Here are some excerpts from an essay I wrote -- penned? -- about The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. I thought it was a wonderful book and I very much enjoyed thinking about it and writing about it.
However, to the unfortunate soul who's reading this -- yes, you -- who has logged onto this blog, expecting bikini pictures or "friends lists" or a rant against the bush administration, finding instead an unfortunate post about "excerpts" from an "essay," I have only a bit of advice: log off with nary a perfunctory glance nor a disgusted moan. Do not read this essay. You have only your sanity to lose. Why do I post it then, if not for the reader? Is it sheer egoism? Is it some sort of masturbatory arrogance? If you've read any post from this site, any at all, you'll have no trouble answering these questions.
First published in an 1890 addition of the literary journal Lippincott’s Magazine, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel, was received with a furor of unrest and disapproval. The book seemed to confirm the public’s most sordid suspicions of Wilde’s notorious dandyism: its blistering paradoxes, blithe praises of selfish hedonism and its homoerotic undercurrents all appeared just too immoral to a Victorian age still stuffy and self-righteous. However, rather than bemoan the disapprobation, Wilde accepted it as but verification of the book’s overriding theme; the disapproval confirmed for him his fundamental distaste of the naïve society he inhabited, an age prone to discuss beauty in terms of morality, as good or wicked, godly or satanic. Perhaps disgusted by the simpletons who could not read beyond the story’s clinquant prose and scandalous epigrams, Wilde added to the second book-addition of the novel a preface noting that “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.”
However, more than a rebuff to critics, the assertions that books have no moral undercurrents and that “all art is quite useless” can be accepted as a lens through which to understand Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy about the role of the artist in society. He believed that art was intended to be nothing but abstract and imaginative – not a means for life or death or guidance. Characterizing how his work had been at the onset of the novel, Basil Hallward, the tragic painter who worshiped the beauty of a fallen man, captured Wilde’s concepts of aesthetic beauty, “And it had all been what art should be – unconscious, ideal, and remote” (119). Importantly, before he had become entranced by, captive to, the beauty of the novel’s protagonist, Dorian Gray, Basil had created art from within himself, made only to be beautiful. In his portrait of Dorian, Basil betrays Oscar Wilde’s belief that there is no morality in beauty and that art is to “conceal the artist.” Thus, borne out of idolatry, the portrait, changing to the tune of its model’s decaying soul, functions to explore the consequences of an aesthetic philosophy about the uselessness of art that is violated by both its painter and model...
If Dorian is the incarnation of this “new mode of style” whereby reality is art and art is morality, then his corruption represents the failure of this ideal. And the putrefaction of the man in the painting serves to belie the moral worth that Basil ascribed to this new understanding of painting that “without intending” exposes all the “artistic idolatry” (28) of beauty....The portrait therefore functions to represent the first consequence of Wilde aesthetic philosophy: that art cannot be life. The novel confuses the boundaries of life and art. Dorian, like a piece of artwork, never ages, always remaining beautiful and hollow. The portrait, contrastingly, becomes like life and must suffer from the gyrating, ostentatious decay of Dorian’s soul...
Lord Henry’s philosophy, like Wilde’s, was of a process of intense self-discovery through pleasure. Dorian, however, wildly perverts these intentions. Rather than treating aesthetics as a means for gratifying and shaping his identity, he slays his identity to gratify his pleasure...The New Hedonist is a master of his own desires. Dorian is a slave to them.
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