Despite being written 120 years ago and being set in the19th century, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a very modern novel. Today, it serves as an excellent reflection of our self-centered generation, obsessed with everlasting youth and beauty. Vanity as the original sin, hedonism as art, and art as a mirror are just a few of the themes explored by Oscar Wilde in his only novel.
The novel offers much more than retelling of the story of Faust selling his soul or Narcissus myth of youth and beauty. This form of literary novel brings forth the idea of leading a double life, a theme that is most interesting to intellectual and artistically inclined readers. The primary focus of this work is the complexity of relationships between art, beauty, youth, life, superficiality and sin.
Wilde invites his readers to consider the inevitability of vanity in their own association with art. According to him, "it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." Wilde explains that all art exists solely to communicate beauty, but is otherwise “useless." As such, he warns against over thinking any artwork: "Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." At the same time, he agrees that the "only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely."
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