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 public art and popular philosophy becomes vivid, a vehicle for wit.
The historical context of the works, the background which is referenced throughout, is the same; while separated by several decades, both works address cultures remarkably similar, cultures in which high society is indulgent to the exclusion of realism. …
