The Aesthetic Ideal In The Picture Of Dorian Gray By Oscar Wilde

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vel par excellence, not in espousing the doctrine, but in exhibiting its dangers…”(Ellman 315) Oscar Wilde wrote the
tragedy of aestheticism, the story of moral corruption by means of aestheticism.Being told that there is nothing more important than beauty, that “there is nothing in the world but youth”(Wilde 29), Dorian Gray becomes”jealous of everything whose beauty doesn’t die.I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me.Why should it keep what I must lose?” He makes a wish which dreadfully affects his life forever: ”If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that I would give anything! Yes,there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that.”(Wilde 32) Dorian offers a Faustian pact in order to preserve himself as a work of art accomplishing in this way Wilde’s belief that ”To become a work of art is the object of living”(Wilde,qtd in Ellman 310) and “the search of beauty being the real secret of life”.(Wilde 57)
The novel unde...