Art vs. Life

A comparative analysis of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot" and Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist", focusing on each author's conception of the nature of representation.

2,935 words () | 1 source | MLA | 2001 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how, throughout history, artists have often been faced with the conflict between reality and art, between living life on the one hand and representing it on the other. In particular, it looks at how both Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in "The Lady of Shallot", and Oscar Wilde, in "The Critic as Artist", address this separation and examine the role of art and the artist in relation to society. It shows that, while Tennyson treats art as tragically irreconcilable with life, Wilde does not see the separation in such somber terms.

From the Paper:

"In The Critic as Artist, Wilde uses the character of Gilbert to make similar arguments about the role of art and the artist. Gilbert sees that "the beauty of the visible arts is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention on the part of the artist" (page 1757). In other words, art is designed to affect one's primary senses, and its beauty lies in its ability to do so successfully, not in its messages or morals. In fact, visual arts are not designed to have such intellectual purposes; art is supposed to appeal neither to "the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone" (1758), Gilbert reasons."