The Picture Of Dorian Gray Romanticism Essay

The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of Oscar Wilde’s masterpieces, portrays one of the most important values and principles for him: aestheticism. As a criticism to the life lived during the Victorian era in England, Wilde exposed a world of beauty a freedom in contradiction to the lack of tolerance a limitation of that era; of course inspired due to Wilde’s personal life. All the restrictions of the Victorian England lead him to a sort of anarchism against what he found to be incoherent rules, and he expressed all this to his art. His literature is a strong, political and social criticism. He gave a different point of view to controversial topics such as life, morality, values, art, sexuality, marriage, and many others, and epigrams, for what he is very well known, where the main source to the exposure of his interpretations of this topic.

Oscar Wilde is known for his homosexuality that eventually lead him to jail, and the perception that is captured from the novel for this topic, apart from being completely ironical in relation to what was established in the British society, is quite strong and could be understood as a consequence of his own life. Marriage and romance are pictured as pointless, imprisoning, faithless, and even contradictory. For example, it is shown a different perception on how love and company are always the ultimate achievement people aim to but is, however, vacant and the only thing that can be taken out of them is loneliness, “The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic” (Wilde, 1993, 9). On the other hand, once commitment has been made, not only loneliness persists, but, what once was supposed to be love, becomes necessity for they try to escape from life using as a means the other person, “The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties” (Wilde, 1993,