Bibliographical Criticism on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

In Oscar Wildes Dorian Gray, the title character leads a secretive narcissistic and hedonistic life that gives his soul a hideous character while his exterior remains pristine and charming. Like his character, Oscar Wilde himself led a charming and charmed lifebut his trial for homosexual acts ended with a conviction and prison sentence. In prison he was forced to confront his own conscience, which he did and depicted in De Profundis (Pearce) Wilde already had a sense of morality, having flirted with a conversion to Catholicism throughout his youtha rarity in Protestant England (Pearce). Yet, he also enjoyed the hedonistic lifestyle and was torn between morality and licentiousness. For Wilde, Dorian represented his own reality; a creature torn between two worldsone of the spirit, the other of the senses.

It is noted midway through Dorian Gray that Dorianlike Wildehad once had an interest in Catholicism: It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize (Wilde). Perhaps a little more than Dorian, Wilde seriously thought about converting to Catholicism while at Oxford for his studies (Malik). He wanted often to be in the presence of John Henry Newman, but when his Protestant father threatened to financially disown him if he...

Wilde lost the courage to follow through on these spiritual pursuits in his own real lifefor a time. He would have to pursue them in writing. Dorian Gray thus represents Wildes own struggles with a guilty soul in need of cleansing. For Gray, there is no cleansingonly the revelation of horror as the painting magically depicts his true, tragically...…the world (Pearce). Dorian would be afforded no opportunity in his own story, since up to that point Wilde himself had not been forced to confront his own soul.

However, upon his deathbed, Wilde did become a Catholic. His friend William Ward would later write, his final decision to find refuge in the Roman Church was not the sudden clutch of the drowning man at the plank in the shipwreck, but a return to a first love one that had haunted him from early days with a persistent spell (Taylor). Wilde finally believed he had nothing left to lose (having already lost everything following his trialfriends, money, fame, and reputation): he wanted to save the one thing that still remainedthe one thing that Dorian had not been able to save: his soul (Pearce). That is the main difference between Dorian and Wilde: Dorian represents the younger Wilde, who knew deep down that his own life was leading him to a dark place. The older Wilde, unafraid to admit the truth, appearsunlike Dorianto have died in a state…