Aestheticism figures prominently in both The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; each work, however, has a specific paradigm: Dorian Gray has aestheticism as the subjective merit of beauty independent of its reality, whereas Prufrock has aestheticism as a sordid quality, all too present within modern culture. The drawing rooms of Prufrock are listless, full of desultory imagery; while in Dorian Gray they are alive: the idle bandying of …
showed first 75 words of 1004 total

showed last 75 words of 1004 total
…deliberate adoption of perspective in dissonance with reality. The futility, fatalism, and determinism of Prufrock is present in Dorian Gray, but the characters have attempered themselves against reality, and have adopted the aesthetic in hedonism. The aestheticism of Dorian Gray is the transformation to sybarite, but with the exclusion of sincerity, as romance, or any true conviction, ruins sensuality. Prufrock does not identify any alternative, but rather enumerates the failings and spiritual inadequacy of society.