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Tang Lin (Leon)
Prof. Chang-jui Kuo
MA Thesis Proposal
7 October 2010
Wildean Aesthetics: From Social Concern and Aesthetic Predicament to Queer
Emotions
(王爾德美學：從社會關注和美學困境到酷異情感)
Being an ingenious but controversial writer in the late Victorian Age, Wilde was
once a conversational taboo in English society. This unanimous forbiddance was
stirred up by his homosexual act counted as a crime in the conservative judicial
system. Given that Wilde had been a notorious figure in the aesthetic movement, his
trials and death led to the posthumous amnesia in English society for decades. His
grandson Merlin Holland points out the state that surrounded the time after Wilde’s
death: “For ten years after his death Wilde’s reputation was cloaked in what
Christopher Millard called ‘a vague fog of obscenity.’ Letters were destroyed lest they
implied guilt or even sympathy by association” (5). Stephen Calloway and David
Colvin remark even more tragically the posthumous reputation of the poet: “Even to
voice a qualified admiration for an artist more reviled than even Byron had been in his
time was, as far as Victorian society was concerned, tantamount to countenancing the
crimes which it has found so revolting that it had demanded the poet’s utter
destruction as atonement for them” (8). This moral punishment lasted until 1940s
when people started to remember the literary giant and visit his grave at Pere Lachaise
in France (Calloway & Colvin 8). Thus, not until decades after his death did scholars
study Oscar Wilde and find him an important character in the late Victorian period.
His short stories help them excavate the Irish folktales that exist only in oral tradition
(Maccormack 102). His novel exemplifies the aesthetic atmosphere that Walter Pater
and John Ruskin were pushing for; his dramas, the so-called social comedies, preserve
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a select world of upper class inundated with scandals; and his critical writings show
even the cream of his philosophy and his reflections upon contemporary social,
aesthetic, and literary trends. In this way, studies on Wilde have become, not as grim
as Calloway and Colvin record, but vivid and vital as Wilde knowingly relates, “I was
a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age” (qtd. in
Calloway & Colvin 104).
What is most talked about of Wilde is not so much his originality in literature as
his aesthetics and dandy life. “Art for art’s sake” is believed to be the dominant force
behind Wilde’s works since he asserts his literary creation as the living representation
of the aesthetic principle: art is beyond morality and should be pure beauty without
utility. This idea is declared by Wilde himself in his preface to The Picture of Dorian
Gray, in which he argues that “we can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long
as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely. All art is quite useless” (4). He contends that any kind of material
can be a building block of art, be it moral or immoral, and that most importantly
“beautiful things mean only beauty” (3). His claim for “useless” pushes forward the
aesthetic movement initiated by John Ruskin and Walter Pater and thus renders
radicalism upon Wilde, whom people consider an irresponsible dandy, luring
contemporary youngsters to corruption and vanity. Richard Ellmann in his Oscar
Wilde also identifies this “uselessness” as one of the energies in Wilde’s aesthetics:
“[Aesthetics] asserts a magnificent isolation from experience, unreality, a sterility”
(302). However, it is debatable whether Wilde’s aesthetics is really useless and
meaningless, and whether his literary works really demonstrate the same
“uselessness” as indicated in his artistic manifesto to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In the current of Victorian aestheticism upheld by John Ruskin and Walter Pater,
aesthetics is not relinquished of its “usefulness” although they are probably
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unconventional. According to Peter Raby, Wilde’s aesthetics cannot be spared of the
influence from his predecessors since it is they who enlighten Wilde in the first place
(15). John Ruskin in the conclusion of his essay collection The Renaissance proposes
an evolved view of aesthetics as a momentary impression acquired from sensations in
life experience. He argues that an aesthetic attitude can be compared to a philosophy
which functions as “constant and eager observation” (552). He continues that at
“every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the
sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement
is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only” (552). To cultivate the
sensitivity of that moment, youngsters are suggested to open their mind to every
“exquisite passion” so that life can be fully revealed and thus fully explored: “Of such
wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has
most” (Pater 552). For Pater, he does not consider art useless because it reveals life
and works for people to understand it.
