Oscar Wilde

Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………2

Chapter One: Oscar Wilde’s Ambivalent Aesthetics…..……4

Chapter Two: Subversive Critic in

Wilde’s Society Comedies…………………………………23

Chapter Three: The Figure of the Artist

In Wilde’s Salome…………………………………………..40

Conclusion…………………………………………………53

Introduction

In my thesis I focus on the work of the prototype figure of the fin de siecle, Oscar Wilde. In the first chapter, I will discuss Wilde’s personality and work and what makes him different from the other Victorian aesthetes. In terms of Wilde’s world the idea of the Dandy and Dandyism comes forth and as I will show this envelopes all aspects of his life from manners to clothing. He is influenced by several aesthetic trends such as Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Craft Movement, bohemianism but he is never entirely absorbed by any of them. In this chapter I want to emphasize his ambivalent aesthetics: he embraces and preaches aesthetic criticism whilst showing interest for scientific theories and socialism.

In Chapter Two, I will explore his subversive critic of the English Upper-class society in his Social Comedies An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Via discussing social grounds such as the Irish matter I will try to expose Wilde’s witty and ironic manner of mocking English Imperialism and his attempts to render the masquerade that exists in Victorian pieties. I will investigate his characters as the fictional counter parts of English social types: the woman with a past, the moralist, the ingénue and his masterpiece: the dandy and meanwhile I will examine his theatre in all its dimensions: the staging, the dialogues, the exquisite costumes because his attention to details represents a novelty for the English stage.

In the third and last chapter I will continue to explore Wilde’s theatrical work but in a different direction as I will discuss his symbolist drama Salome. I aim to tackle the sexual desire present in the play as a consequence of the birth of the New Woman and her recent discovered feminity in the late 19th century. Furthermore the text will centre on the symbols present in the play and Salome as the figure of the fin de siecle femme fatale. I will undertake the antithesis between the perceptions of Wilde’s predecessor on women and Wilde’s different and new approach.

Oscar Wilde’s Ambivalent Aesthetics

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Not only are the figure of the Dandy and the Dandyism of the Senses matters of great importance in Wilde’s literary work but his life, we may say, was fully based on the idea of living for pleasure. Dandyism, very popular in the 1890s, asked for the development of a keen sense of beauty that outgrew the fashion of the period and which spread over art, clothing, manners, conversation, decorations. The Dandy made a spectacle of all the aspects of his life disrespecting morals and conventions in order to experience a multitude of sensations. The concept originated in England and France at the beginning of the 19th century and developed throughout the age until it reached its height during the fin-de-siecle Aestheticism and Decadence.

The forerunner of British Dandyism was Beau Brummell, whom Wilde’s Party so much admired for the seriousness with which he treated the dress code, playing such an important part in the context of the “dandy pose”. Beau Brummell is described in Max Beerbohm’s Dandies and Dandies as “a dandy, nothing but a dandy, from his cradle to that fearful day when he lost his figure” (Beerbohm, Dandies and Dandies), a man famous for nothing more than his style, manners and wit that had a prominent influence on the fashion of the Regency and represented a source of influence for the next generations. He was the inventor of the modern man’s suit that he was wearing with a cravat, renouncing the popular breeches in exchange for the precursor of the trousers, the pantaloons, and stopped wearing a wig cutting his hair in an original style. He took pride in the fact that he never used perfume because he was always clean due to his daily toilette that took five hours and consisted in bathing, shaving, brushing, and dressing. Apart from all that, Brummell and the dandies believed that wit and lifestyle are as important as the way one dresses. They became role models for the chic and elegant culture of the Regency with its pleasantry and brilliance of conversation and exoticism and on those ground they were creating their selves. Wilde gave them his blessing, as he too believed that clothes were a way of expressing one’s personalities, of transmitting emotions. As dandies are reluctant to the idea of dressing after a pattern, they vary their accessories, costumes, fabrics and turn everything they wear into a symbol of what they stand for. Brummell had a preference for simple clothes, while Wilde at the beginning of his career as an aesthete and dandy displayed a very extravagant taste in clothing that included velvet coats, silk stockings, silk shirts with wide turn-down collars and green ties. That was his experimental phase when he tried to achieve fame as an aesthete and to draw society’s attention to his person. However, he dressed in this fashion only during his youth choosing the Brummellian simple but modern standard of clothing when he earned success with his work.

The life of Beau Brummell has ended up to be a pattern for the tragic fate of the dandy. The difference between bohemians and dandies is that dandies prefer to lead a life of wealth and pleasure, imitating aristocracy while bohemians burry themselves in misery and poverty. Nevertheless the costs of the comfort that a dandy requires are significant and most of them reach bankruptcy. Brummell led an idle existence, having rich friends who got him sinking into a life of gambling. He died young of age, impoverished in an asylum in Caen. In resemblance, Wilde’s unfortunate fall, although triggered by the prejudices and anxieties of the Victorian Age, followed the type of the glamorous dandy who consumed his fortune in a life of ease defying the consequences that would emerge from such a conduct.

Brummell’s dedication to beauty and pleasure became a model to be emulated by his countrymen while also bearing strongly upon the beginning of the French Dandyism which, through Baudelaire, evolved into the later Symbolist movement. Although he died some decades before the fin-de-siecle, Aestheticism and Decadence, Baudelaire was a key figure and a source of inspiration for both trends. The English Aesthetes valued him for his “pose of morbid sensitivity”(Calloway 46) and the Decadents copied his drug inspired behavior to experience new sensations. Typically for a dandy, Baudelaire spent the inheritance to which he was entitled on a luxurious life on the Island of Saint-Louis, on an extravagant wardrobe composed of black or blue suits, metallic buttonholes, red ties and pink gloves while indulging himself in never-ending parties and narcotics in his pursuit of a new kind of beauty. The Baudelairean dandy, still elegant and extravagant, was different from both the pattern that Brummell had set up and from the one that the English Aesthetes would adopt later. He was the model for the more bohemian French dandy who turned his back on society and severed all ties to the world around him. The bohemians befriended the dandies and shared their desire for notoriety, the difference being that “one was handsome and given to elegance, the other prided himself on being ugly and affected a careless exterior” (qtd in Seigel 99). Baudelaire spent a life devoted to beauty under any form, women or clothes, while his work evolved an aesthetic of evil/ the grotesque.

Baudelaire separates poetry from morals touching in his work subjects that were considered scandalous in his time, such as death, lesbianism, lost innocence, sacred and profane love. In a review of Baudelaire’s best volume, Les Fleurs du Mal, Swinburne concludes that “The art of poetry has absolutely nothing to do with didactic matter at all”(qtd.in Armstrong 407). Baudelaire defends his aesthetics in a letter to his mother in which he specifically emphasizes the idea that art must not have any didactic purpose but should pursue an ideal of beauty, the same idea cropping up later in the “doctrines of the new aesthetics” deployed in Wilde’s Decay of Lying:

You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Les Fleur de Mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. (qtd. in Richardson 238)

Baudelaire impersonates the dandy who has dedicated himself to art in general, being a poet, aesthete and critic of the arts writing essays on painting, music and literature. His work is remarkable for its audacity to transgress ethical and psychological boundaries releasing a charge of frenzy, violence and sexuality in an era of compulsory chastity which played down his merits. Wilde enjoyed little recognition and appreciation during his lifetime, his social life being part of a minority culture of the literati. Theophile Gautier and Barbey d’Aurevilly explored his poetry in search for the lyrical drama that no other poet had experienced until that moment. His composition embraces atrocity and delicacy, hatred and piety as himself confesses in the poem L’Heautontimorumenos:

Je suis la plaie et le couteau!

Je suis le soufflet et la joue!

Je suis les members et la roué,

Et la victime et le bourreau!

He is torn apart by the impossibility to be completely faithful to either the classical path that his composition was taking or his lust for new and intense sensations. Baudelaire was the bohemian dandy, a prisoner of the ontological limitations of the 19th century culture.

