The Picture Of Dorian Gray Romanticism

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.” Oscar Wilde makes this statement in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is through individualism and education that we form a meaning behind the work. Those that choose to be pessimistic and ignorant are those that miss out on the wonders of the world.

Romanticism is not so much a movement, but a way of being that all encompasses “whose particularity resides in their specific nature and especially in the originality of the relationships between them” . Originating in the early and mid-nineteenth century, romanticism was a response to the Industrial Revolution, the beginning of machinery and factory systems that lead people more city living,

However, if the more we come in contact with what we think of the beauty we learn what the beautiful, but not everyone has the delicacy of taste to be a critic. The idea of the specialization of the critic

The idea of socialism is advocated in Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism, where he states, “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true beautiful, healthy Individualism.” Continuing with the emphasis on individualism that romanticism focused on, socialism opposes private property so that people do not waste life on things and symbols for things, but more on non-materialistic relationships between oneself and others. “The government is to make what is useful” 3, for instinct, distributing necessary commodities and controlling machinery that will take over the labor of the community. With the chores handled by the government, the individuals will now have time to focus on themselves and make what is beautiful, which ranges from artistic works to scientific discoveries. With making art, Wilde says that there is a difference between healthy and unhealthy art, healthy art, regarding the subject of the work, is “the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it”. On the other hand, Wilde states that unhealthy art is essentially unoriginal, where the artist picks a style and subject that they know the majority population will enjoy, “not because the artist has any pleasure in it” 3. Which comes