Sample Essay On Expelled From The Garden: Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic

In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde writes “The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium” (1). What makes this statement both a statement about art, and also a statement about the novel is that Wilde cuts away from the static notion that the beautiful must be an ideal form of beauty. Pre-Raphaelite beauty was indeed inspired by an infantile longing for an earthly garden of Eden. Oscar Wilde has eaten of the apple and is happy to be expelled from the garden. Wilde departs from someone like William Morris in that he turns away from this idea that art must be imbued with a hint of perfection (Prettejohn 213). The face that grows old and ugly in the attic while Dorian pretends that he is young and beautiful is the artifice of art. The painting that grows old reminds us that the beauty in art is not about either A) making a moral claim or B) an idealized form of beauty that at the center is a rotten withered shell. What is art if it is the production of beautiful things? It seems that for Wilde this is only one side of the equation. For sure, Wilde certainly enjoyed crafting a persona of himself for the masses as we can see in in the photograph taken of him in 1882 by photographer Napoleon Sarony. But it is also safe to say that in Dorian Gray Wilde is not making any kind of moral accusations about how Dorian lives his life, for it is obvious that many of the superficial characteristics of Dorian, Wilde himself also had. What Wilde is saying is that in art we become fascinated by the moral life of others not because we wish to correct them, but rather it is part and parcel of a collective human nature both born out of the imperfect tools of humankind’s art making fantasy. Morality is like Caliban receiving language — and in this way the artist is the true philosopher of the novel when he opines “the ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.”  In other words, the reason why Dorian’s portrait grows old, and Dorian remains young, is that there is always a dualism in struggle with itself over the beautiful and the ugly, the torn and the whole, the young and the old, and the realist and idealist.

Works Cited

Prettejohn, Elizabeth. The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites.
Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print.
Sarony, Napoleon. Portrait of Oscar Wilde. 1882.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Print.