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The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel and the work that best sums up his aesthetic theories about a life of sensation and pleasure as the supreme form of art. For Dorian, the true purpose of life was the pursuit of pleasure and beauty, and “Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts”. In the Preface to Dorian Gray Wilde writes: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all”. In the ending he says: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless”. Also the names are significant. In fact “Dorian” means “of Doria”, a part of ancient Greece: the name suggests his classical beauty. “Gray”, meanwhile, suggests the potential in him for good or evil (white or black). The Sibyls of Greek mythology were female prophets, and the name Sybil carries a suggestion of the voice of truth. “Vane” suggests the voice of truth is speaking “in vain” because Dorian does not heed her message. The story The novel is set in London at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young man whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portrait. Under the influence of the brilliant but corrupt Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian throws himself into a life of pleasure. While the young man’s desires are satisfied, including that of eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear not on Dorian but on the portrait. Dorian makes use of everybody, even letting people die because of his insensitivity (Dorian causes the suicide of his fiancée Sibyl and murders his only friend Basil). When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, fitness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it but, in doing so, he kills himself. In the very moment of Dorian’s death, the picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian’s face becomes “withered, wrinkled and loathsome”. This story is profoundly allegorical; it is a 19th century version of the legend of Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In the novel this soul is the picture, which records the sign of time, the corruption and the sins concealed under the mask of Dorian’s timeless beauty. The picture represents the dark side of Dorian’s personality, his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room. The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and there is no escape from reality. Finally, the picture restored to its original beauty, illustrates Wilde’s theory of art: art survives people, art is eternal. The rebel and the dandy Wilde adopted the aesthetic ideal, as he said in one of his famous conversations: “My life is like a work of art”. He lived the double role of rebel and dandy. A dandy was the type of man who thought that looking stylish and fashionable was the most important thing in life. Although people often thought that dandies were superficial and pretentious, in Wilde’s books, the dandy is usually funny and entertaining. He makes humorous comments about society, family and religion, to show how hypocritical and false these are sometimes. Wilde’s dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses his wit to shock and he is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. Life and works Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. His father was a doctor and his mother was a poet, an ambitious literary woman. Oscar liked listening to his parent’s friends, who were very important and interesting people. He received prestigious scholarships to Trinity and to Magdalene College, in Oxford, where he won prizes for his poetry. While at Oxford, he was influenced by aesthetician Walter Pater and became a key exponent of the Aesthetic Movement, accepting the theory of “Art for Art’s Sake” . Oscar was funny and clever, people liked listening to him. He had unusual ideas about art and life and liked to be the centre of attention. In 1879 he moved to London and in 1881 he published his first book of poems. The next year he went to the United States of America for a lecture tour about his writing. He returned to London and married Constance Lloyd, who gave him two sons. Wilde wrote “The happy prince” for his sons. He published “The Canterville Ghost” in 1887 and his most famous novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in 1890. Wilde’s first plays weren’t successful, but then he became popular and in 1895 he wrote “The importance of Being Earnest”, his greatest play. In 1895 he was arrested , convicted of homosexual practices because of his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and he was sentenced to two years hard labour. Prison was a terrible experience and when he left it he had no wife, no children, no money, no job. He wrote his experience of prison life in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. Wilde spent the last years of his life sick and poor, wandering Europe. He died of cerebral meningitis in a Paris hotel in 1900.