권태와 쾌락주의: 오스카 와일드의 도리언 그레이의 초상 (BOredom and Aesthetiscsm in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국현대영미소설학회
· 수록지 정보 : 현대영미소설 / 19권 / 2호 / 5 ~ 28페이지
· 저자명 : 김종갑

초록

One of the constituting elements of modernity is the advent of leasure. For the first time in history people, freed from the heavy burden of labour, came to have time to spare. But it was not a pure blessing. Though the spare time could be investigated for their self-cultivation, it meant for many of them that they had nothing to do, experiencing empty time, thus giving a rise to the new mood of boredom. For them, the opposite of boredom was the exciting stimulation and pleasure. This explains why literary people at the end of the 19th century, the most exemplary among them being Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, came to advocate the aesthetic way of life as a desired goal of life. In The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde presented Henry as a dandy dilettante at the fin de siècle, who relied on aestheticism to spell away boredom threatening him. This paper argues that his boredom is produced not by too much spare time nor by the lack of pleasure, but by the loss of genuine human relations. Henry's boredom turned him into an ironist who negates in principle every value and meaning of human relations, not excluding his relation to friends and relatives such as Dorian Gray and Basil. He willfully isolates himself from the society, with a strong belief that the social isolation is a prerequisite for aestheticism. For him, an aestheticist should be an monadic individualist. This paper concludes that such a form of aestheticism, initially designed as a remedy for boredom, ends with creating more boredom in proportion to the dwindling social relations. The Picture of Dorian Gray teaches us that boredom as the symptom of modernity should be understood in terms of disintegration of genuine human relations.

영어초록

One of the constituting elements of modernity is the advent of leasure. For the first time in history people, freed from the heavy burden of labour, came to have time to spare. But it was not a pure blessing. Though the spare time could be investigated for their self-cultivation, it meant for many of them that they had nothing to do, experiencing empty time, thus giving a rise to the new mood of boredom. For them, the opposite of boredom was the exciting stimulation and pleasure. This explains why literary people at the end of the 19th century, the most exemplary among them being Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, came to advocate the aesthetic way of life as a desired goal of life. In The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde presented Henry as a dandy dilettante at the fin de siècle, who relied on aestheticism to spell away boredom threatening him. This paper argues that his boredom is produced not by too much spare time nor by the lack of pleasure, but by the loss of genuine human relations. Henry's boredom turned him into an ironist who negates in principle every value and meaning of human relations, not excluding his relation to friends and relatives such as Dorian Gray and Basil. He willfully isolates himself from the society, with a strong belief that the social isolation is a prerequisite for aestheticism. For him, an aestheticist should be an monadic individualist. This paper concludes that such a form of aestheticism, initially designed as a remedy for boredom, ends with creating more boredom in proportion to the dwindling social relations. The Picture of Dorian Gray teaches us that boredom as the symptom of modernity should be understood in terms of disintegration of genuine human relations.

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