Oscar Wilde's Portrayal of Women and Art in "A Sphinx without a Secret" Anonymous 9th Grade

Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx without a Secret” is the type of story scholars and critics eschew for its simplicity and self-explanatory title that seems to deflate the climax of the story. However, Oscar Wilde was no hack of a writer and what he wrote had a purpose. As a leading member of the Aesthetic Movement, Wilde’s main purpose of writing was to separate art from morality and saw the didactic, as Edgar Allan Poe did, as a heresy of story writing. “Art for art’s sake” became the motto of the practicing aesthetic, whose main concern was how art was perceived and recognized. In order to appreciate just what Oscar Wilde is trying to show in this short story, an understanding of how he viewed women and art is necessary.

Wilde, as most aesthetics, saw the human form as a work of art and that life should imitate art. This translates to the feminine as well. In most of Wilde’s fiction, he satirized Victorian men’s view of women as passive works of art that should be seen instead of heard. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the Duchess asks Lord Henry, Dorian’s cousin, to describe the female sex; he replies they are “sphinxes without secrets.” A prior comment that sparks this question is her own reference to herself and women being...