John Ruskin’s share of aestheticism is even more significant in that he insists on
its contribution: “[Ruskin’s] mission was to overcome the Victorian dullness of
perception, to release and revitalize the senses, especially the visual sense, and so free
a sensibility that had become fettered by habit, by the mechanical, by the divisiveness
of social and economic institutions” (Raby 20). His ideal aesthetics is focused on the
beneficial side of humanity as a whole as he tried to build the Hinskey road project1
while Pater attempts to persuade young men to know about life through arts; still,
both of Wilde’s mentors do not utter the idea that art is useless although they contend
art should pursue its own course without interference. In a nutshell, art has the
function of enlightenment for personal and collective well-being.
Such an aesthetic stance is, as a matter of fact, echoed in many of Wilde’s critical
writings, among which “The Critic as Artist” and “The Soul of Man under Socialism”
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are the most prominent. In “The Critic as Artist,” the universality of beauty and its
function shares the same enlightenment as Pater’s aesthetics: “It is rather the beholder
who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvelous for us,
and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our
lives” (1127). Beauty inspires the beholders and relates itself to the person and age,
and art makes up what life cannot really afford. It not only brings forth meanings as
well as cultivates the moods in man but also creates symbols for arts and literature
since it is itself the symbol of nature. Moreover, beauty, as long as people have access
to it, shows a world of colors, joys, and pleasures. Thus, as Pater, Wilde deems beauty
not as intellectual knowledge but impressions that arouse feelings for creation, which,
when merged with individuality, brings forth creativity to go beyond traditions and
conventions. It produces new and refreshing images as well as forms. Therefore,
creation of individuality, as Wilde argues in “The Soul of Man under Socialism,”
gives hope for a society to progress with personal talents, artistic sense, tolerance, and
freedom. In this way, Wilde broadens the definition of beautiful arts and artists, and
renders a better understanding of his aesthetics by aligning critics, painters, writers,
historians, and even individuals with artistic eyes as all artists. As long as they can
sense beauty in objectivity and carry out creation in subjectivity, they are the seer of
the beautiful. That is why great critics can be regarded as the highest artists since they
can not only appreciate beauty but decipher the creation brought forth by the beautiful:
“a creation within a creation” (“The Critic as Artist” 1125).
Wilde further elevates aesthetic creation to a higher level in which it constructs
reality. This unique aesthetic idea is best summarized by Ellmann: “Life, straggling
after art, seizes upon forms of art to express itself. Life imitates art” (303). According
to Wilde, life is a mirror that reflects art as its reality. The most genuine thing is the
reality that people construct from artistic works such as literature. Ellmann explains
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that the modern role models for society and individuality are written records of
history and even fictions (303). As he suggests, Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, and even
Shakespeare are influential for their artistic representation in literature because they
help to mould people’s perception of humanity and the world. People are taught to
follow Christ and imitate his virtues. In turn, works such as statues and churches are
built to honor his spiritual greatness. Even our perception of the world is embedded in
the unreachable words in Bible, where paradise and inferno are described. On the
other hand, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Caeser’s merits are used to epitomize human
types and thus render our understanding of humanity. In brief, if what Wilde asserts is
true, arts constitute our reality in that they form the base and mediums for people to
rely on. The beautiful extracts the power from nature, and people morph it into arts to
construct their exterior reality. Thus, aesthetic creation becomes the inspirer of all, and
art is anything but useless since it helps to constitute and even change the world.
