| Oscar Wilde: A Dissident Vision of History |
| In turn-of-the-century England, and especially in the years 1888 to 1895, Oscar Wilde | Párr. 1 |
| literally occupied centre stage as a writer whose fame was reaching a peak. But he |
| continually discomfitted Victorian society with his open challenge to the norms of morality |
| and religion; he was drawn to socialism and homosexuality and refused to define life, art |
| 5 | and reality in conventional terms. |
| In 1895, at the moment of his greatest literary triumph—when his The Importance | Párr. 2 |
| of Being Earnest was being performed to packed houses in London—he was convicted of |
| sodomy and given a term of two years' hard labour. The penal sentence Oscar Wilde |
| received was the climax of the reaction to what one may euphemistically call his |
| 10 | unconventionality. Wilde recognised it as one of two major turning points in his life: the |
| first, when his father sent him to Oxford, the second, when society sent him to jail. Wilde's |
| social protests continued after his release. He violently denounced the English judicial and |
| penal systems and resumed his colourful and controversial lifestyle. He died in 1900, |
| bankrupt financially and, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, morally as well. |
| 15 | Oscar Wilde as rebel is the most enduring image, both in the popular mind and in | Párr. 3 |
| literary and historical commentaries. Wilde was undeniably in revolt against much that |
| made up the social and intellectual milieus of his time. He was rebellious and startling in |
| nearly all that he wrote, said and did. Yet, to see him only, or even mainly, in this light is |
| misleading. That is, he was a rebel and a dissident, but such figures must not be seen as |
| 20 | isolated from their societies. Rather they are themselves products of the social forces of |
| their age. |
| Oscar Wilde was a poseur who never regarded his various stances as ends in | Párr. 4 |
| themselves. He did not turn his back on approaching or understanding either his age or ages |
| past. This is what this essay will call Wilde's sense of history. It will be approached first, |
| 25 | through Wilde's definition of the relationship between life and art (especially literature) and |
| second, through his involvement with what Andre Malraux was later to describe as |
| the human condition. |
| It is not easy to place Oscar Wilde neatly in any one of the niches of the intellectual | Párr. 5 |
| culture of the nineteenth century. He was part of the decadent movement, yet his own |
| 30 | particular proclivities lend this literary classification newer, more shadowy nuances. He |
| was an aesthete, he was close to Stephane Mallarme and the Symbolists, and he was also |
| part of the cultural despair, the "generation in revolt" that H. Stuart Hughes and many |
| others speak of in describing fin-de-siecle Europe. Wilde worked with many types of |
| literature: he was a novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, wit and spinner of tales. He was very |
| 35 | certain of the worth of his literary products. Wilde called himself a "miser of sound and |
| syllable no less than Midas of his coinage" and a "king" and “supreme arbiter of style" in |
| his craft. |
| Wilde considered that he achieved a historical co-relation to his age because of the | Párr. 6 |
| revelations that proceeded from his constant grappling with the problem of life and art. |
| 40 | There had been much championing of the cause of "art for art's sake" in the nineteenth |
| century. But he went beyond that with a historical urgency, which described art as "the |
| supreme reality" and "the great primal note". |
| Wilde set himself to awakening the imagination of his century, since he believed it | Párr. 7 |
| to be the absolute creative force. Imagination—and its best manifestation, art—were the |
| 45 | means to find and know oneself, not immersion in life. Thus the invaluable dimension that |
| Oscar Wilde discovered and wanted so passionately to impart to his age was the suggestive |
| power of the imagination and of art. These gave man indefinite possibilities for |
| transcendence, self-realisation and true achievement. |
| Wilde emphasised the historical importance of the critical spirit, and of the critic in | Párr. 8 |
| 50 | society. He was one of the first to realise that criticism and art were in a vital relationship. |
| In one sense it was symbiotic, but criticism was also "creative and independent." Wilde |
| built on the contributions of his Oxford mentor, Walter Pater, to urge that the critic evaluate |
| art not simply for what it was, but also for what it was not. This type of criticism was more |
| self-conscious and more creative. Through it neither the artist nor the critic were bound by |
| 55 | constraints of time and place. The critic thus was an artist in his own right, employing |
| suggestion, historical comparison, and revelations of possibilities for perfection. |
| The critic was representative of the truly creative historical perspective that Wilde | Párr. 9 |
| saw as necessary for man to realise himself most fully. Oscar Wilde's sense of history is |
| evident in his meditations on man's Fate. It was a concern with the components of the |
| 60 | human condition, on man's role in shaping his destiny, and on situations and social systems |
| that could aid or hinder him in the process. |
| Wilde believed that "whatever is realised is right," and that "the real fool is he who | Párr. 10 |
| does not know himself." This self realisation would proceed from experience; experience |
| was reality. Art, in pointing out the possibilities for experience was a vital contributor to |
| 65 | realisation. Oscar Wilde declared that history should be "an accurate description of what |
| has never occurred," and that "the only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it". The man |
| with a true sense of history is he who aims at realising himself through experience, and |
| does not go out into the world to "do", armed with Reason, Morality or Religion. |
| It can be said that Oscar Wilde's sense of history was coloured to a great extent by | Párr. 11 |
| 70 | the circumstances of his life. Two of his works, however, free him from much of this |
| charge. They are The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Soul of Man under Socialism. The |
| former, if one is permitted a generalization, cannot leave one unmoved. It is more than a |
| mere reverie on an incident, or a call for prison reform. The Ballad explores the themes of |
| suffering, retribution and fate. Wilde admitted it “aimed at eternity." He questioned a social |
| 75 | system that could not only condemn a man and take his life, but maim forever the processes |
| of growth and self realisation of all his comrades who were left alive but under its control. |
| "It is only what is good in Man that wastes and withers there." This is the crisis of the |
| human condition, when the social system and its institutions inflict inescapable and |
| horrifyingly invisible punishment on man's faculties, his sensations, his hopes for newer |
| 80 | and better experiences. For Wilde, the condemned man in the Ballad—and his fellow |
| prisoners—are the symbols of man's universal fate. |
| In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde speaks of socialism as the means | Párr. 12 |
| for man to achieve genuine individualism. Admittedly, Wilde did not go into the theoretical |
| analysis of socialism; he was more concerned that socialism meant the fostering of a culture |
| 85 | “that would realise the essence of a soul." |
| Oscar Wilde was by no means the only nineteenth century figure to muse on what | Párr. 13 |
| history was—or should be. But his sense of history is made more fascinating because it was |
| neither always explicit nor overstated; it was a philosophy of life rather than a rigid theory. |
| Wilde continually focused on the meaning of life—and art. It did not take him long to |
| 95 | decide that art was infinitely superior to life. The irony of his own life was that while |
| extolling the supremacy of art he was made to bend under the pressures of life's blows. |
| Wilde's sense of history was not an esoteric pursuit. It was his attempt to confront the |
| historic and intellectual problems of his time. He did not "win", but he considered that |
| through his experiences and the process of realisation that he was less "shallow" than much |
| 95 | that comprised the age in which he lived. |
| Referencia |
| 100 | Rajani, A. (1984). Oscar Wilde: A Sense of History. India International Centre Quarterly, 11, 75-80. | |