wilde vs d'annunzio

FLIPPED CLASSROOMOSCAR WILDE VS GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

by Ester Mottola & Alessia Zucca

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Gabriele D'Annunzio Italian writer of the 900, was born in Abruzzo in Pescara on March 12, 1863 from a wealthy family, he began to write while still a student with the collection of twenty-six poems Primo Vere (Latin expression meaning at the beginning of spring), published 1879 . He finishes his studies. 1881 he moves to Rome, dealing with worldly news journalism. In 1883 he married the Duchess Maria Hardouin of Gallese, with whom he had three children. In 1889 he published his first novel The Pleasure. In 1895 he moved to Florence to live next to the famous Italian theater actress Eleonora Duse, establishing a sentimental and artistic bond, five years later he published the novel Il fuoco based on the relationship with the actress.With the outbreak of the First World War, Gabriele D'Annunzio enlisted as a volunteer and participated in various military enterprises, being seriously injured in the eye in a plane crash following an emergency landing. He spent his convalescence in Venice where he wrote the Notturno published in 1921, a collection of reflections related to the disease in the period of blindness. In 1918, after the First World War and disappointed by the outcome of the war and considering it a mutilated victory, in 1919 he decided to undertake the Enterprise of Fiume. In 1921 he retired to the villa of Cargnacco in the municipality of Gardone Riviera on Lake Garda, creating the Vittoriale degli Italiani museum.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 into a wealthy family. Wilde was a brilliant student, he attended Trinity College in Dublin and during his studies he showed a nonconformist personality: he was not very popular among his fellow students and not even among his teachers, he preferred to stay alone and read above all the classics. Wilde was quite an exhibitionist and when he moved to London, he received many invitations from London high society because people were completely fascinated by his witty remarks. Oscar Wilde traveled a lot, he went to Italy, Greece and the United States to give a series of lectures on the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes. He married Constance Lloyd and they had two children. Oscar Wilde was immensely popular but things began to take a turn for the worse when he entered into a homosexual relationship with the young Lord Alfred Douglas nicknamed "Bosie". The Marquess of Queensberry, Bosie's father, accused him of homosexuality, which was considered a criminal offense at the time. Oscar Wilde was tried and was sentenced to two years hard labor in Reading Gaol. During these years he wrote two very important works, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) about his experiences in prison, and a long autobiographical letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis (1897), published posthumously in 1905. When he was released from prison, Oscar Wilde was a finished man. He had lost everything, even his wife and children, and public opinion was against him. He decided to leave England and moved to Paris under another name, Sebastian Melmoth. Here he died of meningitis in 1900. The last years of his life were really difficult and he often had to rely on the financial help of the few friends who had remained faithful to him.

The famous writers Oscar Wilde and Gabriele D'Annunzio are chronologically close, precisely both belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, but located respectively in England and Italy. Both poets represent the greatest exponents of the artistic and literary movement of Aestheticism, a product of late Romanticism with a tendency to Decadentism. The fundamental principle of Aestheticism "l'art pour l'art", consists in seeing Art as a representation of itself, independent of the era or place that surrounds it. Art fails when it abandons the ideal for reality, it is life and nature that have to imitate it and not the other way around. Statement that D'Annunzio will interpret to the letter.The Esthete transforms his life into a work of art, praising the cult of beauty, surpassing moral laws, in the exhausting search for pleasures and vices, often through the use of drugs and alcohol. Despising bourgeois vulgarity (you mediocre bourgeois, wrapped in clothes of base clothes), everyday life, the conformist reality of the time, isolating himself hopelessly in solitude and dedicating himself exclusively to his over-mind objectives: an aesthetic mindset in short.Per i due letterati, l’eroe non è semplicemente una fantasia dell’artista, ma una impersonificazione dei suoi ideali, considerato che l’autore vive nella realtà descritta, per cui confrontandoli è possibile chiarire i modelli di pensiero d’ entrambi.

