The Politics of Art and The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, serves as a manifesto in which art, politics and subjectivity are discussed in unusual detail. If all art was, as Wilde argued, simply “surface and symbol”, then what could possibly lie underneath? The answer is provided as this dangerous territory is explored through the text’s complex fusion of literary and political ideas. These subversive notions are presented at an early stage, during self-reflexive discussions of the nature of the relationship between art, politics and subjectivity, all of which are represented as resting just beyond the surface of the novel’s ostensible purpose as a work of gothic romance.