Paper: Wildean Morality - A study of Oscar Wilde's cosmopolitan principles

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Oscar Wilde tends to be best known for his aesthetic principles an criticism that was on par with and influence by the likes of Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold. Although many of his ideas were derived from a study of ancient texts, including Plato and Aristotle, they are considered ahead of his time and oftimes unsuited to the rigid, conformist Victorian society he lived in and was finally condemned by. His writings and life-story show a gorgeous dandy and a marvellous wit, but what most scholars and critics seem to miss out on is what an remarkably moral man he was. Despite his candid admission to being an antinomian, there is a at least a strong sense of right and wrong, fairplay, generosity and genuine depth in Oscar Wilde, who said many times in the Picture of Dorian Gray and in De Profoundis that “shallowness is the supreme vice.” It can be seen that, at least on surface value, Wilde rejected the conventional morality that concerned itself with good or bad conduct and based his ideas of morality on aesthetic ideas, but one could not call him a misfit despite his indiscretions. Superficiality and beauty may have been one of Wilde’s major preoccupations, particularly in his novel and fairy tales,, and to say that he has moral depth seems contradictory, but as he once wrote in Phrases and Philosophies for Use of the Young, “the wise contradict themselves” (MW 572), a subversive way of saying that there is more to a person aside from likes, dislikes, dress and conversation. In his writings, Oscar Wilde consistently expounds the need for ideals of beauty through self-education and practice. By the time he writes De Profoundis, he has added individual responsibility to the mix of his ideals, having endured humiliation and transcended his suffering into something beautiful. Therefore, one can posit that this particularly Wildean brand of morality is developed through a careful blend of contemplation, love of aesthetics and a strong sense of responsible individual agency.

To begin with, contemplation is the exercise of the mental faculties in making judgement calls, considerations and promoting thought. This ideal is derived from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, in which he writes that culture is “a study of perfection” (Arnold 31) that can be developed by allowing “free play of the best thoughts” (5). Such exercises of the mind lead to self-education, which Wilde praises as a ‘high ideal’ in the Critic as Artist (MW 279). Wilde himself writes about the critical faculty whereby art, indeed, all imaginative work, is produced by a person who is self-conscious and aware of what is being created, enduring that anything produced is deliberate, not an accident (253). This self-awareness does not simply conform to Victorian ideals of morality, and it is neither too quick to accept new experiences as being good without meditating on its consequences or meaning, nor does it simply accept things as they are. While Wilde does encourage curiousity in seeking out new experiences, the critical faculty keeps it in check. An example of this lack of contemplation, allowing aesthetic ideals to run unchecked, can be found in the Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton seek out experiences and try to fill their lives with aesthetic beauty, but they fail to take into consideration the 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 paled before the world of art (Brown 79), falls deeper into his ennui and complicates his life further with crime. This lack is also seen in the unlovable characters of his fairy tales, who are limited in their opinions and refuse to contemplate their relationships with others. They are selfish and exploitative, insulated from suffering through status and wealth (Wood 164). This mental insulation causes a deficit in the practice of ethical behaviour, marring the aesthetic side of life by being unable to enjoy it critically. As Wilde censures Douglas in De Profoundis, “you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely” (DP 39). The Happy Prince was once in this position of insulation as well, 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 to understand and empathize with the suffering that his former citizens go through. The Swallow, who stays with him, comes to love the Prince for his goodness and ruses to leave, more willing to bear suffering and pain. These two characters, both previously self-absorbed, transcend their limited perspectives and are rewarded with a place in Heaven. The Swallow, by plucking off the jewels and gold from the Happy Prince, could be considered a thief, committing sin, but through its conscious, discriminating and charitable actions, it gives hope to the people, allowing them to prospect and move from their stagnate, deteriorating conditions. This is, as Gilbert points out, the potential 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 of thought to challenge, transgress and reject acceptable notions of morality. These challenges, combined with aesthetic ideas, would inform society on paths to 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 its effect, experiences become mere consumption for the appetite and any ethical action becomes meaningless because it is form without deliberation.

Given that this is about Oscar Wilde, it would be impossible to contemplate life without some love of aesthetics in mind, particularly since his works tend to define him more than his life defines his work (Wood 160). Wilde takes his cue from Plato, as he has Gilbert explain:

You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual. Insensible, and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education. By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness. (MW 286)

