“Three-Quarters of an Hour to Consume Everything”: Dorian Gray and Commodified Aesthetics

This paper examines the commodification of aesthetics in Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel is most extensively investigated within the artistic context employed, where Wilde’s approach to art, aesthetics and beauty is regarded as surviving on a transcendental ground. Indeed, despite his identity as a decadent of fin de siècle Britain, and his depreciating critique of the middle and working class for their material pursuits, Wilde gets conceptually closer to the capitalist stream of consumption. The novel ostensibly highlights aestheticism, and hence, art living for its sake on the lines of the manner Wilde launches himself to the world of artistry and literature, particularly through the characters of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry. However, the deep desire to experience artistic pleasure and beauty, as illustrated mainly by Dorian, gets along very well with, and ends up as, the British materialist pursuit. Dorian’s initial position as the embodiment of beauty degenerates due to the same dynamic of beauty commodifying itself, and so, the others implementing it. The very commodities where aesthetic pleasure is sought commodify the aesthete. Wilde's use of ornamental and decorative elements, Dorian’s search for eternal youth, and the whole structuration of aestheticism in the novel necessitate a political reading of the text, calling for the recognition of colonial, material and modernist platform the narrative deeply bases itself on.