Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethics and the turn to narrative
- 2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the fin-de-siècle
- 3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers
- 4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess
- 5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics
- 6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethics and the turn to narrative
- 2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the fin-de-siècle
- 3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers
- 4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess
- 5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics
- 6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart.
William ShakespeareThe proximity of the other is the face's meaning, and it means from the very start in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms which forever try to cover the face like a mask of their presence to perception. But always the face shows through these forms. Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particular expressions, which cover over and protect with an immediately adopted face or countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such, that is to say, extreme exposure, defencelessness, vulnerability itself.
Emmanuel LevinasBesides sharing a strong aestheticizing impulse, Oscar Wilde and Henry James both lampooned Victorian morality to make way for what Wilde called a New Ethics. The quintessential fin-de-siècle aesthete, Wilde asserts in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.” The novel that follows this preface unfolds in the form of a fairy tale of sorts and raises moral questions on nearly every page, and yet established boundaries between the moral and the immoral do indeed blur and shift. Thus this strange late-century, proto-postmodern work ventures an experiment in aestheticizing morality, in transforming Victorian deontology into an ethics that provides more scope for beauty and unorthodox choice.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914 , pp. 93 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001