Kant's Aesthetics and Wilde Form

Abstract

Although Wilde was convicted of Gross Indecency, not of having written questionable literature, critics frequently take his trial as a trial of his literature and his theories, and, in a sense, they are oddly enough right since, at key moments, the difficult of reading Wilde's writing becomes manifest in the difficulty of reading what occurs in the trials. That reading difficulty results from the alignment between Wilde's aestheticism and the ostensibly straighter Kantian aesthetics, a theory Wilde queered only by clarifying its paradoxes. Through a comparative reading of Kant's and Wilde's theories of natural and aesthetic beauty and the manifestation of Wilde's theory in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), this article will show how the ambiguities in Wilde's trial result from his insistence on a connection between his theoretical paradoxes and what he called his perverse desires, a connection that enriches both aesthetic theory and our understanding of the cultural significance of his trial.