lying before a portrait of their handsome master a withered, wrinkled body with a knife in its breast. Drew concure that Holbrook Jackson in his study of the Eighteen Nineties, the third chapter entitled “The Last Phase”, is a good example which stresses the way that Wilde’s idea of personality is not only dominant but “may be essential”, to an understanding of his works: “what he seemed to be doing all the time was translating life into art through himself”. (Jackson, 1913 p89) What connection exists between Dorian’s crimes and his interest in art? Adjectives such as “monstrous,” “terrible,” “maddening,” and “corrupt” are applied with little apparent regard to their subject in the descriptions of the “poisonous book” and of Dorian’s interests and activities (Monsman; 2002 p19). Scholars have speculated that Wilde’s own underground homosexual life was hinted at by Lord Henry’s cynical statements and the vagueness of Dorian’s sins. This may have been what made newspaper critics uncomfortable. For Wilde, sin and art seem one in life and in literature; the Platonic ideal of beauty can be worshiped as easily in a young man as in a beautiful object. He probably believed that art did depict life as his own characters used in the novel were immoral like he was The Picture of Dorian Gray was met with critical disapproval, which Wilde apparently enjoyed immensely until his own defences backfired a few years later when he was convicted of sodomy and spent two years in prison. In the preface to his novel, he had written: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book” (Wilde 1992 p3). It is difficult to ascertain how much of Oscar Wilde himself was reflected in the character of Dorian Gray. The author did not live long enough to grow old however the portrait did grow old thus it can be said that this element was not a reflection of the author , and there is no evidence that he was attracted to the kind of depravity and violence that his fictional character practiced. In the late twentieth century, some critics suggested that the portrait itself served as a sort of “closet” in which Dorian Gray could hide his true nature by allowing the portrait to show the depths to which his soul had sunk, while to all outward appearances the man remained pure and innocent (Meyers 1977 p22). Oscar Wilde himself was a homosexual. In the 20th century being gay was considered as a crime. Thus he created a homosexual character, Dorian Gray. This character was also homosexual and felt all the emotions which Wilde was feeling. One can interpret his artistic style as a means of signifying Wilde's preference of illusion to reality. As per Meyers (1977), Dorian is attracted to illusions, idealized by distance. Meyers(1977) states that Wilde claims art and illusion is analogous to homosexuality, and reality to heterosexuality, and thus Dorian's preference for illusion to reality proves his sexual orientation. Wilde's own writing style is full of wonderful illusions and metaphorical phrases, thus a correlation of Wilde's inclination to illusion and his own homosexuality can be made. According to Wilde, art does not imitate life; however, life comes to imitate art, twisting the entire mimetic belief. Which is based on fiction in most of the story Dorian is successful in getting his portrait into the house with all his evil thoughts, ultimately Wilde resists this fantasy in Dorian’s brutal death, be tokening an age in which individual behaviour and individual relations to art have consequences. (Cohen 1987 p810) Our life, similar to an art work, it does not reflect a predetermined reality or a moral set of laws. Wilde's 1885 essay "The Truth of Masks." In that piece, Wilde argued that there were no universal truths in art and that "attitude is everything." This essay’s main theme was that "A Truth in art is that whose paradoxical is also true," like a man can have opposite opinions as well as beliefs without having to be torn among them. How ever, the essay ends with one of Wilde's impressive saying “the truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks” (Danson 1999 p60). Wilde believed that that literature, art and attractive objects have a unique place outside our ordinary life. As they depict the reality. As Norobert Kohl (1989), points out Wilde’s theories of art and literature are both changeable and contradictory. He believes that the poet as well as artist has a duty to society they must titivated the world just by portraying it Wilde's views on art and life can perhaps best be described as contradictory (Nassaar 1974p362). Even though he takes the portrayal of life in art in "The Decay of Lying" and take up an account of formalism in "The Critic as Artist," in his earlier writings he was frequently in support of using realism for particular artistic as well as social ends. In "The Critic as an Artist he completely promotes and portrays realism as he supports his thesis that life depicts art Even so, as Wilde's opinion of life’s depiction in art became increasingly more negative, even in a famous review of his pupil's novel, chastised Wilde for a wholesome dislike of the common-place. This leads him to protest emphatically against so-called ‘realism’ in art. Yet many go on to praise Wilde for managing to write realistically--especially in creating the Jim Vane scenes which a lot of people judge as showing "real pathos" and as showing Wilde's versatility as a writer (Ackroyd 1983 p18). He likewise views Wilde's upper-class "atmosphere" as exhibiting a kind of realism: All that enjoyable accessory element, taken directly from the society, the logical along with social interests, the conventionalities, of the instant, have, in fact . . . the achieved a improved kind of art and life , throwing into liberation the adroitly-devised mystic element after the style of Poe, however with a charm he never reached (Wilde 1992 p129) . What Wilde gives us--in the opening paragraphs of Dorian Gray, for instance--is a nature, which is emphatically written. The aestheticisation of the Natural--and the naturalisation of the Cultural--is constantly foregrounded: a self-conscious and deliberate confusion of life and Art that is burlesqued by Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest when Miss Prism puts her three-volume novel of more than regularly disgusting sentimentality into a bassinette, and a baby into her handbag ( Foster 1956 p20). Conclusion Thus by the above given arguments in the analysis it can be concluded that Wilde’s paradoxical thesis that life follows art can be proved by his own works. He very cleverly presented his arguments thus making his views were prophetic in nature. Each view and argument is backed by with an example of life, his writing seem to support his prophetic views. Thus, he can be called true artist as life ha depicted his work. References Ackroyd Peter (1983);The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde London : Abacus, p18 Bashford Bruce (1999); Oscar Wilde: the Critic as Humanist Fairleigh Dickinson University Press new jersey p23 Böker Uwe; Hibbard A. Julie & Corballis Richard (2002); The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years Editions Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V. pp34-76 Cohen Ed (1987);Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation PMLA, Vol. 102, No. 5 pp. 801-813 College English, Vol. 31, No. 4 pp. 355-365 Danson Lawrence (1999); Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism Oxford University Press p60 Ellman Richard (1969); .The Artist as Critic, Wilde, Oscar, "A collection of critical essays", ed., Eaglewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hallp. 1127 Ellman Richard, (1969);The Decay of Lying Wilde, Oscar, A collection of critical essays, ed. Eaglewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall p. 1086 Foster, Richard (1956); "Wilde as Parodist: A Second Look at The Importance Of Being Earnest." College English 18, 18-23. Jackson Holbrook (1913), The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century” Grant Richards, London p89 Kohl, Norbert (1989); Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Cambridge University Press Levine George (1970); Realism, or, in Praise of Lying: Some Nineteenth Century Novels Meyers Jeff (1977); "Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray." Homosexuality and Literature. McGill-Queen's University Press, pp20-31. Monsman Gerald (2002); The Platonic Eros of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde: "Love's Reflected Image" in the 1890s English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 45 Nassaar S. Christopher (1974); Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 3 , pp. 360-363 Wilde, Oscar (1992); The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Wordsworth Classics. Preface, pp3, 92, 103, 129 176. Read More

