The decay of lying

Oscar Wilde used this title because he thought that the Victorian society was way too earnest. In his book “The importance of being Earnest” he is turning the Victorian conventions upside down and he continuous here. He is saying that people were way too serious and did not have any imagination. Lying was for him a part of imagination. The reason he wrote this essay is because he was fed up by the Victorian society and in most of his works, we are able to distinguish this idea. His works are a kind of reflection of the Victorian Society out of his point of view.

Reading Wilde’s essay, we can fully understand his philosophy. He is describing the obsession of realism that existed in the XIX century. Oscar defends the thesis that art of his time, especially literature and theatre, are corrupted because they are becoming a mirror of the lived reality exposed at a raw state without artifice. At this count, art, which do not dare to cultivate beautiful lies that fertilize the imagination, becomes sterile and deeply annoying. It is thus reduced to the limitation punt and servile of the life and of the nature raised to the rank of false ideals. However, following Wilde, if art takes life among the rough elements in his work, it will recreate it and shapes it in new forms. He keeps between the reality and himself the impenetrable barrier of the beautiful style and of the decorative or ideal method. Wilde is distinguishing the ordinary lie such as the way a politician uses it to remain in power, which is vile and without interest, to the artistic lie, which creates a separate world of meanings finding his truth into respect and improvement of its code. Wilde wrote: "... the purpose of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. It is the very basis of civilized society and, without him, a dinner, even in company of intelligent people, is as gloomy as a conference at the Royal Society... ". He felt that life had already begun to devour art in the novels of Maupassant, the naturalist frescoes of Zola or of Dickens and the psychological novel by Paul Bourget, where the author "commit this mistake to imagine that men and women of modern life can be endlessly analyzed in countless series of chapters. "

Join now!

In this essay Wile used a lot of literary effects to emphasize his point of view, this was also used because Wilde was an author and of course had his own style like most of the authors of his class. He directly begins by comparing novelists to ancient historians. To him novelists were using too much verisimilitude in their written works which is emphasized in the paradox “and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability.” One of the favourite techniques that Wilde uses in his writing is irony. ...

This is a preview of the whole essay