| Aestheticism: a nineteenth-century
literary and artistic movement that argued that art has no utility and morality.
They, instead, stressed the polish and brilliance of aesthetic form. They
were influenced by the Parnassians, a French group of poets who rejected Romanticism for
clarity and precession of details. A belief in "Art for Art's Sake". Decadents: a loose group of English artists and writers of
the 1890's who were fascinated with drugs, cosmetics, perverse sexual practices, the
exotic, the pagan, and the horrific.
Click here to link to Landow's Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's --
Points of Departure
Wilde's Aestheticism
- Our perception of life and nature imitates art rather than the
reverse. Art is not a mimesis of the actual world but a regulator of human
perceptions.
- The art object should have no usefulness. It cannot be judged
true or false. Art's having a message leads to an emptying of its beauty.
- "Truth" in art is style alone -- the supremacy of form over
against the conscious use of didacticism.
- Along with this, Wilde adopts the pose of the dandy whose
life is an aesthetic performance. He rejects the bourgeoisie as socially useful and
therefore incapable of aesthetic performance. Instead, he opts for an interest in
the aristocracy as leisured uselessness -- an attitude, rather than a monetary amount.
- "Sincere and Studied Triviality" suggests a more
thought-out approach than the initial polish of the surface might at first suggest.
What, then, is WIlde attempting to achieve beneath (or through) the witty display
of epigrams?
- For one thing, a desire to undercut all pretensions to serious power.
Wilde's stance is not simple relativism; instead, he is working to keep imploding
set constructions that run the risk of oppression. Ethics should be instinctive and
aesthetic not rule-based or utilitarian.
- Thus, he puts forth an ethics of nonchalance, where one is true to
one's self against the rules of society that represses freedom. What appears as sin
may be progress and freedom.
- He believes that a love of beauty will naturally lead to a certain
natural grace, charm, and harmony of person. Everything should be done without hurt
to another.
- One could argue then (as Landow does) that the Wilde's characters use
wit to avoid understanding each other by reversing or undercutting the meaning of anyone's
statements. No one can lay any claim of responsibility or accountability on another
because such meaning is not received. Despite Wilde's love of freedom and avoidance
of pain, the dandy must avoid any specific demands on himself by a deliberate, if
whimsical, callousness to others.
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