The themes in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. By Ella.

Art and Culture What is the purpose of art? There's an interesting difference in The Picture of Dorian Gray between these two terms, "art" and "culture." While we might normally view them as two part of the same whole, Wilde asks us to examine them more like two sides of a coin here – they're inextricable, but not identical. According to Wilde, art is a good thing; it's purpose is to be purposeless, and the only thing it should be is beautiful. Culture, on the other hand, is not necessarily a good thing – it can be a bad influence. Dorian Gray examines the weird gray area (pun very much intended) between the beauty of art and the fascinating corruption of culture. Dorian's immediate one-to-one identification with the portrait demonstrates his failure to understand real art, which, as we see in the Preface, is meant to be purposeless. The purpose of aestheticism-a devotion to art and it denotes the importance of beauty compared with other values, as morality and material utility. The novel mainly concerns a discussion among these three men, who are fascinated by each others beauty and opinions. The story was highly debated regarding whether it is morally repulsive, due to the focus it places on fascination between men, or a work of Aestheticism.

Theme of innocence The theme of innocence is also a key aspect in the novel, even though it makes the characters look more appealing, there is an uneasy feeling that innocence isn’t all that its cracked to be or even if it exists. Dorian starts off as a innocent, clueless, young boy but after a chapter and a half you can see that he is ready to start his ‘devilish’ ways. Could this be that underneath that pure face is a devil waiting to emerge?

The theme of appearances You know what they ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ well don’t, this novel is completely different. As we see in The Picture of Dorian Gray, you can never be sure what's lying beneath that fancy-pants, super-exciting cover – it may look gorgeous on the outside, but it could be totally poisonous on the inside. The protagonist of this novel, Dorian Gray himself, is a case in point: he's unbelievably beautiful on the surface, but his soul is grosser than gross. However, throughout the novel, he gets away with the most dastardly things, simply because he looks too innocent to do anything wrong. Dorian’s youth and beauty attracts lots of people’s attention, when he makes a pact to the Devil you can see how much beauty has influenced Dorian because he knows that when he loses his beauty then he will lose everything. The price he has to pay is that he will see everyone around him suffer because of his consequences and actions and eventually he will die because of this urge of eternal beauty.

Negative consequences of influences. The yellow book is seem as a distraction to Dorian as he continues to commit these sins and not be punished for them. He investigates new things such as art, music and many others to distract him from his ‘innocent’ conscience that he might think about after he commits his sins even though he has no soul so he could not feel anything about the sins. Lord Henry’s hedonism has made Dorian think differently about life, the value of beauty and intelligence influence Dorian to fall in love with Sibyl and then be disappointed that she is actually bad at acting and she is not as beautiful as he thought which then ends in tragedy.