Wednesday, November 13, 2013

A Walk on the Wilde Side

So, after reading more critical work about Gauguin, I began to feel like, despite my aesthetic appreciation for his art, my paper would be dry and half-hearted at best. While I was getting this sense, we were reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in class; I loved Wilde's sense of style and wit. Also, I have written about gay man for two other research papers, and I thought it would be a fun trend to continue.

For my first work (other than the one we read in class), I chose The Importance of Being Earnest. I found reading this work (a play) to be a somewhat lighter compliment to the heaviness of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Picture of Dorian Gray centers around an archetypal fall from innocence and moral decay, but The Importance of Being Earnest takes a much more humorous approach to satire. (If you have not read/seen the play giving this a quick skim might be helpful: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/earnest/summary.html) The play follows a sequence in the life of Jack (Ernest) Worthing, through a series of hi-jinxes Wilde explores marriage in Victorian England, the shallow nature of high society, and deception. While PDG touches on the nature of marriage, the play explores it more fully. There are two proposals in the play and both are set forth under false pretenses (the men who proposed had false identities). It also shows the how marriage, when conducted as a property transaction, is ridiculous. In Victorian times, it lead to rampant infidelity which fueled the fiery gossip of the era, not to mention sexism.

On the note of sexism, one major difference between the two is their respective portrayal of women. The only prominent female in PDG was Sybil Vane who killed herself for Dorian. In TIOBE, the women are sometimes more powerful than men, like one of the characters, Lady Bracknell, who prevents Jack Worthing from marrying her daughter, Gwendolyn. Women not only hold more power in parts of the play, but also characterize more moral behavior. Wilde portrays two kinds of decpetion -- what we would call a harmless fantasy and then deception that crosses that line and is hurtful. He uses Cecily to show a harmless fantasy when she claims she was proposed to Algernon before they even met. This directly contrasts Mr. Worthing's deception in which he creates a fake brother who he then kills off, showing women on a moral high ground.


1 comment:

  1. My first question would be, the focus of your paper now. This blog post doesn't really clue me into what your paper will be about besides Oscar Wilde's writing, is the only reason that you picked him is because is gay, or is there going to be a connection made between his writing and his sexuality? This blog post is well written, but to me doesn't seem to get a lot done besides summarizing a play and giving a little bit of connection to The Picture of Dorian Gray, but I would have felt this would have made a better first post, and although you did change your topic, I still feel as though this should be directing me more towards imformation you have found and how you are going to use that in your essay.

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