The Rise of Science and the Aesthetic Reaction - Assignment Example

The Rise of Science and the Aesthetic Reaction to It By the 19th century, the primacy of science, sparked by the Enlightenment of the 18th century was fully evident in the progress outwardly seen in society and the economic industrialization of the West. Religion was toppled down from its pedestal of spiritual or inward source of faith. Thus, during the Victorian era in Britain, people were both hopeful of the progress outwardly seen and yet anxious or fearful of what life held inwardly as a result of the doubts fully reinforced by scientific theories. People were asking what to believe in n an era of Darwin's theory of natural selection coming to fore - that if only the strongest survive, what about ethics or morals In the field of literature, writers and artists, both in their lives and their works seem to reflect the duality of temperaments during the era. The reaction to Darwin and Freud (whose psychological theory did not as much as put forward the rationality of man, rather that he is driven by irrational forces) was seemingly two-fold in fin de siecle literature. First, was the depiction of the separation of inner and outward character (a painting that serves as the mirror of the soul of a debauched, perfect-looking man in Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray or a Mr. Hyde, the monster to the respectable Dr. Jekyll in the famous novel by Robert Louis Stevenson) whose reconciliation would not happen in actual life but would be brought about only by death. Second, was the cold-blooded, detached view of life as a field where one can experiment and perform whose boundaries need not be set by society, but by only the individual. In both cases, the case of appreciation for what constitutes beauty or in general, what constitutes art, is laid at the mercy of a conscious or unconscious imitation of the scientific method. But does science lends itself to the cause of art or the appreciation of what is true or beautiful Walter Pater who influenced Oscar Wilde as a student, wrote in his essay, Style that literature's enterprise "may well lie in the naturalization of the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive scholarship--in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too, for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to grapple with" (Pater p. 16). In the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the "full, rich, complex matter to grapple with" has been introduced to Dorian Gray by Lord Henry Wotton whose fascination with the methods of science was applied to the investigation of human life (Wilde chapter 3). That the main character in the novel would indeed take literally Lord Wotton's advice that "the only way to the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it" (Wilde chapter 2), is shown how seemingly the material of life is under the control of the individual - much like a scientist is in control of laboratory. The difference lies of course is that a scientist what experiments from are inanimate - not creatures of feelings, sensibilities or complex passions. What Dr. Jekyll at the start enjoyed over the safety of limiting his evil side to Mr. Hyde, would unravel when the evil side eventually took over his own body - the case of the material devouring the creator or the artist. The aesthete character as depicted in fin de siecle literature also shows how detachment and obsession are the contradictory attitudes towards beauty. It is not as much as morality or insistence on the weight of value has no part in it, as much as beauty seems to be confined in the recesses of the mind, its purity guarded and valued for its own sake - only to be wasted away when its feet touches the ground. In Dorian Gray, as much as the tiring paradoxes mouthed by Lord Wotton, beauty is only in the mind, and its attainment is through its defilement and destruction in real experience. To a certain extent, the character of Gilbert Osmond who fascinated the main character enough to fall into his trap in Henry James' A Portrait of Lady is a fine specimen of such an aesthete. He loves and dissects beautiful things and art, but is full of hate and perfectly hollow inside. How the scientific attitude of detachment came to creep into literature in a way served as a retreat into mind, where ideals can be maintained without being sullied or affected by the chaotic outside world that is in contrast to the apparent order, the rationality of cause and effect that science ascribes to its existence. In the Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote that the 19th century's dislike of realism "is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face" while its "dislike of romanticism is not seeing its own face." The uncanny way artists see beyond what society insists on in appearances which reached its excesses to the prudishness of the Victorian era took in the form of fin de siecle literature's distorted view of beauty and of art in a way because the ideals of the past no longer held, and because beyond the cold detached attitude, lied the real fear that beauty or art no longer has any relevance. Didn't Wilde, in one of his many clichd statements, wrote that "all art is useless" (Wilde Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray) And so, how to see art in the context of the strength and indeed validity of science in explaining the natural world Matthew Arnold in his essay, The Study of Poetry accepts science but in a realm separate from art or poetry, unlike Pater which singled out scientific method or attitude that has relevance for the arts, that influenced the double bind of the late 19th century literature, that is, the means becoming the end. Arnold wrote that poetry (or art, for that matter) will be all the more relevant because "without poetry, science will appear incomplete". And in time, poetry will serve where religion or philosophy ceased to function - "to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us" (Arnold par. 1). Works Cited: Arnold, Matthew. "The Study of Poetry." The Harvard Classics. 1909-14. 15 May 2007 Wilde, Oscar. "The Picture of Dorian Gray." No date. The Project Gutenberg Etext of the Picure of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. Release Date: May 2003 [Etext #4078]. Date last updated January 29, 2005. 15 May 2007. Pater, Walter. "Style". No date. The Project Gutenberg Etext of Appreciations, With An Essay on Style by Walter Horatio Pater. Release Date: May 2003 [Etext #4037]. 15 May 2007. Read More