Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract

Oscar Wilde believed that England was the home of lost ideas. Artists became interested in ideas like dreams, the occult, mysticism, death, decay, madness, darkness, illness, uncertainty, fetishism, eroticism and self-love, anything that is out of the ordinary. All these ideas determine the personality of Dorian Gray, who is the ultimate product of the sick society around him. He becomes a double indentity: a youthful person with innocent beauty all over him, and a "portrait (that) changes to reflect its subject’s every vice and profligacy"(Berman 143), which shows the amoral and bizarre monster shaped by his own sins. His degeneration, started by those around him, ends in the total amoral sinking of himself into a sinful state of terror.