As an admirer of both Baudelaire and Gautier, Wilde shared the former’s view of experiencing the exotic and the latter’s aesthetical idea that art doesn’t need to be useful, a poetics summed up in the phrase “Art for art’s sake” on which hinges the literary manifesto prefacing his Mademoiselle de Maupin. He expresses his admiration for them in his works, praising Baudelaire’s Les Fleur de Mal in his essay “The Decay of Lying” and for Gautier’s poetry in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: Dorian reads two of his poems after Basil Howard’s murder: Sur les Lagunes and Etudes des Mains:

When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title page of the book. It was Gautier’s Emaux et Camees, Charpentier’s Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trelliswork and dotted pomegranates. […] He glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice […] How exquisite they were!(Wilde 2005, 154)

Wilde’s dandyism was not limited to his writings or wardrobe. As well as many of the aesthetes who were part of his circle he developed an obsessive taste for rich decorations and a vivid interest in Oriental works of art. In the ornamentation of his Tite Street House where he lived after his marriage he benefited from the guidance of his friend James McNeill Whistler and the architect E.W. Godwin. They put their stamp on the design of his dinning room, drawing-room and the smoking-room, basically the rooms where Wilde entertained his guests. Prevailing in his dinning and drawing room was a limited colouring scheme that included yellow, red, blue and white. In the drawing-room, it was the ceiling that focalized the guests’ admiring gaze. It had been designed by Whistler, and the inserted peacock feathers betrayed an Oriental influence which rapidly became a favorite token of the dandy’s idea of beauty. His passion for thheme that included yellow, red, blue and white. In the drawing-room, it was the ceiling that focalized the guests’ admiring gaze. It had been designed by Whistler, and the inserted peacock feathers betrayed an Oriental influence which rapidly became a favorite token of the dandy’s idea of beauty. His passion for the extraordinary and the exotic is best illustrated in the extravagant display of his smoking-room:

Heavy curtains draped the windows, giving the room a rather mysterious look. The walls were lined with a peculiar embossed paper called lincrusta-walton, with a William Morris pattern of dark red and dull gold. The general décor was a mixture of the Far East and Morocco, with divans and a glass bead curtain before the door. (Holland 56)

His obvious inclination towards Oriental decorations was due to his dislike for the fashion of the Victorian Age. He strongly rejected the massive productions of furniture and decorative objects lacking originality and uniqueness. As an art collector he showed a keen interest in the Pre-Raphaelite’s work such as the paintings of Simeon Solomon or Burne-Jones and in the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. Everything that surrounded him was meant to embellish the natural and transform it into an object of aesthetic admiration. He would amaze his guests with pompous objects d’art lost among a bric-a-brac of black and white chairs made out of precious wood such as bamboo, and vases. His “extreme chic” emerged from his interest in details and desire to beautify for the purpose of the aesthetic effect.

Nevertheless, Wilde held in high respect two other art connoisseurs and friends, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, whose house he appreciated to be “the one house in London where you will never be bored”(qtd.in Calloway 38). Their collections included, as well as Wilde’s, Japanese prints and Greek antiquities alongside Old Master drawings and Renaissance pictures. Their artistic talent was not limited to a fine collector’s eye, the tasteful layout of items separating them from the other Aesthetes. As a token of his confidence in Ricketts’s artistic choices, Wilde entrusted him with the cover-design and illustration of all his works with the exception of Salome whose illustration was Beardsley’s creation. Wilde’s preoccupation with the covers of his volumes places him alongside Morris with respect to the latter’s overall interest in the arts. The covers of Poems, A House of Pomegranates and The Sphinx are exquisite on account of their meticulous representation and richness of details. As well as his clothes or decorative choices, Wilde used the covers of his books as a means of expressing himself and educating the eye of the public so as to recognize beauty and embrace it as part of their daily life. Unfortunately there are some critics who see in the “rough hand-made paper and bound in white vellum”(Holland 91) editions a possibility to reject and diminish the actual value of Wilde’s writings. This is the case of the review of Poems in Punch where Wilde is accused of being “Aesthetic but not original”. Wilde was never shy when it came to defending his work and specifically his books’ design. His satisfaction with his collaboration with Shannon and Ricketts in particular and its elegant called for no critic’s approval: “there are only two people in the world whom it is absolutely necessary the cover should please. One is Mr Ricketts […], the other myself.”(qtd.in Calloway 50) For the cover and illustration of his symbolist drama, Salome, Wilde turned to the controversial illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.

Aubrey Beardsley, a dandy of sorts who used to dress in the fashionable manner that included white suits, ties and coloured gloves, undertook a merciless critique of Victorian Society in his prints and illustrations. To begin with, he pleaded for gender equal rights that would end women’s submission and loyalty to the pattern of housewife lacking education, power and a will of her own. In his pictures women are drawn to be strong, the male equal counterpart. The illustrations are symbols of society’s fear that is triggered by the imminent emergence of the emancipation of women. Social events such as The Matrimonial Causes from 1857 and The Married Women’s Property Act enforce women’s status in society but at the same time generate anxieties in the traditional Victorian consciousness that is not yet ready to renounce its patriarchal social order. He captures women’s fear of giving birth in a grotesque representation of a mother with her foetus convulsing this way the idealized idea of motherhood. However, what really offended the Victorian virginal attitude was the explicit sexual desire present in his art. The female body is no longer a quintessential image of beauty but a way of expressing an oppressed sexual identity, an example being Beardsley’s drawing of Salome which Wilde dismissed as “naughty scribbles”(qtd.in Donohue 122). Eroticism and the grotesque provide the common ground of most of his illustrations and are the agents of his struggle against Victorian pieties. His art is no exception from the influences that circle among the Aesthetes. In his drawings people are portrayed with gross genitalia, a reminiscence of Japanese art emphasizing his frustration towards the public opinion that sexuality is not a subject of artistic representation. Beardsley’s illustrations show also traces of symbolist impact exposed in the linearity of his patterns. He too suffers from the universal importance that Ruskin’s theories and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have in the reformation of stylistic choices. Therefore mythology and medieval themes are subjects of his illustrations which are drawn respecting the Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail. Unfortunately his vision is neither appreciated nor (intentionally) understood by the hypocritical Victorians, not because of his rough manner and sometimes vulgar representations but due to the fact that it embodies the falsity and social distress that characterize them and which they would prefer to ignore. Yet, his work combined with the Art and Craft Movement inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites becomes the launching point for what is going to be the Art Nouveau throughout Europe.

John Ruskin’s criticism and aesthetic views may have had the greatest impact in the formation of Wilde as an 1890’s Aesthete. Wilde met Ruskin during his study at Oxford while he attended Ruskin’s lecture on “The Aesthetic and Mathematical Schools of Florence”. By that time Ruskin had already achieved the status of a specialist in Italian Renaissance, architecture and social critique. His disapproval of technology in art and architecture and its ugly results forms the basis for Wilde’s Aesthetic ideas of beauty. However Ruskin’s theories that art should copy nature and that a good painting reflects its object into the smallest realistic details would later be rejected by Aesthetic Criticism. Ruskin, in opposition to what Wilde would preach, believed that only truth and accuracy of representation should be the aims with religion and morality for themes, as he states in a lecture on the subject of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics:

No painters ever had more power of conceiving graceful form, or more profound devotion to the beautiful; but all these gifts and affections are kept sternly subordinate to their moral purpose; and, so far as their powers and knowledge went, they either painted from nature things as they were, or from imagination things as they must have been. (Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting)

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of students from the Royal Academy who stood up against the “typecast attitudinising, sensuality, and vacuous mannerism” (Tupan, 86) of the embellished manner originating with Raphael. They painted in the spirit of Ruskin’s aesthetics, and, therefore, their works often represent detailed landscapes, religious or mythological themes, such as Christ in the House of His Parents by Millais which was long disputed when exhibited because of its realistic, crude representation, perceived as sacrilegious. They frequently chose to portray literary scenes from Medieval, Renaissance or Romantic literature (their favorites were Shakespeare and Keats) in a style imitative of the 14th and 15th century painters. They achieved notoriety after Ruskin’s letters to The Times praising their truthful mode of reproducing every wrinkle on one’s face or every petal of a flower. Paintings such as Ophelia by Millais or Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti are representative thanks to their exuberant colours and abundance of symbolic meanings. Nonetheless these characteristics gave critics the opportunity to comment on their technique saying that it lacked spontaneity and their obsession for both symbolism and realism created an unrealistic effect. This aesthetics was not limited to painting and consequently it was adopted also in poetry, although few managed both successfully. Dante Gabriel Rossetti emerged from under the cloak of the Pre-Raphaelites but abandoned the aesthetic for a more romanticized version in which symbolism, the imaginary, and the search for pure beauty were the origins of creation.

