bug
Apr 17th 2009, 07:39 PM
Wilde's whole point in writing The Picture of Dorian Gray was aesthetics. The driving motivation for it was art for art's sake, and he advised against trying to make any more out of the book in his preface. However, since humans seem to think that the more harmonious and symmetrical something is, the prettier it is, I can't imagine all the ethical points tackled in the book don't round out to something concrete. All that Lord Henry says, the obvious rewards and punishments, and references to conscience in the book can't be Wilde just spouting flowery words. Trying to make rhyme and reason out of all the contradictions in the book is quite a challenge, but I am bound and determined to see it through.
Lord Henry, seen as the corrupter of Dorian and the catalyst for his downfall, says outrageous things, in Victorian English context. He says that life should lived for pleasure and sensory experience, and morality's only function is to fill us with fear and regret. Dorian decides to make this his life, his unaging beauty making it possible to live out Lord Henry's ideas. He also has the benifit of bodilly disconnecting his conscience from himself, in the form of the painting that bears the physical consequence of his evil. However, the picture torments him in a different way. He can't sleep, paranoid that someone might find it. He checks and checks to make sure no one has been in the room that houses the painting and begins to suspect that everyone around him is trying to see it. So the simple moral of the story could be that you shouldn't live your life in a hedonistic way or you will pay. But that's boring.
I don't think that it's Lord Henry's poisonous words that corrupt an innocent soul. The good Lord H spends his time studying people and questioning the norms that most people just accept. Tapered down and used by a person not prone to extremes, I can't see whats wrong with living for delights of the senses and new experiences. Dorian's faults existed before he adopted this new way of life, and these faults combined with a decadent lifestyle turned him into a montser. As soon as we meet him in the beginning of the novel, he is a brat. He is selfish and whiny. He doesn't like to be told things that make him think or make him uncomfortable. A month later, through the incident with his first love, we see how prone he is to self-deception and justification of his actions. He has a well-developed skill of redirecting blame so neatly that it becomes impossible for him, in his mind, to be in the wrong. Even at the end, where we are finally alone with Dorian and his thoughts (as most of the book has him parroting Lord Henry), we see that he has decieved himself into thinking that, in not doing the absolute worst thing in a scenario that he could have, he was doing something good for the sake of goodness. He can't understand why the picture isn't getting better. I wonder if the whole book is warning against deception.
Even that doesn't work very neatly. Any other book lovers/analysts who've read this gem want to speculate?
Lord Henry, seen as the corrupter of Dorian and the catalyst for his downfall, says outrageous things, in Victorian English context. He says that life should lived for pleasure and sensory experience, and morality's only function is to fill us with fear and regret. Dorian decides to make this his life, his unaging beauty making it possible to live out Lord Henry's ideas. He also has the benifit of bodilly disconnecting his conscience from himself, in the form of the painting that bears the physical consequence of his evil. However, the picture torments him in a different way. He can't sleep, paranoid that someone might find it. He checks and checks to make sure no one has been in the room that houses the painting and begins to suspect that everyone around him is trying to see it. So the simple moral of the story could be that you shouldn't live your life in a hedonistic way or you will pay. But that's boring.
I don't think that it's Lord Henry's poisonous words that corrupt an innocent soul. The good Lord H spends his time studying people and questioning the norms that most people just accept. Tapered down and used by a person not prone to extremes, I can't see whats wrong with living for delights of the senses and new experiences. Dorian's faults existed before he adopted this new way of life, and these faults combined with a decadent lifestyle turned him into a montser. As soon as we meet him in the beginning of the novel, he is a brat. He is selfish and whiny. He doesn't like to be told things that make him think or make him uncomfortable. A month later, through the incident with his first love, we see how prone he is to self-deception and justification of his actions. He has a well-developed skill of redirecting blame so neatly that it becomes impossible for him, in his mind, to be in the wrong. Even at the end, where we are finally alone with Dorian and his thoughts (as most of the book has him parroting Lord Henry), we see that he has decieved himself into thinking that, in not doing the absolute worst thing in a scenario that he could have, he was doing something good for the sake of goodness. He can't understand why the picture isn't getting better. I wonder if the whole book is warning against deception.
Even that doesn't work very neatly. Any other book lovers/analysts who've read this gem want to speculate?