The Life of Oscar Wilde
The year is 1884 and many things have taken place in the life of our literary giant, Oscar Wilde has been married years and his touring of the United States and other countries have shown his of success in his writing all over the literary world. Some of his most recent writtings are "The Picture of Dorian Gray"(1891), "A Woman of No Importance"(1894) and his most resent essay known as "The Decay of Lying" is Oscar’s story of his outrage about the current style of writing that is going into the art society. What has happened to the spectacularness of this art, it has come down to being as horrid as what is being published in the local newspapers.
Is it true that " The Decay of Lying" has fallen to its deepest shadow of shame? It seems that in the words of Oscar Wilde, that is the shameful truth. How could this type of atrocity take place. It seems that the Victorian society in still under the belief that the Romanticism of life is still coursing through their veins, dead veins to be more specific. Wilde's views romanticism as a crude, childish and yet passive thing of the past and that it should remain there in the past. The romantics ideas of nature and realism need to be brought up-to-date.
Wilde has criticized the likes of as Wordsworth and other writers of the Romantic Era, they would send us out to nature and say "The solutions to societies problems and can best be remedied out here, within the confines of nature, this is where you need to be. Walking, talking, being out in the great airy open and embrace what nature has to offer. Only here can you expect to amend and resolve any personal and troublesome problems." Wilde's interpretation of this remedy: outlandish, extreme and insane, society has entered a new era, it is high time that new policies are enacted and sent out to the masses and out among the residence of the land, an Oscarianian Manifesto draw a close this Era of the Victorian Age.
It was Wilde’s notion that there was much lacking in the literary works of the day, a cry from the masses that is was necessary to receive an answer, Wilde answered that call in the form of an essay, it was called "The Decay of Lying". This particular essay is one that he felt that was needed to be written to wake up call to the present day writers about their failings to keep art as it is Art. There needs to be a clear explanation of what the definition of lying means and in what context. Random House - Webster's College Dictionary defines a lie as the following: lie: verb, lied, lying - a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; a falsehood.
Wilde's intention of his creative writing is to be used as a outlet to escape from the Realism of life, which definition is to emphasizes the importance the ordinary, the lay person and the simplisticness of lives varied situations. It seem that the artists, have been rejecting the notion of stories based on the heroic, the aristocratic and firmly embraced the common...