Wilde's take on the issue of influence is strongly associated with the strategies the writer shares with postmodernists: anti-realism, the creative role of both the writer and the reader, the birth of artistic criticism, and the use of parody (Böker etal 2002 p34.) Postmodernist literature distinguishes itself by the explicit awareness of its own fictionality and its recognition of the reader as a participant in the creation of the literary work. Fiction in the realist tradition, for instance, eliminated the ambiguity of interpretation by claiming a direct relation to a 'reality' outside the literary text.

In contrast, Wilde’s literature renders representation of reality (Böker etal 2002 p76)his .a text reflects a part of reality in a direct and impulsive manner, by giving importance to the role of the writer, who alters reality into art, and by paying attention to the role of the readers, who infer the text according to their surroundings and their imagination. Wilde's critical writings discard realism by paying attention to the creative roles, which may interest the writer as well as the reader.

In "The Decay of Lying" Wilde accepts the fact that the artist has an extremely creative role. He does not support traditional realism when he defines art as a unique type of "lying"(Nassaar 1974 p361). The concept of the lie implies that the artist does not merely imitate the world (presupposition of realism), but reconstructs a new reality through language with the purpose of charming, delighting, giving pleasure. Like the 19th realism, Wilde's aestheticism realizes the autonomy of art.

Wilde clearly understands the fact that art will not in only imitate reality it simply reflects itself. Wilde completely agrees that life imitates art more then art imitates life as art has the ability to change one's view of the world. He ascribes the remarkable increase of fog in London not to changing weather conditions, but entirely to impressionist paintings (Ellman 1969 p1086). Except for the role of the writer, Wilde knew that in art the creative roles of the reader and the critic hold equal importance.

He said that art does not in any way reflect reality or its creator; however, it reflects the reader or the critic who infers the work of art. One such example is the preface of Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray states: "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."(Wilde 1992 p3) As art has no reality in itself, it can convey nothing but itself. It is just by the imagination along with interpretation of the reader by which this art is made alive. Due to this, a work of art might contain diverse interpretations, which are based on the reader’s “moods”, and each interpretation is usually relative and short-term.

In The Critic as Artist, Wilde states that the reader may discover that there is some kind of hidden importance in the text, which the writer never meant to use (Ellman, 1969 p1127). As for the literary tradition of realism, Wilde lived that art mostly reflected relativist‘s view regarding moral issue (Levine 1970 p360). His writings manifest a hint of rebellion against the whole morality of the bourgeois age, and they show a preference for moral ambivalence to the certainty of moral conventions.

Wilde's saying also depicts the so-called innate moral principles of Victorian society as ideological structure and empty mannerisms. His work brings about a transformation of values: he changes negative terms like "sin" and "insincerity" into positive notions for individual development. A very true picture of Wilde’s thesis can be seen in this novel where the main character Dorian Gray, the novel begins with Lord Henry Wotton introducing Dorian Gray, a rich young man of a strange background, and Basil Hallward, a well-known artist.

Basil starts to paint an outstanding portrait of Dorian. And when, Dorian sees it he exclaims that he would trade his soul to always stay young whilst the portrait ages instead of him.

Read More