Rossetti started as a genuine Pre-Raphaelite but misfortunes such as the death of his beloved Lizzie Siddal and his later passion for Morris’s wife-Jane drove him towards a more bohemian life that resembled Baudelaire’s and which transformed him into a “virtual recluse” addicted to spirits and chloral. His decadent behavior is reflected also in his work as he started to write and paint a series which explores female eroticism and femininity “depicting the femmes fatales of his own private mythology”(Calloway 43). His poetry stands for the revival of the flesh in a way which does away with the division between spirit and body. For him the “sexual and the spiritual” (Armstrong, 449) represent one entity and his sonnets in The House of Life are the testimonials for his pursuit of the pleasures of the senses:

I was a child beneath her touch,–a man

When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,–

A spirit when her spirit looked through me,–

A god when all our life-breath met to fan

Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,

Fire within fire, desire in deity.

His search for beauty that arouses all human senses would be embraced also by Walter Horatio Pater who was Wilde’s major influence in the shaping of his Aesthetic Criticism. Pater’s aesthetic doctrine encourages unlimited and exuberant personal experiences so that one can sense and achieve true beauty that is not touched by morals, utility or sex as he states in his essay on Diaphaneite:

The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own. (Pater Diaphaneite)

Walter Horatio Pater, a forwarder of the slogan “Art for Art’s sake” that practically includes the entire ideology of the Aesthetic Movement filled the minds of young aesthetes with the idea that the pursuit of pure beauty comes down to a search for novel sensations in both art and life. Such reflections were highly regarded in the circle of the aesthetes as they were perceived as an alternative to the boredom triggered by the Victorians habits of mind:

Our collective life, pressing equally on every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, not by suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise among them. (Pater Diaphaneite)

In opposition to Ruskin, Pater argues that beauty and art do not need to fulfill any utilitarian purpose and stresses the fact that art is an end in itself as a result of its autonomy. Furthermore he emphasizes in his Essay on Style the importance of words as a medium of reproducing the sensations occurring in the mind of an artist and which are transmitted only through a sensible material representation. For the aesthetes and decadents the only faults that appear in writing are poor style and unsatisfactory representation of a subject. Pater constructs an idea of art that possesses a world of its own, undamaged by any social regulations and which evolves in Wilde’s mind as the doctrine of Nature being cut and hewed so as to resemble Art: “it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life”(Wilde 1999, 158). For them the artist is the shaper of life as he in his work creates patterns that people try to reproduce. Wilde advances in this theory in his Decay of Lying asserting that the real decadence is not embodied by the desire of the aesthetes to live beyond society’s rules but by the desire of society to exclude lying and imaginary from art because they do not match their expectations. It is the very moment art starts to mirror realism and truth that the decay has begun and in “our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land” (Wilde 1999 145).

Due to his keen loyalty to Pater and Rossetti, Wilde’s aesthetics resembles in a high degree the French decadence doctrine that pleads for an existence dedicated entirely to art (tout pour l’art). However, Wilde is a Dandy, a man of the world who enjoys the pursuit of beauty as much as the ironic onslaught on Victorian society under the guise of a playful, mock admiration. That is why Ruskin and Morris’s wish to mix beauty and utility through craftsmanship enjoyed the approval of Oscar Wilde who became a defender of the Arts and Craft Movement emerging by that time as an opponent to the mass production tendency that had started with the Industrial Revolution.

Both Ruskin and Morris believed in a revival of the craftsman as an artist due to his dedication to creating an object from beginning to end. They were repelled by the industrial production of furniture, decorations, architecture, pottery, posters, because it represented only parts assembled by people who no longer had any involvement in the process as a whole, nor did they put their personal hallmark on those particular items. Objects lost their beauty and originality in favor of price and utility. At the other pole, Morris, a student of Ruskin’s, opened his Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company where he manufactured furniture, posters, glasses. His patterns are incredibly rich in details and jubilant colours, and often follow flowery forms that combine with dreamy elements that result in an opulent spectacle of practical beauty. The Movement’s ideal was to recapture the spirit and quality of medieval craftsmanship which Morris and Ruskin so deeply regretted losing. Soon the movement expanded to include jewelry fabrication, garden design, metalwork and illustrations. Morris raised craftsmanship to the condition of fine arts but unfortunately, despite the fact that his socialism made him think that his stock in trade was targeting the middle classes, actually his products were so expensive that only aristocracy could afford to buy them. The Arts and Craft Movement which had given birth to the European Art Nouveau evolved into the cheaper version of Art Deco at the beginning of the 20th century.

As I mentioned before, Wilde’s Dandyism of the Senses is slightly different from Brummell’s, enacted at a more superficial level, or from the Bohemian Dandyism of Baudelaire or Rossetti who segregated themselves from society in their pursuit of beauty and art. Wilde stands apart because of his ambivalent adherence to bohemianism aesthetics while maintaining a strong relation with society. In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde mixes the aesthetics of French symbolism through the “yellow book” that so much influences Dorian in his design of living his life “divorced from any practical purpose or aspect of ordinary existence” (Tupan 121). He surrounds Dorian with the same aesthetic values that he creates for himself blurring the line between Dorian’s life and his own, one not really knowing how much of Dorian Wilde copies over in order to substantiate his creed that the artist is creative and life imitative. However, his novel does not end with the aesthetic decadence of isolation and tension between artist and society; it is also a social critique displaying Wilde’s awareness of the theories of depth psychology, degeneration and atavism:

[Dorian] used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.(Wilde 2005, 135)

[..] the mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives – repression poisons us.(Wilde 2005, 20)

[..]our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious(Wilde 2005, 58)

The theory of degeneration horrifies Victorians because it demolishes the pieties on which they have built Society. Wilde, as if echoing Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, talks about the reversal of human values: man is an instinctual being, and his happiness depends on assuming and fulfilling his instinctual needs:

Socrate a fost o neintelegere; intreaga morala a indreptarii, cea crestina si ea, a fost o neintelgere… Lumina de zi cea mai cruda, rationalitatea cu orice prêt, viata la modul lucid, rece, prevazator, constient, fara instinct, impotrivindu-se instinctelor, toate acestea la randul lor nu erau decat o boala, o alta boala- si nicidecum o reintoarcere la “virtute”, la “sanatate”, la fericire…(Nietzsche 31)

The anxieties that such a theory produces can be observed in Dorian’s suicide. Dorian’s happiness and idea of the beautiful are realized through his instinctual drives, the evil that lies within him. The moment his instinct interferes with the social conventions that have shaped his perception of good/evil and his consciousness, he is mortified by his degeneration and can no longer bear the burden of his crimes. The same pattern can be traced in Wilde’s own decay: he lives according to his instinctual search for aesthetic sensuality which he considers to be his path to happiness but the Victorian chaste society cannot permit such transgression of its expectations and limits and therefore condemns him for his boldness.

Another feature of the fin-de-siecle aestheticism which is in opposition to the French bohemians is the aesthetic politics that in Morris and Wilde takes the form of Aesthetic Socialism. Morris’s Socialist Utopia pictured in News from Nowhere is a manifesto of his post figurative aesthetic as his dream consists in a return to medieval society (Pre-Raphaelite influence) formed of craftsmen and that is not suffocated by the ugly products that have emerge from under the capitalist doctrine. His craftsmanship is affordable only by the rich but his teachings are meant for the common people. He wishes for a world in which there is no hierarchy, no property, women are given the power to work, there is access to encyclopedic education and people are free to express their own will. Like Ruskin he is against the division of labour and sees it as an interruption in the process of creation and goes on arguing that the automated present society bores the workers who cannot find any pleasure in their work. His melancholic utopian Socialism is different from the Socialism implemented later in several European countries according to the doctrines of Engels and Marx. The difference lies in the stress which Morris lays on the rediscovery of joy in labour, while Marx and Engels believe that labour is only meant to sustain life rather than enrich it. The people in Morris’s utopia live in an agrarian world, where there is no government or aristocracy and where everything is pleasant, generous and beautiful.

