Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism

Résumé du document

The 19th Century in Europe, specially in England, is marked by the appearances of new artistic movements. Aestheticism is most important because it embodies a real change in the mentality and in art, and is considered as self sufficient. Immanuel Kant is one of the pioneers of it, and certainly the most important. But aestheticism is most of all represented by the great Irish writer, Oscar Wilde.

Extraits

[...] Moreover, the rise of these middle-classes and the growth of towns and cities symbolize this period of advance. Nevertheless, the first official population survey in 1851 shows that religion is decreasing/ in fact the nation is not as religious as its people, and especially the upper-classes, would like to make the others believe. This is the first point which reveals a kind of hypocrisy of the time: actually, Queen Victoria has moral and religious values and often goes to church. [...]

[...] This is why he defines the “beautiful” as real when it is universally valued. In fact, the value of a masterpiece is determined by feelings and not by demonstration with reason. The “beautiful” has to be “subjective universal” judgements. III] An important figure: Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde was born on October in Dublin to unconventional parents - his mother Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1820-96), was a poet and journalist. His father was Sir William Wilde, an Irish antiquarian, gifted writer, and specialist in diseases of the eye and ear. [...]

[...] Later on in the century, artists who belong to the “Arts and Crafts Movement” look to the pre- industrial handcraft and to nature for inspiration. It is from there that the Aesthetic movement appears in Europe: for example, in France, the novel of Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, illustrates this fact, and it is followed y other writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, and later on, by Gustave Flaubert and Stephane Mallarme. In England, in 1857, another fact in art changes the state of mind of the population: Charles Darwin's Origin of Species disturbs the self-confidence of the time because it questions the ideology of Church: the battle between “faith starts. [...]

[...] Wilde's marriage ended in 1893. He had met a few years earlier Lord Alfred Douglas, an athlete and a poet, who became both the love of the author's life and his downfall because his intimate association led to his trial on charges of homosexuality (then illegal in Britain): he was sentenced to two years hard labour for the crime of sodomy. Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on November penniless, in a cheap Paris hotel at the age of 46. In 1888 Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, fairy- stories written for his two sons. [...]

[...] For him, art should be autonomous and thus the artist should be different from the others, non-conformist. This is the result of the Romantism: this current is focussed on the cult of individuality and sensibility and puts the artist upon all the other men. Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 at Koningsberg, East Prussia, into a family of harness-makers of modest means. A Lutheran pastor thought that he saw some talent in young Immanuel and arranged for him to receive a thorough education. [...]