Chirea Alexandra Mdlina an III ID RE

Tem Lit.irlandez

Write about the significance of dandyism in Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde first began to discover and write in Pen,Pencil and Poison about the life and
opinions of the Regency painter,belletrist,convicted forger and subtle and secret poisoner
almost without rival, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright,he found revealed in the character of this
artistic and intellectual dandy not only an aspect of his own nature and genius,but
also,perhaps,the key to an essential quality of the Aesthetic and Decadent sensibility as it
developed in england in the 1880 and 90s. That quality we might define as a Dandysm of
Senses a self-consciously precious and highly fastidious discrimination brought to bear on
both art and life. The dandy-aesthetes of the fin-du-siecle period above all honed their senses
and cultivated the rarest of sensibilities; they made the perfection of the pose of exquisiteness
their greatest aim and they directed all their languid energies towards nurturing a cult of
aestethic response that begins beyond ordinary notions of taste,that lies beyond mere
considerations of fashion,and operates quite outside the dictates of all conventional canons of
morality. Wilde was perhaps the first to perceive that this very specific sensibility had been
intriguibly foreshadowed by the ideas and opinions enshrined in Wainewrights precociously
brilliant art-journalism of the early years of the ninetheenth century; in particular in those
essays in which the mercurial dandy-critic first adumbrated his own idiosyncratic version of a
pose of exquisite sensibility and the notion of a cult of aesthetic response. Wildes prose
,likewise Wainewrights prose,is seldom less than precious; it is highly crafted,even lapidary
in style,but saved from being tiresome by the fact that often,too,his phracing can be delicately
expressive and amusingly ironic in its touch.
At a moment in the later eighties,with Oxford and America behind him,when Wilde was
consciously redefining his early self-appointed role as the highly conspicuous and,if
anything ,somewhat robust rather the etiolated Apostle of Aestheticism,the example of
Wainewright played a crucial part in the creation of his later,more subtle and carefully drawn
pose. For Wilde, Wainewright appealingly possessed the dangerous and delightful distinction
of being different from others undoubtedly a vital,if ultimately self-desructive,trait of the
character wich Wilde would develop for himself in the years to come. Again discovering
something of his own persona in Wainewright,Wilde observes that
as an art critic he concerns himself primarily with the complex impressions produced by a
work of art. Certainly,the first step in aesthetic criticism is to realize ones own impressions
he never lost sight of the great truth that Arts first appeal is neither to the intellect nor the
emotions,but purely to the artistic temperament.
Wilde,ofcourse belonged initially to that generation of Oxford Aesthetes who,beginning as
disciples of Ruskin,Had first espoused his earnest,Christian,medieval and Pre-Raphaelite
enthusiasm and his desire for Truth to Nature in art,only to be seduced in due course by the
more indulgently neo-pagan, Renaissance-inspired, decadent and ,consequently,rather
dangerously glamorous teachings of Walter Pater. From the mod 1870s a number of
impressionable students of this reticent and seemingly quite unrevolutionary don were indeed

