Oscar Wilde’s work is often discussed in the context of Aestheticism, a movement that he espoused and participated in. We will look at it further to illuminate the writer and, hopefully, elements of the fairy tales.
Aestheticism is often defined as, simply, “art for art’s sake” (a phrase coined by French novelist Theophile Gautier in his 1836 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin). It is a late 19th-century European movement that encompassed the visual arts, literature, music, fashion, and more. In that it promotes the idea of beauty as preeminent in the arts, what is elided is an explicit (or even implicit, most of the time) focus on the political, social, and didactic. Indeed, morality is absolutely subordinate to the aesthetic, as the aesthetic experience is the only thing with meaning. Art is no longer judged by moral standards but by the standards of beauty alone—i.e., its own criteria.
The origins of the movement stem from the Industrial Age, perceived as crass and corrupting by artists and intellectuals. In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant paved the philosophical foundation by writing of differentiating aesthetic standards from morality, utility, and pleasure.
Artists at the zenith of the movement included the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the British artists Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and the American James McNeill Whistler. Their works drew on diverse sources, prized feminine beauty and sensuality, explored color and harmony of tone, and created mood rather than narrative. In literature, Wilde and his tutor Walter Pater led the charge, with Theophile Gautier and the poets Charles Baudelaire and Charles Algernon Swinburne also adding their voices to the movement. Poets demonstrated florid style, packing their verse with metaphor, paradox, allusion, and more. Wilde claimed that life imitated art and not the other way around.
Pater wrote what is generally considered the manifesto of the movement, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), in which he promulgated that era for its emphasized on subjectivity, sensory encounters with lovely things, self-indulgence, and putting one’s energies and efforts into the pursuit of the aforementioned. It was a striking rebuttal to the norms and moral codes of the Victorian era.
Many literary and artistic luminaries did not espouse Aestheticism. In particular, Leo Tolstoy did not think morality and art were extricable. As scholar Carol Burdett writes, “Aestheticism unsettled and challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture. As it percolated more widely into the general culture, it was relentlessly satirized and condemned.”
By the 1890s, Aestheticism was associated strongly with decadence. Burdett explains that the term refers to a few interlocked qualities: “the notion of intense refinement; the valuing of artificiality over nature; a position of ennui or boredom rather than of moral earnestness or the valuing of hard work; an interest in perversity and paradox, and in transgressive modes of sexuality.” Wilde with his flamboyant dress, bold claims that his life was a work of art, and his potent sexuality, was the poster child of decadence. He was brought to trial for gross indecency—engaging in homosexual acts, then illegal in England—and was sentenced to two years’ hard labor. Though this was not the precise end of the movement, it was at least a symbolic one, and Aestheticism ebbed in subsequent years.
