By behaving in a way that is explicitly artificial, dandies like Lord Goring honor and protect the natural.Although Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) created a wide range of poetry, essays, and fairy tales (and one novel) in his brief, tragic life, he is perhaps best known as a dramatist. One’s nature, a locus of beliefs and values, can never be fully or accurately conveyed through behavior this is the true reason that “natural” behavior is impossible. Its characters do refer to one kind of nature in good faith: “nature” as a synonym for “character” or “personality.” Such usage implies that there exists in every person something apart from mannerisms, rouge, and wit. The play as a whole does not deny the existence of the natural, nor does it conflate the natural and the artificial.

Wilde’s contempt is not for nature, though, but for the misconception that it is possible to act naturally. In this play, especially, naturalism is tragicomic. To assert such a thing also appears naïve and laughable. To assert that one particular manner or way of life is “natural” is to believe that there is precisely one correct way to be human – a delusion responsible for most varieties of hate and prejudice. In different ways, they all disparage naturalism, which seems to them a bizarre and alarming narrow-mindedness. Cheveley – the dandies of the play – believe that is impossible to act naturally. Therefore, naturalism is either sloppy art or a cunning facade (“a very difficult pose to keep up”).

The lives of animals and plants are dictated almost entirely by biology, but the lives of human beings are deliberate. If life is a work of art, then one’s behavior can only be bad art or good art, never nature. In explicit reference to this philosophy, Wilde introduces almost every character in the play by comparing him or her to the work of a painter or sculptor. Aesthetes, or “dandies”, argued that works of art should be measured by aesthetic rather than moral criteria they also believed that life should approximate a work of art. Like nearly all aspects of Oscar Wilde’s work, this theme is rooted in aestheticism, a controversial late-19th-century student movement of which Wilde was a part.

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