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Ⅰ. Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism 1.1 Oscar Wilde, the Great Master of Aestheticism Oscar Wilde was the second son born into an Anglo-Irish family, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, to Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Wilde (née Elgee) (her pseudonym being Speranza). Jane was a successful writer, being a poet for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and a life-long Irish nationalist. Sir William was a Ireland’s leading Oto-Ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services to medicine. William also wrote books on archaeology and folklore. In June 1855, the family moved to Merrion Square in a fashionable residential area, where Wilde’s sister, Isola, was born in 1856. Here, Lady Wilde held a regular Saturday afternoon salon with guests including Sheridan le Fanu, Samuel Lever, George Petrie, Isaac Butt and Samuel Ferguson. Oscar was educated at home up to the age of nine. He attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Fermanagh from the ages of nine to sixteen, spending the summer months with his family in rural Waterford, Wexford and at Sir William’s family home in Mayo. Here the Wilde brothers played with the older George Moore. After leaving Portora, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874, sharing rooms with his older brother Willie Wilde for two years. He was an outstanding student, and won the Berkeley Gold Medal, the highest award available to classics students at Trinity. He was awarded a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued his studies from 1874 to 1878 and where he became a part of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets being to make an art of life. Wilde had a less than happy relationship with the prestigious Oxford Union. On matriculating in the autumn of 1874, Wilde applied to join the Union, but failed to be elected, a fact which came to light only recently. When the Union’s librarian requested a presentation copy of Poems (1881), Wilde complied. After a debate called by Oliver Elton, the gift was condemned for supposed plagiarism and returned. While at Magdalen, he won the 1878 Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna, which he read out at Encaenia; he failed, though, to win the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize for an essay that would be published posthumously as The Rise of Historical Criticism (1909). In November 1878, he graduated with a double first in classical moderations and Literae Humaniores. After graduating from Oxford, Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met and courted Florence Balcombe. She, however, became engaged to the writer Bram Stoker. On hearing of her engagement, Wilde wrote to her stating his intention to leave Ireland permanently. He left in 1878, and returned to his native country only twice, for brief visits. He spent the next six years in London and Paris, and in the United States, where he traveled to deliver lectures. In London, he met Constance Lloyd, daughter of wealthy Queen’s Counsel Horace Lloyd. She was visiting Dublin in 1884, when Oscar was in the city to give lectures at the Gaiety Theatre. He proposed to her, and they married on May 29, 1884 in Paddington, London. Constance's allowance of £250 allowed the Wildes to live in relative luxury. The couple had two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). In 1891, Wilde became infatuated with the beautiful young poet Lord Alfred Douglas (known as “Bosie”). The dynamic between Bosie and Wilde was unstable at the best of times, and the pair often split for months before agreeing to reunite. Still, the relationship consumed Wilde’s personal life, to the extent that the sexual nature of their friendship had become a matter of public knowledge. In 1895, Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, accused Wilde of sodomy. Wilde replied by charging Queensbury with libel. Queensbury located several of Wilde’s letters to Bosie, as well as other incriminating evidence. In a second trial often referred to as “the trial of the century,” the writer was found guilty of “indecent acts” and was sentenced to two years of hard labor in England's Reading Goal. In 1897, while in prison, Wilde wrote De Profundis, an examination of his newfound spirituality. After his release, he moved to France under an assumed name. He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898 and published two letters on the poor conditions of prison. One of the letters helped reform a law to keep children from imprisonment. His new life in France, however, was lonely, impoverished, and humiliating. Wilde died in 1900 in a Paris hotel room. He retained his epigrammatic wit until his last breath. He is rumored to have said of the drab establishment that between the awful wallpaper and himself, “One of us has to go.” Critical and popular attention to Wilde has recently experienced a resurgence; various directors have produced films based on his plays and life, and his writings remain a wellspring of witticisms and reflections on aestheticism, morality, and society. 