When discussing Wilde’s Decadence, critics usually focus on Dorian Gray. In his chapter “The Damnation of Decadence,” from London in the 1890s, Karl Beckson, for instance, he writes about Dorian Gray, this “most famous Decadent novel of the British 1890s […] sums up—and radicalizes—much that Wilde had read in Pater and in French literature” (47). In particular, critics assign Dorian’s hedonism, immorality, and androgyny to decadence; likewise, they point to his portrait’s corruption and decay as illustrating this decadence. For example, Barbara Belford writes: “One is never sure of the extent of Dorian’s sins, but it is his disregard for humanity and lack of generosity rather than any sexual act that determine his destruction […] when Lord Henry wants to seduce Dorian into the hedonistic life, he supplies him with a “poisonous” book, assumed to be À rebours, Wilde’s bible of the Decadence.” (173)

London in the 1890s: A Cultural History was published by ‎W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (February 1, 1993)

Citation: Article: “The Perversion of Decadence: The Cases of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Salome.”