Oscar Wilde's Background - The Picture of Dorian Gray PDF

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde  About the Author Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (born October 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France) was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel, The Picture of...

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde  About the Author Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (born October 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France) was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).  About the Author In his comedies he proved himself to be a master of the epigram. He was a spokesman for the late 19th- century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art’s sake, and he was the object of notorious civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–1897). Despite his fall from society’s grace at the end of his life, Wilde came to be regarded as the personification of wit and sophistication.  Early Life and Education Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, William Wilde, was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, Jane Francesca Wilde, was a nationalist poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore who wrote under the name Speranza. Wilde was one of three children. His elder brother, Willie, became a journalist, and his younger sister, Isola, died of a fever when she was 10.  Early Life and Education After attending Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (1864–1871), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College Dublin (1871–1874) and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–1878), which awarded him a degree with honors. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna.  Early Writings and Marriage Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City that he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” Despite widespread hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.  Early Writings and Marriage In 1884, Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born, in 1885 and 1886, respectively. Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman’s World (1887–89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale.  Relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and Trials for Gross Indecency In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure—or, as Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, characterized it, “a Faustian thirst for experience.” “I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all.” —Oscar Wilde, from a letter to a friend, 1885  Relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and Trials for Gross Indecency About the time of his son Vyvyan’s birth, Wilde began a sexual relationship with a friend, Canadian journalist and art critic Robert Ross. It was the first in a series of secret affairs that he had with other men, culminating in his close and tempestuous friendship with Lord Alfred (“Bosie”) Douglas, whom he had met in 1891 and who was 16 years younger than Wilde. Their relationship infuriated the marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father, a violent-tempered man whom Douglas despised. Accused by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued the marquess for criminal libel.  Relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and Trials for Gross Indecency The case went to trial in April 1895. Wilde’s case collapsed within three days, however, when the evidence went against him. His writings were called into question, particularly The Picture of Dorian Gray and its homoerotic themes, and it was revealed that Wilde had solicited the services of male sex workers (albeit initially at Douglas’s urging). Wilde dropped the suit, but the evidence made him vulnerable to arrest for having violated Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized sex acts between men.  Relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and Trials for Gross Indecency Wilde testified brilliantly, drawing applause after giving an eloquent speech about “the love that dare not speak its name”, an expression in Douglas’s poem “Two Loves”. Interpreting it as a coy reference to homosexuality, the prosecution demanded that Wilde explain its meaning. He characterized it, in part, as “a great affection of an elder for a younger man… such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.”  Imprisonment and De Profundis Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work. Yet the letter also expressed Wilde’s spirituality, with elegant ruminations on suffering, repentance, and “the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist.”  Imprisonment and De Profundis To avoid scandal Constance Wilde moved to the European continent and changed the family’s surname to Holland. They corresponded often through letters, however, and she visited him once in prison after the death of his mother in 1896. She died in Genoa, Italy, in 1898, several days after a botched operation that was meant to resolve a uterine tumor.  The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Death In May 1897, Wilde was released from prison, a bankrupt, and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems, he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that sustained him, and he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, who would become his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas.  The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Death In January 2017, Wilde was among 50,000 men who were posthumously pardoned under the Turing Law (named for British mathematician and logician Alan Turing, who was convicted of gross indecency in 1952). The law was introduced to exonerate individuals who had been unjustly convicted of homosexual crimes that no longer exist.  The Picture of Dorian Gray In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French Decadent fiction. The novel tells the story of an extraordinarily beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, who is taken under the wing of an older, amoral man, Lord Henry Wotton.  The Picture of Dorian Gray Entranced by Henry’s views on art and sensuality, Dorian wishes to remain as young and handsome as a portrait of himself painted by another admirer, Basil Hallward. In time, the portrait changes and becomes hideous to reflect all of Dorian’s sins and moral failings while the flesh-and-blood Dorian remains entirely unchanged in appearance. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of the novel’s apparently moral ending.