30 pages • 1 hour read
Oscar WildeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Socialism’s primary recommendation, for Wilde, is its potential to facilitate individualism. By “individualism,” Wilde does not exactly mean independence; although Wilde argues that compulsory social and societal responsibilities inhibit individualism, he also notes that humans are “naturally social.” Nor does Wilde see individualism as a euphemism for selfishness, arguing that people would be much less selfish in a truly individualist society. Rather, Wilde defines individualism as the realization of who one is as a unique human being, independent of any external pressures, and he argues that a society composed of such individualists would be much healthier and happier than 19th-century England.
Wilde does not deny that some people—primarily artists—approach such individualism even in capitalist societies. Suffering itself can refine the individual in the way Wilde imagines. Of Russia, a place of such rampant inequality that it had only abolished serfdom in the mid-19th century, Wilde writes: “No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection except by pain” (88). Moreover, suffering can prompt rebellion, which itself tends to develop the self—hence Wilde’s preference for the “ungrateful” and “disobedient” poor. However, there is a problem with cultivating individualism through these avenues that for Wilde eclipses even the obvious objections (e.
By Oscar Wilde
An Ideal Husband
Oscar Wilde
A Woman of No Importance
Oscar Wilde
De Profundis
Oscar Wilde
Lady Windermere's Fan
Oscar Wilde
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
Oscar Wilde
Salome
Oscar Wilde
The Ballad Of Reading Gaol
Oscar Wilde
The Canterville Ghost
Oscar Wilde
The Decay of Lying
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
The Nightingale and the Rose
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
The Selfish Giant
Oscar Wilde