1.2 Aestheticism, a Short-lived Literary Movement The British decadent writers were deeply influenced by the Oxford don Walter Pater and his essays published in 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty. His Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) became a sacred text for art-centric young men of the Victorian era. Decadent writers used the slogan “Art for Art’s Sake” (L’art pour l’art), coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin and promoted by Théophile Gautier in France, and asserted that there was no connection between art and morality. The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold’s utilitarian conception of art as something moral or useful. Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the movement were suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music. Aestheticism had its forerunners in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and among the Pre-Raphaelites. In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, both influenced by the French Symbolists, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The movement and these poets were satirised in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience and other works, such as F. C. Burnand’s The Colonel, and in comic magazines, such as Punch. Compton Mackenzie’s novel Sinister Street makes use of the type as a phase through which the protagonist passes under the influence of older, decadent individuals. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was a young participant in aesthete society at Oxford, portray the aesthete mostly from a satirical point of view, but also from that of an insider. Some names associated with this loose assemblage are Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford, and Anthony Powell. Ⅱ. The Aesthetic Images of the Major Characters 2.1 Dorian Gray Characterization of Dorian Gray reflects the deep thoughts of Oscar Wilde to art and life, form and content, soul and body. In the novel, Dorian Gray is a simple, kind, handsome young aristocrat. When he sees the portrait which Basil Hallward draws for him, he is attracted by his own beauty deeply, and thinks about one day he would lose his youth, so he makes a ridiculous promise: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that--for that--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:30) Unexpectedly the promise become true, the portrait not only bares his changing appearance, but also records the traces of the moral degeneration of him. At the end, the conflict of art and reality emerges and Dorian introspects his soul, finally recognizes that “His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:192). Therefore, Dorian whose appearance remains young and handsome, with the extreme aversion and fear to the portrait, wants to stab it by a knife, but the person who is stabbed to death is himself, and he is “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:194) but the servants “found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:194) Because of the portrait is the symbol of artistic beauty, it is clear that in the end of the novel, Oscar Wilde reveals the aestheticism’s subject: art beats life, art and beauty, are eternal and paramount. Although Dorian is beautiful in reality, his portrait is disfigured slowly. The portrait shows a soul of a fallen man. Sometimes he hates the portrait and himself, but more often he is proud of his way of life. Although his appearance is very beautiful, his mind is very ugly and evil. The portrait which bears all of these is the display of his inner ugliness. His damage and tortuosity to the portrait also shows that art reflects real life more; it will be further away from beauty, just as with Dorian’s misdeeds increase, the portrait becomes more and more ugly. Art is destroyed when it faces to the ugly acts, and at the same time, art also reflects reality mercilessly. It can be seen that the portrait is given a transcendent perfect personality, and reflects Dorian as a mirror. The novel seems to show realism, but realism is rejected and belittled by Oscar Wilde. In the preface of the novel, Oscar Wilde wrote,#p#分页标题#e# “The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:3). He believes that “as a method, realism is a complete loss” (Holland, 1994:154). But at the end, the portrait restores the original condition, namely beauty defeats ugliness. This expresses Oscar Wilde’s opinion of aestheticism, and precisely embodies his view about art and life: “life imitates art more than art imitates life.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:3) 2.2 Basil Hallward Basil Hallward is the painter who draws the portrait for Dorian. As a typical aesthete, his mad pursuit of art is almost fanatic, and this also reflects Wilde’s craziness about art and beauty. When Hallward sees Dorian at the first time, he immediately feels the deterrent power of the beauty from that moment, “it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:9). Dorian’s beauty not only makes him “sees things differently, thinks of them differently” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:13), but also suggests to him “an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:13). “The value of art lies in the uncertain volatile, ever-changing real world in an instant flash relatively solid set the form of condensate. That put the painting is the most beautiful images with art form” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:13). He dedicates his own to create a portrait, the portrait of his ideal. As Hallward says in the novel: “Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry--too much of myself!”(Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:26) So Hallward is not only a discoverer, a seeker and a creator of beauty, but also a person fulfilling the idea of aestheticism. Because aesthetes advocate the ultra-utilitarian of beauty, Hallward does not want to show the portrait at all. He does not eager to exchange it for fame and money, only giving it to Dorian as a gift. He takes creation as his whole life, and converts his worship of Dorian’s beauty into dynamic force of artistic creation. Clearly, Hallward only pays attention to the form of Dorian’s beauty. Hallward’s tragic ending shows, on the one hand, the artist who isolates the relationship between art and life, to pursue the pure beauty and art will inevitably fail. He emphasizes excessively that art is higher than everything, even says “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:9). Because of his over-pursuit of artistic beauty, he can not resist the temptation of beauty. When he knows Dorian’s degeneration, he still imagines the terrible rumors about Dorian is fake. Eventually he dies by Dorian’s murder, and becomes the victim of his own work, the sacrifice of beauty. On the other hand, it reflects Wilde’s confusion of beauty and art. Although Wilde advocates art is the highest thing, and believes art is higher than life, beauty is higher than morality, but because he can not separate himself from the reality and go beyond the natural criteria through humans’ history --- art reflects nature and life, therefore, he can only arrange a tragic life for Basil, to reflect his own thoughts and confusions to society and life. 2.3 Lord Henry Another hero of the novel is Lord Henry, who is cynical and has the gift of the gab. He just speaks without moral. In this novel, he is the person who awakens the evil in Dorian’s subconsciousnesss. Those humorous witticism and irony of Henry are around a stable principle --- happiness. He believes that the most important thing in life is happiness and it is the agreement of human nature. The aim of people’s life should be the full development of themselves, the realization of their own natural requirements, and satisfying the impulse of instinct and desire. For him, the traditional morality and rationality which are highly praised are only the morbid pursuit and hypocritical theory of the time. They inhibit human nature, and in fact they are the most immoral acts. Even Henry has those talks and thoughts, he never does anything beyond the limit. Henry’s preaching about morality and life, in fact, is the reflection of Oscar Wilde’s own ideas in the novel. Henry advocates a new hedonism’s principles of life, while he is also an advocator of decadence and hedonism. He obeys feeling, thinks that people are animals without senses, and if people refuse the uncivilized impulse of their own, they will be punished. Similarly, people should chase for happiness, without any restrains. However, Henry also embodies many factors of aestheticism. He has not only individual characteristics to expand himself, but also a tendency to indulge in decadent pleasure. He believes that people should develop themselves, display the nature adequately, and this fits well the individual freedom advocated by aestheticism. He used to go his own way and take a cynical attitude towards life, but when others criticize him, he retorts plausibly that the posturing is just in order to maintain his character. He uses his strange tales and absurd arguments to manifest his own personality, but also challenge high society. Although Henry’s paradox and witticism is witty and humorous, in fact, he exposes the evils of society as aesthetes in reality. Oscar Wilde once said, “I think I am Basil; people think I am Lord Henry” (Holland, 1994:197). From Lord Henry’s languages and behaviors, we can see the shadow of Oscar Wilde. He uses his eloquent tongue to anesthetize and seduce Dorian, worries for him, exculpates for him, and his craftiness and superior intelligence let him become the most unforgettable character in the novel. 2.4 Sibyl Vane Sibyl Vane’s emergence in the novel is an important turning point for Dorian Gray. She is Dorian’s first love and he is attracted by her beauty on the stage, totally fascinated and proposes to her. He describes enthusiastically the appearance of Sibyl to Henry “a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little, flowerlike face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:48). His praise to Sibyl also suits his fervent expect to perfect art, and the actress’s role of Sibyl becomes a reflection of “beauty” in reality. Because the beauty which is admired by Dorian is her beauty on the stage, so when her ardor is withdrawn from Shakespeare’ plays and shifts to “Charming Prince” in reality, her “beauty” fades away gradually, her acting in Dorian’s eyes is artificial, clumsy and bad, therefore, Dorian abandons her mercilessly and looks for the next object of beauty. Clearly, Sibyl’s death consists in that she shifts her artistic world to the real world, because Wilde Considered “All bad arts are caused by their returning to the nature and be up to the ideal” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:3). Although she recognizes the real life, she does not really get rid of the influence of dramas’ romantic factors. She also does not realize the selfishness and callousness under Dorian’s charming appearance. When