Wilde’s aesthetics, for the above reason, carries the function of social
enlightenment. Addressing social issues in Victorian aestheticism, Alan Sinfield in
The Wilde Century, makes an interesting observation that aesthetics is developed upon
the ground of feminine opposition and assumes Matthew Arnold’s phraseology:
“sweetness and light versus philistines and barbarians” (86). He argues that
Since the late eighteenth century, when enclosures, the factory system
and urbanization helped to provoke the Romantic movement, the middle
class has thrown up a dissent fraction partly hostile to the hegemony of
that class. The line runs through the Pre-Raphaelites, the decadent and
aesthetic movements….Characteristically, middle-class dissidence
constitutes poetry, literature, the spirit, nature, personal religion, intimate
and family relations as ‘the human’; it sets them over against mechanical,
urban, industrial and commercial organization in the modern world. (86)
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Sinfield’s proposition gives rise to a new thinking of political weight upon the
aestheticism as developed by Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde, with personal differences
among them. In his reading, Sinfield seems to shed the sweet light upon the aesthetics
which culminates in Wilde, and which can be viewed as a feminine way of social
change against the masculine social mainstream.
In addition to social concern, the literary representation of Wilde’s aesthetics
holds, as Sinfield maintains, the function of emotional release, especially those
emotions which were not identified as queer in the Victorian context. In his book,
Sinfield argues that Wilde utilizes his literary creation as a self-exploration of the
“invert” emotions in a society whose sexual awareness had not matured enough for
modern sexual categorization. That is, homosexuality as a queer emotion had not been
recognized as an identity (1-2). The modern homosexual subculture and identification
were, at that time, embedded in what people consider effeminate aesthetes: that is,
Wilde is feminine because he is aesthetic. The bond between his dandy life and
exuberant manifestation of aesthetics is very strong, therein allowing the invert
emotions in his works to be beautiful though weird. Aesthetics, as represented in his
works, thus becomes a blank sheet for him to explore homosexual emotions,
recognized as queer nowadays. They might be immoral, according to the Victorian
standard of morality, but this immorality has the function of self-knowing, or knowing
about the unspoken emotions, as Sinfield analyzes “The Portrait of W. H.” to be a
work exemplifying a search for uncertain identity (19). In this backdrop, aesthetics
becomes a platform for not only expressing personal emotions but also countering the
traditional boundary.
To speak of Wilde’s aesthetics as emotional release and subversion seems to
receive more credits than the proposition that his aesthetics promulgates social
salvation since modern scholars tend to treat Wilde and his literature as affiliation in
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the late Victorian “fin-de-siecle,” or in English “decadence.” Calloway in his article
“Wilde and the Dandyism of the Senses” articulates the central idea of the
fin-de-siecle as “nurturing a cult of aesthetic response that begins beyond ordinary
notions of taste, that lies beyond mere considerations of fashion, and operates quite
outside the dictates of all conventional cannons of morality” (34). In Wilde’s hand,
aesthetic link to decadence confounds the ideal of Victorian aestheticism, which
emphasizes social and individual elevation. Wildean aesthetics becomes to insinuate
negativity not because it is intrinsically corrupted but for that the fin-de-siecle topples
social norms, resisting to be normalized by common morality and social duty. This
resistance is thus believed to bring destruction to an individual in that he/she cannot
become a well-intended citizen who devotes to social order. However, it is important
not to confuse fin-de-siecle with the aesthetic movement begun by Ruskin and Pater.
Both masters probably resort to exquisite predilections for their art discourse, yet they
do not utter the idea that beauty will lead to corruption and destruction. As mentioned
above, all of them deem aesthetics as something that brings creation and
enlightenment, not destruction. Interestingly enough, nor does Wilde believe himself
to stand for the absolute decadence, as in Dorian Gray he conceives himself as the
upright Basil Hallward and repudiates the public image that he is the
Mephistopheles-like Henry Wotton.2 Therefore, the destruction of the beautiful found
in many of Wilde’s works such as Dorian Gray must be properly scrutinized for his
aesthetic struggle in the ambiguous area between creative aesthetics and corrupted
decadence. That is, what makes him assimilate or dissimilate two currents of aesthetic
energies, social enlightenment and personal release, to the extent that Wilde himself
becomes a synonym of social resistance on the ground of subversive emotions? How
do these ramifications converge into a Wildean aesthetics? What kind of adjustment
does Wilde do to the whole aesthetic movement? On what purpose does he render his
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aesthetics a meaning different from that of his predecessors? To know about these
questions also assist to produce a more profound exploration into my central
problematic—whether art for art’s sake is purely an aesthetic claim without use and
meaning.
From the analysis above, Wilde’s claim that all arts are useless should be
questioned as to the mainstream moral criticism that traps him in the shadow of
Dorian Gray. In this sense, the “useless” claim becomes a self-defense against any
moral charges on his composition of the novel.3 If art is useless as claimed, both
Wilde and the Victorian public would be preposterous to worry about the corruption
exerted by the story; however, this is not the truth. The uselessness and amorality are
relative as contrasted with the oppositional force mentioned above. It may be immoral
but definitely not useless. The incongruity between his critical works and the Dorian
manifesto, in this case, should not serve as an obstacle in realizing the aesthetic values
and social implications in Wilde’s writings as Holland urges people to only appreciate
but never resolve Wilde’s myths (16).4 Although he makes this statement for
understandable reasons, it also disrupts a chance for further exploration in Wilde.
Rather, I would take Peter Raby’s observation, in his Oscar Wilde, that Wilde mimics
in his writing and alters the original; consequently making his self-dramatization and
expression with many “voices, personae, and masks, which enabled him to operate
across a wide range of tones” (6). Raby suggests that Wilde has lied deep in the
multiple masks created for his artist’s position. It is this mask that this thesis will try
to remove. If Wilde’s writing is not merely a mask for him to perform but something
as a vehicle for illustrating his aesthetic and social theories, then this incongruity
between uselessness and aesthetic functions becomes an interesting departure point to
see behind the screen.
To sum up, this thesis will jump out of the conventional view of “art for art’s
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sake”—beauty means not only beauty but also something else about society and the
person—and try to explore the social implications in Wilde’s aesthetics by examining
his critical and literary writings. Some of his early poems and later dramas will be
utilized to figure a rounded-out aesthetic representation. This thesis will study the
issue that Wilde’s aesthetics entails a strong social concern as well as a reflection
upon social realities. His aesthetics is not isolation from experience, nor is it useless
and meaningless. On the contrary, this thesis will tackle the social values of Wilde’s
aesthetics, trace its development and problems, and scrutinize his breakthrough in
expressing queer emotions. I will argue that Wilde’s aesthetics is developed and
problematized along with the atmosphere of modernity, materiality, capitalism, and
Christian conservatism, and ultimately manifested by his personal attempt at
subversive emotions, creating a queer face of Wildean aesthetics. His literary
representation helps to bring out the destructive side of Victorian society; nevertheless,
Wilde is unable to resolve the problems of modern materiality over the ideal function
of aesthetic elevation. Consequently, he transfers the aesthetic energy of resistance
unto the emotional expression of literary freedom while exposing the modern
problems both in arts and society. Thus, Wilde’s works array a wide range of
subversive emotions for artistic creation. In the following, this thesis will be divided
into four sections: “Aesthetics and Society,” “Aesthetic Predicament: Destruction of
the Beautiful,” “A Queer Face in Aesthetics,” and a concluding chapter “A Bold
Challenger of Life.”
Chapter two “Aesthetics and Society” will contextualize Wilde’s aesthetics in the
Victorian background and scrutinize its relations with Victorian society. It will first
trace the aestheticism descended from John Ruskin and Walter Pater and scrutinize
Wilde’s coalescing of the movement. A probe into Ruskin and Pater’s influence upon
Wilde will be done, but emphasis will still be on Wilde’s critical writings concerning
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aesthetic principles. Three aesthetic energies (emotion, form, and freedom) will be
emphasized to facilitate later discussion. The works to be discussed include “The
Critic as Artist,” “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” and “The Decay of Lying.” I
will also unfold a Victorian social context, in which aestheticism finds the ground to
grow, based upon the theory of modernity. I will furthermore supplement the theory
by adding to it Habermas’ observation on the change of social structure from the 18th
century onwards, John Stuart Mill’s social criticism, rise of material pursuit
(capitalism, mass production, swelling of desires), and the convergence of modernity
and Christianity. I will assert that it is the social forces converging into a dimwitted
mediocre collectivity that brews necessity for Victorian aestheticism to mature. It is
on account of these modern trends that Victorian aestheticism carries the function of
countering mainstream and plays the feminine role of social resistance.
