Themes

The artist is the creator of beautiful things and he reveals art finding beautiful meanings in beautiful things; for these there is hope.The artist can express everything; all art is at once surface and symbol.."All art is quite useless..."

Aestheticism (" The Theory of Aestheticism: Walter Pater (1839-1894) : Walter Pater was the author of an essay on Aesthetic Poetry which had an extraordinary infuence on a whole generation of young writers, including Oscar Wilde.According to Pater, one of life's pleasures was art. Pater argued that it should have no moral basis or purpose. It was good in its own right, an end in itself. This was summed up in Thèophile Gautier's slogan "l'art pour l'art" (art for art's sake), implying that art was to be free of all moral and didactic restraint.Although Pater did not mean that pleasure had to be immoral, his doctrine was read as a reaction against Victorian standards of morality, known as the Victorian compromise. The word victorian acquired a negative meaning in our century, suggesting an idea of "prudery"-extreme propriety, often hypocritical, in behaviour or speech, and especially in sexual matters) is one of the main themes of the novel, in fact, thanks to Henry's teachings, Dorian becomes an aesthete, he wants to be beautiful for ever, he seeks sensations and pleasure. He loves flowers, clothes, jewels, he wants to know more about life and he wants to experience all he can for him "life was the first, the greatest of the art...

Other main themes are beauty and youth, but they are also connected to the corruption of the soul and the superficiality of the people.Moreover there is a contrast between two personalities: a Dorian Gray who lives in elegant high society and who has a clear conscience, and a Dorian who commits crimes.

The novel is profoundly allegorical, it is one of the various versions of the myth of Faust, the man who sold his soul to the devil to satisfy all his desires. In this case the soul becomes the picture, and it records the traits of experience, the corrupted deeds, the sins and the disgusting horror concealed under the mask of Dorian's timeless beauty. The picture is not authonomous, it represents the protagonist's dark personality, his double, (as in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,) which he tries to forget by hiding it. This novel, even if Wilde supported the theory of art for art's sake, (see above) has a moral i.e. that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be avoided; Dorian destroys the picture but he cannot escape from the punishment for all his sins i.e. death. The horrible and corrupted picture can be considered the symbol of the hidden immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class (see above), while Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are the symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy.At the end of the novel, the portrait, beautiful again, illustrates Wilde's theories that art survives people, art is eternal.