oscar wilde society |

Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Society

This is something that I had to write for an English test and my teacher was truly impressed and it made me proud, which is kind of weird because I’m never fully proud of anything that I write. I think I needed that little ego bust. I mean, everyone needs one once in a while.
What I had to do was write an essay about an author of my choice and describe the society of his/her time through his/her works. I chose Oscar Wilde because I have what I call a “literary crush” on him. A “literary crush” is when you’re so in love with a book or an author that you establish a sort of platonic relationship with them.
Back to the essay itself, personally I think it’s a little mechanic, if you can say that, probably because not only we had to show that we can actually write in a language that is not our own (since I’m not English) but also because we had to show that we actually did study.

With The Importance of being Earnest Oscar Wilde opens a whole new perspective on theatre itself and on the society of his time. Through a well structured play, Wilde makes perfectly clear what his personal opinion on the Victorian society. Basing the plot of the play on the concept of living a double life, the playwright shows how vain, hypocritical and void of any real moral value society is. Two young men are living a double life between the country and the city: they know different people, they behaving in different ways and both are known as Ernest. The pun between the words honest, earnest and the name Ernest itself is, of course, intended: both Algy and John, the main characters, have changed their names to Ernest, but there is very little honesty in their behaviour. The play on words in the title works as a key to comprehend what Wilde’s intent is. His aim is to tell the crude truth through irony and sarcasm and he succeeds perfectly by having the characters focused on the most trivial and vainest of things, instead of on the most vital and important matters. But if this double life is their way of escaping society, why are they doing this? Why would someone mock the Victorian society when the government was actually doing its job and Britain was on top of the world? Why would someone like Oscar Wild, an Irish man, write a play to openly make fun of the society he came to be part of?
When Queen Victoria became queen at the age of seventeen, marking the beginning of the Victorian era, no one expected her reign to last as long as it did. No one thought that while she ruled Britain, her nation would rise higher than ever before. But here we are, about a hundred years after her death, studying and writing about her reign. Such a powerful figure can’t be forgotten and the same goes for the multitude of accomplishments achieved during her sovereignty, such as the creation of the Indian Empire, an event that made the queen, empress of a distant new world.

Whereas economically and politically speaking, Britain had no visible fault whatsoever, as far as the values that permeated its society, they did quite a lot to fuel the most unconventional and spirited writers, such as Oscar Wilde.

The adjective victorian is still quite often used nowadays and it describes those people who act just like the Victorians: bigotry, prudery and hypocrisy are the three words which perfectly describe the society of that time.

The importance of the family, for example, is one of those values that Wilde makes fun of in the aforementioned play. At the beginning and throughout the story, John is victimized by the old aunt of his friend, who is strongly opposed to a possible wedding between the young man and her daughter, simply because he has no family and no way to prove that his parents were rich or in a any way high-ranking. But at the end of the play, John finds out that he’s Algy’s brother and suddenly everything is fine and the wedding can take place. In other words the opposition to the wedding was merely due to the fear of being looked down upon by the other members of society. By criticizing the Victorian idea of family integrity. Wilde manages to ridiculize at the same time the concepts of love and marriage.

But Wilde’s most famous play lacks a certain something that is the main point of another of his works, dated five years before the play. The picture of Dorian Gray, whereas not strictly focused on society itself, still gives us something to reflect on. Dorian, just like Algy and John, has a double: a painting made by a dear friend, Basil, who fears he might have put too much of himself in his work. As Dorian, the young hedonist, goes through his life with that light-heartedness that characterises him and marks his soul with all his sins, it is the painting itself that suffers the punishments, while Dorian maintains his ethereal beauty.

Both works are perfect examples of the controversy between Victorian values and reality, between what happens when no one is watching or behind closed doors. It can0t go unsaid that Oscar Wilde was victim of the strict Victorian morality: due to his homosexuality he was imprisoned and condemned to two years of hard labours and then forced to spend the rest of his life away from British soil. Wilde gave an example, not only with his works but also with his own life. Dorian and the novelist are quite similar in a way: both hedonists deep down to the core. Some people nowadays strive to be different in order to escape the conformistic tendency of a society that has common traits with the Victorian one. Some people even try to follow Wilde’s every step but they forget something that is indeed extremely important. Behind Oscar Wilde’s lifestyle and opinions there is a whole revaluated philosophy that revolved around the concept of pure beauty, art and pleasure. These three words created a whole new world, a new perspective of it. A dandy is someone who doesn’t really escape society but lives close to it, dealing with it with sarcasm and trying to make people understand the very sense of things. Oscar Wilde is that man. A man who spent most of his life in a society he hated and who made his way through it with irony and sarcasm, maintaining the same charm and sense of humour even when people his time were too obtuse to see the truth in his works and in his life.