When life imitates art

Abstract

When Oscar Wilde defiantly observed that life is imitation of art, literary criticism had found another role to the complicated relationship between literature and reality. The issue is most central in Cesare Pavese and Sylvia Plath, for their lives seemed to re-enact what their fictional characters in, respectively, Among Women Only and The Bell Jar, had attempted. The conscious manipulation of novelistic material into physical and mental events appears to prove correct Wilde's statement about the power of imitation. However, apart from the work of scholars who wrote on Pavese and Plath as an isolated case, the theory of life as imitation of art was never used to define the authors’ intention. Therefore, further theorization is necessary.