she has no features of art any longer, she disappears naturally in Dorian’s life. This is just the projection of Wilde’s artistic idea that art and reality can not coexist. Ⅲ. The Paradoxical Aestheticism 3.1 The Paradoxical Narcissus The novel pictures a panorama of the life of dandies---There is no necessity for them to work and they do not choose work as an assertion of their manhood. Instead, they do nothing, and conversation and parties, drink and good food, music and theatre are their occupation. In the novel the narrow and specific interior settings are seldom away and from Basil’s studio, Dorian’s play room-cum study where he hides his portrait, and of the grimy and labyrinth-like streets of London; the plot, similarly takes on the gothic and abrupt look of drama; and most importantly, the language style of the novel is always conversational, except for Wilde’s occasional divergence of the description of interior decorative art, as is the interest of the aesthetes. Unlike his drama, however, the conversation is often self-oriented, like the following chatter between Henry and Sir Thomas. The Politician looked at him keenly: “What change do you propose, then?” he asked. Lord Henry laughed: “I don’t want to change anything except for the weather,” he answered, “I am quite content with philosophic contemplation. But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we should appeal to science is that it is not emotional.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:36)#p#分页标题#e# It is all too obvious here that Lord Henry is not conducting a conversation with his partner, but is merely using presence of the latter as a means of making an impact on the audience. What is basically a monologue is characterized by its sudden change of direction in answer of the politician’s proposal. Henry avoids making a direct reply but cunningly states about his paradox of “emotion” and “science”. As long as Lord Henry is present, whatever and whenever, each of his statement is absolute generalization, with the one concrete detail leading to a succession of abstract paradoxes. Partly dialectical and partly epigrammatic, paradox is a way of truth, though not absolute truth. In no way the paradox demands any questions and searches for any answer. For paradox, its reverse is equally true. However, conversation is normally conducted on the basis of single-sided views, each standing for one aspect of the duality of things, as common sense, and thus intending to persuade its opposite side. Since the paradox conflicts with itself, there is no use of dialogues. Therefore, a style of conversational monologue indulging in paradoxes becomes the special language of the Narcissus. Due to the self-satisfactory characteristics, paradox sounds more like a definition or differentiation. With the aim of shocking and showing-off, it represents the solo effort of the dandy to establish the profile of his own special existence, the existence of narcissus, indeed. In leaping from one standpoint to another, he is illuminating himself rather than any given topic, just like what he says“The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional” (Raby, 2001:47). If emotion does good to us and is advantageous, then why it is also advantageous to be not emotional with the help of science? Wi1de tots with the idea of “emotion”, admiring and at the same time rebutting it, just like acrobating on the tight-rope, only in sway could he maintain the delicate balance. On purpose, Wilde is aware of his congestion of paradoxes and tries to avoid awkwardness and obscurity in the discussion in this dialog: “How dreadful!” cried Lord Henry, “I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.” “I do not understand you,” said Sir Thomas, growing rather red. “I do, Lord Henry.” murmured Mr. Erskine, with a smile. “Paradoxes are all very well in their way…” rejoined the Baronet. “Was that a paradoxes?” asked Mr. Erskine. “I did not think so. Perhaps it was. Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobat we can judge them.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:46) Lord Henry Wotton delights in transforming trite trite truisms into outrageous paradoxes by reversing the presuppositions on which they are based. Though Wotton never openly attacks social conventions, he exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian values by turning them upside down. Like Sir Thomas in the cited passage, many Victorian critics could not handle Wilde’s paradoxical style and iconoclastic thinking. They often disparaged Wilde's style of showy paradoxes as a boring, mechanical trick, as this anonymous critic did in the following excerpt: …he spoils his style by making it mechanical. To call Mr. Wilde’s favorite rhetorical figure by the name of paradox is really too complimentary; he carries the joke too far, and makes paradox ridiculous.