Wilde’s socialism in comparison to Morris’s grants more attention to “a world free from social intolerance, or the oppression of conventional thought and behaviour”(Gagnier 28). He contends that capitalism destroys individualism and that in a world where property does not exist, people are free to actually live instead of struggling to survive. In his view one should seek spiritual rather than material welfare. He is, like Morris, a disciple of the eradication of private property which he sees as an impediment in one’s happy existence:

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.(Wilde 1999, 253)

In contradiction to Morris who rejects machines and technology, Wilde appeals to science to enhance the quality of life among the lower classes that, liberated from social hardships, would dedicate their lives to creating beauty. We may conclude that Wilde’s Socialism is subordinated to art, and his reformative ideas are only meant to serve an aesthetic bloom. He goes on to say that an artist should not respond to any government because the limitations that society’s regulations impose on an artist damage his creativity.

Wilde’s aestheticism is less homogeneous than the continental school. He was open to multiple influences coming from the cultural manifold, mainly from the new school of physiological psychology which practiced hypnosis – his countryman, Bram Stoker, was one more case in point -, from the current biological theories on heredity, journalistic reports on London life, or the new socialist or ahistorial trends in philosophy. He was a dandy, a man of the world, who enjoyed parties and triviality while also turning, for inspiration, to the French Bohemians. He was a dandy who by definition was copying the lifestyles of the rich, but who also condemned them and desired for a reform based on socialist ideology. However, he constructed his life according to the doctrine that he preached, renewing himself every day and making his life a part of his art.

Subversive Critic in Wilde’s Society Comedies

Oscar Wilde was a great journalist, poet, novelist but the works by which he has been best remembered were his comedies of Society, four in number that were written and produced throughout the 1890s: Lady Windermere’s Fan (opened on 20th of February 1892), A Woman of No Importance (opened on 19th of April 1893), An Ideal Husband (opened on 3rd of January 1895) and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (opened on 14th of February 1895). Besides the obvious comic dimension of the plays, Wilde manages to create a subversive critique of Society in which the result of mixing irony, wit and paradox is a series of comedies with melodramatic touches that sometimes evolve into farce and whose characters wear thick masks of good nature. His plays met great success with the public due to the attention given to the minute staging: the costumes were highly fashionable, the decorum was carefully arranged to copy the houses of the upper-classes, the lines were repeatedly thought over and modified until the desired effect was achieved. Bernard Shaw’s statements on one of his plays was edifying for Wilde’s manner of handling theatre:

Mr Oscar Wilde’s new play at the Haymarket is a dangerous subject, because he has the property of making his critics dull. They laugh angrily at his epigrams, like a child who is coaxed into being amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage and agony. They protest that the trick is obvious, and that such epigrams can be turned out by the score by anyone light minded enough to condescend to such frivolity. As far as I can ascertain, I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will. The fact that his plays, though apparently lucrative, remain unique under these circumstances, says much for the self-denial of our scribes. In a certain sense Mr Wilde is to me out only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre (qtd.in Holland 96).

Bernard Shaw spoke the truth because even if his plays had immense success with the audience, unfortunately, it was not the same with the critics. Wilde conveyed a high degree of novelty in his plays that made them impossible for the obtuse Victorian critics to include in a category, therefore, in the beginning they wrote coarse reviews about them. The critics were faced with a new literary type they could not grasp and as a result chose to comment upon trivial things such as Wilde’s behaviour at the end of the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan when he gave a short and truly appreciated speech but appeared on stage with a cigarette in his hand. This gesture vexed the reviewers who prefered to analyse it rather than the play and said about Wilde that: “People of birth and breeding don’t do such things”. (qtd. in Holland 82). Although Wilde never bestowed interest in the opinions of the critics, the consequence of this moment was that at the closure of the first night of A Woman of No Importance when he was expected to give a speech again, he stood up and announced that: “Ladies and gentleman, I regret to inform you that Mr Oscar Wilde is not in the house.” (qtd. in Holland 88)

Wilde’s public was a reflection of his characters: “well connected, well dressed, wealthy and influential”(Raby 144) so everything resembled to be a great house party during the English season (although the performances of his plays become compulsory events to attend) as everyone had been introduced and acquainted. He gave an extraordinary attention to costumes and accessories. His own, when he appeared at the debut of Lady Windermere’s Fan wearing mauve gloves and a green carnation to match the one his dandy- Cecil Graham wore in the play, and also the costumes of the actors were exquisite and rapidly grew into being fashion items copied by the upper class. He made the button-hole notorious through Lord Goring, transformed Lady Windermere’s cloak into a symbol for love and created a coupe de theatre out of Jack Worthing’s mourning clothes. The decorations were rigidly arranged to copy in detail the real English houses and the costumes were carefully chosen to equal them so nothing would be “clashed or ugly”(Jackson 162). Lady Alexander, the wife of Sir George Alexander-the director and actor in The Importance of Being Earnest said about the premiere of the play that “Everybody knew everybody, everybody put on their best clothes, everybody wished us success.” (qtd. in Jackson162) Wilde’s plays were enjoyed by an aristocracy tired of its own seriousness and the witty epigrams were immensely reproduced in the English saloons.

Before entering Wilde’s comedy world we need to investigate first his status in the English society and the social circumstances that revolve on the English-Irish matter and that certainly affected Wilde in some degree. After the 1840’s famine that ravaged Ireland leaving it with a million deaths and another million that had emigrated, a series of nationalist interventions took place with the goal of parting with the English administration. In 1886 was introduced the first Home Rule Bill that asked for autonomy inside the Union but it never passed the British House of Commons. Subsequently, Charles Stewart Parnell, a radical Irish politician who strongly sustained the Home Rule policy died in 1892 destroying the dream of “uniting the varying Irish interests represented in the Commons”(Cave 222). Later the same year the Irish National Literary Society was founded and Douglas Hyde gave a stimulating speech “On the Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish People” that led to the establishment of the Gaelic League. All these were part of what was known as the Irish Renaissance that dominates Irish literature, music and art. The movement campaigned for the rebirth of Celtic traditions, myths, and symbols as inspirational sources for Irish writers. It also generated a trend in the preservation of Ireland’s national language: Gaelic. All these were formed to counteract the English invasion of Irish culture. Politically, 1893 brings a second Home Rule Bill that passed the British House of Commons but not the House of Lords. Continuing their process of liberation the Irish found in 1894 the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society and the Irish Trades Union Congress that would enforce their desire for emancipation along with the on-going Catholic emancipation that had started some previous years giving birth to a strong nationalist feeling. Although Wilde’s plays could never be seen as a clear politic manifestation of anti-English views, he wrote from an outsider point of view. His status of an outsider was marked not only by his Irish origin but also by his lack of class affiliation to the aristocracy. Wilde took advantage of the fact that he was invited in the houses of the upper-class and that he was appreciated for his enjoyable company and “would attack the bastions of the English establishment from within.”(Cave 223)

Wilde has expressed his disapproval towards English Imperialist policy earlier in his essay The Soul of Man under Socialism but what he tries to do now with his plays is actually an attempt of “deconstructing Englishness.”(Cave 223). English Imperialist Society takes a lot of proud in their inviolable moral values that dominates every aspect of their life from marriage to work. What Wilde does is to expose the corruption that lies underneath this refined glossy exterior and the compromises that are asked for to maintain the image of a perfect life. His characters are de-masked by a continuous series of events that generally appear as consequences of their fraudulent past that menaces their present respectability. As a constant alien element of English society, Wilde could observe the fake affected manners of its members and the rotten truth that exists under it.

