Architecture of desire

The urban influence and the sublimation of art in the construction of modern masculinity by Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust

Abstract

This essay investigates how urban and artistic transformations at the end of the 19th century influenced the construction of modern masculinity in the works The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, and À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust. The objective is to analyze how aesthetic enjoyment, erotic dissidence, and the displacement from home to the city allowed for new forms of male subjectivation, distinct from the patriarchal Victorian ideal. The methodology adopts the comparative analysis of literary criticism, based on authors such as João Pedro Vala (2021), John Tosh (2007), Julia Kristeva (1982), and Walter Benjamin (2015). The results of the study indicated that Wilde and Proust, when portraying dandies and flaneurs, destabilize traditional paradigms by associating masculinity with artistic sensitivity, hedonism, and urban wandering. In Proust, art leads to the narrator’s self-understanding and maturity, while in Wilde, the aestheticization of existence leads to self-destruction. The central characters experience the city as an erotic and sensory space, contrasting with the domesticity imposed on the bourgeois man. It is concluded that, in these works, art does not merely reflect desire: it acts as a means of sexual and subjective expression, configuring itself as an aesthetic, symbolic and liberating force. Therefore, modernity intertwined with the city, instead of reaffirming the home as the center of masculinity and, in this way, reiterating patriarchal domination, emerges as a stage for new ways of life, where sensory pleasure and symbolic displacement are drivers of self-knowledge and a break with conventions.