The Picture of Dorian Gray is full of aesthetic elements。 This paper attempts to summarize some of the outstanding features of aestheticism through analyzing its characters, plotting and language。 First of all, the failure of the romantic relationship between Dorian and Sybil represents Dorian’s pursuit for sensorial pleasure; secondly, Dorian’s new hedonism actually reflects Wilde’s notion of freeing inpiduality for aesthetic enjoyment; thirdly, Wilde depicted ugliness and homosexuality。 On one hand, he still emphasizes men’s nature; on the other hand, he creates beauty despite whether the subject is moral or not。 Then, his refined form and diction reveal his commitment for artistic beauty as an aesthetic hunter。 Many of his bitterly ironical and paradoxical statements have now become classic mottos and quotations, continuously instruct his later generations。文献综述
II。 Aesthetic Sensibility
People infatuated by aestheticism tend to pursue beauty by the fulfillment of their sensorial pleasures。 As an outstanding proponent of aestheticism, Wilde shaped his hero of The Picture of Dorian Gray into a person with vehement sensation, who has “extreme loyalty to beauty”。 Under the principle of visual beauty, the romantic relationship between Dorian Gray and Sybil is doomed to be a failure at the very beginning。
2。1 Irrational Love
Love is an inexhaustible theme for many writers, while Wilde exposed the love derived from visual arts, which is quite different from others。 From the very beginning, the woman Dorian Gray fell in love with is Sybil as the embodiment of art rather than the woman herself。 At the first night after he finished watching Sybil’s performance, Dorian was furious when the Jew wanted to take him to Sybil, because “Juliet had been dead for hundreds of years, and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in Verona” (Wilde: 46)。 Dorian was infatuated by the artistic Shakespearean characters embodied by Sybil。 And after having watched her performances for three days, he was still unwilling to know her。 The fact is that what attracted him is not Sybil herself but the one who helped him awaken to “the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art。”（Wilde, 2006: 75) What’s more, Dorian introduced Sybil to Henry as a girl “with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head” (Wilde: 45)。 For him, Sybil was a girl like Greek goddess。 Even when Henry asked him if he loved her when Sybil was Sybil, Dorian answered him it would be impossible。 It is doomed to be a tragedy that Sybil, as far as Dorian is concerned, can be anybody like Imogen, Juliet and so on, but Sybil Vane herself。 When Sybil was away from the stage and back into the real life, Dorian turned his face away from her and blamed her of “killing(ed) my (Dorian’s) love”, being “shallow and stupid” and no more than “a third-rate actress with a pretty face。” (Wilde: 75) Dorian’s rejection is unbearably painful for Sybil so that she committed a suicide in the theatre where her love began and also ended。 It is obvious that her death results from Dorian’s extreme desire for perfect love。 As a figure Wilde exclusively created to take his aestheticism into effect, Dorian’s view on love is also what Wilde stands for。 Generally speaking, a romantic relationship mostly begins with love and lasts on the basis of mutual understanding。 However, for Dorian, he just loved the roles Sybil played and he didn’t know the real Sybil at all。 Moreover, when he found she was not the person he imagined, he left her without hesitation。 In a word, their relationship was actually irrational。 来,自,优.尔:论;文*网www.youerw.com +QQ752018766-
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, through Henry, Wilde has expressed his doubts against intellectual faculty for many times, “I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal。 It was the most premature definition ever given。 Man is many things, but he is not rational。” (Wilde: 27) “beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins。 Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face。” (Wilde: 6)。 王尔德道林格雷画像唯美主义风格(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_88013.html