In his play An Ideal Husband he attacks the sacred institution of marriage mocking Victorian pieties, displaying the never ending number of compromises that the characters are willing to make to preserve their good name. If in his other two previous plays he maintains the matter of class and the bound issues of morality, richness and position in the limits of parties and family business in An Ideal Husband he makes them a game of politics and higher state affairs. Robert Chiltren, the Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs is the ideal husband with a shameful secret past who has made his way to the top selling a state secret for his own benefit about the Suez Canal in his early career. Presently he is blackmailed with exposure unless he is willing to sustain the Argentine scheme in the Parliament. The Argentine Canal Scheme, Wilde’s invention has its roots in the French Panama Canal scandal that occurs while his writing of the play giving it the touch of reality to make the play authentic.

The society Wilde presents here evolves around the ones who hold political power and whose “reference points are to the House of Parliament, to Downing Street, attaches at Embassies, and seats in the Cabinet”(Raby 154) and who are grouped in the Chiltren’s residence as the entertainment centre. The play begins with a description of the house of Sir Robert Chiltern, one of the main characters who, in the beginning, is taught to be the ideal husband but in the end, he has exposed all the perversity that is necessary to become “a personality of mark”(Wilde 2005, 340). The ideal of the play is anticipated by the French tapestry, the “Triumph of Love” that hints the fact that love and marriage are the main concern’s of the characters of this play. Sir Robert Chiltern is considered to be the ideal husband, an English gentleman. His physical appearance is described in detail and shows a successful man, rigorous and organized who victoriously draws a sharp line between intellect and passion. He seems in control of his existence and “conscious of the success he has made in life”(Wilde 2005, 340). He is the image of the desired and admired man of the Victorian Age and his life is praised and respected until his past revives through Mrs. Cheveley’s blackmail and threat to exposure. He accuses Mrs. Cheveley of infamous conduct when she compels him to support her scheme although he has also built his career and fortune on corrupted acts. He plays the role of the moral husband in front of his wife but sensing the vicinity of a public scandal, he argues in a discussion with her on Mrs. Cheveley that: “No one should be entirely judged by their past”(Wilde 2005, 365). He becomes more tolerant and easily casts off the moral correctness that has made him an example of good behavior. He confesses everything to Lord Goring and tries as well to excuse himself in front of him blaming youth, his initial lack of fortune and his good birth. Practically he considers the circumstances and society to be guilty of his shameful deed. Furthermore he doesn’t seem to repent what he has done but exposes a somewhat pleased feeling about the way he has managed his faith: “I didn’t sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price”(Wilde 2005, 373). He is an obvious example of a character with a mask, Wilde’s embodiment of “immorality and hypocrisy, and the immense self-satisfaction, of the English ruling classes, and which yet contrives to show glimpses of the charm and elegance, the allure, of a way of life which has no future.”(Raby 154)

His spouse, Lady Chiltern, is a woman of strong morals who rejects anyone who appears to have any faults in this matter. Her description of being “a woman of grave Greek beauty”(Wilde 2005, 335) resembles to that of a statue that enforces the coldness and impermeability of her personality. Her physical portrait is less detailed probably because her simplicity of mind is reflected in her looks. The other characters are the ones who shape an image of her nature therefore the correctness and integrity that she so much appreciates is seen both as a negative and a positive aspect, depending on the character that talks about her:

Lady Markby. […] And he has married a most admirable wife. Lady Chiltern is a woman of the very highest principles, I am glad to say. […] And Lady Chiltern has a very ennobling effect on life (Wilde 2005, 361).

Sir Robert Chiltern. Yes; my wife is as perfect as all that (Wilde 2005, 371).

Lord Goring. Lady Chiltern, I have sometimes thought that… perhaps you are a little hard in some of your views on life (Wilde 2005, 384).

Mrs. Cheveley [leaning back in her chair]. Do you know, Gertrude, I don’t mind your talking morality a bit. Morality is simple the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike. You dislike me, I am quite aware of that. And I have always detested you(Wilde 2005, 398).

She embodies the perfect Victorian wife: plain, strict, devoted to her principles. Her entire existence gravitates around her husband who she considers to be the highest example of perfection in faultless demeanor. She loves him because she sees herself in him and when she is confronted with his past mistake she perceives it as betrayal as if she has lost the object of her adoration: “We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything”(Wilde 2005, 368). In the first instance she requires him to retire from public life as a punishment for his past misbehavior but in the end she learns that reality cannot always be faithful to her beloved morals and forgives him. Despite her strictness, Wilde creates her also as a modern woman, member of the Woman’s Liberal Association which deals with aspects of political and social life: Factory Acts, Female Inspectors, the Eight Hours’ Bill, and the Parliamentary Franchise. All these keep the action very close to the realities of the 1890s when a shy movement for the emancipation of women starts. However she is reduced to the state of only being an obedient wife by the mocking misogynist belief of Lord Goring that: “A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s”(Wilde 2005, 447). convincing her that her duty is to encourage her husband to keep his position in the office. Wilde plays with these two characters throughout the entire comedy in the attempt to reveal falsity, making their marriage an object of mockery.

Mrs. Cheveley, Wilde’s example of the woman with a past, the villainous in this play gives away her nature from her entrance at the Chiltren’s party being different from the other ladies in the saloon and different from what is expected of a woman in Victorian society. She is the image of the adventurer, the ambitious woman that has the power to intrigue and dares to mock their values. Moreover, her ridicule of Victorian society goes throughout the play. She is an outsider therefore is able to judge Society objectively and to trace its faults accurately:” I can’t stand your English house parties. In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast”(Wilde 2005, 353). Mrs Cheveley is a clever and rich woman with a curious past having been engaged to Lord Goring and a companion for Baron Arnheim who is behind both Robert Chiltren’s past corrupted mistake and Mrs. Cheveley’s lack of scrupulous. The scenes in which Mrs Cheveley appears are the most intriguing: she is the centre of attention at the Chiltren’s reception, comes round Lady Chiltren one afternoon uninvited, and pays a midnight visit to Lord Goring stirring up spirits everywhere she goes.

Her late night visit to Lord Goring is a piece of Wilde’s “high comedy and melodrama”(Raby 156). The entire scene is a long line of unexpected happenings that trouble Lord Goring in his attempt to remain in control: one by one appear his meddling father Lord Caversham, Mrs Cheveley, Robert Chiltren. The scene is dominated by the pressure of Lady Chiltren’s arrival as she has already announced in her pink letter. The level of misinterpretations increases and the tension is hardly bearable as Lord Goring and the audience expect for a hilarious and melodramatic disclosure of the mysterious and simultaneous rendezvous. The chaotic scene where chairs fall, bells ring, letters are stolen and burned is calmly directed by the imperturbable “Sphinx-like Ideal Butler, Phipps”(Raby 157). The peak of the melodrama is Lord Goring’s struggle with Mrs Cheveley for the snake-brooch when he manages to unmask her showing the ugliness that is hidden under her colorful appearance which is making her “dreadful to look at”(Wilde 2005, 427). Wilde exploits in this scene all his characters emphasizing their faults, exaggerating their falsity and habits until they are “transparent and so exposed to ironic scrutiny”(Raby 146). He reveals a connoisseur’s eye when it comes to mirroring English upper-class society; all his characters are accurately created with an unprecedented attention bestowed to details. He mocks Englishness through his characters Lord Goring and Mrs. Cheveley but also imposes a general domination through the “physical pattern and verbal tone”(Raby 157)

The character that takes the role of the protector of the Chiltren’s love is the trivial Lord Goring. He is the character that at the first impression seems to wear the thickest mask and to be the most unnatural of the characters. He is the overdressed “flawless dandy”(Wilde 2005, 345) that uses wit as means of defense and of keeping the distance between him and the others so he would not be expected to sincerely participate in any of their problems. His dialogue is full of wit and irony towards his interlocutor and his criticism is often missed because of his studied subtlety. Everything about him is a “well-bred” pose and represents the embodiment of the aesthetic preference for extreme artifice. He can be taken for the on-stage replica of Wilde himself:

Lord Goring enters in evening dress with a buttonhole. He is wearing a silk hat and Inverness cape. White-gloved, he carries a Louis Seize cane. His are all the delicate fopperies of fashion. One sees that he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first well dressed philosopher in the history of thought (Wilde 2005, 402).

