Dorian Gray Research Paper

In this statement by Lord Henry, Wilde speaks through Lord Henry saying that the supposed morality that his contemporary Victorian society brags about is actually rejecting some of life’s most beautiful aspects.

Opposers of a purely aesthetic lifestyle will say what they consider an inevitability: one’s desires and impulses, though when acted upon result in a more pleasurable life, will at times be undeniably immoral (Duggan). The downfall of Dorian Gray, the embodiment of irrepressible aestheticism, demonstrates the immorality of such a lifestyle and brutally shows its consequences. Because of this, Wilde uses Dorian Gray not as an advertisement for aestheticism, but instead, he uses Dorian’s life as a warning against aestheticism’s hostility

Waldrep writes, “Although one could make an argument for reading The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) as a realist novel…. a better approach might be to argue that in order to discuss Wilde’s only novel one must come to terms with the way that it functions within the confines of a realism that combines with, eg., melodrama” (1). Wilde’s views on realism could be described as contradictory. Wilde considered himself to be the precursor for a new style of art based in Greece. The style was an aesthetics that would combine the best of the Greek with the best of the new, having realism being an important connection between the two. Yet even after all of this, Wilde’s opinion of realism became increasingly more negative, but he still managed to write realistically.

Wilde’s critical attitude towards realism was not simply a type of anti-realism. For Wilde, an aesthetics based on such a principle risked containing any and all fantastic, romantic, or other creative and critical impulses. To a large extent, Wilde’s arguments on this point were saying that realism is the antithesis of imagination. Yet he continued to use realism throughout his work, including in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Waldrep writes about this in The Aesthetic Realism of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian

Dorian Gray shows that through the misreading of persona, an individual can assume a sort of power that threatens the established order of things. When Dorian begins to take Lord Henry’s advice, the original pure personality of Dorian disappears and thus begins his downfall. He lives according to what Lord Henry professes, and what Lord Henry inspires Dorian is an attitude indifferent to consequence and altogether amoral. He no longer has that pure light in him that he had once before. He sold his soul thus giving him a new “power” that ultimately destroys him in the