Hence would the choice of beauty and desire to improve one’s surroundings be engendered through such an education. To Wilde, the world as it is is not as important as the world as it could be, and aestheticization would shape the world as it could be. Aestheticization, however, is mot just limited to physical beauty – Wilde’s ideal does not mean that beauty lacks utility, but rather that all useful things should be beautiful too, or strive to create beauty (Waldrep 104). The Happy Prince, again, provides an excellent illustration of this principle in practice: during his lifetime, he was brought up surrounded by beauty and did not know suffering. When he becomes a statue, he sees the misery of his people and is moved to desire that they should know at least some of the happiness he previously had known; his preference for beauty prevails and is even transferred to apply to everybody else – everyone should live in beauty. Art does not specialize nor discriminate, it is universal (MW 290). Only by stepping away from the vulgar world as it is can one begin to imagine a world that could be, that is, the world that is perfect and should be realized. This stepping away may sound like a spiritual concept, but the idea that love of beauty makes a person step back and consider the world carefully points to how powerful art is (Brown 52). The aesthetic imagination, therefore, promotes an ethical sense that is higher than the conventional morality, which is designed to cater to the masses. Conventional moral behaviour, as Wilde observes, “is obviously very easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle class respectability” (MW 295). Shelton Waldrep points out how Wilde depicts sordid realism in the Picture of Dorian Gray, calling it a contradiction in doctrine. Wilde speaks like the mystic who must express cosmopolitan truths in contradictory aphorisms, but this can be seen as no contradiction at all. In De Profoundis, he writes of how much wiser the poor are due to the constant ugliness they face, and how more tolerant of sinners they are than the middle class, who shun anyone that has gone to prison. This middle class that comprises of the Society that sets rules is shallow enough to abandon a man the very moment he needs help and rehabilitation (MR 101). The depictions of ugliness are necessary to point out precisely what beauty is not. After his release from prison, Wilde writes the Ballad of Reading Gaol and letters to the Daily Chronicle to expose the inhumane treatment and conditions of prisoners. They were not written merely to express and elicit horrors, nor simply as catharsis – that would not be in keeping with his principles at all; it is simply a way of telling the public that ignorance of horrible laws and regulations will not make the hideous go away. Instead, the dreadful, the fearful and the hideous (DP 220, note on l.90) must firstly be accepted, then they must be transformed or changed (MW 280). Where the crude masses do not have the refinement to understand how to perform this transformation, the civilized have no such limits upon themselves.

In putting the two spheres of contemplation and aesthetics together, it is left to the individual to execute the aestheticization of the world, and if the individual cannot take on the world, then the individual must at least be responsible for his or her own life. This is evident in the Critic as Artist and more starkly in De Profoundis. In the former, Gilbert stresses the importance of how it is not enough to simply do, one must be, and one should not simply be, which indicates a static shape, one must become (270), because when Art and Life come together, they create Chaos (85), which constantly shifts and changes, so one must always become adapted to it. In De Profoundis, he writes, “there is nothing wrong in what one does, ... there is something wrong in what one becomes” (DP 98, emphasis mine). The onus is on the individual who must take responsibility for what he or she becomes – especially in terms of moral behaviour. While Wilde did not conform to dominant mores of the Victorian public (Foster 89), he acknowledged his agency in his own ruination (DP 94). Conscious of his behaviour and generous to the plight of others, he refused to allow the ugliness of prison drag him down to the crude level of malice towards those who sentenced him (Brown 15). De Profoundis may be damning to Lord Douglas, but Wilde recognize his own weaknesses and resolves to change, forgiving Lord Douglas and allowing his optimism to prevail in the hope of change (Foster 106). It is up to the individual to prevent the Eternal Negation in one’s own self, and intellectual deterioration brought on by the unconscious allowance of Hate to grow (DP 73). This negation is prevented by the cultivation of an outward mask through which the individual could be truthful (MW 282). By constantly maintaining this facade can the individual continually practise the contemplative and aesthetic faculties. This facade therefore is an important act to define oneself (Foster 90) instead of unquestioningly accepting conventional morality. Wilde created and maintained a front in which he was seemingly so self-absorbed, he was oblivious to the petty envy of others towards him (Brown 15). One could say that this was wilful ignorance to the faults of others, yet it would not do to respond to malice in kind, because that would negate the intellect. Instead, he forgives such acts, especially Lord Douglas’, and accepts the experience he suffers at the hands of others with good grace so that he would carry on, in full understanding that he should still continue his self-development (still keep becoming). Informed by his past in working towards his ideal, Wilde uses his artistic distance from life and critical faculty to rise above his awful experiences (Brown 15). This is the responsibility of the individual: to reflect on one’s own self to arrive at an ethical sense higher than the ideal that conventional proposes.

Oscar Wilde was definitely very gay, even by today’s standards, if the amount of scholarly research on him is any indication. He was also definitely a superficial dandy concerned with outward appearances and the art of artificiality. In public eye, he had a rise to great heights and an equally great fall, but privately, one could say his life itself was a continuous series of progress. The laws of society forced him to hide his homosexuality and bound him physically in prison, yet the laws of society did not crush his individualism, which he continued to assert even after he fell into disgrace. Even in the depths, he continued to use his mind and steel it against psychological torment; he still believed in beauty and desired to see improvement in prison conditions that others would also retain a sense of beauty; he did not deny his past, accepted the consequences of his actions and found even more individualism in the sorrow he experienced. His search for experiences and observations led him to think critically that he might derive life’s lessons, and his love for beauty gave him motivation to create a work of art of his life. The cosmopolitan quality of his principles made him adaptable and help him endure even beyond death. In his purple prose, his green carnation lives on.




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Wood, Naomi. “Creating the Sensual Child: Paterian Aesthetics, Pederasty, and OscarWilde’s Fairy Tales.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies(2002): Vol. 16, Iss. 2, 156 – 170.


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