The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

I Would Give My Soul

I Would Give My Soul is an extract taken from The Picture Of Dorian Gray written by Oscar Wilde.

The extract starts with Lord Henry’s speech. He is trying to convince Dorian of his beauty manipulating him. Dorian represents a pure, immature, fragile man that is unaware of his potentials.

The language used by Henry is simple, clear and persuasive. Beauty is seen as a form of genius, something that could bring man to power and happiness. Henry has a materialistic vision based on beauty and youth in line with the ideas of the Aesthetic Movement. To convince Dorian, Henry talks about time and he says that time runs quickly and youth and beauty do not persist. He also told him that beauty and youth bring man to power and that he is the symbol of beauty. He tries to worships him  as a religious symbol. The sentence “the world belongs to you for a season” is a clear example of the Henry’s idea of power. In addition, youth is compared to a season, more precisely to spring and you could see it when Henry talks about flowers.

The only very important things, according to Lord Henry, are beauty and youth.

The language used and the use of the punctuation are used to convince Dorian of the truth of Lord Henry's thoughts about life.

After this speech Dorian became aware of his beauty and potentials and he changes his way of living and of thinking. He has fear of the death and the novelist makes Dorian become the symbol of the fragility of man. Dorian wants to be immortal and forever young and beautiful to have a strong power and to do everything he wants. “I would give my soul for that”, soul and feelings are not important. At the centre of everything there are beauty and power. So, this is why Dorian, aware of his potentials, gives his soul. He is searching the immortality.

The beauty described in this extract is in line with the idea of the Preface and also with the one of the aesthetic movement. Beauty is not linked to any moral code. It is a way of thinking completely different from the one of the Victorian age that was based on the utilitarianism and the idea to give an education through the use of arts.