Life and Art

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the works of Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry Wotton and Thomas Mann. The paper shows how the notion of the self as a construction is particularly evident, not only in the fictional work of these writers, but also in the way that they themselves lived their lives.

From the Paper:

"After visiting Walt Whitman during his lecture tour of America in 1882, Oscar Wilde said of the American poet: 'I have an admiration for that man which I can hardly express'. Looking at both Wilde and Whitman as personalities, it is difficult, at first glance, to imagine what Wilde, with his reputation as a quick-witted dandy could have found so admirable in Whitman, the self-confessed 'good gray poet'. But it was in Whitman, according to Alan Helms, that Wilde found 'an illustration of his favourite theory', that life imitates art. What Wilde found in Whitman was 'a consciously crafted man who had become his own ideal version of himself'. Later, in 1888, when Wilde commented to fellow Irish poet Yeats, 'I think a man should invent his own myth' it became evident that the notion of self-creation or the cultivation of his own image was something to which Wilde himself aspired."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Ellman, Richard, Eminent Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)
• Heller, Erich, The Ironic German: A Study of Thomas Mann (Boston: Little Brown, 1958)
• Helms, Alan, ''Hints...Faint Clews and Indirections': Whitman's Homosexual Disguises' in Walt Whitman: Here and Now, ed. Joann P. Krieg (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985) pp. 61-68
• Janaway, Christopher, Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
• Lewis, Lloyd; Smith, Henry Justin, Oscar Wilde Discovers America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936)

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