The Aesthetic Ideal In The Picture Of Dorian Gray By Oscar Wilde

15 Pages 3731 Words

presses nothing but itself.” Wilde emphasizes the need for form and the necessity of treating life as art by assuming a pose. “The first duty in life is to assume a pose.What the second duty is no one yet has found out.”
According to Diana Neill, the two basic principles of the Wildean aesthetic creed were “Art for art’s sake” and “All art is immoral” (279). Oscar Wilde put the case for aestheticism in his essay in which he declares:”…great works of art are living things-are in fact the only things that live. So much, indeed, will he (the ideal critic) feel this that I am certain that as civilization progresses and becomes more highly organized, the elect spirits will grow less interested in actual life and will seek to gain their impression almost entirely from what Art has touched. Life is terribly defficient in form.”(Wilde, qtd. in Neill,279)
And later in the same essay:”…It is through Art and through Art only, that we can realize our perfection; through Art and Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” (Wilde, qtd. in Neill,279)
Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in 1891, but it still continues to fascinate us with its depiction of one of society's overwhelming obsessions - the cult of youthful beauty. It was originally condemned as "a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction" and "a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents".

Wilde offended the puritans in his preface to the novel by asserting: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." He went on to claim that "It is the spectator, and not life that art really mirrors" and stated that a central point of the book was that "Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray".
”Dorian Gray is the aesthetic no...