The Contradictions Of Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism In The Picture Of Dorian Gary

Oscar Wilde is a famous English playwright, essayist, poet, and a synthesizer of aestheticism, and he is also one of the most controversial writers in the history of British literature. He created lots of plays, poems, essays and fairy tales in his life, but The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only fiction he created, the importance of the fiction is self-evident. Oscar Wilde claimed that “Art for Art’s sake”, he thinks that life should imitate art, and art has nothing to do with morality. However, the contradiction in his works reveals the character created by Wilde does not lose the traditional morality. Wilde tried to against Britain’s moral corruption pass on the aesthetic image Dorian Gray that was away from the reality. This paper will research the novel of The Picture of Dorian Gray, to explore the contradiction of Wilde’s aestheticism thoughts.This paper is organized in the following parts: introduction, main body, and conclusion. The part of introduction introduces Oscar Wilde’s personal life and his major works; a brief introduce to The Picture of Dorian Gray; the literature review in China and abroad about Wilde and his The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter one is theory part. This chapter describes the theory of aestheticism, and gives a brief description of the aesthetic movement. Besides, this chapter also explains Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic thoughts, and inner contradictions of his thoughts. Chapter two we starts from subjective and objective perspective to analysis the causes of Wilde’s aestheticism thoughts, which includes the influence of family environment and education background on Wilde. And corrupt social situation in Victorian era makes Wilde has so-called “socialism” tendency. Chapter three is based on the three personalities of Oscar Wilde reflects in the novel to reveal Wilde’s self-contradiction. Chapter four is on the basis of previous parts, discusses the contradiction between artistic independence and the artist, and the paradox between art and morality in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The last part is conclusion.