The sanctified lie : form and content in the art of Oscar Wilde

Abstract

This study seeks to show that in the work of Oscar Wilde, form and content, though manifestly separate, are latently connected. In Wilde's aesthetics, form and content are more than mere critical generalities---they are also metaphors for, respectively, art and nature, order and chaos, two conflicting but interdependent principles. Form in Wilde's work is a metaphor for the artist's defense against the largeness and ambiguity of nature and life. Therefore, to create, Wilde needs to insist on form over content, art over nature. Form in Wilde's work manifests itself in a deliberately artificial style, a style revealed by, for example, epigrammatic dialogue and posing of characters. However, because of this emphasis on form, nature and life will make an uncanny figurative return in Wilde's fiction, a return symbolized, for instance, by emotional ambivalence, intellectual ambiguity, and even acts of murder. In Wilde, form and content are interdependent because the content is latent in the principle of form, which stands for the human struggle against the perceived disorder of nature and life, a struggle which nevertheless is revelatory of that same chaos