D'Annunzio's Andrea Sperelli and Wilde's Dorian Gray are very similar characters, both dandies, i.e. aesthetes who flaunt elegance with an unbridled lifestyle, individualistic and dedicated to appearances and who let themselves be carried away by the decadence of their era. However, they have differences, due to literary influences and different societies. Sperelli and Gray are two young men who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of pleasures of any kind, intellectual as well as material, one does it in Italian, the other in English. The first is more devoted to the pleasure derived from many love affairs, without mystical complications, with a provincial Decadentism, despite European experience and fame. The second spends twenty years in a compromising and sinister existence, experiencing exaggerated and even "diabolical" pleasures, a condition dictated by the different political situation, as England was influenced by the utilitarian and moralistic Victorian era, or the empire before of everything and the only recognized political solution. Gray, as a perfect dandy, is described as a superficial amateur, for Wilde in fact, the true esthete is an old man with a young face, a mask that hides the signs of aging and conceals corruption. While Andrea is young, but with evident signs of his experience and he is not ashamed of it. From the comparison emerges mainly an affinity distinct only from a greater exaggeration in the field of experience and thought on the part of Wilde. In fact, the English hero comes to enjoy excessively mystical and demonic situations, leading him to a disastrous fall on every level, resulting in a tragic death. Wilde's arrogance and nonconformism cause revenge from the London aristocracy who imprison him for contempt of morality, for homosexuality, leading him to defeat.

D'Annunzio is slightly more moderate than the Englishman, despite dedicating his existence to the cult of beauty, in him there is the constant of transforming himself into a character that coincides with reality. In fact, even if with an attitude of superiority towards the mass, he actively participated in the political life of the time, representing a contradiction with the completely individualistic behavior of Decadence. But the genius of the character is all here: to create the individualistic mass, or rather to be an imitated, almost revered captain of fortune. The general rehearsal will be in Fiume, where the Italian poet will demonstrate his intellectual strength, proving to be a leader of crowds. Mussolini will take advantage of this and will focus heavily on these aspects. The Duce will surpass the Vate, effectively becoming the first multi-purpose dictator of the modern era. Writer, lover, pilot, sportsman and much more. The Duce exaggerated and found himself ill with Caesarism, Italy hooked on Teutonic aims, all seasoned with a final tragedy, unfortunately transferred to all the Italian people. Italy in that period lived to excess, a unique case in the world. But after all, in a country where literature was born first and then the nation, it shouldn't be surprising.

DORIAN VS ANDREA

Wilde's Dorian Gray and D'Annunzio's Andrea Sperelli, both refined aesthetes aimed solely at the realization of themselves and their passions, undoubtedly derived some of their aspects from the model of Des Esseintes, the protagonist of the decadent novel À rebours by the French Huysmans. The friendship with the elegant and refined Lord Henry Wotton, known in the studio of a painter friend in love with Dorian, Basil Hallward, who expresses this adoration by making portraits of him, push him to appreciate culture and aesthetic sense. Thus he learns to consider beauty as something sublime, as the ultimate goal of things, so much so that, struck by the beauty of his own image, reproduced in Basil's last portrait, the most beautiful, a real masterpiece, he decides to make a pact with the devil: he will never grow old because the painting will grow old in his place. The years go by and Dorian is always beautiful and young, he is a restless spirit, constantly looking for something new that can solicit and satisfy his morbid sensitivity, fond of every frivolity, but also of every intellectual experience (from mysticism to materialism), a lover of music and theater, an expert in perfumes, jewels, embroidery, tapestries and even ecclesiastical vestments. In short, the dandy Dorian is by no means an empty, superficial personality. His “inimitable” life is «… the first and greatest of the arts…». Greedy for pleasures and utterly devoid of moral inhibitions, he makes highly snobbish life choices, aristocratically frivolous and maddeningly sensual. He knows a girl, but the love story ends soon and the young woman kills herself. The portrait that ages instead of Dorian is the symbol of the conflict between life as art and art as life, of that thin, almost imperceptible border between art and life, which slowly runs out, to the point of making life itself a work of art. These characters are more than simple literary inventions: they, like the novels in which they are the protagonists, testify to the serious crisis that was corroding at the end of the 19th century, if it hasn't already destroyed the romantic and positivistic ideals, ideals based on social commitment, on the principles of equality and solidarity and, above all, on a strong and solid moral conscience. The same authors of these characters fully feel the conscience of the crisis: D'Annunzio and Wilde are united by similar intellectual characteristics and eccentric and nonconformist behaviors. The elegant ways, the refined paradoxes with which Wilde-Gray attempted to fill the artistic void of the Victorian age, made him the symbol and idol of the cultural avant-garde, but also exposed him to the revenge of the London aristocracy who, focusing on conservative respectability, had him imprisoned for outrage against morality, for homosexuality, thus suffering a heavy defeat Even Dorian Gray, who ends his life in a dramatic way, and Andrea Sperelli — who despite numerous frivolous adventures can neither replace nor forget the beautiful and mysterious Elena Muti — are actually losers. They are exhausted and exhausted individualists, and their desire for affirmation is nothing more than a wishful thinking destined to defeat in the impact with the world.

DEBATE: SHAW VS ORWELL