Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is undoubtedly a reflection of its author and his times. As a leading academic, social, and political figure in late 19th-century London, Wilde was highly engaged in the ongoing public dialogue around the flow of new social developments and philosophical beliefs that flowed from London to the rest of the world Western. As a developing center of thought, Victorian London society was constantly under attack by new ideas generated by people like Wilde, resulting in a society rich in radical philosophies but incredibly restrictive and resistant to change. The best way to avoid suffering societal damage from this deluge of thoughts was to avoid thinking about it at all, something the Victorians became very adept at. Once filtered through their societal screens, radical philosophies became much more civilized. By alternately establishing and destroying assumptions and ideologies throughout the text, Wilde creates a void in which he forces the reader to reflect on the validity of aesthetic, Victorian, and contemporary ideologies rather than accepting a conclusion presented by Wilde or by the reader's societal assumptions. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay. The Picture in particular strongly reflects the philosophy of aestheticism which became popular at the time largely due to the work and influence of Wilde. This philosophy gained momentum in England due to academic celebrities' rejection of the robotic ugliness and inhumanity of the Industrial Revolution. Aestheticism defends the idea that “all art is completely useless” (Wilde's preface), but that its beauty serves as a sort of counterweight to the hideous functionalism of the time. Wilde lays out the proponents of his personal brand of aestheticism in his epigram-filled preface, asserting that "No artist desires to prove anything...No artist has ethical sympathies." An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unforgivable mannerism of style” (Wilde’s Preface). Art, Wilde asserts, has no inherent meaning and should not aim to be anything other than beautiful. He calls art "useless", but believes that its creation is excusable as long as it is "extremely admired" (Wilde's preface). If a viewer perceives a certain meaning in the art, it is a reflection of themselves rather than of the work, Wilde explains. This philosophy is examined throughout the book, largely and most directly through the character of Basil. At the beginning of the novel, he explains to Lord Henry: “An artist must create beautiful things, but must not put anything of his own life into them. We live in a time where men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty” (Wilde ch. 1). Basil believes that he has revealed too much of himself in the portrait of Dorian and therefore it is inappropriate for others to see it because they might perceive some moral or meaning in it, thus ruining its artistic value. Later in the novel, however, although he still feels "that I have put too much of myself into it", Basil reverses his position on the biographical nature of art and decides that "it is a mistake to think that the passion we feel in creation is always truly shown in the work we create. Art is always more abstract than we believe...It often seems to me that art hides the artist much more completely than it reveals him” (Wilde ch. 9). This change of thought is one of the means used by Wilde to force thereader to examine the implications of aestheticism. It suggests that the meaning or beauty of art is a unique channel between the viewer and the work. Instead of being a social phenomenon used to influence society or create movements, art is – or should be – solely an individual experience. For Dorian, the portrait said nothing about Basil or himself. The yellow book given to him by the Lord Henry was the same – Wilde does not blame Henry, the author, or the book itself for "corrupting" Dorian, he emphasizes the personal interpretation and application of the work by Dorian as the reason for his perceived wickedness. “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” asserts Wilde, “books are well written or poorly written. That’s all” (Wilde’s preface). This statement is addressed to the Yellow Book as well as to critics of the original edition of Wilde's The Picture: is it the book that is immoral, or is it your inappropriate analysis of the book beyond what the Did the author intend that creates immorality, reflecting on you as a person rather than the writer? As we progress through the narrative, however, the questions Wilde poses have increasingly vague and delineated answers. Since a majority of readers do not come from the same aesthetic background as Wilde, we constantly analyze the book through two lenses that yield conflicting answers: one being Wilde's philosophy that art has no of meaning, and the other being the modern formalist perspective that our society's current thought systems often do by default. Wilde asserts that, to be properly received, we must read his book solely for the pleasure or beauty we find in the tale, ignoring any implication of subterranean meaning. However, our traditional training flashes red lights at the plethora of symbols, themes, and literary devices