¨A wish to love freely¨ an insight to oscar wilde´s 19th century poetry.

Stellmary’s López Oseguera Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009
English 3221 KJ1 Prof. Lydia Platón

¨A Wish to Love Freely¨ an insight to Oscar Wilde´s 19th century poetry.

¨Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life mimicry, their passions aquotation.¨ (Wilde, O.)

The Victorian Era (19th century) was known around the world as one of the most notorious centuries, an era of transformation in the technological, political, and scientific branches, but also an era of extreme prudishness and repression among human beings. Victorian society was tied to a set of moral values where the dignity, sexual restraint, the ethical stability,and the absolute order constituted the virtues of a noble man or woman. The liberty of expressing oneself´s emotions or sexuality was labeled as mundane and, as a result, thoroughly rejected and despised. The strict rules that governed that century were part of the instruments responsible for the downfall of one of most recognized writers of the late 19th century, Oscar Wilde, on whom thisresearch is going to focus. In this paper, I would make an approach on the sociological portrait of same sex relationships in Victorian century viewed from the perspective of Oscar Wilde, a writer whose life, writing style, and thoughts (beautiful in essence, but way ahead of the common thinking of his period of time), where tarnished and despised by a repressive society that signaled his living styleand condemned him due to the biased conception of what is moral and what is not.
In this research I will pinpoint some crucial aspects of the biography of Oscar Will Wilde; events of his life that will propel the analysis of Wilde´s way of thinking and thus the understanding of his motivations and conceptions about the world expressed through his poetry. An important aspect of Wilde´s stateof mind, pointed out in almost all of his biographies is the proclaimed support of art as a way of beauty. (Thus, we need to further analyze some aspects of this modern current, known as the aesthetic movement, or the ¨Art for Art’s Sake¨ movement). This movement is of great importance in Wilde´s life and career because most of his writings, his intellectual transformations and more importantly,his support of homosexual rights arise in this moment in particular.
Also an exhaustive analysis can be made concerning Wilde´s free expression (in his poems and writings) of his thoughts and feelings regarding homosexuality as a healthy and completely normal relationship with same bases of a heterosexual relationship (name love and affection), in an era in which the bonds between two maleswere portrayed as ¨indecent¨ and ¨immoral¨. Of course, if we analyze this conception, the reactions among the conservative groups of Victorians (the skepticism, the rejection due to the righteous laws, the religious issues reigning over the society, and also the conception that love could only be represented as a man and woman relationship) also needs to be analyzed.
Another insight in myresearch would be the relationship between Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas and the effect that this relationship combined with the rejection of that era regarding homosexual relations affected Wilde´s writing and more specifically, his poetry. Also, the secrecy of their relationship (stated by the 19th century harsh and merciless restrictions concerning homosexual affairs or ¨sodomy¨as they wrongly called it), is analyzed in two of the famous poems that exist regarding this couple: Two Loves (1894) and In Praise of Shame (1894) in which ¨…the love that dare not speak its name.¨ (Two Loves Poem, L. Stanza), is the representation of a romance hidden from the cruel fangs of a ruthless society.
This relationship triggers Wilde´s most horrible experience: Imprisonment....