The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde –EXERCISES

• Dorian’s lifestyle: the protagonist right from the first lines of the extract reveals to be very interested in worldly life and ART, indeed the reader is immediately told of his decision to open his beautiful house every month in order to display his luxurious belongings. He symbolizes a model, almost an archetype for the aristocratic; his beauty and his manners are emphasized and celebrated by richest people.

• According to Dorian the greatest of arts is LIFE.

• Being consulted on matters of fashion begins not to be enough for Dorian, because he is now looking for new schemes of life which will have their logical philosophy and their order, principles, ideals; he wants to find the highest realization of life in the “spiritualizing of the senses” (39-40)

• The common attitude to the “worship of the senses” is feeling afraid about passions and desires, they appear to be sensations stronger than the man’s rationality. This attitude (people blame it) has caused an incomprehension of the true nature of the senses.

• The principles of Dorian’s “new Hedonism”: HEDONISM = a school of thought which identifies pleasure with moral, intrinsic value. Principles: to re-create life and to save it from a ugly Puritanism, moreover his Hedonism shall not subdue to any system or theory that involve the sacrifice of passionate experience. Finally, it has not to be the fruit of experience, but the experience itself.

• Third person omniscient narrator; he sometimes allows the reader to see Dorian's thoughts and perspective.

• In the final line Dorian wants to focus on the passing of time, and he believes that he has to live every single moment intensively because life does not last forever. The human being, therefore, has to delight in pleasant present things.

• In the last paragraph Oscar Wilde refers to Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of Renaissance, exactly at lines 65-66 where he appeals to experience.

• Arnold Hauser underlines the irrational attitude of people during the Aesthetic period. He claims that people, by celebrating hedonism and sensualism, would reach an antisocial and immoral way of thinking.