The two characters that throughout the play make a purpose from living for pleasure are Lord Goring and Mabel Chiltern. For them, looking good, having no practical pursuits, enjoying themselves, making trivial conversation and being interested in nothing else but their own splendid state are the only possible choices. Wilde himself is said to have said that he desires to “lead the life of pleasure for a time and then-who knows?-rest and do nothing.”(qtd.in Holland 27). Of course this kind of demeanor, being uncommon for such a strict period has attracted disapproval especially in the case of Lord Goring and his father Lord Caversham who is constantly outraged by his son fancy of a “living entirely for pleasure”(Wilde 2005, 348).

In addition Wilde creates English Society to be an infinite row of tea-parties, luncheons, dances and park walks governed by the overall feeling of idleness towards work. Nobody works or wants to work in the play and wealth is acquired through blackmail or selling state secrets. From a social perspective, Victorian Age is the period of the rise of the working class who, as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution achieves great fortunes and moves forward in the social rank menacing the privileged position of aristocracy. However, Wilde’s English aristocracy believes to be a “society still ostensibly ruling a large part of the world” (Raby 158).

The characters have defining features that betray their belonging to a type: the dandy, the woman with a past, the corrupted, the moralist and all of them are subdued to the “imperialist rhetoric”(Wilde 2005, 224) that displays antithetical subjects: “good and evil, conqueror and subject […] and the manly man and the womanly woman”(Cave 224). The last pair is represented by the emblems of masculinity and feminity: Lord Goring’s button-hole and Lady Chiltren’s pink letter. Wilde uses all their conventions and customs and makes them agents of his mockery. The language is carefully used and trough means of wit and irony is turned to ridicule the “English stiff upper-lip”.(Cave 224) All his characters are exploited in any possible way until they manage to fulfill their duty: to mock English upper class society and its actual lack of morals.

Both the previous play and The Importance of Being Earnest share themes of marriage, love and Wilde’s determination to reveal the hypocrisy that dominates the 1980s society. This play that Wilde pointed to be a “somewhat farcical comedy” (qtd.in Holland 98) makes use of his ability to create a subversive critique hidden under a comic series of farces and impediments that precede marriage in the London upper class dimension. The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband represent instances of the same English Society which is treated in two different ways: the first is an “ostensible farce”(Raby 159) that mirrors an almost surreal image of Society, the latter is a mockery of conventional morality and politics. Both of them reflect Wilde’s contemporary Society of which he also wants to be part but in the same time he traces and reproduces it in minute details claming to have made drama “the most objective form known to art”(Raby 159).

The Importance of Being Earnest is different from the other plays because it lacks a certain number of common features of the others. “This new play seems an excursion-a day-trip into a less demanding, less adventurous kind of theatre”(Jackson 165). It lacks the pressuring grave plot, the pompous, sole-uplifting speeches which the characters give in tensioned moments or the classical pattern of characters. Here there is no woman with a past-Miss Prism’s stupid past mistake cannot equal the past sins of Wilde’s other women. Also Wilde’s agent of “getting back at a discriminating society”(Tupan, 122), the role of the dandy is split between two men but witty phrases and epigrams are equally produced by their female counterparts. In this play the wearisome feeling of guilt, the life-changing secret, the imposed double life of the characters lack the seriousness that give the other plays a slight realistic effect.

The main attraction and the idea around which The Importance of Being Earnest is build is Wilde’s brilliant construction of doubleness by creating characters with two opposed selves. They embody but at the same time represent a caricature of dramatic types: the “formidable dowager, sweet ingénue, fussy clergyman and scapegrace man about town”(Jackson 172). He creates for each of them a secret life that allows them to lead a life that is controlled by them and which is not entirely overwhelmed by the requirement of fulfilling their social duties. Algernon is a loyal practitioner of “Bunburyism”, Jack has an invented nuisance of a brother Earnest, Cecily hides an imaginary but passionate engagement with Earnest, Gwendolen ends doing what she wants although apparently she is very obedient, Miss Prism and Chasuble love each other secretly but without daring to confess to one another and the terrible Lady Bracknell only hints to be a woman with a past. None of them believes in their moral posture but are conscious that this is the way they are supposed to behave and represent the “struggles of a particular social group to avoid being exposed for what they really are”(Cave 227): characters that long to be examples of high society members but end up their farcical variants.

The Importance of Being Earnest lacks the presence of the naïve idealistic woman (Lady Windermere, Hester Worsley, and Lady Chiltren) that give moralizing speeches which are generally unbelievably unrealistic. Wilde creates the two young ladies in the play as ridiculous versions of the others by bestowing them an ideal they highly think of: the desire to marry a man called Earnest. When Gwendolen and Cecily meet they turn to aggressiveness in order to prove that each of them is engaged to Earnest Worthing. This foolish farce ends with the exposure of Jack and Algernon and of their lying to them. Paradoxically the young women are not furious about anything else but the fact that their names are not Earnest.

The farcical elements of the play are numerous and begin with Algernon’s obsession for food and continue with the confusion that the identity of Earnest Worthing creates. When Jack, under the name of Earnest, proposes to Algernon’s cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax he finds out that her immense love for him is in great proportion due to his being named Earnest. Urged by the desire to make Gwendolene love him for John Worthing and not Earnest, he decides to kill his notorious younger brother. Alternatively, Algernon who is fascinated by John’s description of his ward, Cecily Cardew, he settles in going to John’s country house pretending to be Earnest in order to meet her. The humorous peak is reached when Jack also comes at the country house all dressed up in mourning clothes weeping for the sudden loss of Earnest that represents the scene with “the finest visual effect”(Jackson 171).

Enter Jack slowly from the back of the garden. He is dressed in the deepest mourning, with crape hat band and black gloves.

[…]

Chasuble: Dear Mr. Worthing, I trust this garb of woe does not betoken some terrible calamity?

Jack: My Brother.

Miss Prism: More shameful debts and extravagance?

Chasuble: Still leading his life of pleasure?

Jack (shaking his head): Dead!

Chasuble: Your brother Ernest dead?

Jack: Quite dead.

Miss Prism: What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it (Wilde 2000, 387).

As mentioned above Wilde feels like an outsider of Victorian Society and the idea of exclusiveness is overtly dealt with in this play through Lady Bracknell’s “unwavering dogmatism”(Jackson 169) that she displays during her severe and “compulsory” interrogation of Jack. Her “magisterial” style of diminishing Jack on grounds of politics, address, and habits is part of her “draconian social discriminations”(Jackson 171). While she seems quite pleased with his income and possessions, she is outraged by the thought of him being adopted by Thomas Cardew after having been found in a railway station so she dismisses him on the basis that he cannot represent “a recognized position in good society”(Wilde 2000, 377). Lady Bracknell is the embodiment of Society’s prejudices and the extraordinary polish and make-up one needs before being accepted. Her obsession with status is a consequence of her own parvenus. She married in aristocracy although “When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way”(Wilde 2000, 410). She is the embodiment of the highest hypocrisy and English arrogance.

The social events of the 1890s are matters of small talk in The Importance of Being Earnest. The Irish Home Rule issue is brought in discussion through Jack’s confession that he is a Liberal Unionist. Education, marriage, status of the lower classes, religion- all of them are concerns of the Victorian Age and targets of Wilde’s wit and irony. The French Revolution is reduced to “that unfortunate movement”(Wilde 2000, 377), marriage is just a transaction and education is perceived as being a possible motive for riot. The “acts of violence in Grosvenor Square(Wilde 2000, 375)” are the echo of aristocracy’s fear for insurrection and the socialistic ideas that the masses come in touch.

Another characteristic of Wilde’s writing is not present in the play: “self-conscious decadence”(Jackson 166). Characters such as Lord Henry Wotton, Lord Illingworth and Baron Arnheim all represent the tools of seduction for young minds: Dorian, Gerald Arbuthnot and Robert Chiltren. None of this play’s characters is seduced and corrupted as none of them is actually innocent. Nevertheless the farce has a philosophical message that “we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality”(qtd in. Jackson 173).

