His foremost work is his life: Who is Oscar Wilde?

Oscar Wilde was influenced by his mother, who said that "men must live for the sake of sinning".

By William James Published on 16 Haziran 2023 : 21:31.
His foremost work is his life: Who is Oscar Wilde?

Oscar Wilde is associated with pioneers of modernist literature such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. But he was influential on the 20th-century avant-garde not only with his literature but also with his criticisms of art and literature. Also, his foremost work is undoubtedly his life. He says that he has already added his genius to his life, and he puts only his talent into his works.

Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was brought up in a cultured and wealthy family, learning languages from French governesses. More than his father, Sir, a doctor, Oscar Wilde was more influenced by his mother, who said that "men must live for the sake of sin."

Thanks to his success at Dublin's Trinity School, Oscar Wilde won a scholarship and went to England to study at Magdalen, one of Oxford's most distinguished colleges. At school, he excels with his deep knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome and his deviant behavior. After finishing school, he settled in London. He lives in great luxury, eats in the most expensive restaurants, and stays in the most exclusive hotels. He spends money on his tailors to be completely different and stylish. Result: He consumes his father's wealth in a short time.

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at the age of 46.

Instead of wearing normal trousers, he wears knee-length panties, silk stockings, colorful ties, and wide-brimmed hats, as in the 18th century. He always has a very expensive huge flower on his lapel. He only wears a dark costume, traditionally, on his birthday, as everyone else wears it. The reason for this choice is to show that he is mourning the loss of another year of his youth. It develops a speech rhetoric woven with striking as well as funny word games. It produces idiosyncratic aphorisms, brilliant jokes, and surprising paradoxes.

Oscar Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884, and they had two sons from this marriage. In addition to her literary pursuits, she edits The Women's World and publishes articles on political and social issues. Oscar Wilde, the author of The Portrait of Dorian Gray, which is considered the most authoritative of allegorical works, and best known for this work, is an artist who has worked in almost every field of literature, from poetry, theater works, novels, stories, and letters.

The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's only novel published in 1891, describes the relationship of Dorian Gray, a handsome young nobleman of the aristocratic class, with his true-to-life portrait of Dorian Gray by his painter friend Basil Hallward. It tells the story of Dorian Gray's friendship with a nobleman named Lord Henry, whom he met in the workshop of his painter friend, and how the portrait took the place of Dorian in real life, as he began to lead a hedonistic life under the influence of this friendship.

Oscar Wilde had this to say about the three characters in the novel: “I am Basil Hallward, the talented, kind-hearted but ugly. The evil angel Lord Henry Wotton is what everyone thinks I am… and Dorian Gray is the person I wish I could look like.”

Salomé, published in 1893 by Oscar Wilde, whose story takes its source from the Bible, is a one-act drama and is famous for revolutionizing modern theater techniques. When writing Salomé, Oscar Wilde was particularly influenced by one of the most important symbolist poets and dramatists, Maurice Maeterlinck. It is also said to be inspired by Gustave Moreau's drawings of Salomé. Rehearsals for the play began in England, but the play was censored because it was forbidden to depict characters from the Bible on stage. The main reason, of course, is that the game is quite sexually audacious. The work was staged in Paris in 1896, five years after it was written.

Oscar Wilde's life ended tragically on November 30, 1900. When he died in a miserable hotel, only seven people attended his funeral. However, Oscar Wilde, who gained a certain reputation and prestige at the beginning of his artistic life, was leading his life as a very confident, strong, and respected literary man before the disaster that would put him in prison and lose all his money and honor. But all the disasters came as a result of meeting Lord Alfred Douglas, and having a relationship with him that would never be welcome in that era. Today, he was sent to prison for a crime that cannot be understood much, namely the crime of living immorally.

With his novel, fables, stories, poems, essays, unique speaking, wit, idiosyncrasies, attire, and aesthetic behavior, Wilde launched an attack on Victorian morality. He has never hidden that he is gay. He paid for this war with two years in prison as a result of the Queensberry Case. Wilde was a 20th-century thinker who lived in the 19th century. He sensed the social developments that would take place in the new periods and the revolutions that would be undertaken for freedom, and he saw the explosions that would occur in the field of art.