MB UNIUD

THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY

The portrait of Dorian Gray symbolises  the double nature of the protagonist. Dorian who, handsome and attractive  hides a false mystifying guilty identity, as it comes to surface at the close of the novel. Here he stabs  the portatrait, the very identity of nice looking Dorian comes to the light. According to Oscar Wilde there is no way  to grasp the sense of life or time which flows incessantly like a river. Therefore people should live their lives as if each individual lives were a work of art. This explains for the importance he attributed to the aesthetic moment, a moment of ecstasy where each person can grasp moments of beauty and fulfilment . The preface of "The Picture of Dorian Grey"  is the text that helps us to understand these ideas.

The preface is a collection of statements that form a manifesto about the purpose of art, the role of the artist, and the value of beauty. The preface, is very important, because Wilde said that it serves as a primer for how Wilde intends the novel to be read. He defines the artist as "the creator of beautiful things," and the critic as "he who can translate into another manner or new material his impression of beautiful things." He condemns anyone who finds ugliness where there is beauty as "corrupt." He states that a book can be neither moral or immoral, and that morality itself serves only as "part of the subject matter" of art. Since art exists only to communicate beauty, Wilde warns against reading too much into any work of art: "Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." The preface ends with the whimsical statement that "All art is quite useless"; earlier, however, we are told that the "only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely."