Stylistic Features of Oscar Wilde’s Wrightings

In this example the effect is increased because the members of chiasmus are antonyms “young, old, comedy, tragedy”. Usually chiasmus is a syntactical stylistic device, not a lexical one, but in this example the witty arrangement of the words gives the utterance an epigrammatic character. This can be considered as lexical chiasmus. Examples show the brilliancy of Wilde’s style.

One more stylistic device used by Wilde is antithesis.

According to Prof. Galperin I.R antithesis is based on relative opposition which arises out of the context through the expansion of objectively contrasting pairs.34

Syntactically antithesis is just another case of parallel constructions. But unlike parallelism, which is indifferent to the semantics of its components, the two parts of an antithesis must be semantically opposite to each other, as in these examples from O.Wilde:

e.g. “Don’t use big words. They mean so little.” (p.252)

“Curious thing, plain women are always jealous of

their husbands, beautiful women never are!” (p.108)

Here we can see the semantic contrast, which is formed with the help of objectively contrasting pairs “big – little”, “plain – beautiful”, “always – never”.

e.g. “She certainly had a wonderful faculty of remembering

people’s names, and forgetting their faces.” (p. 98)

In this example we can see antonyms: “remembering” and “forgetting”, which create the contrasting pair and make the antithesis more expressive. But in his antithesis Wilde also uses some contextual antonyms.

e.g. “Men become old, but they never become good”.

(p.33)

“Men can be analysed, women merely adored.”

(p.180)

“…if one plays good music, people don’t listen, if one plays bad music, people don’t talk”. (p.199)

It is important to note, that Wild’s antithesis is always accompanied by parallelisms, thus showing the difference of phenomena compared.

e.g. “Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?

Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of

everything and the value of nothing”. (p.72)

Thus we can make a conclusion that syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices play an important role in Wilde’s style. Wilde is a talented writer who can make us feel the way he wants us to feel. This co-existence is built up so subtly, that the reader remains unaware of the process. It is still stronger when the aesthetic function begin to manifest itself clearly and unequivocally through a gradual increase in intensity, in the foregrounding of certain features, repetitions, of certain syntactical patterns and in the broken rhythm of the author’s mode of narrating events, facts and situations.One can find different syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices in Wilde’s plays such as parallel constructions, repetition, chiasmus, antithesis and many others. These expressive means help the author to create his clear-cut and elegant style, to give rhythm to his language. They give a musical value to every phrase.

Wilde’s writing is skilful, playing, and understandable to everybody. It has a great charm and brilliancy of the author’s personality.

General Conclusion