探究王尔德作品中的艺术和道德_英语本科毕业论文(22页).doc

-探究王尔德作品中的艺术和道德_英语本科毕业论文-第 17 页苏州大学外国语学院成教本科毕业论文（2013届夜大学）题 目： On the Art and Morality of Wildes Works 探究王尔德作品中的艺术和道德 专 业： 英 语 姓 名： 李玉洁 学 号： YB1104017084 指导教师： 提交日期： 2013年10月 AcknowledgementsThere are a lot of people who help me to contribute to the completion of this thesis. and I would like to avail myself of this opportunity to extend my deep gratitude to them.Firstly, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Su Xiaojun, who have given lots of intellectual guidance and moving encouragement in my three-year study at Soochow University, in particular whose strong support of my thesis topic has given me great confidence to continue my writing.Secondly, I would like to thank my classmates for their unfailing support and patience in answering my questions in the interviews during my thesis writing.Finally, I am also much obliged to my family members, without their support and encouragement, my completion of this thesis would not have been possible.AbstractOscar Wilde, one of the most important writers of Irish literature, as well as the English literature. He was an advocator of artistic aestheticism, insisting that it was life and nature that imitated art, not art imitated life and nature; art should not be restrained by morality. Wilde presented multiple images in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and demonstrated himself behind various masks through conflicts among the multiple personalities. In the fairy tales, he created a realm of experience separate and distinct from the reality. Yet his fairy tales did not abandon reality. Wilde applied the paradox in his dramas. The paradox was used to fully express his thoughts and viewpoints. This paper did a detailed analysis of the art and morality in Wildes works. Firstly, this paper introduced the study on morality of previous literary works. Then, it elaborated the artistic theories of Oscar Wilde, and explored the concealed morality of his novel for instance of his representative works. Finally, it found that the morality and art were presented throughout his works, which usually were overlooked. And that at the crossroad between ideal and reality, between art and morality, Wildes hate and love and pursuit made him an individual of contradictions who bled upon the thorns of life and in the end a martyred artist.Key words: Oscar Wilde; art and morality; contradictions摘要奥斯卡·王尔德是爱尔兰文学史和英国文学史上最重要的作家之一。他是一位艺术唯美主义的倡导者，坚持认为是生活和自然模仿艺术，而不是艺术模仿生活和自然，艺术不应受到道德的束缚。王尔德在他唯一的小说道林格雷的画像中展示了多种多样的人物形象，并通过这些人物间的矛盾冲突阐释了多重面具遮掩下的奥斯卡本人。在童话故事中，他创造了一个与现实脱离并远离世事的理想王国。然而，王尔德的童话故事并没有遗弃现实。在戏剧中，他运用矛盾表达法充分地表达了他的想法和观点。本文对王尔德的作品中的艺术与道德感进行了详细分析。首先介绍了先前作品对道德感的不同研究。然后详尽阐述了王尔德的艺术理论并从他有代表性的作品中选取小说为例对隐藏在其中的道德感进行探究。最后发现，王尔德的作品一直就是艺术与道德感共同存在着，只是通常被忽略了。在理想与现实的十字路口，在唯美与道德之间，王尔德的爱恨与追求使他自己成为一个充满矛盾的个体。他在人生的荆棘路上流着血，最终成为艺术的殉道者。关键词: 奥斯卡·王尔德；艺术与道德；矛盾ContentsIntroduction1Chapter 1 Morality of Literary Works 3Chapter 2 Art and Morality of Wildes Works52.1 Wildes Artistic Theories5 2.1.1 Theory of “Art for Arts Sake”52.1.2 Theory of “Life Imitating Art”62.1.3 Contradictions Revealed in Advocating the Self-Contained Art82.2 Morality Concealed in the Novel92.2.1 Unity of “Body and Soul”92.2.2 Morality in the Aesthetic Art10Chapter 3 Relationship Between Art and Morality 13Chapter 4 Contradictions in Wildes Literary Practice164.1 Contradictions in the Fairy Tales164.2 Wildes Paradox16Chapter 5 Conclusion17IntroductionThe full name of Oscar Wilde is Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wills Wilde (18541900). He was born in Ireland, well known as a playwright, novelist, essayist and poet. In the early age, he had participated in his mothers Dublin salon, and turned out an excellent literary talk. After being educated in Trinity College, Dublin, he attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for English Verse; he took a First Class degree in Classics in spite of a reputation for idleness. At Oxford, the aesthetic innovators such as English writers Walter Pater and John Ruskin had a great influence over him.In 1881, Oscar Wilde published his first book, a collection of Poems. One year later, Wilde went to New York for a successful lecture tour, then he produced the first plays there, Vera; or, The Nihilists (1882) and The Duchess of Padua (1891) (as Guido Ferrandi), a blank verse tragedy, although not so successful. On returning to England he settled in London and married a wealthy Irish woman. Later, they had two sons. After that, he devoted himself exclusively to writing.Oscar Wilde published two collections of fairy tales The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), and A House of Pomegranates (1892), a group of short stories Lord Arthur Saviles Crime (1891), and a