Chapter three “Aesthetic Predicament: Destruction of the Beautiful” will
continue the discussion of social concern in Wilde’s literary works. This chapter will
focus on the destructive side of modern materiality through studying Wilde’s
representation of the beautiful: the characters and figures in some of Wilde’s stories
and dramas. I will argue that the morbidity in Wilde’s works does not so much seduce
people to corruption but as a reflection upon the consequence of materiality, desires,
dullness, and indifference. That is, Wilde writes to criticize; however, the very
problems he sets out to lash out also become his own as he can no longer separate the
originally ideal aesthetic elevation from modern materiality. Aesthetic anticipation for
social change is sabotaged by the very modern forces that aesthetics sets out to oppose.
Ultimately, the assimilation of aesthetics and materiality becomes inevitable and left
unresolved by Wilde himself. I will use An Ideal Husband to illustrate this kind of
material seduction, Dorian Gray to instantiate the excess of desires and material love,
and “The Fisherman and His Soul,” “The Young King,” and “The Infanta” to
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elucidate the loss of heart and human affection. These literary representations thus
serve as a reflection to contemporary Victorians, though mostly misunderstood as
decadent.
Chapter four “A Queer Face in Aesthetics” will study Wilde’s emotional
expression in aesthetics through his literary works, such as Salome, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, “The Fisherman and His Soul,” and “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” I will
argue that, unable to solve the conflict between materiality and aesthetics, Wilde
instead directs the three aesthetic energies to the expression of subversive emotions.
That is, Wilde exploits the form and content of his works to re-present “sympathy
with thoughts” in “The Critic as Artist” and “Soul of Man under Socialism.”
Aesthetics might have become a problem for Wilde in the late Victorian context and
lost its original expectation, yet his daring expression opens a new portal for
aesthetics to evolve: to become modern and resistant in its own right. In this scenario,
the subversive emotions in his works, though sometimes thought of as gross
indecency, actually help him achieve artistic diversity, beyond morality and existent
social values. To queer the beautiful, Wilde thus lays the foundation for future queer
aesthetics and should be regarded as a precursor in queer literature. This chapter will
begin by clearing out my use of the term “queer” and proceed to Wilde’s seemingly
deviant but fluid emotions and how he expresses them, such as same-sex passions,
bisexual love, fetishism, necrophilia, and zoophilism, in his works. Here I would like
to point out that my use of modern sexual categories is expedient, for the sexual
desires are comprehended as different things in different ages. As I will argue later,
homosexuality as an identity had not been stabilized until the beginning of the
twentieth century; however, I find it necessary to attach them with modern tags for the
sake of clarity. By discussing his personal expression of subversive emotions, Wilde’s
aesthetics seems to create its own vitality and leaves the aesthetic dilemma behind,
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thus endowing arts with true freedom.
The concluding chapter “A Bold Challenger of Life” will summarize the major
points discussed before and use them to illustrate Wilde’s life. Nevertheless, I will
conclude that his aesthetic demonstration, such as his sexual acts and intentional
languidness, also drags him to destruction. He is indeed critical in almost all his works,
but it is pitiable that he cannot pull himself out of Victorian problems, such as
material pursuit, indulgence in desire, and media persecution. Wilde lives fully to his
subversive and aesthetic emotions, almost as a performer and language breaker; yet,
his concept of freedom and resistance to authority also strand him into trials which he
can never get over until his death. In the literary world, Wilde seems to be a seer, a
leader, and a bold challenger; however, in reality he is a martyr and victim of the same
aesthetics, and it is exactly the martyrdom and victimhood which render Wilde such a
unique literary status in English literature, and which make Wildean aesthetics as the
forerunner of future queer identities. He longs to change but is either murdered or
sacrificed by the change.
