Art and Life in Nineteenth Century Literature Art and life can be seen as two ends of a double-edged sword that both imitate and enhance each other. They are far apart enough to act as alternate universes to each other and yet are closely linked; art attempts to imitate and reflect life and thus augments our experience of it, while also being exalted by it. At the same time, individuals inspired by art replicate and apply it to life (thus imitating art) and here again life is made better for allowing the development of art. This relationship between the contrasting ideals can be seen reflected in nineteenth century English literature, and has been examined in this paper. These dynamics between the opposing contrasts is expressed in the philosophical position of antimimesis, that is, life imitating art. It is the direct opposite of the Aristotle-inspired ‘mimesis,’ a critical and philosophical term dealing with “imitation, representation, resemblance and presentation of self.” (Gerbauer and Wulf, 1992.) It comes from the Greek word for “to imitate” or “emulate.” Mimesis is, in its contemporary interpretation, the process by which art reflects and reinterprets the world around it. Originally, in ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art with correspondence to life (or the physical world) as a model for beauty and truth. After Plato, use of the term mimesis shifted gradually towards literary function (and was subsequently re-interpreted multiple times) until it arrived at the nineteenth century exposition with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination (1798). He argued in the book that imitation reveals the sameness of process in nature, saying, “(T)he composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same through the radically different, or the different through a base radically the same.” Coleridge here opposes imitation to copying, referring in “copying to Wordsworth’s (his contemporary and friend) notion that poetry should replicate nature by capturing actual speech (calling it a “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility). He proposes instead that the unity of essence is revealed precisely through different materialities of media. Oscar Wilde was a notable proponent of the anti-mimesis position, who wrote that “Life imitates Art more often than Art imitates Life,” in his essay The Decay of Lying (1889). He wrote under a Platonic school of thought, claiming that anti-mimesis “results not merely from life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of life is to find expression, and that art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.” What is found in life and nature is thus not really there but is what artists have taught people to find there. The effects of beauty and wonder did not exist in life until art invented them, according to Wilde. His anti-mimetic idealism was part of the nineteenth century debate between Romanticism and Realism. (McGrath, 1999.) George Bernard Shaw wrote in his preface to Three Plays for Puritans (1897, 1898, 1900), “I have noticed that when a certain type of feather appears in painting and is admired as beautiful, it presently becomes common in nature so that the Beatrices and Francescas in the picture galleries of one generation come to life as the parlour maids and waitresses of the next” and commented that men and women are created by their own fancies in the image of imaginary creatures in his youthful fiction, and that the real world does not therefore exist. He did, however, disagree with some of Wilde’s points, considering most attempts by life to imitate art to be reprehensible, in part because the art people choose to imitate was idealistic and romanticised. In The Mill and the Floss (1860), written by Mary Anne Evans under the pseudonym George Eliot, the theme of art and life co-existing as binary contrasts and yet acting as supplements to each other can be seen. The protagonist of the novel, Maggie, has the book The Imitation of Christ (1418-1427, Latin) by Thomas à Kempis gifted to her and is inspired on reading it to renounce all art and pleasurable Vol 1.1
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