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

Art for art’s sake, which flowered during the 1880s and the 1890s in the works of Wilde,Moore and Symons had many roots in the past.”Its ultimate origins were in the German romantic philosophers and in Keats and Poe. Rossetti, isolated from society, revived Keats and offered an art without moral or social purpose. Morris, desolated by the ugliness around him, tried to restore beauty to useful things. Gautier in , Baudelaire in his poems and in his preface to Poe, and Flaubert in his novels illustrated or reco

Narcissism and Dandyism go hand in hand ,and both rely upon visual appreciation. When Dorian says ”when one loses one’s good looks[…] one loses everything”(Wilde 68), he is justifying his future conduct which will inevitably lead to murder and self-mutilation. ”It was his beauty that ruined him, his beauty and the youth he had prayed for”(Wilde 250).

Sibyl poisones herself in despair and “even her death is rendered aesthetic”(Ellman 316), first by Lord Henry “The girl never really lived, so she has never really died. There is something to me quite beautiful about her death.”(Wilde 118) and then by Dorian “She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine[…] she passed again into the sphere of art.”(Wilde 125) “Sibyl is the opposite of Dorian. She gives up the pretense of art so as to live entirely artlessly in this world, only to commit suicide, Dorian tries to give up the causality of life and to live in the deathless (and lifeless) world of art, only to commit suicide, too.”(Ellman 316)

Although Lord Henry states that, ”There is no such thing as a good influence,Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral-immoral from a scientific point of view[...]Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts,or burn with his natural passions.His virtues are not real to him .His sins ,if there are such things as sins, are borrowed.He becomes an echo of someone else’s music,an actor of a part that has not been written for him”(Wilde 23), he nonetheless drastically changes Dorian Gray. As Dorian acts on the beliefs of Lord Henry, the portrait's beauty becomes corrupted. The picture ceases to mirror his external beauty and begins to mirror his internal ugliness, his corrupted soul, his sins and vices.

Some topics in this essay:
Sibyl Vane, Dorian Gray, Lord Henry, Dorian Dorian, Oscar Wilde, Henry Wotton, Lord Henry’s, Lying” Wilde, Narcissism Dandyism, Basil Hallward, lord henry, dorian gray, oscar wilde, life” wilde, wilde 96, reality dorian, lives world, love dorian, art art, world art, wilde 96 sibyl, failure” wilde 96, complete failure” wilde, 96 sibyl gotten, sibyl gotten world,