Oscar Wilde emerged in late Victorian London “as the living embodiment of the Aesthetic movement,” promoting l’art pour l’art and a flamboyant dandyism that defied puritanical norms.
It seems the argument between art as aesthetic and art for art sake, encompassing political purpose—this battle has gone on a lot longer and more in-depth than many would care to admit. The struggle between coded imagery and Victorian culture would be comedic in today’s terms. It seems the curse of isolated spaces our publications is everyone had too much time to dwell on them! Like the walls of the prison, if you paste enough bodies in a pattern, soon they aren’t individual things any longer. They become averages. Normalized.
This is the fear of the extreme conservative and fundamentalist—the normalization of what is going on anyway!
💯 agree. That’s the core terror…. not that these “deviations” exist, but that they might BELONG. Wilde knew this intimately. His very existence….his wit, his style, his unapologetic queerness….posed a threat not because it was rare, but because it was RECOGNIZABLE. It echoed something already there, just buried beneath layers of lace, Latin, and law.
Victorian culture was obsessed with performance, with purity as spectacle. But the more they tried to box art in, as moral, educational, redemptive, the more cracks appeared. His aestheticism wasn’t apolitical; it was a rebellion dressed in velvet. A flower pinned to the lapel of empire, blooming in spite of it.
Isolate people long enough (in prison cells or parlor rooms), and the fixation on regulation turns the human form into pattern….something that can be filed, stamped, repressed. But Wilde SAW that, and he subverted it. He turned the prison wall into prose. He made art dangerous again.
The fear remains the same today…. if we allow visibility, then we must admit the truth….these lives are not aberrations. They’re averages. And that terrifies them.
It seems the argument between art as aesthetic and art for art sake, encompassing political purpose—this battle has gone on a lot longer and more in-depth than many would care to admit. The struggle between coded imagery and Victorian culture would be comedic in today’s terms. It seems the curse of isolated spaces our publications is everyone had too much time to dwell on them! Like the walls of the prison, if you paste enough bodies in a pattern, soon they aren’t individual things any longer. They become averages. Normalized.
This is the fear of the extreme conservative and fundamentalist—the normalization of what is going on anyway!
💯 agree. That’s the core terror…. not that these “deviations” exist, but that they might BELONG. Wilde knew this intimately. His very existence….his wit, his style, his unapologetic queerness….posed a threat not because it was rare, but because it was RECOGNIZABLE. It echoed something already there, just buried beneath layers of lace, Latin, and law.
Victorian culture was obsessed with performance, with purity as spectacle. But the more they tried to box art in, as moral, educational, redemptive, the more cracks appeared. His aestheticism wasn’t apolitical; it was a rebellion dressed in velvet. A flower pinned to the lapel of empire, blooming in spite of it.
Isolate people long enough (in prison cells or parlor rooms), and the fixation on regulation turns the human form into pattern….something that can be filed, stamped, repressed. But Wilde SAW that, and he subverted it. He turned the prison wall into prose. He made art dangerous again.
The fear remains the same today…. if we allow visibility, then we must admit the truth….these lives are not aberrations. They’re averages. And that terrifies them.
🤺