Decadence and Murder in Oscar Wilde's Literature

Abstract

This thesis investigates decadence – moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury and its opposition to most Victorian ideals – and highlights murder as the possible and often-following consequence of this phenomenon specifically in the literature of Oscar Wilde, a certified decadent aesthete whose legacy remains valuable today. The role of various decadent elements such as hatred of the world, alienation, prioritization of decadent concepts such as beauty, pleasure, art, aesthetics, and love, as well as the resulting immorality is introduced with the help of the original decadent novel, Huysmans’ Against Nature, and the influence of such matters on the decadent individual as well as their collective potential to lead to murder is furthermore discussed. In the first two chapters, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salomé instantiate extreme overindulgence in decadence and immorally-charged decadent pleasures which eventually and unsurprisingly result in the protagonists bringing death to other characters as well as themselves in addition to bringing ruination to their souls and consequently, their afterlives. In the third and last chapter, two alternatives destinations of decadence are presented. The protagonists of “The Portrait of Mr W.H.” and “The Nightingale and the Rose” prematurely abandon their decadence and settle instead for the despised life of a commonplace Victorian man. In “The Happy Prince”, “The Selfish Giant”, and “The Canterville Ghost”, however, Wilde puts forward an opportunity for the decadent to quite literally get the best of both worlds – to nevertheless indulge in their enchantment of choice (which happens to be ideal love) in this life, and to receive hopes of salvation and the continuation of their fulfilling pleasures in the subsequent one.