Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde as the brightest example of aestheticism

Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde as the brightest example of aestheticism

Introduction
Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde (1854-1900) –is the most famous English writer, the author of poetry, fairy tales, comedies and action-novels. The most prominent of his works is The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is the brightest example of an intellectual novel of the XIX century. The works of O. Wilde express both the romantic traditions of the first half of the 19th century, as well as the realistic and modernist aesthetic principles of the second half.
The famous novel by Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray is quite close to symbolism. The whole plot of the novel is symbolic: the genius of the artist serves as a mirror of the soul of a man, in which all of its filth is reflected. There’s the main thesis of the writer, which can be interpreted in different ways: art must be immoral (otherwise it cannot reflect life). A novel is a contradictory work. It affects the influence of Gothic novels about a man who sold his soul to the devil for his unfading beauty and youth.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is not an imitation of a literary source, but an unmatched original creation. The title of the novel emphasizes the special significance of the portrait in the plot, and if it is intended to orient the reader, then the portrait deserves close attention, no matter how one can evaluate the merits of this artistic invention.

The transformations of the portrait express the essence of what is happening in the novel. The only novel by Wilde is based on the author's extensive literary erudition. The researchers easily find similarities with the romanticism of the early nineteenth century, in particular with the works of Hoffmann, or Chamisso, and then in Balzac's works, which had a romantic beginning, reflected in the novel by Wilde.
1. The plot line of the novel, its symbolism
The most important stage in the life and work of Oscar Wilde was his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde lived in captivity of his own contradictions: he is a supporter of "pure art", then a fighter for his submission to high ethical ideals. The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) was conceived, judging by the foreword of the author, as the apotheosis of art standing over life, as a hymn to hedonism - the philosophy of pleasure. In the paradoxical aphorisms of the preface, Wilde repeated the well-known propositions of his aesthetics: "the artist is the one who creates the beautiful," "the artist is not a moralist," "art is a mirror that reflects who looks at it, not life at all." From theoretical positions, he turns to the tragic story of Dorian Gray. The world knows many heroes who gave their soul to the devil in exchange for wealth, the throne, the knowledge of truth, the possession of a beloved woman. Dorian Gray sacrifices his soul for the sake of eternal youth and beauty. A young handsome man, admiring his image, cannot get rid of the idea that the portrait will always possess what it will inevitably lose.
"Oh, if it was the other way around! If the portrait were changing, and I could always remain the same as now! "The prayer was heard, and the wish was fulfilled. The weak-willed Dorian becomes an obedient toy in the hands of the highly experienced cynic Lord Henry. Believing his speech about the omnipotence of beauty, about being beyond any control of any laws, Dorian gives sensual pleasures, slipping into the abyss of debauchery and crimes. Low-lying passions, however, do not leave a trace on him. Coming over many years his face shines with the freshness of youth, its inimitable purity. The portrait changes monstrously, for the soul of Dorian, embodied in it, becomes vicious, deceitful and dirty. Unable to withstand the painful encounters with his tainted conscience, Dorian thrust a knife into the portrait to get rid of this terrible witness, the same knife that he had previously killed Basil, who painted this portrait.
Rushed servants saw a magnificent portrait of his master in all the splendour of his marvellous youth and beauty. On the floor was laying a disgusting corpse, in which, only by the rings in its hands, they recognized Dorian Gray.

The plot line of the novel is reminiscent of Balzac's "Shagreen Skin," both philosophical and symbolic novels. However, in addition to similarities, there are significant differences. Wilde did not create a realistic novel, although many scenes are quite plausible.
Wilde did not set out to create multifaceted characters. Each of his hero is the embodiment of one idea: Dorian is a longing for eternal youth, Lord Henry is a cult of pleasure philosophy, Basil is devotion to art.

The writer doesn’t pay as much attention to action, to characteristics, as to the delicate play of the mind, led by Lord Henry, in whose paradoxes there are embodied the cherished thoughts of the author. In author’s intellectual game, Prince Paradox implicates Dorian, astonishing his imagination with unusual and audacious speeches.

The words for Wilde are much more important than the facts. He himself and his heroes completely give themselves to verbal fights. The new hedonism of Lord Henry is somewhat similar to that of Nietzsche. Both of them ennoble the cult of egoism with the dream of a beautiful, perfect man.
"The goal of life is self-expression. To manifest in its fullness its essence - that's why we live ... If every person could live a full life, letting every emotion and every thought, implementing each of his dreams - the world would feel again such a powerful impulse to joy that they are forgotten There would have been all the diseases of the Middle Ages, and we would have returned to the ideals of Hellenism, and maybe to something even more valuable and beautiful. "
It is difficult to argue with Lord Henry, in particular he is right, but these partial truths do not hide the fallacy of his initial position. Nobody except Basil does not try to refute it in a world where he rotates, in a big fashion like a coquetry of the mind. "You are lovely, but a true demon tempter. Be sure to come and have dinner with us, "exclaims the venerable Duchess.

Preaching the freedom of instincts, Lord Henry rebels against self-restraint with all his heart. "The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it ... Having sinned, a person gets rid of the attraction to sin, for exercise is the path to purification." Lord Henry flattered the attention of the young Dorian, who, like a rare violin, responded to every touch, he liked to corrupt him mentally, to hear in his heated speeches the echoes of his own thoughts. Turning a young man into an object of dispassionate observation, he sets an experiment on his soul, completely subordinating it to himself. Dorian willingly and unconsciously drinks the “sweet poison” contained in the paradoxes of the teacher.

Dorian's love for Sibylla Wayne most clearly testifies to the unconsciousness of Lord Henry's philosophy. Dorian is incapable of a simple human feeling. He does not fall in love with a girl, but in art, to which she gave herself completely until she met him. He loved Rosalind (the play Sibylla performed) today, tomorrow he was in love with her play of Imogen. He adored Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona in her, but he never liked the ordinary girl Sybil Wayne. Dorian mercilessly pushed her away, breaking her heart, as soon as from a magnificent actress she turned into a living loving woman. She ceased to occupy his imagination and he could not agree with her that love is superior to art.

Dorian professed another philosophy, according to which the complete self-determination of man is possible only in art. He wanted to turn his life into the greatest art. Falling in love with himself above all else, he did not really care about others. Sybil, who, in his opinion, acted selfishly, causing his death to him a momentary excitement - the first victim of Dorian, followed by others. Friendship with him is disastrous for young people, he infects them with a craving for pleasure, they either commit suicide or slip to the bottom. Dorian's life would have turned into a nightmare if day and night the ghosts of his crimes reminded him of himself. However, he makes his conscience silent: "Life is too short to take on the burden of other people's mistakes. Everyone lives as he wants, and pays himself".
The insults and crimes committed by Dorian are only a chain of amazing experiences for him, after which, with special pleasure, he plunged into the atmosphere of art. Upon learning of the suicide of Sibylla, he goes to the opera to listen to the "divine Patty", killing Basil, with ecstasy gives himself to reading Gautier's poetry. Evil was for him only one means of realizing what he considered the beauty of life. "The worst thing in the world is boredom. That is the only sin that does not have forgiveness". Dorian learned this statement of Lord Henry.

He transforms the world by the power of his imagination, creates his own world in which everything has taken its forms and dressed in bright colours. He constantly changes his hobbies. Then Catholicism, which attracted its rituals, then mysticism with its marvellous gift to make the simple mysterious, then Darwinism - so tempting was the idea of absolute dependence of the spirit on physical conditions. There was a period in Dorian's life when he gave himself up to music. He studied aromatic substances, discovering that "every spiritual mood is connected with sensory perception." Then came a new passion: jewellery, tapestries and old embroideries. All these treasures helped him to escape from the fear he felt before the depth of his fall. He was convinced that in his life culture and debauchery accompanied each other. This is understandable: Dorian expelled from culture all human, art perceived as something neutral, not affecting the activities of man. Once he was intoxicated with the thought that "eternal youth, tireless passion, delicate and forbidden delights, the madness of happiness and the even more frenzied madness of sin - everything will be given to him."

Wilde wanted to glorify the hero, who sacrificed his soul to beauty and art, but the artistic truth was stronger than this idea. He showed that Dorian polluted himself, that beauty, devoid of eternity, became ugly. In Lord Henry's words, addressed to Dorian at the end of the novel, a bitter irony sounded, which he himself did not feel:
"Ah, Dorian, how lucky you are! How beautiful your life is! .. ... All of you perceived it as music, so it did not spoil you. ... I am very glad that you did not sculpt any statue, did not write pictures, did not create anything outside of yourself. Your art was life. "

These words were said at the moment when Dorian realized that he had disfigured his soul, ruined his life by eating the poison of such seductive speeches. At that moment of realizing the inconsistency of egocentrism and hedonism, the idolatrous words sound especially absurd: "The world has become different, because you came to it, made of ivory and gold. The bend of your lips remakes anew the history of the world. "

Dorian became a victim of his maximalist passion - love for himself. Thinking exclusively about his personality, he solved it. Trying to kill his conscience Dorian Gray kills himself. Wilde argued with his own thoughts in the novel and destroyed the building of his false philosophy, built with such elegance and lightness, with his own hands. Besides, Wilde is far from consistency in his conviction: Dorian evokes more sympathy and compassion than the victims of his passions.
In his fate, Wilde revealed the tragedy of a real contradiction: pleasure, which has become an end in itself, generates not joy, but torment. Dorian cannot bear the sight of his portrait and pierces it with a knife. Nevertheless, the work was completed and possessed such a terrifying power, and then it had some kind of harmony and, consequently, beauty. This beauty was undoubtedly peculiar, but it is not the meaning of all Wilde manifests - the proclamation of a new beauty (that is, a new harmony) that affirms a new morality through aestheticizing what was previously considered immoral.

