Unraveling the Baumgartenian Trinity

Negeen N. Nikravesh, “Unraveling the Baumgartenian Trinity: The Decay of Dorian Gray” (pp. 6–33)

This article explores the aesthetic and cultural connections in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) to read Wilde’s revision of aesthetic idealism as a social commentary. I suggest that Wilde upsets the Baumgartenian definition of aesthetic pleasure—the truth-beauty-goodness trinity at the root of idealist aesthetics—and instead offers a Wildean sense of pleasure rooted in decadence and stemming from hedonism. In the separation of body and soul in Dorian, his beautiful, never-aging exterior and grotesque interior presents a negative version of aesthetic transcendence found in the deformed union of beauty, truth, and goodness, with beauty linked instead to evil and artifice. This inversion of Baumgarten’s aesthetics points to a deterioration of art, as evil permeates pleasurable art and perfect form to deform these values from the inside out. However, Dorian’s simultaneous “beauty” and “imperfection” complicates Baumgarten’s definition, instead linking beauty and perfection with immoral hedonism. Unending pleasure, and all the evils that help one achieve such pleasures, become the only ideal for Dorian. This inversion allows Dorian to embody his sexual identity in a way that he would not have been able to in his historical moment. In an inadvertent way, Dorian’s mask of beauty allows him to tell his own truth. It paradoxically functions as a form of deception as well as an ultimate liberation from the façade of propriety. By realigning beauty to symbolize pleasure and immorality, the novel doubles as a social critique of Victorian morality and respectability. Wilde inscribes a new aesthetic ideal into art: ugliness (as opposed to beauty), hedonism (as opposed to goodness), and immorality (as a new truth). Unraveling these values undermines (and perhaps pokes fun at) the “Baumgartenian trinity,” and the visual deterioration of Dorian’s soul and its increasing depravity becomes elevated to the status of an ideal. Through Dorian’s decadent hedonism, Wilde disrupts the unity of idealist aesthetics and establishes a new form of aesthetic beauty—a rejection of societally dictated concepts of “goodness” and “truth” in favor of personal goodness and truth. As Wilde reveals in The Picture of Dorian Gray, this “beauty” can only be found in an inverted sense in fin de siècle society.