Wilde and Aesthetics

ELT 38: 1 1995 reprint of the club's two books. Since the 1890s have achieved extensive scholarly attention, the Woodstock volumes are likely to be welcomed. Karl Beckson ______________ Brooklyn College, CUNY Wilde and Aesthetics Guy WUloughby. Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. 170 pp. $32.50 ONE MIGHT well be wary of critics who argue that a single "unUying" theme exists in any author' s work—especially Ui the varied and complex work of Oscar WUde. At first this wariness seems justified by Guy WUloughby^ Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, as WUloughby focuses on an overarching, unifying Christ theme in Wilde's writings. In the end, however, WUloughby avoids an overly unifying strategy. Instead Art and Christhood provides a valuable critique of Christhood as the prime model for WUde's sense of the individual's "Realization," Wilde's term for the most important "Individual " expression possible. Indeed, WUlougby provides a valuable critique of WUde's orientation towards Christ, U perhaps with varying degrees of success. WUloughby places extreme emphasis on Christ's status Ui WUde's work—for WUloughby, Christ is not simply an important theme. In many ways it is the theme, as it unifies aU other themes, from WUde's relationship to romanticism to his position vis-à -vis materialism. And, as WUloughby points out, there is much textual support for this tack; WUloughby places emphasis on WUde's recurrent references to Christ and Christ-like figures, including WUde's argument Ui De Profundis that "the complex integrality that typifies Romantic art 'was to [Christ] the proper basis of actual IUe' which therefore made him 'the precursor of the Romantic movement.'" WUloughby addresses this Christhood theme in an original way, arguing that Christ's WUdean status is important Ui two ways: Christ provides both an insight into WUde's aesthetics, as weU as into the problems WUde's aesthetics might address in our own fin de siècle—as we are equally Ui need of "'form' amid the 'chaos' of reductive practices": "What relevance, it might be asked, do [WUde's aesthetics] have for us today? The answer, I believe, is straightforward: WUde's aesthetics matter in these post-Structuralist days more than previously, because we, too, are struggling to salvage an affirmative concept of art out of a 118 BOOK REVIEWS deep-seated cultural pessimism." How, then, wül WUde's aesthetics draw upon Christ's status to accomplish these impressive goals? First, WUde's aesthetics wield Christ as a model for a "revolutionary" aesthetic , an aesthetic WUloughby cites as WUde's "peculiar achievement." This revolutionary aesthetic position reconcUes two diverse phUosophical approaches which pervade our own era; WUde wül "graft onto the near-solipsistic poetics of Pater the organic impulse, and its social imperative, tirelessly propounded by John Ruskin and Arnold." In other words, WUde wül provide a "synthesis" relevant to both his fin-de-siecle angst, and our own sense of chaotic uistabUity—at least, U post-structuralism is to be viewed in WUloughby's terms. SpecUically, WUde's aesthetics wUl intimate how "the private intensities of the one must combine with the moral concern of the other, so that the new aesthetics may be philosophically modish and ethically responsible together." WUloughby argues that this synthesis emerges around WUde's portrayal of Christ and the Christ-lüce figure—a portrayal we should not be so hasty to reject as being naive and untenable: "WUde's work in toto celebrates the human power to imagine and to impose order, however fleetingly, on experience; his rereading of Jesus as a definitive model for the new aesthetics—as a quintessential artist-in-ltfe—is the key to his thought." WUloughby offers a series of close readings to argue this point, and does so with much success. The only reservation here is that WUloughby sometimes tries officiously to tie his diverse readings together —on page 44, for example he constructs his argument somewhat awkwardly by referring piecemeal to four dtfferent works. WUloughby's specific poults are often valuable, however; he argues on that same page that Christ becomes a figure (literally and metaphorically...