… His method is this: he takes some well-established truth, something in which the which of centuries and the wit of the greatest men have concurred, and asserts the contrary; then he whittles his assertion down, and when at his best arrives at the same point which might have been reached by starting at the other end. (Beckson, 1970:81) I would like to see Wilde’s paradoxes not as a cheap rhetorical figure for varnishing his writings, but as an evidence of his relativist way of thinking. As Ernest Newman observed with regard to Wilde’s epigrams, the writing of a paradox could be described as “seeing round corners”. A paradox compliments a truth with its opposite. In this way, paradoxes expose the one-sidedness of each prevailing truth. The light-heartedness of Wilde’s paradoxes conceals a strategy of inversion which succeeds in revealing the relativity of every so-called “universal” or “natural” truth. Indeed, Wilde’s seemingly frivolous, nonsensical inversions of hackneyed clichés undermine the “natural” truths of Victorian values by disclosing their ideological bias. However, it should he noted that he rejected absolute truths only with respect to the interpretation of Works of art and moral conventions, but did not give up his belief in the objective truths of science. Another element of the paradoxes is epigram, a showing-off of wit and “subjectification”. The fact that these words are not directed towards the partner that their content is of no particular relevance to anything, and that they are spoken for the effect of their wit rather than any other purpose, should not be taken to mean that they have no function in the novel. On the contrary, these very features manifest the dandy’s lack of commitment and his gigantic narcissus. For the narcissus, the only possible society is oneself, and the only thing worth doing is “shocking”. So the effect is everything. Thus they discover paradoxes help to build up the best “pose” for them in conversation. They are used to mocking everything possible and in turn making themselves mocked, as Wilde once declared that the well-bred contradicts others, while the wise contradict themselves. For those packs of paradoxes are considered to be a mask weaved to disguise. As part of the result, such paradoxical language makes the novel fragmented once in a while, in the dislocation between language and characters, in the discrepancy between personal identity and social role, however, Wilde the narcissus couldn't help writing in this way because he is always willing to fully unfold his soul in front of the public. That’s the way of his life, and the value of his life. 3.2 A Paradoxical Aesthete If The Picture of Dorian Gray being Wilde’s own picture, like what he said famously about his selves in the three heroes, then Wilde himself is the biggest paradox, that he precisely foretells his fate, the fate of a tragic decadent. He strives to peel off life from art, yet he intoxicates himself so whore-heartedly in artistic world that he could not, if he still wants, move back to the real world in the end. He practices his own words to make life artful and net the contrary, like what he thinks of the school of realism. His paradox that nature holds the mirror up to art overturns the traditional conception of imitation and can be seen as an aspect of the modern revolt against the determinists of realism. Like what he said in the novel “the nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:3), his dislike of reality was too visible to make him out of age, the age of Victoria, so no wonder that his contemporaries sneered at him just the way he sneered at them. The real artist, no matter in which time, is not good at acting, so the only world for him is the world of Utopia. Still, for most ordinary person, life goes on as it was and the Utopia is but a lotus, momentarily comforting but eternally depressing them. What to do once the dream is over? Is The Picture of Dorian Gray partly autobiographical? Can we really live a life of art? If so, how could the life be taken out from art? Could this famous aesthete jump out this trap of paradox? Wilde himself provided a perfect answer. Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. Moreover, it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. To understand this we’d better take an eye to the inner world. Wilde once defended himself by saying “each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who fined them has brought them” (San Juan, Jr., 1967:356)—although we know that he is guilty of murder. This best explains his doctrine, but in a more paradoxical and thus more vague wording. Dorian listens to his id, just doing things at will. Whether or not committing crimes as a result, he sins already just for this reason and in philosophical sense. “In a sense his fetish is not beauty but the need to know his integral self. And the talisman for this project is the portrait.” (San Juan, Jr., 1967:356) “Trueness” hides only behind things in their visible shapes. No one has, even for once, beheld it with his eyes. So it is paradoxical in the sense that trueness is never true. To put it simple, reality is far from trueness, but instead of the idea, in some cases being only one side, or in other cases even the opposite side of it on the looks. Nothing but art can span over these obstacles and touch trueness, as the picture of Dorian Gray which draws the ugliness out of his extremely beautiful face. Unexposed, the portrait remains as there artifact shrouded in mystery; exposed, it reflects the actuality that visible appearance and faces conceal. Could it he that Dorian, if he desires to know his true self, must ruin the good and beautiful? Wilde’s narrative authority works through the changes of the portrait; thus art becomes a vehicle of truth. But as to concern for the topic of reality and nature in art, he finds art to have two basic energies, both of them subversive. One asserts its magnificent isolation from experience, its unreality, its sterility. He would concur with Nabokov that art is a kind of trick played on nature. Thus he gives birth to a new aesthetic consciousness, that the “real World” and “the world of art” separate in many ways. For Wilde, art must never be confused with the mere reflection of empirical reality, but constitutes itself out of the imaginative transformation of the empirical object into an aesthetic reality. The more distant aesthetic reality is from “actual life”, the more perfect it will be. “The real world”, in Wilde’s eyes, should be neglected, not worthy of mention; “the world of art”, on the other hand, can he presented to take the place of the “real” one, nearly realistic rather than purely imaginative as for Wilde.