The Picture Of Dorian Gray Analysis

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” The aesthetic movement dealt with the nature of art and the simple beauty that is encompasses. Wilde prefaces his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a reflection on the artist, the art, and the value of both. In Oscar Wilde’s novel, Wilde describes his part of the aesthetic movement and bases the events in the novel on his own experiences.
The aesthetic movement was an artistic and literary movement that was centered on the saying “art for art’s sake” and arguing that art was not to be utilitarian or practical. The movement wanted art to exist for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it did not need to serve any political or didactic purpose. The pieces of art created by the artists in the movement did not tell stories or sermons; their art was visual, delightful, hinting at sensual desires; their poetry was pure. The proponents of the movement say that the experience of art is the most intense experience available in life and that nothing should be allowed to restrict it. The intensity of the aesthetic experience is the dominant goal in human life. If there are morally unwanted things of art, they do not really matter in contrast to this all-important experience which art can give.
When the Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, first showed up with his loving association with art it was seen by many as almost “unhealthy” and dangerous, “Wilde himself was accused of corrupting a young man (Lord Alfred Douglas), and his writings (including The Picture of Dorian Gray) were help up as evidence of his dangerous ideas” (Boilard). Some of his writings were frowned upon because they focused on subjects of sensual love, lust and cruelty. It was said that Wilde did not...

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...osed in the preface of the novel and through Lord Henry’s intellectual talks with Dorian, “Wilde’s odd preface, which reads like an aesthetics’ version of Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell,’ warns that ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’” (BRC). Wilde understood and showed in the life of Dorian Gray, a necessity for a more controlled and careful attitude toward aestheticism, without which morality will inevitable be indefinable. The aestheticism expressed by Dorian results in self-absorption and intellectual deterioration. “If in the hunt of one’s desires and of the beautiful parts of life, the condition of others’ or of one’s own mind is put at risk, the pleasure gathered must sometimes be surrendered for the greater good” (Pearce). As Wilde makes known, it is only through a more controlled attitude that aestheticism and morality may finally line up.