His name is connected to Aestheticism and even more with Decadentism, even though he stands a little apart.
The Aesthetic writers broke with the conventions of the time and gave free rein to imagination and fantasy, echoing Romantics but taking their theories and attitudes to extremes. They chose to live an extravagant life devoted to the cult of beauty and art.
Decadentism was marked by a sort of extremism. Their representatives, disregarding the simple genuine values of life and disdaining mediocrity, cut themselves off from masses. They often fall in vice and corruption.
Despite his decadent aestheticism, Wilde was still Victorian at heart and the precept of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ was for him basically a moral as well as an aesthetic imperative That’s why in The Preface to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, among other things he stressed the integrity and coherence of the artist, who must always be ‘in accord with himself’. Even his novel which was branded as immoral, when it appeared, can be read as a morality. Its conclusion sounds like the ‘deserved’ punishment of a life only devoted to the pursuit of sensation.
A man pretending to be something else (mask)
Mask as the only identity, as a multiple possibility with contrasting viewpoints
Personal vision of truth which can be perceived by two different individuals
Negation of commonplace
Tendency towards a lack of sense of pity and good
The idea of fatality and doom
Images of duality and double life with two distinct tones
Blend of aesthetic discussions and epigrammatic wit
A humoristic sense of life
No bitterness in his paradox