What Wilde tries and eventually manages in his plays is to unveil the hollowness that rules Victorian aristocracy. As an Irish dandy he considers himself an outsider therefore engages in this act of rebellion with the necessary tools that transform his plays into a referential point for Victorian aristocratic behaviour. He masks and de-masks his characters, reveals the gross façade and the fraudulent fabrication that their lives are by intersecting their private and public identity. He succeeds in demonstrating that Victorian pieties and morality is only a pose that hides a decaying way of life and this is “a claim which Society found it hard to accept, or forgive.”(Raby 159)

One of Wilde’s last photos taken before the 1895 trials.

The Figure of the Artist in Wilde’s Salome

After the immense success and popularity that he achieved with the social comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde left London for Paris where he wrote the controversial Salome, a symbolist tragedy in one act. Wilde gave the part of Salome to Sarah Bernhardt, a famous French actress, one of Wilde’s particular favorites, and rehearsals started at the Palace Theatre in London. Unfortunately the play saw only one performance during Wilde’s life at the Theatre de L’Oevre in Paris in 1896. At that time he was imprisoned for acts of “gross indecency” and would never be able to see a representation of what was going to become “a household word wherever the English language is not spoken”(Donohue 119). The grounds on which the Lord Chamberlain had refused to give licence for the English performance was an interdict pronounced by King Henry VIII against catholic mystery plays during the Reformation. The real and hidden motive, however, was the strict Victorian morality which Wilde had endeavoured to defeat through his writings all his life.

In defiance of the pieties and morality that surfaced Victorians; the fin de siecle society was dominated by the beginning of the emancipation of women and along with that, by the mood generated by the overt discussion of female sexuality which had been denied and ignored till then. Gradually women were parting with the traditional picture of housewives and mothers for the sake of freedom and the desire to build a career. Yet labour conditions were still hard for women and the wages very low, so ultimately most of them resorted to prostitution to maintain themselves; there were about 80 000 prostitutes in turn of the century London. Although scared by rebellious women, men became fascinated with their affirmed sexuality and disobedience in point of social conventions. This image of independence was rapidly being altered by traditionalists who condemned their liberty and perceived them as manipulative, vicious beings with abnormal lusts. In his reflections On Women, the German philosopher Schopenhauer argues that in all women reside evil, the habit of lying and the singular purpose of seducing men in every way and of manipulating them through sexuality:

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct […]

But a woman is always and everywhere driven to indirect mastery, namely through a man; all her direct mastery being limited to him alone. Therefore it lies in woman's nature to look upon everything only as a means for winning man, and her interest in anything else is always a simulated one, a mere Women roundabout way to gain her ends, consisting of coquetry and pretence. (Schopenhauer, On Women)

Schopenhauer’s views on women and femininity were echoed by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols where Schopenhauer is extolled as the only genuine philosopher of the 19th century. Nietzsche talks about woman as an idealized projection of man’s subconscious rather than as an autonomous being; he sees her as a liar in whom literature mingles with sin, identifying woman with the figure of the decadent artist:

Barbatul a creat-o pe femeie-oare din ce? Dintr-o coasta a Dumnezeului sau-a “idealului” sau… (Nietzsche 15)

Intre femei.- “Adevarul? O, dar nu-l cunoasteti! Nu-i oare adevarul un antentat la pudoarea noastra?” (Nietzsche 16)

Femeia deplina comite literature asa cum ar comite un mic pacat: de proba, in treacat, cautand in jur daca o vede cineva si pentru ca s-o vada… (Nietzsche 17)

Wilde does not disagree with Nietzsche; on the contrary, several of the German idol-breaker’s ideas germinated into his. It was only that he valued positively what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had deplored in woman. Wilde makes Salome into an artist figure, meaning an artful liar, and the personification of the aesthetic criticism which he preaches in his essay The Decay of Lying: “Lying and poetry are arts” (Wilde 2000, 144) and “the object of art is not simple truth but complex beauty” (Wilde 2000, 152), therefore “society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar” (Wilde 2000, 155). He makes Salome his agent of destruction who wreaks havoc upon the Victorian binaries of Manichean thinking: he reverses sexual roles, subjugates law to lust, rewrites poetry as prose, creates a lyrical drama that transgresses generic boundaries arguing that “In order to know an essence one must eliminate it”(qtd.in Dollimore 4). His drama offends the public eye, being labeled “half Biblical, half pornographic” (qtd.in Donohue 118) and relegated to the domain of private reading. The situation was different in France, where the overlay of prose and poetry had already been explored by Aloysius Bertrand in his work Gespard de la Nuit (1842) and by Charles Baudelaire in Petits Poemes en Prose, which appeared posthumously in 1869, being later adopted by the symbolist poets. Paris was also known as somewhat more libertine and indulgent with respect to sexual expression. Unlike the English, the French accept that “sexual attraction had operated for a long time as the wild card in social relations” (Chambers 102); therefore, when Salome was staged, it was received with enthusiasm and the drama’s provocative Salome was characterized as a “jeune princesse, que definitivment vous evoquates” (qtd. in Donohue 122).

Wilde writes a mythological version of Salome rather than a Biblical one interpreting very loosely the story and the characters from the Bible. He combines the three Biblical Herods: Herod Antipas, Herod Agrippa and Herod the Tetrarch and furthermore he endows his character with a tormented lust for his step-daughter and at the same time with veneration for the prophecies of Iokanaan creating a Herod who embodies Wilde’s own distress and duality: “Herod is a Wildean self-portrait, a clandestine expression of Wilde’s alleged ambivalence over the extremes represented by Salome and Iokanaan”(Donohue 137). He gives to Herod’s wife and Salome’s mother a somewhat marginal and farcical role in the play- the disbeliever -, while shifting the centre of attention from Iokanaan to Salome. Consequently, the play’s subject is her uncontrolled and prohibited desire, as well as its suppression by authority.

Salome also differs from previous versions in that Wilde gives his heroine the power to demand Iokanaan’s head instead of relying on her mother, becoming the only tool of destruction. Moreover, in Wilde’s version, the Tetrarch court is minutely described and divided into two groups having Herodias and the Page as extreme representatives of “worldly cynism and symbolist fantasy”(Donohue 125). There are people from the entire known world at the banquet: Syrian, Cappadocian, Nubian, Roman, Jews, Nazarenes and the discussions revolve around Caesar and Jesus. The scene is dominated by the heavy feeling of immediate change in a dying world, trapped in its last moment of depravation, unconscious of the irreversible disorder. The first element of distress is the appearance of Salome on the terrace. She disobeys Herod and refuses to return to the banquet ignoring his authority. Another token of the impending crisis is the suicide of the Syrian who “serves as a pivotal figure” (Donohue 126). He is fascinated by the young princess and, without being able to refuse her desire to see Iokanaan, disposes the guards to bring him to her. When he realizes that he has defied Herod’s will to keep the prophet hidden in favor of Salome’s seduction and that his insubordination has caused her erotic infatuation with the prophet, he kills himself. His death leaves a marsh of blood between Salome and Iokanaan, an omen of evil, and the Syrian becomes a symbol of the clash between lust and law.

