Starter: Extract from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance This book is a collected, edited sequence of essays by Walter Pater (1839–1894), a Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. Oscar Wilde first read it in 1874, as a student at Trinity College Dublin. The book became a kind of manual for Aestheticism. For many, the historical period Pater covered – and the way, in treating it, he insisted on the importance of artistic style over moral content – was a by-word for un–Christian vice. The Bishop of Oxford specifically preached against the book’s ‘neo-pagan’ character. The Renaissance animated not just every aspect of Wilde’s work, but his desire to make his life into a work of art; ‘to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy is success in life’, as the Conclusion urges. Looking back over his own life from the isolation of prison in De Profundis (1897), he remembered it as ‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty’; ‘that book which has had such a strange influence over my life’. See more at: http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/walter-pater-studies-in-the-history-of-the-renaissance#sthash.YbOzy0dQ.dpuf Any thoughts or questions?

We have already seen a few allusions to the end of the ‘Conclusion’ of The Renaissance. How far is Wilde really condoning these attitudes? ‘[...] a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like’ (5) ‘I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism’ (18-9) ‘Life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him’ (20) ‘There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life.’ (37) How are these attitudes ‘Gothic’? Keep looking out for allusions to Pater as we continue to read TPODG! The Gothic horror of the Decadence is the horror is dissolution, of the nation, of society, and ultimately, as we move into the Modernist world, of the human subject itself. (David Punter and Glennis Byron)

TASK: complete the worksheet on Chapter 4 As you re-read Chapter 4 and complete the worksheet, look out for examples of Paterian attitudes!

What is the effect of ‘watch[ing] life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure’? How far do you think Lord Henry is used to condone Paterian attitudes? Consider Victorian values and Christian morality. Read the key quotations on the worksheet.

Plenary Make a case for Chapter 4 being the most important chapter in the novel so far.

Homework ‘Gothic settings are characterised by excess’. Discuss. Use the passages from Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein to help you.