OSCAR WILDE: THE REBEL AND THE DANDY

Oscar Wilde totally adopted “the aesthetic ideal”, as he affirmed in one of his famous conversations:”My life is like a work of art”. He lived flamboyantly and ostentatiously, dividing his time between high society and “bohemian” cirlces, in the double role of rebel and dandy.
The dandy must be distinguished from the” bohemian”: while the bohemian allies himself to the masses, the urban proletariat, the dandy is a bourgeois artist, who, in spite of his uneasiness, remains a member of his class.
The Wildian dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses his wit to shock, and is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. Wilde took on the figure of the dandy because it embodied much of what he wished to express, but he added to it elements linked to sensation, which are peculiarly Wildean: the more sensations the dandy could absorb, the richer and nearer perfection his personality would be. Since life was meant for pleasure, and pleasure was an indulgence in the beautiful, beautiful clothes, beautiful talks, delicious food, and handsome boys were the main interests of Wilde. He affirmed:”There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. This is all”.

ART FOR ART’S SAKE
The concept of “Art for Art’s Sake”was to Wilde a moral imperative and not merely an aesthetic one. The Preface of his novel “The Picutre of Dorian Gray” embodies his view of art and the artist, and it canbe read as a kind of poem. He believed that only “Art as the cult of Beauty” could prevent the murder of the soul. Wilde perceived the artist as an alien in a materialistic world, he wrote only to please himself and was not concerned in communicating his theories to his fellow-beings. His pursuit of beauty and fulfillment was the tragic act of a superior being turned into an outcast.