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Death In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray

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In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist, Dorian, end ups being death after living a life of pleasure and sin. The character followed the advice of Lord Henry, which explained that “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” (28).
Dorian took this aesthetic philosophy and aplicated it to his life. As the story continues, Dorian gray commits multiple crimes that will be reflected in his portrait. At the end of the book Dorian tries to destroy the portrait,that shows an image of his corrupted soul, which haunts him like a conscience. In the book it is said that “His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, unripe time, a time of shallow moods and sickly …show more content…

It was Dorian´s decisions the ones that led him to his death. The end of the novel show that the painting didn´t actually had any “moral stance”, because it was reverted to its natural state of beauty. Dorian followed some aesthetic principles, and this ones stated how art should be apart from any moral feelings. Even the mentor of Dorian states this when saying to Basil that “An artist should create beautiful things but should put nothing of his own life into them” (chapter 1). This words of Lord Henry show how art should be separated from any kind of sentimentalism. Having into account Wilde's philosophy of aestheticism, it would be correct to state that the death of Dorian represents the responsibility he had for violating the philosophy of aestheticism. Dorian believed that his portrait reflected the state of his soul. Nevertheless, having into account the creeds of aestheticism, art has no moral component. Dorian lived the aesthetic philosophy Lord Henry teached to him, but he was violating his own living codes by believing that art was related to morality. This “violation” to his own codes led him to death. This is a reason to think that principles are shown as dangerous in this book. Dorian committed so much to an ideal of life that at the end that ideal killed him. As a conclusion, the

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