Despite leading a lifestyle that in his day was considered deviant at best, Oscar Wilde showed a strong interest in the Christian Scripture from early on in his literary career. Working as an editor for Pall Mall magazine let him read many pieces of traditional poetry and prose inspired by the Bible, while trips to Paris exposed him to authors like Gustave Flaubert, Catulle Mendès, and Anatole France and their experiments with secularized Biblical tales. Wilde’s goal was loftier, though; he wanted to write a Fifth Gospel, a demystified follow-up to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s classical tellings of Christ’s life. He wrote or shared with friends several smaller works retelling typical evangels in a more secular, accessible light, but passed away before he got a chance to publish and market a Fifth Gospel - the full story of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection - as such. However, he did successfully write and release it to the public in another form, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The researcher decides Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned to be the objects of the study on inferiority and superiority complex causing hedonistic lifestyle in main character. The first reason, both of literary works cover the changing of each life of the main character, society and ultimately the individual. Second, they both share the same social background of the main character in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian, displays a well-respected young man. He doesn’t recognize his own beauty until he sees it reflected in Basil’s portrait, and, once he does, it’s all too late. While Anthony in The Beautiful and Damned is illustrates reaching pleasure as the lifestyle and it becomes a habit.
Some feel very strongly about what they know to be certain. Some feel certain about religion, others about love. In Oscar Wilde’s book The Picture of Dorian Gray a character, Lord Henry Wotton, says this, : “The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the lesson of romance” (181). The truth one knows does not always prove to be certain.
With this book, Dorian comes “to his senses” about the
Relatively all authors are very fond of creating an underlying message to criticize society. Authors do this through social commentary. The book “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is no exception. The author, Oscar Wilde, criticizes the upper class through the consistent underlying idea that people are often deceived by one's beauty and are unable to understand the poison that fills the world is corrupting it. From the beginning of this book, the social commentary towards the upper class begins with the structure of the novel.
1. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” displays the Victorian Period by having a prevalent terminology of a proper naming system, indicating the social class of certain important figures. Another theme that is hidden throughout the story is the homosexuality of Basil, and the disapproval it would have generated in Victorian society. The events that take place in the story also describe a setting that was proper and exquisite. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” also intermixes works of art into the landscape while keeping social norms in the spotlight (Wilde 17, 41).
Even after Basil heard rumors of Dorian’s horrible ways he did not give up on his perfect image of him. He saw Dorian one ill-fated night on his way to the train and was finally faced head on with what Dorian had done. “It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them white as snow?’”
Dorian is a young man who is not yet fully formed in his thinking and has a very handsome appearance. Basil is instantly taken with him and finds that he wants Dorian all to himself. The way Basil influences Dorian isn 't through words but rather through his actions. He idolizes him.
The Picture of Dorian Gray written by Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray shocked the moral judgments of British book critics. Some of them said Oscar Wilde deserved to be pursuance for breaking the laws guarding the common morality because the uses of homosexuality were in that time banned. This book was for that time unusual because it had a pretty serious criticism on the society from that time. The novel is about a young and extraordinarily beautiful youngster, named Dorian Gray that have promised to his soul in order to live a life of eternal youth, he must try to adapt himself to the bodily decay and dissipation that are shown in his portrait.
Morality and The Picture of Dorian Gray “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” C.G. Jung The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, was first published in 1890, right in the middle of the Victorian Era, an era that was characterized by its conservatism. Ever since, and due to the content of the book, it has been condemned as immoral. Furthermore, on 1891, Wilde published a preface protecting his book from public punishment in which he said “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
In the early 18th century a new genre of fiction prose, named "Gothic Novel" was introduced. The term ”Gothic” used to refer to the German tribe of the Goths. The Gothic novel spread over the 19th century and had the popular theme of haunted places such as castles, crypts, gloomy monasteries; supernatural elements having the role to intensify the atmosphere. The characteristic motifs of the gothic genre were the strange places, the supernatural, magic objects, monsters, demons, science used for bad purposes. And many of them appear also in "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
All actions have an inverse action that can be acquired. The novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, significantly portrays the inverse options in life. Superficial happiness is the leading cause for double standards. The main character preservers through an abundance of difficult situations, while retaining his beauty. This is all due to his double life that he has come accustomed to living.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of Oscar Wilde’s masterpieces, portrays one of the most important values and principles for him: aestheticism. As a criticism to the life lived during the Victorian era in England, Wilde exposed a world of beauty a freedom in contradiction to the lack of tolerance a limitation of that era; of course inspired due to Wilde’s personal life. All the restrictions of the Victorian England lead him to a sort of anarchism against what he found to be incoherent rules, and he expressed all this to his art. His literature is a strong, political and social criticism. He gave a different point of view to controversial topics such as life, morality, values, art, sexuality, marriage, and many others, and epigrams, for what he is very well known, where the main source to the exposure of his interpretations of this topic.
Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous.” (Wilde 98). Through this scene, Wilde makes it clear to the reader how corrupt Dorian’s world perspective is.
