On The Subversion Of Tradition By Wilde’s Aestheticism In The Picture Of Dorian Gray

The English classical writer Oscar Wilde devotes himself to the front-pageartistic revolution called Aestheticism and proceeded it to the summit. Stronglyinfluenced by the aesthetic doctrine of art for art’s sake, Wilde takes shape a series ofinnovative and unique aesthetic thoughts, including art’s precedence of life, art’sindependence from life, and art’s irrelevance with morality and so on. His only novelThe Picture of Dorian Gray intensively embodies Wilde’s aesthetics, and it is theconcrete reflection of Wilde’s idea about art’s nature.Taking Wilde’s aestheticism as the research object, this paper explores itsreflections in the novel and then makes comparisons between Wilde’s aesthetics andtraditional art to find out the anti-traditional features of Wilde’s aestheticism. Throughthe research for the realizations in the novel of Wilde’s unique artistic opinions likeart’s superiority to life, art’s far distance from reality and art’s indifference to morality,by the way of combining the theoretical research of aestheticism and text analysis, thestudy has found that Wilde’s aestheticism subverts traditional literature both in artistictheories and in narrative techniques. Wilde’s aestheticism breaks both traditionalpatterns of the interdependence between art, reality and moral and the limitations oftraditional creative techniques in order to protect art’s independency and purity.