Megan and Tristan Oscar Wilde Aetheticism

    Many of Oscar Wilde's publishings addressed the principles of the aesthetic movement popular in Victorian England, which was that art should take no part in molding the social or moral identities of society and instead should be focused on their aesthetic values. They acknowledged that art can be pleasurable but it would be a mistake if it was allowed to have any real influence, which was commonly said as "art for art's sake". Oscar Wilde was a prominant leader in promoting the movement near the end of the nineteenth century. While in college, Wilde was greatly influenced by the works of a\the English poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne and the American writer Edgar Allan Poe.

     In The Importance of Being Earnet, Wilde uses Algernon as a means of criticizing the elite of his society and to condemn the old Victorian values to which aestheticism was strongly opposed. In order to do so, he has Algernon deliver many hypocritical lines, such as, “[the low class] seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility” (Wilde 184). Such a statement would have been extremely ironic at the time, as it was the upper classes to which Algernon belongs, that were identified as suffering from moral degradation. In another piece of Wilde's, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, starts out with, “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.” He justified this through the aesthetic belief that life should imitate art.

     Wilde was an advocate for aestheticism outside of his literary work as well and is now a symbolic figure of the movement as a whole.

This picture shows Oscar Wilde surrounded by a group of lavishly dressed women known as aesthetes.