Bibliography Essay

Bibliography Essay

The Sphinx

By Graham Marema

Wilde, Oscar; Charles S. Ricketts; Bruce Rogers. The Sphinx.

London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894.

Title

The Sphinx

Author

Oscar Wilde

Illustrator

Charlie Ricketts

Publisher

Elkin Mathews and John Lane (London)

Date of publication

1894

Edition

This is a first edition. On the page before the title page it reads: “The edition of this book is limited for England to 200 copies, all rights reserved.”

Physical Description

The book is a hardback, slender, about half an inch thick, with a creamy yellow binding. In the place of a title, author, or any text at all, there is an illustration. It’s all the same gold sheen, which illuminates when tilted into the light just so. The illustration style is something reminiscent to art deco – a minimalist, straight-edged depiction of a woman on the right and a sphinx on the left. The sphinx sits in a throne-like orb of small golden beads, its face small and hooked, its wings folded symmetrically behind its shoulders. Above it, tucked into the creases of the many lines that adorn the page, is a single bell. The woman peers at the sphinx from over her shoulder. She wears a long golden robe, her hair curled onto her head into something that vaguely resembles an uncooked turkey. She holds a vine of gold leaves and wears no shoes. On the back in a similar illustration in the same style. On the left is a dark, hooded figure, holding a lamp. Above the figure, instead of a bell, there is a dove. Another sphinx-like figure stands on the right side, pointed away from the dark figure, wings extended, back legs flexed as if about to burst off of the book and into flight.

The pages are handmade, thick. They have deckled edges, which gives the appearance that they have been torn. There are ten illustrations (eight are full page) and they are all the same style as the illustrations on the front. All are drawn in red. Though there are no chapters, there are thirteen instances when the first letter of a stanza is intricately drawn in green calligraphy, indicating a new section in the text. The first letter of the poem is the most ornate. There are also guide words at the bottom of the page, written in green.

The font is a typical typewriter font, slightly wider spacing than Word’s Typewriter font. The words are printed lightly on the paper.

Biographies of the makers

Oscar Wilde: (1854 – 1900) Wilde, born in Dublin, was a very popular novelist, playwright, and poet in London during the end of the nineteenth century. One of his most famous works is The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is well known for his quick wit. As a child he was educated at home, but in his twenties he studied at Trinity College in Dublin and later studied at Oxford. In 1882, Wilde did a tour of North America to lecture on aestheticism, something which was both acclaimed and criticized. Later in his life, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for “gross indecency” with Alfred Taylor, another man. He died of cerebral meningitis in November 1900.

Charlie Ricketts: (1866 – 1931) Ricketts is an artist and illustrator best known for his work illustrating for the Vale Press. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland but grew up in France and Italy. Both of his parents, his mother French and his father English, died when he was young, after which he went to study at the City and Guilds Technical Art School in Lambeth. During most of his career he worked for Vale Press, whose printing was done by Ballantyne Press. After 1902 he began to explore painting and sculpture and also dabbled in stage design. He died at age 65.

History of the book

The Sphinx – and this particular edition of The Sphinx – was published 1894. It was launched well into Wilde’s career. At the time of this poem’s conception, several movements were underway that influenced its creation. Western Europe had been fascinated by the seemingly fantastical wonders of Egypt since Napoleon’s 1798 invasion, but during Victorianism, which ended at the beginning of the twentieth century, had a particular fascination for a mysterious, decadent Ancient Egypt. The Victorian Era also brought forward the idea of aesthetics, which Wilde adopted and studied for some time. Aesthetics affected art, literature, architecture, and many other styles of expression in many different ways, but its main goal was to view art as the highest value in life. The Arts and Crafts movement was also underway in Europe and North America at this time. It depicted simple images, using medieval or even folk styles in decoration. This art’s influence can be seen in the illustrations of The Sphinx, as well as the simplistic, easy-to-read layout.

Critical Analysis

It is in these illustrations that one can easily see the time period from which Wilde was writing. They reflect a fascination with and an exoticism of Ancient Egypt and the eastern world, which is also reflected in the text of the poem. The illustrations are even produced on a thick, deckled paper, which gives off the feel and look of papyrus. They show strange beasts, women with long flowing hair in crimson robes, vines full of luscious fruit, dark figures passing between tall reeds. All inked in red, all simplistic and graceful, all adding to the illustration of an exotic Egypt that seemed present on Wilde’s and the time period’s mind.

In the poem, the sphinx is actually just a trinket sitting in the narrator’s room. But as the narrator stares at it, his imagination gives life to the image, and he ruminates over all the places the cat-human has gone, all the people she’s met, all the wars she’s witnessed. The narrator’s mind paints an exotic, dazzling image of Ancient Egypt and the eastern world. “You can read the Hieroglyphs on the great sandstone obelisks,” he says, “and you have talked with Basilisks, and you have looked on Hippogriffs.” The sphinx lies upon his “Chinese mat,” and has conversed with all sorts of pharaohs, gods, immortals, mythical creatures, “a swarthy Ethiop whose body was of polished jet,” a man whose hair was “colored like that yellow gem which hidden in their garment’s hem the merchants bring from Kurdistan,” and countless others.

The mind of the narrator reflects the collective mind of the time period, a time obsessed with the fantastic unknown of the east; the illustrations reflect the same thing. Ricketts uses an almost art deco style, which is reminiscent of the simplistic symmetry of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The bright red of the illustrations, gold of the cover decorations, and green of the calligraphy create a simple, colorful scheme similar to what was being seen in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the time.

This poem was never meant to be a literal description of what life was truly like in Ancient Egypt. It is a reflection of a fascination at the time with the exotic “other,” which manifests itself in a talking sphinx. This is made most clear in the illustrations, which depict not only what the narrator seems to envision as he dreams about the life of the sphinx, but also the imagination of the general public as they dreamed about the east.

Works Cited

Brdnik, Gregory. “Oscar Wilde.” Biography of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde Online, 27

June 2016. Web. 09 Feb. 2016.

Hawes, Kenna. “Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx” and Victorian Egyptomania.”Oscar Wilde’s             “The Sphinx” and Victorian Egyptomania. Victorian Web, 11 Sept. 2003. Web.

Toller, Mellita. “Religion and Mythology in Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx”” LMU Munich,

Web

Wilde, Oscar; Charles S. Ricketts; Bruce Rogers. The Sphinx. London: Elkin Mathews

and John Lane, 1894.