A Paragraph-level 'Claim' about Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

     At first glance, Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" might appear as an edifying novel preaching the importance of leading an aesthetic life. After all, Wilde truly fascinates his readers with Dorian’s attractiveness and Lord Henry’s brilliant sense of speech, in spite of their pursuit of hedonistic lifestyle filled with immorality in the name of aestheticism. On the other hand, Wilde portrays Basil as a coward with no real taste of the ‘meaningful’ things in life who eventually faces brutal death. Taking into consideration Basil’s job as an artist, he is the one who is the most justified to lead a life dominated by aestheticism. However, he nevertheless lives an upright life. The dramatic difference makes a clear distinction between the boundaries of moral and mad pursuit of aestheticism. Basil’s words, “I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it,” indicate that he believes in the different nature of artwork and real life. Dorian and Lord Henry, on the contrary, regard actual incidents in life as mere artwork, an experiment for pure joy and beauty, even. Such attitude is aptly explicated in Lord Henry’s own words about Dorian’s “experimental” love towards Sibyl Bane: “He would be a wonderful study” and “If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.” Therefore, it is perhaps more accurate to assume that this Gothic novel is an ironic work dealing with the need of realizing the discrepancy between artistic desire for beauty and real life. In this sense, the intimate yet somewhat ironic juxtaposition of two types of characters with very different values and attitudes achieves its clear moral of the novel regarding art and life.