The Incompatibility between Art and Morality
Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism in The Picture of Dorian Gray
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.220401.038How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Oscar Wilde; aestheticism; art; morality; incompatibility
- Abstract
“All art is quite useless” is one of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams prefaces his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. He argued that art did not hold any purpose, nor did it take any responsibility in influencing society’s morality, religion, or education. Its sole purpose should be to find beauty, attain beauty and please its appreciators and nothing more— “Art for art’s sake.” This statement of Wilde encapsulates the very core of the aesthetic movement in Victorian England, of which Wilde himself was a fervent supporter. Proponents of the aesthetic philosophy, known as the aesthetes, extend the theory to life itself. “It is life that mimics art.” To them, ideal life is also quite useless. It should be all about beauty and happiness and nothing more. Therefore, The Picture of Dorian Gray was overtly read as an espousal of an aesthetic lifestyle. However, that would be too arbitrary and shallow an interpretation. Upon further examination, we would note that Dorian’s embrace and unrestrained practice of new hedonism led to his utter depravity and corruption. A juxtaposition of the philosophy of aestheticism and Dorian’s ruination would intrigue us to further probe into Wilde’s actual stance in aestheticism and, more importantly, the seemingly predetermined incompatibility between art and morality.
- Copyright
- © 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Zhiwei Ai PY - 2022 DA - 2022/04/08 TI - The Incompatibility between Art and Morality BT - Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2022) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 186 EP - 193 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220401.038 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.220401.038 ID - Ai2022 ER -