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The Victorian age was an age filled with strict moral principles. On the one hand, Queen Victoria who had a firm sense of duty and showed a respect for moral proprieties and values set the strict standards of solid virtues. On the other hand, the new capitalists are benefiting from such virtues as obedience and rationality. The dissatisfaction of the society looked for an expression in art and literature. The solid morality of Victorian era was challenged by the social skeptics and reformers.
In such a materialistic age full of extravagance and waste, there appeared a new thought named aestheticism which advocated the principle of “art for art’s sake” in the late 19th century. Aestheticism was the reverse of romanticism and realism, emphasizing that art transcended reality, life and ethics, and was suggested to judge a work from the view of pure art.
Wilde was an activist of the aesthetic movement. His novel—The Picture of Dorian Gray was one of the most typical works of aestheticism. He tries to separate art from utilitarianism and help people to gain redemption in the way of showing respect to the pure art and beauty.
2. Literature Review
Wilde is one of the most controversial characters in the history of British literature, whose value is widely accepted and acknowledged by the literary arena five years after his death. His works together with his life still attract many people’s attention.
The study on Wilde in the domestic and overseas has gone deeply into nearly every aspect, such as Wilde’s homosexuality, his personality, his aesthetic views, critical views as well as the paradox in his works. Two people are important and helpful for us to do the research on Wilde. One is Robert Ross who published Wilde’s long letter in 1905 and Works of Oscar Wilde in 1908; another is Rupert Hart Davis, he edited Wilde’s letters and published The Letters of Oscar Wilde and More Letters of Oscar Wilde. These two people provided firsthand information for the later study on Wilde. One of the most significant researchers on Wilde in our china is Zhang Jieming, who has translated reading essays of Oscar Wilde and written aesthetic narration: A New Discussion on Oscar Wilde, promoting the comprehensive understanding of Wilde’s aesthetic and artistic views in China.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, the representative of the Aestheticism in the nineteenth century, was known as one of the three incomparable works for the trend of “art for art’s sake”. It was misunderstood for a long time because of the description of evil and degeneration and has always been the focus of discussion and criticism. Since its advent, many critics and scholars have given a lot of interpretation to the novel from all kinds of perspectives, such as aestheticism, consumerism, psychology, art, ecology and so on. As the picture in the novel is mysterious and reflects the soul of Dorian Gray, some scholars have made researches in the view of duality and then compared the life between the character and the writer himself.
With regard to the analysis of the novel in the aspects of morality, Stuart Mason was the pioneer who published Art and Morality in 1907. In 2001, Jill Larson promoted the argument about later Victorian aesthetics and ethics. In analyzing Oscar Wilde, he declared that:
Oscar Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray develops a proto-postmodern ethics by telling a traditional fairy-tale or fable-like story with an ostensibly clear moral. But that morality survives only as the embedded beak and talons in an otherwise ethically elusive and contradictory text. (Larson, 2001: 13)
In China, Huang Xiuguo published The Moral Sense in Oscar Wilde’s Works in 2004 and Zhou Yan published Oscar Wilde: A Moralistic Aesthete—Ethical Analysis of the Picture of Dorian Gray in 2006. As Lu Jiande said in his thesis, Wilde did not give up moral senses and his own morality had even higher moral demands. Many of the Chinese scholars realized the moral sense in the novel and began to view the book in a more objective way. However, some of these scholars stressed the morality too much while ignored the aesthetic thoughts which were the basic and core content of the novel.