오스카 와일드의 Vera;or, The Nihilists의 구조와 주제 = The Thematic Structure of Oscar Wilde's Romantic Tragedies

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This is an attempt to study the thematic structure of Oscar Wilde's romantic tragedy; Vera; or, The Nihilists by a close examination of each play, on the assumption that the term 'structure' includes both content and form. Vern is the first example of Wilde's interest in the bizarre and individualism which produced Dorian Gray and Salome. Each of the five scenes of Vera is a genuine unit in spite of the weakness in characterization and plot construction that are caused by Wilde's inexperience as a dramatist; each has its own climax; and each leads inevitably into the one that follows. Act I, for all its improbability, lays the basis for the action, and the climactic assassination of Act II places the heroine in her classic dilemma of love or honor. In Act III she resolves it in favor of honor, and in Act IV we have the expected peripetea, and love conquers all. Vera's suicide is the supreme act of the Romantic individual's will. Vera, for whom life is at first valuable only as a form through which to realize her ethical and social idealism, makes her own life perfect by ending it at the perfect moment.
Vera; or, The Nihilists was Oscar Wilde's first performed play, a work, as Wilde described it, "not of polities but of passion," expressing "cry of peoples for Liberty." Liberty as subject --and the rhetoric of republicanism that made liberty a catchword --came naturally to Wilde, as son of the Irish patriot Speranza and as an aesthetic individual. But Wilde was also professionally ambitious. By writing a wordy tragedy of self-sacrifice with Russia and the Nihilist movement as background, Wilde hoped to appeal to popular taste in the theatre and to capitalize on public interest in current affairs, with a woman as the hero. Wilde's feminism is one of the least commonly recognized aspect of his progressive ideas. He was, however, a consistent champion of women's rights both in his life and his work, supporting all the primary demands of late nineteenth-century feminism. His doctrine was in essence that of a utopian anarchist, preaching the doctrine of individualism and aestheticism. Wilde always liked to create manly women and womanly men, as a challenge to the stratified thinking of his day and demonstrates that the gender-antitheses of the age were almost meaningless through the characterization of female leads.
Many critics have complained about Wilde's indebtedness and adherence to a tradition that was already established in drama; romantic tragedy, post-romantic French drama and the plays of his English contemporaries. Our superficial understanding of his plays might lead to the false conclusion that his achievement lay merely in putting together melodramatic situations, using techniques from the French well-made play and romantic tragedy, and projecting them onto a background of social criticism in the problem play. The real problem of his plays is the tension between the individual and society, between public and private life, between established norms and their deliberate violation.
The subject-matter and the conflict in Vera, however, lies in not only her classic conflict between her love for an individual named Alexis and her loyalty to a cause involving others, that is, nihilism but rather in the classic motif of the character ton psychically between equal and opposing internal forces - a theme implied by the play's title itself. Ultimately the natural physical consummation of their love is replaced by the heroine's suicide, in which she faces the knowledge of her real desires and of her true nature, fulfilling herself independently of the pressure to conform. Through the aesthetic of the play, Wilde communicates what he understood about the transgressive power of love and commitment in human relationships. What makes the play an integral step in Wilde's transgressive aesthetic is the character of Vera, In sum, Vera is a non-traditional woman who is in a process of self-discovery, which will lead her to an individualism connecting her with the larger life of humanity.