'If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being immensely over-educated.'
- The Importance of Being Earnest.
So while commenting on reading this particular quote my mind was cast back to Stephen Fry's (a legend by the way!) third Podgram entitled 'Wallpaper'. It centered around a certain Mr. Wilde, and one section around his aesthetic view of the world, in that things are not judged by what is good or bad, but what is beautiful or ugly.
When asked why there was such an upsurge in violence across America, Wilde's response was:
'because your wallpaper is so ugly.'
Now, it may at first glance, seem a humourous response, but when looking at it through the Aesthetic school of thought it makes a large amount of logical sense. Now, think of the world through the eyes of an aesthete, where you judge things by how beautiful they are.
You can see that nature has astounding beauty, wondrously singing notes of the perfect pitch through the ebbs and flows of the hills (Blimey! Where did that come from?), however you contrast that with the majority of human made objects that are ugly. We spoil the parts of the world that we touch, we do not enhance but in fact destroy the natural beauty that the Earth has produced.
So, think of growing up in this ugly, man-made world, where everything that surrounds you, the wallpaper that you are encased in, is ugly. If everything you see is ugly, then you in essence think ugly thoughts, you cannot see beauty, so therefore there is no good. You are forced to, to quote Mr. Fry, 'crap in your own nest'.
It is certainly an interesting point of view that can be thought upon for hours on end.
Now here comes my weird way of thinking again, and I must apologise but it will be another literature based point. After pondering this point about wallpaper, the light bulb sprung into life, an illumination made my literature cogs tick.
It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw--not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.
But there is something else about that paper-- the smell!
But there is something else about that paper-- the smell!
A quote from 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It's a short story, only around 6,000 words, you'll read it in 30 minutes but it is stunning. It illustrates the 19th Century attitudes towards women's health, both mental and physical (in more specific terms looking at the handling of post-natal depression). The story revolves around the narrator's confinement with her mental health and her eventual decline into psychosis. All centering around the thing that we've been talking about. (I say we like other people have had an input or something... Maybe it's the inbred teacher in me hmmm...)
Wallpaper. Of the yellow variety.(and yes that is supposed to be ugly!)
So, this story highlights what Wilde is saying (in some ways, it obviously takes a different stance on many other things, but lets just take it in the basic form). This wallpaper is the manifestation of her psychosis, the foul colour, the breakneck pattern that disappears into nowhere committing every design sin it could possibly commit. This wallpaper is ugly, therefore her thoughts are even uglier.
Give it a read.
So from a Facebook profile to psychosis, the range of things my mind travels through in the time frame of a few minutes never ceases to bewilder me!
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