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Endnotes
1
This construction project was proposed by Ruskin as a practical action toward
aesthetic application when Wilde was still an undergraduate student at Magdalen
College. Peter Raby quoted from Wilde the situation when the construction was to
come about: “[Ruskin] thought, he said, that we should be working at something that
would do good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all
labour there was something noble. Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we
would do anything he wished. So he went out around Oxford and found two villages,
Upper and Lower Hinskey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so that the
villagers could not pass from one to the other without many miles of a round. And
when we came back in winter he asked us to help him to make a road across this
morass for these village people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how
to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank—a very difficult
thing to do” (19). Despite Ruskin’s good will and his intention to beautify the terrain
and benefit the villagers, this project failed in the end due to his students’ lack of
masonry and working skills, especially when they were mostly students with pens, not
with shovels.
2
In The Illustrated Life of Oscar Wilde, Calloway and Colvin record a famous
sentence that comes to the public after the release of Dorian Gray: “Basil Hallward is
what I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks me; Dorian is what I would like
to be” (66). This short response from Wilde provokes my attention over the role he
identifies with in the novel since his public image is probably socially constructed by
public opinions: “the world thinks me.” Obviously, he does not acquiesce with the
misconception and instead explains that he is the benign and well-intended fictional
painter Hallward. In the novel, it is Henry Wotton who exerts “decadent” influence
upon Dorian who finally walks into his destruction. Hallward is a painter who cares
for Dorian’s moral integrity and spiritual well-being. Dorian is the representation of
pure beauty with too much innocence but little self-restraint. Wilde’s not siding with
the evil and corrupted character thus poses an interesting query to his stance in the
aesthetic movement, considered by the Victorian public as decadent.
3
When the novel was first released in Britain, it was so critically received that
everyone seemed to focus only on its moral implication in that the story seems to
promulgate an irresponsible bohemian life. To defend his work, Wilde responded to
the moral criticism in the preface to the novel: “vice and virtue are to the artist
materials for an art” (4). For him, morality is merely a building block of a complete
work of art, and his novel does not so much concern morality as aesthetics. To
strengthen the original response from the author, Stuart Mason, in his edited collection
of essays and letters concerning the novel, indicates that Wilde refutes the Victorian
public opinion that the work is “exotic,” “unhealthy,” and “morbid” (19). Mason
summarizes Wilde’s remark that “the artist is never morbid” but the public, and the
use of “exotic” is largely due to public intolerance of the surpassing genius of the
work while his novel is very healthy in reflecting his contemporary art (19-20). In a
reply to the review in The Daily Chronicle, Wilde further emphasizes that moral is
only a dramatic element, not the object of the work itself. Although he contradictorily
explains the issue of conscience on Dorian Gray and asserts that Dorian “is haunted
all through his life by an exaggerated sense of conscience” (Mason 73), which seems
to direct his own defense back to the level of morality and ethics, it goes without
saying that Wilde considers art more significant than anything else in his story and
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insinuates that Victorian critics and public failed to understand its authentic value.
4
Holland’s urge for appreciation is grounded in his defense against the biographical
writings from Wilde’s friends, journalists, and scholars, who cited without testifying
the truth several suspicions about Wilde’s life, such as the accusation that he is a
transvestite, lustful homosexual, and syphilitic patient. These biased opinions without
evidence result from Wilde’s elusiveness. For that reason, Holland’s defense is
imaginable since his call to appreciate and respect is to decentralize the attention
focused on untrue public speculations. He urges people to appreciate the
“multicolored kaleidoscope” rather than to resolve the seeming contradiction (16).
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