Wilde: Outline

[jhameia]

The practice of morality is developed by the responsible individual through both contemplation and love of aesthetics.

Contemplation:
morality sense is developed through meditating actions and behaviour.
adapting from Matthew Arnold's Sweetness and Light - the best thoughts with the best intentions.
Dorian Gray: Dorian and Harry are unable to contemplate on the effects of their words and experiences on others. As a result, Dorian's sense of morality deteriorates, and Harry loses his wife.
Devoted Friend: Water-rat would be considered immoral because his refuses to consider how actions of the Miller adversely affect Little Hans.
De Profoundis: Onus on Douglas for shallowness, not considering actions.

Wood:
164 The only truly dead characters in his stories are those who are so limited by preconceived notions of themselevs and their erlation to others that they cannot experience life or themselves with the deliberation of artists. Wilde's monstrous characters are ... grotesquely selfish and exploitive, relying upon their status, wealth, and importance in society to insulate them from the pain and suffering of others. The resonant characters are those who love and are willing to cut short their own lives and possibilities to remain true to that love, making their lives art.

Brown, Julia Prewitt. Cosmopolitan Criticism.

2 Wilde self-consciously displays the transcendent "lie" or art, a lie that deserves to be defended if only because it corrects the far more pervasive and dangerous illusion that *things as they are* represent the whole truth. Things *as they might have been*, *as they once were*, and *as they might be* figure in Wilde's ethical-aesthetic meditation on his life as well.

79 Our ethics norms, whatever they may be, tend to pale before the experience of the "fiery-coloured world" illuminated by art. Dorian becomes increasingly curious about experiences that lie outside the normas he has known.


Aesthetics:
Through a love for the beautiful, the individual should strive to be a kind of person that causes goodness, so as to keep being surrounded by beauty.
Ugliness in the world can rarely be avoided so the individual should try to make beauty a reality rather than leave the world as it is.
Happy Prince

Waldrep, Shelton. "The Aesthetic Realism of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray."

104 ... construing Wilde as an aesthete necessarily means understanding that to Wilde himself such a designation would not mean a divorce between utility and value as it did, e.g. for Gautier. For wilde, realism embodied an absolute value for aesthetics, given that only by seeing the world as it really is and appreciating what is beautiful - through the power of one's ablity to make choices - can one ever hope to begin the task of making the world thoroughly aesthetic. ... Realism ... is just another name for the total aestheticization of everything.

105 The contradictions contained in Wilde's novel between realism (or Naturalism) and decadence ... expres the paradoxes of his aesthetic doctrine.

107 Wilde did, however, depend on the use of realism for "background", plot, and much else, as can be seen not only in the plays and fiction but also in the style and the subject matter of The Ballad of Reading Gaol...


Wood, Naomi. "Creating the Sensual Child: Paterian Aesthetics, Pederasty, and Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales."

160 Oscar Wilde is famous fo the apparently seamless correspondences between his life and art. Frequently his art is used to explain his life rather than vice versa.

It is clear that Wilde was aware of the aural appeal of his tales, and he polished them and their delivery as carefully for his hearing audiences as for his reading one.

Brown:

52 The power of art to transform and to spiritualize us ("realise our perfection") is contingent on art's initial separation from our customary being. It is only by standing over life, as it were, it is only through maintaining distance on its sordid perils, that Art can effect human consciousness at all.

55 Without the aesthetic, then, there can be no "higher ethics", because it is from the aesthetic that the power to *progress* derives. The penetration and critique of conveintional of "vulgar standard[s] of goodness," which is necessary to progress, is the work of the aesthetic imagination...




Individual:
the individual is responsible for own life.
agency of self to realize moral behaviour, become conscious / sensitive to others,
reflect on own contemplation and aesthetic senses,
realization that both qualities are universal (cosmopolitan).
De Profoundis
Critic as Artist
Happy Prince

Foster, David. "Oscar Wilde, De Profoundis, and the Rhetoric of Agency."
89 Wilde's resistance to dominant mores of his time was articulated, made public, and critiqued in his textual identities.

106 In these pages the pathos of victimization vanishes before the optimistic good humor of the active, knowing agent of change.

Brown:

15 How did Wilde manage to do this? Despite the painful, degrading intimacy into which Wilde had permitted Douglas to draw him, much of his moral freedom was intact. Wilde's friendship with his wife remained constant. Unconventional in her tolerance of Wilde's living habits from the beginning of their marriage, Constance Wilde probed to be a genuine solace to him through the trials and for some time after. When Wilde was in prison, she travelled in ill health from Genoa to Reading to break the news of his mother's death to him in person. Not simply above petty vindictiveness, she was as actively generous as Wilde himself. Instances of spontaneous charity, as opposed to the calculated philantrophy of the age, abound in the biographis of Wilde. Such acts gave pleasure and assistance to many who barely acknowledged his existence after the trials, even to some who assisted in his prosecution. Like his parents, who were also involved in a libel suit, Wilde invited envy for the very reason that he was oblivious to it. Many of the most damning clues in the case against Wilde were provided by an entirely voluntary agent, an actor named Charles Brookfield. When Wilde learned of Brookfield's role in his prosecution, he could only say "How absurd of Brookfield!" Wilde's character in this respect remained steady throughout the trials. He maintained a magnanimity and lack of malice despite the fact that many friends dropped him a few fellow artists signed petitions for mitigation of a sentence that was widely known to result in death.
...
For wilde could rise above the mounting horrors of his existence ... precisely because of his artistic distance from himself, a distance that attained its peak, I have suggested, only after his disastrous relationship with Alfred Douglas...

