The article «Between Morality and Art: Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray as a Synthesis of Literary Movements» was written by me in 2025 for presentation at the student symposium «Integrality: The Architecture of the Future.» However, at the conference itself, I presented a different paper titled «Jazz Motifs in M.A. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, ” which was written a year prior.
Oscar Wilde’s novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray is a monumental work by the Irish writer that has never lost its relevance. This unique story remains shrouded in speculation, debate, and criticism. Having read the novel multiple times and analyzed literary scholarship, I arrived at my own conclusions regarding the completeness and diversity of the book. I reflected these in the accompanying article.
Romanticism is the progenitor of Oscar Wilde’s favorite movement—the aestheticism in which he wrote most of his works. In my article, I analyzed the key characteristics of this literary movement and aimed to demonstrate that The Picture of Dorian Gray is primarily a romantic work. The novel incorporates not only elements of Aestheticism but also Hedonism, which is closely tied to the romantic worldview. To be more precise, their main intersection lies in the absolute veneration of human feeling, emotion, and experience, contrasted with dry rationalism. However, there are also distinct differences. The Picture of Dorian Gray does not belong to any single movement—it is a synthesis of several, but Romanticism holds a distinguished place in this synthesis.
«In the writer’s desire to assert the superiority of art over life, romantic absolutization of creativity and its independence manifests. In Wilde’s aestheticism, the positions of romantic theory acquire a polemical sharpness, expressed in the form of paradox.»
