ABSTRACT
Drawing on the author’s book Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film (2016), this chapter explores the role of the ageing self in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Irony is a key trope in this novel, critical in the contamination of ageing and youth, moralism and aestheticism. Wilde’s novel delineates the way in which moralism and aestheticism contaminate each other, rather than being dialectically opposed to each other. Implicitly it takes issue with an instrumentalist assessment of the value of art. Art is subservient in Dorian Gray’s instrumentalism, serving as a secret hiding place for visible signs of what is frowned upon in society: ageing, ugliness, sins and the passions. The irony is that, rather than being at odds with aestheticism, morality depends upon artificial devices that produce the effects and the appearance of perfection: beauty and youth as moral embodiments of innocence. Within this moral idealization of beauty and youth, sin becomes synonymous with age and change. Wilde questions our sense of outward, social appearance by highlighting the ambivalence of both public representation and imitative art. Thus, Wilde’s novel instigates a critique of youth culture at the end of the nineteenth century.
