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Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, provides a series of profound social criticism of his time in the form of witty epigrams. These epigrams made pointed social observations about life at the time of Wilde's novel. Nonetheless, they can sill be applied to societies' customs and attitudes today.
Perhaps one of the most famous epigrams in The Picture of Dorian Gray comes from Lord Henry Wotton, who notes "I choose my friends for their beauty and my enemies for their intelligence. A man cannot be too careful in choosing his enemies." Here, this is a reversal of common logic at the time that held...
Today, the epigram is equally valid, as we still consider intelligence and companionship important qualities in a friend.
Another Lord Wotton epigram is, "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." Within the context of the novel, Lord Wotton's comment is told in the context of Dorian's finding that the sensual pleasures of life are as apparent after his murder of a young woman. Today, such a comment still has…
Works Cited
Wilde, Oscar. 1998. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Modern Library.
Although Dorian has clearly been touched (figuratively) by Lord Henry, he immediately "falls in love" with the young actress he sees during a stage performance of a Shakespeare play. It seems to the reader that Wilde intentionally makes Dorian's feelings for Sibyl unrealistic and not true to Dorian's character by having Dorian come from nowhere with news that he is engaged to Sibyl, and then a few days later
Is this 'good' or natural one might ask, if Basil is one of the moral characters of the book and defying nature and wishing for eternal youth is immoral? Henry's counsel to Dorian that Dorian yield to his every natural temptation and not bow down to societal morality could be seen as an endorsement of the natural, but Henry also celebrates youth to an unnatural, unchanging degree and he
He has tried to live a life of pure pleasure with no concern for others, but he cannot escape his own fear, because he knows all the wrongs he has done. The ultimate sin was killing the only person who ever saw true beauty in him. For its time, this book was extremely well done, and the writing cannot be faulted in the light of Victorian English literature. The story,
This literary parallel also underlined in the final description of the portrait of what Dorian Gray has become at the end of the book, Chapter 20: "The thing was still loathsome -- more loathsome, if possible, than before -- and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his
Indeed, Dorian Gray does end up doing much wrong to Miss Vane which induces her to commit suicide. However, her brother, a worldly seaman, does not get the opportunity to fulfill his promise, for he too ends up dead through the machinations of the evil Dorian Gray. Dorian's third mistake occurs at the conclusion of the story when he decides to destroy the painting which after many years has become
picture of Dorian and the rise of Aestheticism Oscar Wilde, despite having lived and died in the first half of the twentieth century, that is, in the year 1900, when he was just about 46 years old, remains, to this day in the twenty first century, a man whose intellectual witticisms and aestheticisms are well appreciated and even stay unparalleled today. In fact, it is often said that Oscar Wilde's