Oh Sylvia, you are bad!

To add to the flowers...flowers have a beauty that does not last. Some flowers bloom and die in a day. So could it be the flowers provide a continuation on the idea that beauty is fleeting and will fade in time?

True. (I mean about the flowers.  ) Maybe the hothouse and exotic flowers are protrayed negatively because (like Dorian) they don’t bloom and fade naturally as flowers are supposed to...?

He is a brainless, beautiful thing, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.

I must confess that the opening sentence about the scent of the flowers that Sylvia quotes got the whole thing off to a bad start for me.  For it’s followed by this: “From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes...” And I immediately wondered how one could distinguish the rich odour of roses from the heavy scent of lilac from the delicate perfume of the flowering thorn with all that smoke floating about.  With so much emphasis on things olfactory, why no mention of the smell of smoke comingling with it all?  A small thing, I know, but it made me impatient with the book right from that second sentence.

Another flower reference that jumped out at me when flipping back through the book was this one about Sybil and her brother:  “The passers-by glanced in wonder at the sullen, heavy youth who, in coarse, ill-fitting clothes, was in the company of such a graceful, refined-looking girl.  He was like a common gardener walking with a rose.”

I think that Stefanie and Syliva are definitely on to something in their analysis of the flower imagery. No surprise that Sybil would be compared to a flower that blooms gloriously but briefly.

Ella’s point that the theme of beauty requires flowers in the Wildean universe highlights something else that bothers me about this novel and that is that the beauty that’s championed here is so very conventional and predictable.

In the preface Wilde condemns as corrupt those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things and praises as cultivated those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things.  What about finding beautiful meanings in things conventionally regarded as ugly? That interests me much more than all these golden curls and scarlet lips and white marble and flame coloured flowers and on and on.

the beauty that?s championed here is so very conventional and predictable

Yes. Perhaps that’s why I am confused by the flowers. I expect more originality from Wilde, at least some sarcastic twist or double meaning.

By the way, I second Ella’s nomination, if only because she’s had such a hideous week. Just as long as there isn’t any disemboweling or limitless depravity in it…

Hmmm, why read, if not for the disemboweling and limitless depravity?

Did anyone catch the joke about American novels in chapter 3? For some reason I found it really funny and keep laughing every time I page by it.

They are at the Duchess’s house and talking about poor Dartmour who is going to marry and American whose father has a dry-goods store. The Duchess asks, “Dry goods! What are American dry-goods?” And Lord Henry replies, “American novels.”

Heh, heh

I think “The Virginians” would be a nice little American dry-good. Shall we plan on April 30th?

And I agree, Kate, when I was thinking about Wildean beauty, I was thinking ultra conventional: bushels of roses, lots of diamond jewelry. I think where he is interesting is when he jams tons of things into his descriptions, like those Persian saddlebags, or the Japanese look to Basil’s garden. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anyone else, with the possible exception of Henry James, who gets so elaborate with his settings. For such a short little novel, there’s a lot of interior decorating.

Naturally, Wilde did not include that “American dry goods” comment in the 1890 version published in the US…

Interior decorating. Heh.

Oscar Wilde + The Virginian = ... Brokeback Mountain??

Groan…

Okay..I got the Microsoft Reader version of The Virginian...I’m ready to ri...um....READ (lol)

DNW

Yee haw!

I have the feeling things could get seriously silly with this one…

This post is not about Dorian Gray, but is a tribute to Wilde’s view of poetry and poetic language. Rather than start a new thread I post it here and trust other posters in this thread permit this slightly off-topic comment.
_____________________
A STATE OF GRACE?

Some say that much poetry is just prose pretending to be poetry.  Too demanding or too undesirable an exercise such poetry is discarded as archaic for modern sensibilities.  The need to do away with what are seen as worn-out conventions, such writers do not concern themselves with rhyme, rhythm, metre, standard poetic forms.  Perhaps such prose-poets, a useful term, simply have a preference that readers should create their own speeds, patterns, intonations and emphases.  Some critics see many such poets as mediocrities, pretenders, who house their words in a so-called poetic form, in dalliance.

On the other hand some critics prefer to see all great writing as poetry. Some of Wilde’s work is, for me, great wrting, great poetry. Poetry as great writing is, in this sense, a language and a being, an ideal of intensity and candour, nobility and heroism, a compactness and a sort of genius. But, in our time, the frontier between the two has become more and more permeable.  “The war has been won,” wrote Philip Dacey, “Non-metrical verse has swept the field.”1 Robert Frost put the issue this way: you can do anything in poetry you want to.....poetry is the thought of the heart, a felt thing.2 And I would add, for me poetry exists when the mind and heart are one.-Ron Price with thanks to 1 Philip Dacey, Strong Measures: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poets in Traditional Forms, Harper & Rowe, 1986, p.16; and 2Robert Frost in Robert Frost: The Later Years, Thompson, p.238.

If the poet is lucky
and in a state of grace,
a new emotion forms
and a new poem begins.1

And if the poet writes
his memoirs they should
deal not with events, but
with thoughts; not physical
accidents, circumstances or
deeds, but...spiritual moods
and mind’s imaginative passions.2

1 Louise Bogan, “Notes to July Dawn,” Poems in Folio, Press of the Morning Sun, San Francisco, 1957.
2 Oscar Wilde in John Ashbery, Modern Critical Reviews, editor, Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Pub., 1985, p.217.
---Ron Price 28 July 2007

I like this idea. Soon I will have to go to a Drug Treatment from all this reading. But i don`t mind. Reading for me is like the greatest thing I could do. And I will sure continue to read this forum because it is great, I have found some new ideas here. Keep up the good work.