More important than Lord Henry’s philosophy
of the role of women, however, is his insistence on the necessity
of individualism. As a mode of thinking, individualism took center
stage during the nineteenth century. It was first celebrated by
the Romantics, who, in the early 1800s, decided
that free and spontaneous expression of the self was the true source
of art and literature. The Romantics rejected the eighteenth-century
sensibility that sought to imitate and reproduce the classical models
of ancient Greece and Rome, which were perceived as too stylized to
allow for the expression of anything genuine or relevant. Holding
the self as the center of creation, Romanticism inevitably emphasized
personal freedom, sensory experience, and the special status of
the artist. By the time Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian
Gray, however, the romantic belief that man could realize these
things in himself by returning to nature had largely faded. Indeed,
Wilde’s novel marks an interesting shift in the changing philosophy
of the times. For although the residue of the Romantic movement
can be seen in Dorian’s story—Lord Henry advocates that nothing
should hinder the freedom of the artistic individual’s development—the
means by which that development occurs in the story is noticeably
different. In the world of The Picture of Dorian Gray, art
is to be made by submerging oneself in society rather than escaping
from it.
