Oscar Wilde: A Unique Aesthete

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish-born English playwright, novelist, essayist and poet, brings us a series of successful and sometimes innovative productions of different genres. He is regarded as one of the most representative proponents for the movement of Aestheticism. As a controversial figure, Wilde keeps his life and personality in the public eyes.Nobody will deny that Wilde is an outstanding aesthete. However, in my opinion, he is also a unique one. He has long been considered as a paradoxical figure because of the contradictory nature of his works, especially his comedies. On one hand, Wilde insists on his claim that there are no such things as moral or immoral and that art is useless. On the other hand his four comedies all center around social reality and the characters he creates are concerned with moral problems.Meanwhile he is a mixture of convention and revolution. When writing comedies, Wilde makes use of the ideas and the dramatic skills of traditional French well-made play, melodrama, and problem drama in order to create bis own plots and characters. But he doesn't limit himself to this. The Importance of Being Earnest is the best example of his revolution and innovation in the field of drama. Besides, in the comedies themselves exits his revolutionary spirit. He challenges social, sexual and moral conventions of the Victorian society and expresses his own individual views, which contain progressive feminism and the rejection of all forms of authority.In addition, Wilde's uniqueness is reflected in the dandies he figures in the comedies. The dandies are amongst the most attractive of Wilde's characters. The dandy image has its historical and philosophical development in England and France during the nineteenth century. But Wildean dandies are unique because of his unique combination of paradoxes, epigrams, puns and verbal wit in their language, which distinguishes Wilde from all other dramatists, and constitutes the originality of his contribution to the history of English comedy.Although in some people's eyes, Wilde is not called a major writer, his works especially his plays provide him with a quality of lasting vitality. His best writings,...