PREFACE ANALYSIS

The picture of Dorian Gray’s preface can be considered a Manifesto: a text where a writer declares his ideas. The reason why a writer decides to write a manifesto is that he wants to question the ideas that already existed.

It is written in an epigrammatic form: the style helps the message to stick into the reader’s mind.

This preface is usually considered the Manifesto of Aestheticism. According to the text art is beautiful; besides art’s aim is to reveal art, it means that the artist is no longer the most important element. Whatever the artist produces is connected to his experience. Moreover the interpretation itself is a mode of autobiography: the reader is the one who gives sense to the opera.

People who find ugly in art are corrupt, because art is always beautiful. Indeed only cultivated find beautiful in art and they are the elects.

Books are not moral or immoral, they are well or badly written. That is all. Readers should judge books by the style and not the moral or immoral content. Indeed art’s aim is not doing religion. This could appear such as a form of defence of Wilde’s opera. Art’s aim is not moral or educational and vice and virtues are just the artist materials for an art, but they have nothing in common with the aesthetic meaning of the opera. As previously said only elects can appreciate the beautiful in art and Wild refers to them with his book.

The writer needs to hide not because of naturalism theories, but because his life, as a subjective starting point, sublimates and transfigures in the creation’s completeness. From this point derives the idea of an art that doesn’t mimic life, bit vice versa. The critic is the one who appreciates art, he belongs to the cultivated circle. Also in this way art extends its power to life, creating a new custom as well as a new taste and a new sensibility.

Wilde’s discusses Victorian’s respectability and Utilitarism saying that art is quite useless. Art frees men from object’s slavery thanks to its futility.