#p#分页标题#e# Therefore, “the world of Art” to Wilde is not only in contrast to the “real world”, but it also imposes its order upon “the real world”. Hence unlike the usual view, the opposite of art to Wilde is not reality but trueness. That’s to say, art mirrors trueness, not reality. Yet trueness dwells in the spectator, and reality in life. Thus it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Wilde’s notion of art which, in his own words, is a mirror that reflects the “spectator” rather than “reality”, is a process in which the self realizes itself. His work of art actually provides the artist with an opportunity for self-reflection and self-discovery. Having held up a verbal mirror to Dorian, Henry allows him to see himself as others see him and makes him self-conscious. The picture also has a function as self-reflexive art which arises through the spectator’s identification with the image in it. We might say, therefore, that Wilde’s artistic world paves the path for the artist to achieve an imaginary identification with an ideal which is an oasis in a rough, vulgar world. Art depends on truth, or trueness, no less than truth depends on art. Or in some sense they are one. On this point Wilde’s aestheticism naturally becomes his philosophy, and his doctrine of art consequently merges into his way of lice. In his eyes, people “see” or cannot “see” the truth because of reality, isolating as well as connecting art with trueness. But reality, omnipresent and everlasting as mote, is evidently out of his concerns, and is merely as trivial as mote, not worthwhile to be put into art, and by no means to be its focus. But there is the rub. Artists are those who should see through the veil of reality, and then reveal trueness in art, as much as possible and as transparent as possible. He dislikes realism because this school, as its name suggests, is not inventing but simply recording as a panorama. Moreover, it is not the same in fidelity, as is the concern of realism but not that of aestheticism. The latter, far differently and even surprisingly, concerns about “lying” instead, whose definition is more close to “making-up” in literary creation. For Wilde, culture takes priority over nature; art takes precedence over life; life over soul; the mask over the face; words over things; and fiction over facts. We could see that Wilde’s reversals are commonly expressed in such paradoxical style, giving striking form to their ostentatious dismissal of established current views of life and art. Then artists in Wilde’s group withdraw from the real world and resort to the artistic utopia. While other people, in other time, do not have real chance, but only the possibility to live in the world of art. So artists are born to, and art is made to help us to fulfill this possibility. This possibility, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, is the possibility of human nature in Lord Henry’s doctrine of a “new Hedonism”. In this way, Lord Henry preaches his cynic philosophy upon Dorian’s mind and influences him profoundly later on. “the only way to get yield to it.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:23) In some sense, either “the Hellenic ideal” rid of a temptation is to or the “temptation” in Henry’s mouth hints, although not very precisely, the “trueness” in philosophy---the trueness in one’s mind, mentioned variously in some modern humanistic philosophy. Such trueness is never deteriorated by the outer world, purely flowing out of the individual feelings, of the experience of sensations, without processing and as well proving of reason. It is firstly revealed but later concealed. “The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1978:23) In the world of the novel, “London gossips about his debauchery, his association with drunken sailors and thieves, in a frantic quest for sensations; it is up to the reader to spell out the nature of his immoralism.” (San Juan, Jr., 1967:356) In the real world, however, trueness is fantasized but never put into words except that of Henry, never to mention action. It exists in being not itself. That is Wilde’s, as well as the World’s biggest paradox. Since Wilde is apt at creating, or speaking paradox, his theory itself as a whole is based upon this paradox. It polishes him as well as tarnishes him, for that many critics, right after the very publication of the novel, pointed out that Wilde was self-contradictory between lines, and much meticulous about making his words sound paradoxical. We take this to be somewhat sensible because Wilde is sometimes obscure in language. That obscurity results from his attempt to make a game of paradox