A Paradoxical Aesthete--On Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish-born playwright, novelist, essayist and poet, associated with the nineteenth-century "art for art's sake" movement, was undoubtedly better known in his lifetime for his scandalous lifestyle than for his literary theories and their execution in his dramas. If Oscar Wilde is remembered for anything since his turn-of-the-century demise, it is his meteoric rise as a raconteur, playwright and cultural critic and his startlingly rapid fall into disrepute as a homosexual committed to two years in solitary confinement with hard labor in Reading Gaol. But actually He should have deserved a higher status in literature and those dissidents should have biased him so long.So it might be helpful and necessary that we re-evaluate Wilde's aestheticism and his work-The Picture of Dorian Gray. Only with modern stand about symbolism, feminism and aestheticism could we rediscover his "art" that is transcendental over his time and even himself, as both an individual and an artist. Wilde, the artist, into which he might be fairly ranked, should have lived out of his time, and even out of himself the ordinary person. Those aspects of this fiction I am to deal with are actually the many selves of Oscar Wilde-a symbol, a so-called homosexual, a Taoist, and an aesthete, finally integrating into just one-a paradoxical aesthete.The first part chiefly focuses on symbolism, which is dealt with in an aesthetical way. As it is concerned about the characters, this story seems to have just three heroes and a portrait, each symbolizing one form of Oscar Wilde, the multiform creature, as the previous comments said of him. As all the aesthetics wanted to abstract "aesthetical elements" from beauty in art, Wilde tried to attach a certain aspect of humanity onto each of his characters, thus making them all "flat characters". Never existent in real life hence and ago, such symbolized characters, also aesthetes in many senses, actually embody Wilde's ideal of aestheticism. That is, he personified his ideals as well as idealized hispersons. Although these characters are to be seen as "flat characters", they reflect Wilde's aesthetical treatment of complexity in humanity. Scientifically speaking, the three heroes-Harry, Dorian, and Basil- reside in Wilde as ego, superego and id respectively.Unlike the heroes of the story, the female characters are obscured, which partly mirrors the prejudice toward them in Victorian age, and partly could find clues in Wilde's sexual identities. Deprived of their humanity, women in Victorian were really alienated as "objects", only alive in artistic world as in the extreme case of Sybil Vane-Wilde's female character.Part three mainly concerns with the most controversial topic about Wilde-his sexual identity. As is concerted about this issue, I'd rather group him into "bisexuality" or "Narcissism", paradoxical, platonic as well as aesthetical. The one-liner paradox, as the usual style of narcissi, is spoken for the sake of itself.We by chance discover, in Part four, the inheritance of Wilde from the great Chinese saint-Chuang Tzi, who also preferred paradox, advocated non-action, and even made a dream possibly stimulating the story of Dorian Gray.In Part five, we conclude that Wilde slips into the trap of his own, as is the biggest paradox. His theory of aestheticism, being part of his "art", remotes art from life so successfully that he himself can't separate his life from his aestheticism. Although the paradise of art momentarily provides such shelter, Wilde indulges himself too much in this world that finally he cannot tell life from art. It is he, and not anyone else, who breaks away from his aestheticism in aim of approaching it ironically. In a word, he himself is the biggest paradox ever made, a tragic aesthetical paradox.