21 Wilde uses the word *realize* here to mean *live out* or *make actual*.

Oscar Wilde tends to be best known for hisaesthetic principles an criticism that was on part with and influence by thelikes of Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold. Although many of his ideas werederived from a study of ancient texts, including Plato and Aristotle, they areconsidered ahead of his time and oftimes unsuited to the rigid, conformistVictorian society he lived in and was finally condemned by. His writings andlife-story show a gorgeous dandy and a marvellous wit, but what most scholarsand critics seem to miss out on is what an remarkably moral man he was. Despitehis candid admission to being an antinomian, there is a at least a strong senseof right and wrong, fairplay, generosity and genuine dept in Oscar Wild, whosaid many times in the Picture of Dorian Gray and in De Profoundisthat “shallowness is the supreme vice.” It can be seen that, at least onsurface value, Wilde rejected the conventional morality that concerned itselfwith good or bad conduct and based his ideas of morality on aesthetic ideas,but one could not call him a misfit despite his indiscretions. Superficialityand beauty may have been one of Wilde’s major preoccupations, particularly inhis novel and fairy tales,, and to say that he has moral depth seemscontradictory, but as he once wrote in Phrases and Philosophies for Use ofthe Young, “the wise contradict themselves” (572), a subversive way ofsaying that there is more to a person aside from likes, dislikes, dress andconversation. In his writings, Oscar Wilde consistently expounds the need forideals of beauty through self-education and practice. By the time he writes DeProfoundis, he has added individual responsibility to the mix of hisideals, having endured humiliation and transcended his suffering into somethingbeautiful. Therefore, one can posit that this particularly Wildean brand ofmorality is developed through a careful blend of contemplation, love ofaesthetics and a strong sense of responsible individual agency.

 

To begin with, contemplation is the exercise ofthe mental faculties in making judgement calls, considerations and promotingthought. This ideal is derived from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy,in which he writes that culture is “a study of perfection” (31) that can bedeveloped by allowing “free play of the best thoughts” (C&A 5). Suchexercises of the mind lead to self-education, which Wilde praises as a ‘highideal’ in the Critic as Artist (279). Wilde himself writes about thecritical faculty whereby art, indeed, all imaginative work, is produced by aperson who is self-conscious and aware of what is being created, enduring thatanything produced is deliberate, not an accident (CA 253). This self-awarenessdoes not simply conform to Victorian ideals of morality, and it is neither tooquick to accept new experiences as being good without meditating on itsconsequences or meaning, nor does it simply accept things as they are. WhileWilde does encourage curiousity in seeking out new experiences, the criticalfaculty keeps it in check. An example of this lack of contemplation, allowingaesthetic ideals to run unchecked, can be found in the Picture of DorianGray. Both Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton seek out experiences and tryto fill their lives with aesthetic beauty, but they fail to take into considerationthe effects of their actions on others. As a result, Lord Henry loses his wife,and Dorian, unable to appreciate his life because his ethical sense has paledbefore the world of art (Brown 79), falls deeper into his ennui and complicateshis life further with crime. This lack is also seen in the unlovable charactersof his fairy tales, who are limited in their opinions and refuse to contemplatetheir relationships with others. They are selfish and exploitative, insulatedfrom suffering through status and wealth (Wood 164). This mental insulationcauses a deficit in the practice of ethica behaviour, marring the aestheticside of life by being unable to enjoy it critically. As Wilde censures Douglasin De Profoundis, “you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely”(DP 39). The Happy Prince was once in this position of insulation aswell, but when in death he begins to survey his city from his vantage point,the time, lack of distraction and distance from pure aesthetics allow him tounderstand and emphatize with the suffering that his former citizens gothrough. The Swallow, who stays with him, comes to love the Prince for hisgoodness and ruses to leave, more willing to bear suffering and pain. These twocharacters, both previously self-absorbed, transcend their limited perspectivesand are rewarded with a place in Heaven. The Swallow, by plucking off thejewels and gold from the Happy Prince, could be considered a thief, committingsin, but through its conscio0us, discriminating and charitable actions, itgives hope to the people, allowing them to prospect and move from theirstagnate, deteriotating conditions. This is, as Gilbert points out, thepotential that Sin presents as a transgression of any current moral standards,by opening up new avenues for advancement in revitalizing the spirits of men(257). The uncontemplative person allows things to happen and does not care,taking the world as it is. Wilde’s philosophy, however, encourages the use ofthought to challenge, transgress and reject acceptable notions of morality.These challenges, combined with aesthetic ideas, would inform society on pathsto progress on by presenting it with ideals to work towards. These ideals,however, cannot be presented if the critical faculty is left idle. Thus,without the exercise of the critical faculty in contemplation, beauty loses itseffect, experiences become mere consumption for the sppetite and any ethical action becomes meaningless because it is form without deliberation.


This thing is due in 16 hours.

Halfway through the second point right now.

And... why am I handwriting this?!