Christa Giles

Wilde praises decorative art as a ˝deliberate rejection of
Nature as the ideal of beauty.˝ It follows then that Wilde
was to call The Picture of Dorian Gray ˝an essay on the
decorative arts.˝ 81 For decorative art, in Wilde’s view,
fostered in the soul ˝that sense of form which is the basis of
creative no less than critical achievement˝ 82 The worship of
form was of course one of the central tenets of dandyism.
The concern with the concept of form in Wilde’s
work is reflected not only in his interest in costume and
dress, but also in his appreciation of the complex, eccentric,
ornate, and obscure style of Huysmans’ novels. In The
Picture of Dorian Gray, A rebours is described as being
written in a style ˝vivid and obscure at once, full of argot
and archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate
paraphrases.˝ 83 This phrase recalls Gautier’s famous
˝Notice˝ to Les Fleurs du Mal, in which he concentrated on
the importance of form in decadent authors. The primacy
of form, ˝the imaginative beauty of the design˝ 84 (which
could herald Art Nouveau) is also for Wilde and
Huysmans synonymous with the dandy. For the dandy is
he who suggests an aesthetic mode of being, the one who
connects art with life by means of the self-created
individual. ˝There is no art where there is no style,˝ Wilde
proclaimed, ˝no style where there is no unity, and unity is
of the individual.˝ 85 The dandy represents an aspiration
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