The task of art is to legitimize the criminal and the evil. It is a belief based on the fact that evil does not exist in itself: it is only a perverse good that should be learned from the inside out turned evil. If you consider Dorian Gray as the author of your own portrait, the Wilde parable speaks of two aspects of creativity. Firstly, the artist, immersed in vice for the discovery of a new truth, perishes, stained and prone to corruption, as if infected with other people's vices, which he described (he was searching for a new topic in his work). On the other hand, the true work of art, after passing through the ashes of decomposition in the course of creation, rebels in its former form as a new model of beauty, even if the prototype of this beauty (Dorian Gray) is deeply flawed.

2. Novel, as the embodiment of the writer's aesthetic ideas
It is impossible to omit the fact that this novel considers at the same time as a hymn to aesthetics and as "an aesthetic dystopia." In this novel O. Wilde most fully expresses the basic positions of his theory of aestheticism. Twenty-five aphorisms of the preface in a concentrated form determine the aesthetic views of the author.
In the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray there are many paradoxes about love, marriage, the relationship between a man and a woman, art, beauty, life, virtue. Wilde very often resorts to his sharp weapons, referring to women. In his opinion, the most intelligent and craftier woman is not a creature in the world. She always knows what to do to circle a man around her finger and achieves her goal.

Wilde is very negative about marriage, considering it a demoralizing factor for men. A person who wants to get married knows either everything or nothing about family life. Many Oscar Wilde paradoxes are devoted to the theme "life", "man in life", "man in society". The writer was filled with a terrible curiosity for life, which prompted him to look into its darkest depths for the sake of the sensations hidden in them. According to Wilde, life more imitates art than the art of living. But behind the cold Bengal fire of his sayings there is a hot, passionate desire to blow up, overturn, or at least shake the immutability of hypocritical morality.
However, the most favourite themes of the author of paradoxes, indisputably, are beauty and art. In love with the beauty of Wilde painfully worries her disappearance from the modern world. Rough reality with its "material progress" and trading spirit, which suppresses poetic imagination and kills high ideals, causes Wilde's unchanging hatred and contempt. The only refuge from stupefying boredom, vulgarity and monotonous monotony head of English aesthetes sees in art. Wilde could easily sneer at everything, but in relation to art, whose power he firmly believed in, remained extremely serious. The idea that art is higher than life has also been expressed in a beautiful romantic fiction, on which the whole novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is built. No one can see what Dorian really is but the portrait relentlessly registers all the consequences of his vicious life. This Oscar Wilde wanted to express an important idea for him that the essence of man and phenomena can reveal only art, in connection with which the writer and appreciated it above reality.

Conclusion
The period of O. Wilde's creativity is the period of the development of aestheticism in English and world literature. The work of Oscar Wilde is very multifaceted; it reveals many philosophical, aesthetic and moral problems. The philosophical and aesthetic problems of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are very diverse. It is also worth mentioning that the novel is the embodiment of the writer's aesthetic ideas.
An important place in the work, and throughout the work of Oscar Wilde is the problem of the relationship between art and reality. It is realized in many aspects, the main of which is the correlation of form and content, eternity and the moment of beauty, art, the relation of the creator and his creation, the ethical relation to art, to beautiful things. The main thing, as evidenced by the novel, is that it is a work of art with a great literary book basis.
The main thing, no matter how artistic findings of others Oscar Wilde was not inspired, he created an original, uncommon work that belongs to the most significant finds of art in the last third of the twentieth century. The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray organically combines the main aesthetic provisions of the theory of art by Oscar Wilde (preface to the novel) and their artistic realization (the novel itself). In the preface, the writer claims, "art is completely useless" and "art does not reflect life."

Wilde used the romantic creative method. The writer's desire to affirm the idea of the superiority of art over life, romantic absurd of creativity and its independence is manifested. In the aestheticism of Wilde, the positions of the romantic theory acquire a polemical sharpness, expressed in the form of a paradox. Since art is higher than life, it cannot be viewed from the point of view of human morality.

The tragic denouement of the novel refutes the paradoxes of Lord Henry: immorality and soulless aestheticism are qualities that mutilate a person and lead him to death. In the creative heritage of Wilde, this is his only major work of prose. The author himself did not give him a genre definition. It is called a novel, but it can be called a story, and even a "drama in prose." The Picture of Dorian Gray is devoid of clear genre certainty, and therefore there are specifying characteristics: a novel-allegory, a novel-symbol, a novel-myth. Each of these definitions can be found in one way or another in the text of the novel, to a lesser extent for allegory. In the history of world literature, Wilde came in as the most vivid representative of the phenomenon in art known as aestheticism.