misled, as Pater himself would later put it,by the infamous Conclusion to the first edition of
his Studies in the History of Renaissance,the book which,twenty years on,Wilde would
describe as having had such a strange influence over my life. In its most infamous
passages,suppressed by the author himself in the second editionbut rewritten in a less
inflammatory style and reinstated in subsequent editions of the work,Pater had proposed that
young man should,in the serch for aesthetic experience and in pursuit of the all important
heightened sensibility, burn always with a hard,gem-like flame. He further exhorted them to
seek primarily for sensation and great passions in both art and life,and to get as many
pulsations as possible into the given time.
The wildean cenacle of dandies were never swept away by the usual unconditional admiration
for the solid virtues of the Queen Anne period; they looked instead with somewhat novel
interest at the far more self-consciously chic,elegant and even,at times,flashy world of
Regency culture and society ,observing with delight its constant obsessions with
manners,atyle and ton,the value it placed upon exoticism,on the creation of effect.and
perhaps, most relevantly for Wilde himself,the high regard in wich the fast,fashionable society
of that era held verbal brilliance.
In this search for a still high-minded,but essentially amoral theory of art,Wilde yet again
found his precursor in Wainewright. Describing Waindewrights subtle and artistic
temperament ,whilst remaining curiously untroubled by any real consideration of his serious
crimes,Wilde draws particular attention to the way in which Wainewright effortlessly
separates art and morality.
In cataloguing Wainewrights novel and varied artistic predilections, Wilde also discovers
another remarkable aspect of his taste,which sets it apart from the pedantic,stylistic obsessions
of the early and high Victorians and links him,rather ,with the new aesthetic freedom of the
eighties:
It is clear that he was one of the first to recognize what is,ideed,the very keynote of aestethic
eclecticism,I mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things,irrespective of age or
place,of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room,wich is not to be a room for
show,but a room to live in,we should never aim at any archeological reconstruction of the
past,nor burden ourselves with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this artistic
perception he was entirely right. All beautiful things belong to the same age ()
This inventory of rare ,precious and pleasingly obscure delights of the connoisseur,together
with its concomitant implication of a super-subtle artistic temperament to match,might almost
serve as a description of anyone of a number of aesthets of the 1890s.
Wildes opinions on most aesthetic matters are so well known,that it comes as something of a
surprise to realize just how little his actual personal artistic predilections can be documented.
In three areas in which his aesthetic discrimination played a part: in his dress,his interiors and
in the appearance of his published books,we can fortunately gather enough information to
follow the major developments in his tastes,in particular in that important transitional period
between about 1883-4 and 1889,during which his earlier,simpler aesteticism underwent a seachange into something darker and more decadent as a result,it would appear,of his increasing
exposure to the richer veins of European ,and particular French,literary and artistic theory and
activity.
Other influential dandies of the fin-du-siecle were Barbey dAurevilly and Baudelaire a
figure destined to remain a key figure for the 1880s,revered by the Aesthets for his pose of
morbid sensibility,and by Decadents for his opium-and hashish-inspired explorations of

strange and exquisite sensations and Wilde himself carries a great admiration for his work of
art.
Though Wilde has usually been regarded as an Aesthete or Decadent whose devotion to art for
arts sake was immutable,in fact he never adhered rigidly to such a doctrine. From the
beginning of his career,he wrote poems as a conventional Victorian, expressing moral,political
and religious attitudes expected in serious art. His concerns with the cultural crises of the time
found expression in much of his early verse written during and after his Oxford years that
is ,before he turned attention to the nature of art in advancing the Aesthetic Movement. But
even while rejecting the Victorian notion of art as moral edification,Wilde could not sustain
his aestethicism ,for he was driven by the conviction,drawn from such disparate figures as
Baudelaire,Ruskin,Pater and Whistler,that life and art were ultimately shaped by ones moral
and spiritual nature. Inevitably,the tension between his avowed aestheticism and his Victorian
sensibility resulted in contradictions throughout his work,as he expressed in his essay The
Truth of Masks : A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true
Among Wildes influences in poetry,we can find a significant early focus,occurred when he
visited Italy,on religious poems,also the ancient Greece- had a great influence on wildean
poetry- with mythological and pastoral settings . At the same time that Classical and religious
preoccupations informed his early verse,Wilde was schooling himself in the Pre-Raphaelite
painters and poets,as revealed in his earliest poem touched by their influence : La bella donna
della mia mente, inspired by the late-medieval phenomenon of courtly love,involving the
secret veneration by a knight of a high-born Lady. The thematic variation on Wiles early
verse extended to political concerns dating from 1876,when he was moved by the atrocities
against Christians in the Balkans,where the Slavs rebelled against Turkish rule,in the
following year he wrote The Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria.
Also Wildes wish to associate himself with the major poets of the nineteenth century not only
indicated his aspirations but also determined the theme and structure of many of his poems.
He was accused of plagiarism by a literary historian,and this stigmata haunted the young poet
many years. His volume Poems, did contained several lyrics that revealed Wildes response to
avant-garde French Impressionism, as well as Whistlers visionary paintings,both of them had
an extensive influence for the poets of the nineteenth century.
References : Raby,Peter The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, Homerton
College,Cambridge