purely with language. In his collection of essays Intentions, he put like that, “Life, strangling after art, seizes upon forms in art to express itself, so that life imitates art rather than art life.” (Richard, 1987:100) Wilde made a name for himself in times of repetition of these words. Under such famous doctrine Wilde had subverted the definition of many others. Like that Henry rebuts Dorian in saying he could never be poisoned by a book, Wilde thought, “nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more.” (Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1978:23) In Wilde’s concept, art may then transmit criminal impulses to his audience and thus the artist may be criminal and instill his work with criminality. And he even said, “What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress” (Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1978:23) in accordance with his Hellenic ideal, Wilde even refreshed the definition of sin and thus the attitude toward it altered. So unusual is the idea that sin is an essential element of progress. But this is rightly a paradox of Wilde’s style. So in accordance with the theory of trueness, he alleges that sin is self-expressive rather than self-repressive, and then man’s goal of life is the liberation of personality. Actually he is not serious in saying so. For many others, especially for the critics, each attempts to explain it in the usual way turns out to be a failure. Therefore Wilde is only understood once out of thousand times of misunderstanding. Still he cares about nothing but art, holding to his own way. He is, in most cases, not disposed to offer further explanation. Wilde’s paradox here is that he likes to be understood from a beginning of being misunderstood. He wins success at the price of his failures equal in number. The more paradoxical he sounds in his doctrine, the more perseverant he keeps to his doctrine. He, in the final place, is most willing to be ranked among the artists, if it has once been listed in his many titles. His tendency to linger between artists and litterateur is typical in aesthetes, who are special in that they themselves are the strict doers of their words. They are the same person in life as in art. What they attempt in their art is to sustain the traditional binary opposition, the material and the spiritual, to redeem artists from their “awfully commercial” situations, “to retain the purity and autonomy of art, and to preserve an untainted territory for their aesthetic dream.” (Zhou, 1996:5) Still, their great efforts reinforce the social change. “In their life, thought and works they certainly created an ‘artistic world’ which they believed was transcendental to everyday life; but to us, as I shall argue below, this world embraces the real world and is shot through by the consumerist way of life.” (Zhou, 1996:6) This dilemma especially in Wilde’s, that produces a central paradox in the aesthete's works, what they say and believe always leads beyond itself to a point which is against their original intension. But Wilde is a little different from them. “Wilde balanced two ideas which, we have observed, look contradictory. One is that art is disengaged from actual life, the other that it is deeply incriminated with it.” (Richard, 1987:105) That art is sterile in one way, and that it is infectious, are attitudes not beyond reconciliation. From the analysis of the factors of aestheticism in The Picture of Dorian Gray, we can see that aesthetes include Wilde are a group of people who are careless, sloppy, elegant, wise, and arrogant. They are not decadent persons, instead, they are only persons who like to live a life of pleasure, and they have special interests to life’s details. They allow aesthetic feeling to lead life. Beauty is the only value in their eyes, and it is the eternal wealth. This kind of pursuit and worship become extreme, and must be doomed. This is also the reason that aestheticism declined before prevailed. There is a lot of contradiction in Wilde’s thought. Although his artistic view with idealism has limitations, it also shows that he defends the pure art. The opinion of “selfhood” advocated in it just conforms to aestheticism’s belief---free personality. The beauty advocated by Wilde, has no relationship with morality and kindness, and it is a kind of abstract perfection, an incarnation of the ideal. Wilde places the form in a matchless lofty position, and calls the trend of aestheticism’s thought as British Renaissance, thinking that this movement’s gist is “the cordial worship to pure Beauty, the perfect pursuit to Form”. (San Juan, Jr., 1967:45) Wilde is one of the most complicated writers in the history of British literature. Wilde’s “pure Art” theory has produced a far-reaching influence on 20th century’s literature. We quote Annette T. Rubinstein’s words to make a just recommend to the aesthetes including Wilde: “Although the works that they leave are not much, but their significance is much more enormous than these poor accomplishment, the suicidal aesthetics of the ‘end of the century’ which are shaped up because of their meteoric wonders are survived, and reappears in every kind of literary countercurrent from surrealism to existentialism. Degenerating 20th century’s bourgeois culture exactly shows itself by these countercurrent.” (Rubinstein, 1953:337)#p#分页标题#e# |
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