The preface

The preface is a collection of free-standing statements that form a manifesto about the purpose of art, the role of the artist, and the value of beauty. Signed by Oscar Wilde, the preface serves as a primer for how Wilde intends the novel to be read. He defines the artist as "the creator of beautiful things”. 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. Art exists only to communicate beauty." The preface ends with the statement that "All art is quite useless”.

Basil’s studio

It is an extract from the first pages of the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. The extract has the function to introduce the characters and the setting. Furthermore, the first sequence has the function to anticipate the second one; indeed, the function of the second sequence is to describe the studio in depth. It is interesting to notice that the language used by Oscar Wilde is very heavy and complex: he uses latin expressions (“odour” of roses, etc.) and a complicated syntax that makes feel a sense of heaviness and oppression into the reader. The narrator appeals to the sense of smell in describing the room. By this way, Wilde creates a great effect into the reader: he can feels him into the studio. It seems that the description of flowers’ and lilacs’ perfume could be a typical Romantic description, but, to tell the truth, the description communicate to the reader not an immortal beauty, but a beauty that is going to rot. Indeed, Wilde describes not the perfume of roses and lilacs, but the “odour” of them, and that is to say that flowers’ beauty is too much and to full that it is not pleasant; on the contrary, it creates an annoying and heavy atmosphere. Moreover, Wilde goes on with the description of the room, appealing to another sense: the sight. He describes other plants that it is possible to see outside the window. The flowers “honey-sweet” and “honey-coloured”, “whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs”. All this is closely connected with the aesthetic theory,(W. Pater) for which time flows incessantly like a river towards death, and so all that it is good and beautiful in the world is destined to die. In the face of the tragic brevity of existence and the uncertainty of time, art is the only means to stop time, the only certainty. It follows that, art should not just reproduce the world but offer an alternative to it. The main implication of this new aesthetic position was that art had not reference to life, and therefore it had nothing to do with morality and did not need to be didactic like during the Victorian age. In the Victorian age art had to be useful and teach morals. But the aesthetics critic the immorality and bad conscience of Victorian middle class. In the centre of the room stood a portrait of a young man of an extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, was sitting the artist himself: Basil Hallward. Following the Aesthetic Movement, Hallward tried to capture the beauty and to make its immortal, painting a beautiful young guy. The paint can stops the passing of the time, because art is forever, and it is a certainty: that beauty will never fade.

I would give my soul

In the chapter 2, Lord Henry Wotton meets Dorian Grey, and he finds him to be totally unselfconscious about his beauty. They are both enthralled by the beauty that the painter Basil has captured in the portrait of Dorian. Lord Henry is telling that Dorian is young and beautiful, and that beauty is the wonder of wonders, like a natural spectacle. But the truth is that youth and beauty are not forever like for the guy in the paint, and so Dorian “has only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully”. Indeed, when your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you. Lord Henry incites Dorian to live fully and to always search for new sensations, because he will never get back his youth. By his words, Dorian recognized himself for the first time, and the sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. And so, Dorian sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In the novel this soul is the picture, which records the signs of time, the corruption, the horror and the sins concealed under the mask of Dorian’s timeless beauty. Wilde plays on the Renaissance idea of the correspondence existing between the physical and spiritual realms: beautiful people are moral people and ugly people are immoral people. The picture represents the dark side of Dorian’s personality, his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room. The moral of the novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped.