Oscar Wilde is called an aesthese, a part of the movements that said that art should not have any morality or lesson or utility but that art should be for it’s own sake. Oscar Wilde was also gay.
Reading “The Picture of Dorian Grey” was weird because:
A) Not only is it a moral story with a lesson along the lines that if you do bad, your soul would corrupt
B) the sin that is portrayed in the story i.e. Grey living a hedonistic life, pursuing whatever beautiful interests him etc. is exactly what the life of an aesthese would be
C) Another sin that is hinted throughout the book is homosexuality and Grey’s relations with young men.
I can’t reconcile the fact that Wilde being a proponent of the “Art for art’s sake” movement and the Aesthete lifestyle and gay himself essentially created a work that in a way is polemically opposed to both aesthetic lifestyle and homosexuality in its essence?Am I getting anything wrong or reading into it the wrong way?
I loved the first half of the book and the premise of the portrait that ages instead of you, but the second half didn’t live upto the premise, just like how in Brave New World, the first half is excellent, with all these sci-fi never thought before concepts but the second half is a stupid love story of sorts.
by ramjikatidda