that suggest the work is more than appropriate for much deeper dissection. So we are suspended between divergent leads – what, if anything, is Wilde trying to say with this narrative? The only proper conclusion when analyzing it from an aesthetic point of view is that the book is simply an informative pamphlet for the aesthetic movement. Yet we know that Wilde was deeply involved in the politics of his time and made sharp public comments on social issues (such as blind rationalism, the abandonment of romanticism, and the plummeting value of life). human), what our formalist perspective tells us. the book contains. This is where it is useful to analyze Wilde's text through a deconstructionist lens to see if we can find meaning in this contradiction. The existence of the work is itself a total contradiction. Despite Wilde's insistence that art should not be analyzed or moralized, the very act of reading involves constant analysis of the information received. Even Wilde later declared in a letter to a newspaper that “Dorian Gray is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: every excess, as well as every renunciation, brings its own punishment” (Wilde, letter). This would appear clearly through our prism of formalism; Dorian's undoing is his excess and renunciation of limits, while Henry's excess is that of the lips and Basil's of the eyes - all three men overstep what is acceptable in their Victorian society and, in doing so, contribute to their fall and that of their friend. However, in Wilde's hands, this critique could easily point to the excesses of English social constraint and the renunciation of so many human desires that characterized Victorian society. The same statement can be rotated twiceways, creating different meanings for different readers. Some other key contradictions in the book are Dorian's lack of thinking versus Lord Henry's overthinking, and Dorian's total embrace of raw experiences versus Henry's lack of thinking. Although he encouraged Dorian to pursue every avenue of pleasure imaginable, Henry's life remains well within the bounds of social acceptability, even if his words do not. While Wilde repeatedly states that "art has no influence on action" (Wilde ch. 19), we see Dorian's every movement directly linked to the effects of his portrait or the Yellow Book. A final, very important contrast is Dorian's angelic physical appearance and the ugly, sinful nature revealed by his portrait. Throughout the work, we see the dominant ideological set of Victorian cultural assumptions nullified by the very things it thus condemns. Handsome young Dorian is easily manipulated and can barely think for himself, while Lord Henry's vile and scandalous nature is matched by cunning intelligence and social skills. To suggest that such noble virtues might be the cause of these characters' downfall is to contradict these dominant cultural ideals and truly deconstruct the assumptions of Victorian society, granting greater validity to things that would have been looked down upon originally. era, namely aesthetics. At the end of the book, Lord Henry tells Dorian that he is "really starting to moralize." You will soon behave like the converted and the revivalists, warning people against all the sins of which you are tired. You are far too charming to do that” (Wilde ch. 19). The virtue of morality here, celebrated by the Victorians, is implied by Lord Henry as something unfortunate, a disease to be avoided, suggesting that those moral champions who warn people against sin are in fact trapped in a restricted and “unpleasant” existence. The pleasure Dorian experiences in life leads to his downfall, while the other characters' traditionalism is clearly their own, living in boxes with no room for new experiences. By rejecting the dominant moral code of the time and filling this void with a new creed that he then appears to refute, Wilde creates a void such that it is impossible to achieve any determinate meaning. Thus, at the end of the text we are left with a gaping hole from which little precise meaning can be drawn. Wilde's traces are all destroyed, with no good suggestions as to what Wilde believes or what we should believe. The pillars of beauty, morality and reason have all been toppled, art is seen as meaningless but means everything, Victorian sensibilities and Wilde's own philosophy have been dismantled, and the very fact that the book exists seems to contradict itself. The text is extremely unstable, alternately making assertions and refuting them by example, or vice versa, such that we lose track of what is valid and trust nothing. By the end of the book, a deconstructionist would say that there is no longer a solid foundation. It is into this void that I believe Wilde implores us to think – the only thing left standing in his story. Dorian, Henry, and Basil all fail to think about consequences, lacking thought about restraint, involvement, or the world outside themselves. The rest of the Victorian puppet characters are the most blind of all, thinking of almost nothing. Society guides them so gently that they do not need to think for themselves, but simply to repeat what they see happening: "the terror of society, which is the basis of morality, the terror of God, who is the secret of