Oscar Wilde Research Paper

Wilde’s lifestyle may have caused him to be snubbed in certain social situations.   It maybe that he drew on his own experiences to create the atmosphere of scandal in the last chapters, even though, other than murder, the protagonist’s “sins” are never named and only briefly alluded to.

In 1888, Oscar Wilde published a set of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and "The Young King." These stories, "revealed another approach to moral situations and human relationships" (Stayley 319). The fairy tales were perhaps the first time Wilde introduced homosexual undertones into his works. For example, in the story The Happy Prince, a male bird and a statue of a Prince fall in love. Although it could be argued that the love between the Prince and the bird was only that of friends, most likely Wilde is expressing his own feelings of homosexuality through the bird and the Prince's relationship. For example,

In this quote he is revealing his femininity and his belief in the empowerment of women. Wilde also states that men should not be afraid to read these magazines with pleasure, emphasizing on the fact that he is gay. Soon after working at the magazine, Wilde had an affair with a young man named, Lord Alfred Douglas . On February 18, 1895, Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, sent a card at Wilde's home addressed to "Oscar Wilde: Posing Somdomite," a misspelling of sodomite. Wilde was so mad that he sued him for libel.

Throughout his life Oscar Wilde had many strong influences exerted upon him. During his early childhood his mother influenced him and into college some of his professors and certain philosophers left a substantial impression upon him. Into adulthood these influences leaked out in his writing. These influences gave him ample ideas for writing The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde's study of the Hellenistic ideals of Epicurus, his coddled lifestyle as a child and his devotion to the movement of Aesthetics and Moral Ambiguity have produced one of the most astounding works of horror fiction.

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest can be considered his most popular work. Oscar Wilde was a highly criticized literary figure during the time of the nineteenth century, as his work became a large mockery of the Victorian age. Wilde ridiculed Victorian beliefs most prominently in The Importance of Being Earnest. The drama of this work criticizes this very idea of dedication, which at the time can be seen as a virtue that Victorians held to a high standard. The Victorian ideal comprised the essence of working hard while being sincere, open and loving life earnestly.

In Oscar Wilde’s play, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, we find many comedic elements strengthening his criticism of Victorian society. With a range of devices providing comedic elements, this comedy of manners is a play varied in its provision of humour. Firstly, Wilde uses satire in the play in order to mock society at the time, with the many ideals and manners of the people of the time challenged, the satirized theme of marriage featuring heavily in Act 1. A great example of such is in Gwendolen’s erroneous insinuation that men with the name of Ernest are more ‘safe’ in terms of marriage.

Many claim that it is impossible to think of the past literacy without thinking of Wilde. Of course much of his legacy was due to that Wilde fiercely fell from fame in the early of 1895, and was then sentenced to death. There was great contention over the sexuality that Wilde practiced. Regardless of his negative impression on the Victorians, he manages yet to this day to have an ever-lasting impact on literacy and playwright. We must examine why Wilde has had such an impact on contemporary works; is this due to the fact that his literacies were truly remarkable, or is this because he himself and his personality made a lasting mark on the contemporaries due to his flamboyant ways. Wilde’s conviction in 1895 generated such a large movement of emotions that would portray him negatively for centuries to come. The people who truly knew him best, however, knew him as a conversationalist even before a writer. Wilde more often than not spoke with great intention. Scientist Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell spoke with Wilde just after his exile in 1895, and reported Wilde to be “ a man of wide information and interests, and of commanding intelligence, he is an extraordinarily illuminating intellect”. The men who knew him may have not admired his literacy works at the time, but they did recognize Wilde as something extraordinary in any era because of his personality alone. His personality, however, does not explain as to why many

The Victorian era emerged as a narrowly conventional society that strived to continue the excellence of idealistic morals and conventions that both assisted in the formation of the time period and that remained constant throughout the sixty-plus years in English history. Notable figures of the 19th century influenced how society functioned and often challenged the norm. Among these figures, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde poised his actions and writings to contest and satirise the societal customs that were existent during the era. Throughout Wilde’s workings, he both explicitly and implicitly wove myriad viewpoints into his plays and novels – these contained the satirised comments and suppositions of the Victorian era, which ranged from social

In Victorian society, the conventional norms of status, gender roles, and marriage were closely linked by an institution that men and women were placed with unrealistic demands and expectations from society. Women were brought up by their parents to become the perfect housewife, and men were forced into marriages based on status within the society. In Oscar Wilde’s play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” he mocks the typical Victorian conventions and ideals of what society held on the individual. I will be examining the techniques Wilde uses, such as satire, symbolism, and farcical situations, and showing how he takes those Victorian

Oscar Wilde was an Irish novelist, playwright, and poet. He is recognized as one of the foremost figures of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic movement, centered on the doctrine of “art for art’s sake”, supporting an emphasis on aesthetic value rather than social-political or moral themes. Wilde was born into an intellectual Irish family on October 16th, 1854. His father was an aural surgeon and his mother was a poet. She established a literary salon through which she exposed Wilde and his siblings to literature, art, and culture. As a young man, Wilde attended Trinity College in Dublin, and then Oxford for further studies. It was here that he made his first substantial attempts at creative writing and adopted aestheticism as a way of life.

novels. The poetry of Oscar Wilde, which was influenced by personal history and by the

Looking back on Oscar Wilde 's life, there are many realizations that he struggled finding something that suited him best with his type of work. A man of the 19th century, who is best known for his only novella The Picture of Dorian Gray and his play The Importance of Being Earnest as well as his infamous arrest, imprisonment and being a gay author leading to his downfall. Oscar Wilde who was known as a playwright, author, sometime poet, and also a not very motivated school student, still came to success. He was very talented, intelligent and aesthetically interested and looked at others works as influential. Using this influence he started to write his own works and became a successful and well known author.

The ideology of an unrealistic world illustrates how truth emerges through “motifs” . The “tea” drinking ritual symbolises social status. It suggests we are judged by our social etiquette, conforming to the laws of society issignificant for them. It has been viewed as naturalistic which is symbolic due to its humorous presentation. The classes are portrayed in a hasty manner as we notice Gwendolyn and Cecily struggle to regain their composure as “sugar is not fashionable anymore”.Furthermore, it invites the audience to mock these two ladies; instead of using their intellectual talent they are wasting their time contemplating whether “cake is rarely seen at the best houses”. Wilde’s presentation of the social hierarchy mocks the upper-class

They lived in the same periods. They intensely influenced each other but mostly Oscar Wilde was inspired of Walter Pater who was an initiator of aesthetic movement which claimed `art for art's sake' in Victorian period. Furthermore, he was a sensualist, a follower of hedonism in many respects. He treated some hidden homosexual themes in his writings but it was not done as courageously as Oscar Wilde did. Both of them used fiction as their ways of free expression. As Oscar Wilde thouches upon this and reveals his strategy in The Decay of Lying " Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." (1082) So his mask behind which he conceals himself is his fictional characters such as Dorian Gray who symbolizes his aesthetic and sensualist side, Lord Henry who mirrors his intellectual and evil side. Oscar Wilde was such a great personality that he gave birth to many characters out of his own personality. He was claimed to be a plagiarist and blamed for insincerity in his own age. But his insincerity was quite sincere. He was a hypocrite, to be honest, in his lifetime. His deeds and ideas contradicted each other just as it is the case in Lord Henry. He was an homosexual who sublimated spiritual platonic love and he claimed his relationship with Alfred Douglas as an intellectual one. He summarizes his

The most famous aspect of Oscar Wilde's literature is his epigrams: compact, witty maxims that often expose the absurdities of society using paradox , he criticised the dispairity between mass culture and high society .