Morrissey and Oscar Wilde - comparison

[PompeDeVelo]

Hello!


I will write an essay where I am supposed to do a comparison of the works by Morrissey and Oscar Wilde. The reason to why I logged in here is to get some suggestions of writings that I should take a closer look at. I've considered "Bigmouth strikes again" and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" but that is as far as I can go at this stage... It would be great if you could recommend any suitable Oscar Wilde works!

All the best!

P.S. I'm not a native speaker so please bear with me! My English is definitely not flawless.

 

[Worm]

It's probably difficult to compare their works in a formal sense. There are certain themes and ideas that are common to both.

I would focus chiefly on two of Wilde's works, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" and "De Profundis". The former you could relate to Morrissey's ideas about work-- i.e. realizing oneself as an individual as opposed to suffering through soul-crushing work-- and the latter to Morrissey's willingness to accept sorrow as a difficult but necessary part of self-realization and enlightenment. In "De Profundis" Wilde wrote long passages detailing his new understanding, gained after his hardships in prison, of the importance of sorrow, which he had until then (so he says) largely ignored in favor of pleasure. In both works you will find the uncompromising insistence on heroic self-realization in an age of barbarism, hypocrisy, and the dehumanizing encroachment of industrialization.

A couple of other works would make for interesting parallels. "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." is a clever gender-bending theory about Shakespeare's sonnets, and "Pen, Pencil and Poison" is about an artist-criminal, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. The thematic links are obvious but not much more than superficial.