Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic theories

In a nutshell

The Aesthetic Movement developed itself in the 19th century as a reaction to escape from the ugliness and materialism of the Industrial Age. It aimed to enhance beauty, even if it did not have a deep meaning. Many authors belonged to this movement, for example, Oscar Wilde, whose novel The Picture of Dorian Gray became an emblematic work of the Aesthetic Movement.

Aesthetic Theories

The Aesthetic Movement emerged in France and reflected the need of the artist to redefine the role of art. As a consequence, French artists withdrew from politics and society to isolate themselves into cultivating art and beauty, and the bohemian, which was a sort of protest against bourgeois life. Walter Pater and Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti were pioneers of the Aesthetic Movement in France and England.

The literary pieces from Aestheticism usually portray a hedonistic attitude and excessive attention to the self. Furthermore, there is an evocative use of the language of the senses and disenchantment with contemporary society.

The Author's Life

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He attended Oxford where he became a disciple of Walter Pater thanks to his eccentricity. After graduating he settled in London and quickly turned into a fashionable dandy for his amazing style and way of dressing.

Note: Dandyism was a literary and artistic movement characterized by excessive refinement.

In 1881, Wilde edited Poems and went on a tour in the USA where he was able to give a voice to Aestheticism, he explained it was the search for the beautiful through painting, sculpting, and poetry. Later in 1883, he returned to Europe, got married, and had two children with Constance Lloyd. During this time his career was at a high peak, in fact, women and men wore lilies as a tribute to his dandified Aestheticism.

In the late 1880s, Wilde produced short stories such as The Canterville Ghost, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In the 1890s, he dedicated himself to writing drama plays, for example, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and the tragedy in French Salomé (1893), however, these last works destroyed his reputation because it was considered immoral. In 1891 he went to jail due to homosexual practices, where he wrote De Profundis. After he got out of jail, he lived in France under a pseudonym and died of meningitis in Paris in 1900.

Main Topics

Wilde wrote about themes such as beauty, depravity, and duplicity. However, his most predominant topic was beauty.

BEAUTY AS THE SECRET OF LIFE

Wilde recurs to the Renaissance idea of the relation between the physical and the spiritual worlds where beautiful people are moral people, and ugly people are immoral people. For example, in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the variation of this topic is the magical portrait that represents the other side of Dorian's personality.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray was written by Oscar Wilde and published in 1891. This novel deals with topics such as the purpose of art, the superficiality of society, and the supremacy of beauty. The story is told by an unobtrusive third-person narrator, the settings are depicted with words appealing to the senses, and the characters reveal themselves through their words or what other people say about them.

THE PLOT

The setting of the novel is London in the 19th century. A young beautiful man, Dorian Gray, dazzles the painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portrait. The portrait satisfies Dorian's thirst to maintain his beauty, so every sign of age, experience, and vice appears on the portrait. Dorian lives only for pleasure, he used and even let people die by being selfish and insensitive.

Later, Dorian kills the painter when he sees the corrupted image of the picture. Eventually, Dorian wants to get rid of the painting, so he stabs it, but in doing so he ends up mysteriously killing himself. At the precise moment of his death, the picture goes back to its original purity, and Dorian becomes 'withered, wrinkled, and loathsome'.

THE MORAL OF THE NOVEL

This novel portrays that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be avoided. Once Dorian has destroyed the picture, he cannot escape from the punishment for all his sins, that is, death. The horrible picture symbolizes the immorality and lack of conscience of the Victorian middle classes, on the other hand, Dorian's innocence and pure appearance are symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy. Finally, the restoration of the picture to its original beauty depicts Wilde's art theories: art survives, and art is eternal.

The following extract belongs to the second chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray:

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose?

(Wilde O.)

In this passage, Dorian explains to Lord Henry and Basil why his portrait makes him upset. At first, he felt admiration for the picture, however, after remembering the words of Lord Henry, that he would not always have his beauty and youth, this admiration is replaced with jealousy and rage which portrays Dorian's ever-increasing vanity and aim to escape from reality.