Comprehension

>> What are you told of Dorian's lifestyle?

Right from the start of the extract the narrator presents Dorian Gray's lifestyle. “Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art”. He organizes parties in order to show to the guests his richness through the elegant decorations of his house and the charm of the musicians. Dorian Gray is the archetype of male youth and beauty, in other words a dandy. A dandy according to Oscar Wilde was “a man unduly devoted to style, smartness, and fashion in dress and appearance”. His beautiful aspect contrasts with his immorality.

>> What is for him the greatest of arts?

The greatest of arts is life, all the others are only the preparation of life.

>> Why is Dorian Gray an ideal for educated young men? Why is being consulted on matters of fashion not enough for Dorian?

Dorian Gray is an ideal for educated young men in fact other people see him as “the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world”. He is a young, beauty man characterized by elegant manners and good education. All these aspects of his character make him a model for other men.

>> What is the common attitude to “the worship of the senses” and what has this attitude caused?

“The worship of the sense” represents Dorian Gray's point of view. Life is a mixture of pleasure, sense and natural instincts. Men feels a natural instinct of terror about passion and sensations that seem stronger than themselves which implies that they don't understand the true nature of the senses.

>> What are the principles of Dorian's “new Hedonism”?

Dorian Gray begins to take on Lord Henry's mannerisms and believe in his philosophies of life, speaking on the importance of a “new Hedonism that was to re-create life, to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having its curious revival”. Puritanism has taken over and the world needs people who go in search of pleasure.

Interpretation

>> What kind of narrator does Wilde use in his novel? Do you feel his presence?

Oscar Wilde in the extract of The Picture of Dorian Gray uses a third person omniscient narrator. The story is presented by a narrator that know everything that happens including what each character is thinking and feeling.

>> What idea of life is expressed in the final sentence of the passage?

“But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment”. In the final sentence of the passage life is seen like a meant of pleasure, living means not accepting any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience.

>> Where in the last paragraph does Wilde quote Pater?

Walter Pater expressed the same concept of life in his collection of essays Studies in the History of Renaissance (1873) which he concluded with the following words: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life”. In the last paragraph Oscar Wilde quotes Pater: “Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be”.

>> Could this sort of fin-de-siècle hedonism be a suitable term for the younger generation of our age?

The sort of fin-de-siècle hedonism described by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray is not suitable for the younger generation of our age. It is important to be conditioned by passions, sensations and also feelings but this is not all.

>> How can this story be interpreted?

In my opinion this story can be interpreted as a criticism of the moral hypocrisy, vulgarity and materialism of Victorian society.