Scarica Oscar Wilde's Aestheticism & The Picture of Dorian Gray: Art for Art's Sake & Double Life e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Wilde is the symbol of aestheticism. According to this philosophical movement, art doesn’t have any kind of moral purpose. It should be valuable for its own sake. Oscar Wilde can be associated with the figure of the dandy. The dandy not only feeds his aristocratic image through extravagant clothes, but also leads a life full of pleasure. Aestheticism is a sort of religion that raises the dandy above the bourgeois mentality. The theory of dandyism was created by Baudelaire and it’s like a philosophy of life. Wilde distinguishes himself from other, making his own life a work of art. Aestheticism is the outcome of a denied Utilitarianism. Bentham’s principles were based on the idea that only what is good is useful. In contrast, in Wilde’s novel reveal aestheticism and it’s clear that he wants to criticize Victorian’s mentality. The picture of Dorian Gray- THE PREFACE AND THE PURPOSE OF ART The Preface is the manifest of the aesthetic movement. First, the author defines the role of an artist, because art is related to beauty. Artist’s aim is spread beauty, not to talk about himself. The goal of art is to hide the artist because art expresses itself. Consequently, the critic only gives his impression. Oscar Wilde believes that if someone is observing a piece of art and he doesn’t recognized beauty, it means that he’s corrupted and not cultivated. -VICTORIAN SOCIETY: Wilde uses lots of paradoxes because he wanted to criticize Victorian’s mentality. Following morality is only a mannerism of style and is just appearance. Victorian people didn’t like Romanticism due to the fact that they were interested in nature and they believed in reason and progress based on material things. On the contrary, Romantics focused on imagination and dream. The author thought that art is both “surface” and “symbol”, which means that there are deep symbols underneath every work of art. For this reason, Victorian people didn’t want to see the world as it really was because they preferred to live in an ideal situation based on utilitarianism. The picture of Dorian Grey The picture of Dorian Gray, THE THEME OF DOUBLE: Dorian seems innocent and this is related to the main massage of “The picture of Dorian Grey”. Wilde wants to criticize Victorian society and this double image is an important massage: someone can be respectable publicly, but privately not. Victorian people look beautiful outside, but it doesn’t mean that they are beautiful also inside. Dorian is looking for pleasure, but he doesn’t want to pay all the consequences of his life of corruption. So, Dorian’s double life is based on hypocrisy due to be accepted in his society. IDEA OF BEAUTY (+preface) ▸Keats influenced Wilde’s idea of beauty. According to Keats beauty cannot be expressed in words, because it goes beyond human limits. It an absolute value, because the beauty of art cannot be perceived. Oscar Wilde was influenced by the fact that beauty is related to truth and is a synonym of perfection achievable through art. ▸There is no connection between morality and art. Wilde is influence by Kant’s critique of the Power of Judgment. Kant divides the sense of beauty from the sense of goodness. So, Art is not useful for our everyday life, but it’s essential for our soul. Art is fundamental to express the invisible. (▸Individualism is the realization of ourselves in our pursuit for happiness. The best example is Jesus of Nazareth because he really became the person he meant to be.) The picture of Dorian Gray, ART AND BEAUTY: Another fundamental message is that art never dies, that’s why it is superior to life. Influenced by John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, Wilde believes that the essence of art is not its utility or didactic aim, but it exists for the sake of beauty. For instance, when the portrait turns into its original beauty, we ask ourselves whether it’s the same picture of a young man we saw at the beginning. The picture of Dorian Grey Summary: The artist Basil Hallward decides to paint the picture of a young man, Dorian Gray, because he was fascinated by his beauty. The portrait shows Dorian’s beauty, but it also reveals that it will last while he will grow. Then Dorian meets Lord Henry and they talk about the precariousness of youth and Dorian wants to make a pledge: he will kill himself if he can preserve his youth, while the portrait will support all the sign of time. Dorian leads a scandalous life, full of pleasure and corruption. He also rejects the actress Sybil Vane, but when he sees that in the picture there is a sign of cruelty, he returns to her. Meanwhile she kills herself. Dorian has to keep terrible secrets due to his life of vice, such as the murder of Basil. When he sees
