The theme of decadence in The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
Staring from the definition found in the dictionary, the decadence is a literary movement especially of late 19th-century France and England characterized by refined aestheticism, artifice, and the quest for new sensations. 1
In decadence, important is not necessarily what is seen, but the hermeneutics: what man feels when he sees the creative result of this feeling. It is the current that requires a co-operation from the public to the artistic work for the purposes of re-creation.
The image proposed by the decadents is a violent one, an image that shocks by having a fascinating and terrifying power. It is a image that stimulates and also stimulates. To achieve such effects, these images (whether they are painted, engraved or created through the word) should be wandered as much as possible from the usual. The trick lies in the colour, in the innovation, in the way of using the beauty of the jewelry and the gems. For the decadents not life is devoted to art but art is devoted to life, life is art. Decadence shared in the creation of space for the later ascension of an internationally oriented avant-garde; and lastly, Decadence also required the creator to be independent of the surrounding society, thus making it one of the first manifestations of an alternative subculture. Decadence in the visual arts represented the dynamic duality of order and chaos, the painful moment of the birth of a new life and a new structure. 2
The same feeling is shared by the dandy, Dorian Grey, the character in the novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ by Oscar Wilde. For his decadent spirit, as it seen in his literary works Huysmans or Wilde, the love for the artificial is nothing else but the love for perfection, where the time does not leave marks. They are dandys who live in a world made by themselves, they create their own lives as if their lives were some asocial shows, turned the wrong way, and loving...