Lost With Wild Wilde Essay

Lost with Wild Wilde

  “The heart was made to be broken.”
  The rosy world of fairy tales where the princess is invariably rescued by Prince Charming once enthralled me in those green salad days. That’s also when I first read The Nightingale and The Rose and The Happy Prince. I vaguely felt there was something different from other happily-ever-after tales, something I couldn’t tell at young age. Fancy dreams have faded as years pass by, yet that two stories are still remembered vividly. So I picked them up again, and this time, the abandoned rose, the nightingale drained of blood, the lifeless swallow and the prince with a broken leaden heart almost brought me to tears.
  “The heart was made to be broken,” as if Oscar Wilde was whispering by my ear.
  Instead of showing cruelty explicitly around, Wilde is more like a dressed-up santa clause bringing gifts on Christmas Eve. When kids cheer up and rush to him expectantly for those colorful wrapped boxes, he abruptly tears down the costume and blurts out,” There’s no santa clause at all.” and then turns away, leaving the kids at a loss.
  I’m one of the kids left behind, lost, grieved but intoxicated.

  “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
  Beauty and youth are the eternal themes adorably and elaborately described by Wilde’s pen. That’s typical Oscar Wilde, who exhibited the most exquisite and delicate things and then crushed them in eager faces.
  He upheld the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” and practiced the principle of hedonism, which are in full bloom in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
  Dorian Gray is introduced as a naïve young boy, who, under Lord Henry’s influence and inculcation, realizes the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfillment of the senses. Inspired by the portrait by the painter Basil, who is obssessed with Dorian, he sells his soul to ensure the portrait would grow old and ugly rather than himself. This trade plunges him into an evil and...