An Analysis Of The Picture Of Dorian Gray Using Structuralism Theory (Binary Opposition Tenet)

Third, the picture of Dorian Gray is a media that the writer uses to introduce and promote aestheticism which was a new way to see and understand arts at that time (aestheticism vs realism).

As a matter of fact, Oscar Wilde is considered as one of mastermind of Aesthetic movement in England. He criticized the values that Victorian elite people had through his works which one of them is the picture of Dorian Gray. Indeed, he also protested the common notion of society's as that time regarding arts as a representation of society's life including morality and interactivity. That is why he introduced the theory of aestheticism.

In the picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar tries to offer a new concept of seeing and appreciating arts. Through the character of Basil, an artist who had a great hope to change the way how people at that time were supposed to see arts. He believed that the realism theory was no more valid. People should not value the arts by considering the meaning that the arts probably carry. Arts in his new perspective should be treated only as a product of abstract beauty in which people enjoy only for the sake of their beauty. People should not treat arts as the autobiography of the artist neither as the representation or product of the cultural and social life of certain society. Arts had nothing to do with it.

"Every portrait that is painted with a feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter..., it is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter, who on the colored canvas, reveals himself"

"an artist should create beautiful things but should put nothing of his own life in them we live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Someday I will show the world what it is; and for that reason, the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray".

Therefore, I would say that the shifting of the way how people start questioning the old theory and reconstructing the theory, it indicates that at that time there was a kind of movement or revolution occurred in the way how people treated arts. In other words, Oscar Wilde tries to show how people at that time were mostly against the theory of realism and they came up with a new theory called "aestheticism" in which based on the theory, art is just an art and it has nothing to do with any external things like politics, social-economy and other purposes. It does not carry meaning. It just represents the beauty itself.

References:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/174