melodramatic tale, his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Ultimately, he achieved fame with a succession of comedies, beginning with Lady Windermeres Fan (1892), and following up with A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895). His most characteristic play, The Importance of Being Earnest (also 1895) was proved the most successful. Few comedies of the English stage had such wit, elegance, and theatrical dexterity (Hartnoll, Found 545). The last play of Oscar Wildes was the poetic one-act Salome, written in French. It was banned in England and was first seen privately in London until 1905 .Wilde also left an unfinished one-act play, A Florentine Tragedy which was later completed by Sturge Moore and was produced in London in 1906.London witnessed Oscar Wildes tragic downfall at the peak of his career in 1895. He was accused of homosexuality by the Marquis of Queensbury, father of Wildes close friend, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was convicted of homosexual offenses and sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison. During the two years, he composed De Profundis (From the Depths, 1905), and a poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Financially bankrupt, ruined in health and spiritually downcast, Wilde left prison in 1897 and spent the rest of his life in Paris, using a pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. Later, Wilde died of meningitis in Paris on November 30, 1900.As ZhaoLi and Xu Jingan had summed up in the book Aestheticism, published by Peoples University Press in 1988, Wildes artistic theories mainly consist of three aspects: First, art should be separated from life in that beauty is second to nothing and life is second to art; the beauty and value of art do not exist in life and nature. In writing, beautiful yet untrue stories, namely “lying” works should be advocated. Second, art itself is but the object in that art has its own independent life and value, being obligated to nothing. Only the beauty of form in art is worth seeking after. Third, art is prior to life in that life imitates art rather than life being reflected by art.Based on a general reading of Wildes all types of literary works, deep understanding of his artistic theories and analyzing of the morality of his works, this paper ultimately found that there were obvious contradictions within them. Chapter 1 Morality of Literary WorksNo one could be free from moral whether to be against it or to be in coherence with it. All the works and their authors were endowed with morality, though it was not always in consistence with the dominant. To be completely objective and non-moral was impossible. The works had to do with reality and it would have to deal with the value judgment and ethnical problems. No matter how hard the author tried to be objective, he certainly showed his personal moral inclination at least through the selection and arrangement of materials, as David Masson pointed out that the value judgment had its inevitability. As long as the author extracted materials from the real life, the morality emerged with it. Wilde wanted to cast away morality through the “art for art” principle or plucking into the sensation of crimes, but he never really or completely discarded the moral awareness. Then he transgressed the moral into aesthetics. In the long history of western literature, spiritual function of literary was dominated. As early as in the earliest Greek mythology, there had been the moral message. Plato banished the poets from the Republic, because the poetry did not moralize. Aristotle discoursed at great length on the validity of Greek tragedy by arguing that the tragedy aroused emotional tumult in the audiences hearts, which gave them catharsis and purified their soul. In fact most of the great Greek tragedies explored ethnic problems. In the long period of the religious Mediation, religion was the exclusive subject of literary and the only criterion. In the Renaissance period the writers spared no effort to establish the new moral standard that adapted to the developing bourgeoisie society. Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare or other great writers, all quested for a grander moral theme: the social morality. Sir Philip Sydney, the great English critic, in his Apology for Poetry argued that poem was a superior means of communication and its value based on what was communicated. The world of the poem was a better world than the real one and was presented in such a way that the readers were stimulated to try and imitate it in their own practice. When it came to the 19th century, the moral awareness was wider and deeper. Balzac, the great French novelist, in his works scrutinized the whole society in the light of morality. Charles Dickens tried so hard to punish the vice and encourage goodness that he was under the suspicion that he preached too much. These great writers influenced the readers with the moral proposition combined in their works. The writers of the modern genres also showed their speculation on morality, though they didnt always sustain the predominant one. And their moral anxiety was shown in a more diverting way.Chapter 2 Art and Morality of Wildes Works2.1. Wildes Artistic Theories 2.1.1. Theory of “Art for Arts Sake”During the late nineteenth century, the industrial revolution undermined the three main corners of the Victorian society (namely religion, family and duty) without offering ready-made alternatives. Social skepticism grew, the Victorian morality was under pressure. When the central governing standards of the Victorian society were challenged by the first economic crisis and by social reformers like the Fabians, the avant-garde of artists and intellectuals like Oscar Wilde were forced to realize the bankruptcy of the old values. Since the materialist values of the middle-class could not satisfy him, Oscar Wilde followed the theory of “art for arts sake.” He advocated the palace of beauty, appealing to beauty and art. And declared, “Beauty is a form of Genius-is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the reflections in dark watersit cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty” (Ellmann 22). Wilde held that art represented pure beauty with the optimal forms. “The object of art is not simple truth but complex beauty” (Wilde 1997, 21). “All bad art comes from returning to life and nature elevating them into ideals” (Wilde 1997, 52), because neither life nor nature should be perfect, ugly sometimes. Wilde urged people to believe in non-utilitarian art, claiming:The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art (Wilde 1997, 16). Therefore, “Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day” (赵武平 15). And “into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue” (赵武平16). Wilde argued for the separation of life and art and claimed that literary realism violated this first law of aesthetics, whereas romance reverently obeyed it. He set art and life in irreconcilable conflict and denied that literature needed in any way to be responsible to life. Wildes such claim that art did not adhere to life but being independent became a rebellion against the reality and life. Nonetheless, from time to time, Oscar Wilde would keep aloof from the ivory tower of the “beauty” to boldly expose and sharply criticize the ugliness and darkness of the reality and life. He even wrote a prose of “The Soul of Man under Socialism” in 1891 though his opinions towards socialism might need to be carefully further thought about. His action revealed that such an artist who wrote such kind of article would never be ignorant of life or reality at all, so the art that he had been propagating should not be absolutely non-utilitarian. Furthermore, Wildes literary creation could never be outside of the reality of life, from not even his fairy tales which have usually been considered the most far away from the real life. Fairy tales need not abandon reality in order to satisfy mans psychological developments needs and desires. On the contrary, they should reflect essential and conditions of mans existence (Cohen 77). For instance, in a letter Wilde connected the relationship between fairy tales and reality with that between literary modes of realism and romance: “The story The Happy Prince is an attempt to treat a tragic modern problem in a form that aims at delicacy and imaginative treatment: it is a reaction against the purely imitative character of modern art” (Cohen 79). In another letter Wilde claimed the stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales were an attempt to mirror modern life in a form remote from reality-to deal with modern problems in a mode that was ideal and not imitative(Cohen 78).It can be concluded that by advocating the theory of “art for arts sake,” Wilde believed in the non-utilitarianism of art, contradictorily, however, he admitted that art had the social function to save the society. 2.1.2. Theory of “Life Imitating Art”In spite of arguing for separation of art and life and doctrine of “art for arts sake,” Oscar Wilde further developed his artistic theory. He pointed out that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” (Wilde 1997, 38). He further illustrated: “life holds the mirror up to art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction” (Wilde 1997, 38). Still, “nature, no less than life, is an imitation of artThings are be