Biographie d'Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement. Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals.
After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.
Everlasting beauty has its price...
The story happens during the Victorian era, around the figure of the young and very handsome lad Dorian Gray. After becoming the model and muse of Basil Hallward, a sensitive painter, Gray is so enthralled by his portrait that he implicitly makes a deal with the devil ; he wished for the picture to grow old in his place so he can remain untouched by the marks of time. But every pact has a catch... Influenced by his mentor Lord Henry and his hedonistic world view, Dorian basks in a decadent lifestyle for years while his picture takes all the blames and gets uglier... to a point of no-return.
By portraying a cruel, narcissistic and amoral character, Wilde offers his readers a still contemporary critique of hedonistic behaviors and the superficiality and blindness of those who adopt this way of living.