The play has strong visual interdictions, the passionate desire present in characters such as the Syrian, Herod and Salome being also evoked by the obsessive restraints on seeing, and gazing or looking upon the point of attraction which threads the entire action. A recurrent image is that of the moon, which has a different symbolic meaning for each of them. For the Page of Herodias, who is tormented with the idea of death, the moon is: “a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman” (Wilde 2000, 135)/ “the hand of a dead woman who is seeking to cover herself with a shroud” (Wilde 2000, 140), and after the Syrians sudden death he thinks he has been proved right: “I knew that the moon was seeking a dead thing, but I knew not that it was he whom she sought” (Wilde 2000, 144). For the Syrian who is bewitched by Salome, the moon’s image fuses with the princess’s: “a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet” (Wilde 2000, 135) or “a little princess whose eyes are eyes of amber” (Wilde 2000, 140). To Salome, who is absorbed in narcissistic contemplation of her virginity, the moon is a projection of herself: “a little piece of money, you would think she was a little silver flower […] cold and chaste […] she has a virgin’s beauty […] she is a virgin. She has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men, like the other goddesses” (Wilde 2000, 138). The moon for Salome is the image of her own adoration and perfection, but, when she is enwrapped by Iokanaan’s physical appearance, she declares that “the breast of the moon when she lies on the breast of the sea” (Wilde 2000, 142) is incomparable with his whiteness. For her stepfather, the moon is a sign of disturbance: “a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers” (Wilde 2000, 145). Herodias’s conclusion to all these suggestive and symbolic perceptions of the moon is that “the moon is like the moon, that is all”(Wilde 2000, 145), as if she were trying, with her simple and unintended comic affirmation, to put an end to this dreamy and gloomy atmosphere that has enveloped the scene.

Another subject of seeing and gazing in the play is Salome herself- the object of passionate lust of both the Syrian and Herod. She is the embodiment of dangerous beauty, as several warnings are uttered that stress the fact that one should not look at her. She represents, for Herod, “something that is strongly desired and equally forcibly forbidden”(Donohue 131). When she dances the “dance of the seven veils” in front of him, the play reaches its peak of suggestive erotic, as the reader can imagine the Tetrarch’s passionate look while she covers and uncovers herself with the seven veils. This dance has a multitude of meanings. Nietzsche believes dancing to be an experience that allows the performer to play with everything: “cu picioarele, cu notiunile, cu vorbele”(Nietzsche 84). Salome uses dancing as her weapon to obtain the object of her desire. She acknowledges Herod’s feelings and learns to manipulate him. She is no longer a virginal image, and gradually mutates into the seductress described in Schopenhauer’s essay. She plays with the Tetrarch’s instincts undermining his authority, defeating his will and making him kill the prophet and, in the end, herself. It can also be seen as an “unmaking of the world of flesh” (Tupan 123), as she aspires to the divine, to transcend her condition. She represents the earthly essence of the moon, as Salome herself bestows on the moon the qualities which she sees in her: chaste, cold, silver feet and untouched. This is how she is represented by Beardsley in his illustrations. He separates her from the terrestrial, as she is part of the cult of the moon. Wilde’s Salome is not an expression of libidinal desire, as she emerges in Moreau’s painting, where she is surrounded by sensual symbols, such as the black panther and the lotus flower. Moreau’s Salome is “an emblem of sensuality, of unhealthy curiosity, and of that terrible fate reserved for searchers after a nameless ideal” (qtd.in Donohue 128).

Salome’s enamouring of Iokanaan represents a premature and inhuman lust of a young woman that is destructive and illicit, but it has an uncontrollable power over her, and she becomes persistent in fulfilling the wish which has been denied to her: to kiss the prophet. She expresses her desire freely; it is so intense that “it overcomes all the world and life itself” (Donohue 131). Her lust exceeds her comprehension, and she no longer has any option but to yield to it: within her resides a vengeful vicious passion, which is satisfied only when she obtains Iokanaan’s head. At this moment she preaches the new religion that represents Wilde’s wish that love be exempt from the rules of society: “Love only should one consider” (Wilde 2000, 160). Salome is a figure of the triumph of love, of the spiritualization of desire, while, at the same time, feeding into the myth of the fin de siecle femme fatale.

Gustav Moreau Dancing Before Herod, 1876

She is an innocent girl who is confronted with a desire abnormal for her age, and, therefore, banned away from her. However, in the course of the action, her demeanor changes revealing her cruel and perverse nature. She does not surrender to Herod’s insistences, she is manipulative of men – she manages to enthrall both Herod and the Syrian – she knows how to negotiate and is conscious of the power that abides in her unscrupulous beauty. She represents “the castration of the forces of law and order by the forces of illicit sexual desire” (qtd.in Donohue 129). Her kissing of the severed head is considered a sign of necrophilia which the Victorians associated with a degenerative erotic manifestation. After satisfying her desire at the cost of a “crime against an unknown God”(Wilde 2000, 160) there is no other option for Salome than death: thanatos overshadows eros. Even dead, she is not defeated, as she becomes a fin de siecle myth alongside Dracula, Dorian Gray, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, interpreted as “terrifying metaphors for sexuality” (Kaye 53). The femme fatale is society’s fear of reversed poles: men are no longer the only ones who are featured with the power to seduce and control.

One of the reasons why this play was seen as an offence against society is Wilde’s disobedience towards the binaries that governed society: feminine/masculine, heterosexual/homosexual. In his Sexual Dissidence, Jonathan Dollimore argues that: “one of many reasons why people were terrified by Wilde was because of a perceived connection between his aesthetic transgression and his sexual transgression”(Dollimore 67). This kind of trespassing occurs in Salome at the point where the action hints at a disguised homosexuality. She expresses her interest in Narraboth by promising him to drop a “little green flower” which is identified with the green carnation that appears in Lady Windermere’s Fan as his dandy’s button-hole. This flower has a symbolical meaning, as it was silently acknowledged as the flower that indicated a homosexual orientation in Paris. Judging by this gesture, Salome’s desire can be interpreted as “perversely and clandestinely male” (Donohue 127). The line between heterosexual and homosexual desire is blurred by Beardsley’s illustration of Salome and Iokanaan as mirror images. The severed head is portrayed as a variant of the Medusa – the antique image of the fatal woman – and, at the same time, Salome’s hair suggests the body of a spider. Feminine and masculine are no longer separated, and sexual desire becomes the only “ruling divinity” (qtd.in Donohue 129).

The play elicited unfavourable reviews, some critics accusing Wilde of plagiarism, perversity and blasphemy. The Pall Mall Gazette columnist contends that nothing in the play is original, it being only an unfortunate mixture of Flaubert, Maeterlinck, Gautier, and Huysmans. A personal recollection of Robert Ross is edifying for Wilde’s response to the accusations of plagiarism: “My dear fellow, when I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals” (qtd.in Holland 84).

The accusations of perversity and blasphemy may be explained away through a Freudian analysis of Salome as merely a girl in whom resides the “Daughter of Sodom”, which leads to the conclusion that there is no difference between the unconscious lust that exists in an adolescent, a woman and a prostitute. In his Three Studies in the Theory of Sexuality – Freud argues that in Salome lies every type of desire, as the princess is in turn “a peevish, erotically discerning girl, an unworldly adolescent, and a woman who prostitutes herself by cannily bargaining for sexual favours” (Kaye 57).

Wilde’s Salome is representative for both Wilde and the period he wrote in as a piece of innovative drama which through its subject, its transgression of binaries and the amount of self-expression amounts to a statement in aesthetic criticism: beauty without morals. Its construction, language and abundance of symbolism alongside its intense sexuality could only be perceived as a public offence because of the Victorians’ incapacity to understand Wilde’s message.

Aubrey Beardsley Dance of the Seven Veils; Wilde declares that Beardsley is “the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance” (qtd. in Donohue 123)

Aubrey Beardsley’s first illustration of Salome

Conclusion

To conclude the present thesis, I would like to say that, as I have shown, Oscar Wilde was different from the Victorian writers on various levels. He was a paradoxical aesthete due to the fact that, even if he embraced the ideas of the bohemian writers he could not stand apart from the social realities that shaped English Society. He strongly believed in the aesthetics of beauty that he preached and not only did he write respecting his theory but he also lived by it, blurring the fine line between his art and his life. He wanted to dedicate his existence to the search of pure beauty as the aesthetes that inspired him: Baudelaire, Pater, Rossetti, Huysmans. As a dandy, he could not turn his back to Society but he fought against its hypocrisy and false morality. His controversial personality is reflected in his works: he makes the English upper-class the subject of his plays and at the same time he embraces socialism as proper means of developing individualism. He struggles for equal rights and the abolition of privet property but lives a life of pleasure in his richly and extravagant house. These contradictions that characterize both his life and art make him the figure of the Fin de Siecle artist and a referential point for the culture of his generation.