The Paradoxical Oscar Wilde (The Novel, vol. 3)

"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde

One could reasonably ask Mr. Wilde, should the commonly held perception of death prove false, and he spring back to life: Why then, sir, did you devote your life to creating it?

Essential to the understanding and the interpretation of Wilde is his penchant for the paradoxical. Wilde also writes that "there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." Thus, art is amoral. There is no moral to the story, so to speak. Far be it from the author to impart some essential truth, or teach us a lesson by making an example of his characters.

But (paradoxically) Wilde does exactly that in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Throughout the entire novel, Dorian is developed as a Messianic figure for the New Hedonism. In fact, some of the imagery is quite explicit; see p. 62:
"He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses."

and p. 155: "'[Your friends] have gone down into the depths. You led them there.'"

Dorian's art is his life; his furnishings and adornments are his paintings; his speech is his poetry; and he does this all so perfectly, so stainlessly, that it is clear that he will be the savior of the pragmatic, heralding a new truth by living it flawlessly. And that would be the end of the story, if all art were amoral, and it's aim to beautify.

But as the novel progresses, Dorian grows increasingly unhappy, culminating with his destroying the source of that unhappiness, the painting of himself for whose eternal beauty he traded his soul. Upon stabbing the painting, which houses his soul, he dies, and the original beauty of the paper art work is restored. This improbable, supernatural ending raises a few questions of identity: wherein lies the definable I, the essence of the individual - is it the body, or the soul? Does Dorian, in attempting to stab the painting, mistakenly stab himself? Or, by stabbing the painting, and thus his soul, does he murder himself? But also, we must ask: what is Wilde trying to demonstrate here?

It would seem that the death of the embodiment of beauty would contradict Wilde's theories of art being for aesthetic purposes only, as well as amoral, if we interpret Dorian's life to be artistic, and the ending to carry with it some ethical warning. Is Dorian a cautionary tale - or just unfortunate? Is the book amoral - or, perhaps, the preface itself amoral, and thus it's claims of the amorality of art rendered obsolete? There are no clear answers to these questions, and I think that is Wilde's goal. He writes what sounds beautiful, but he also tries to shock, inspire, change, or teach you. It's a paradox - anything any reader gleans from the text is due to the reader seeing himself, and his beliefs, in the text. "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors," writes Wilde. And owing to the innumerable lives who've come into contact with The Picture of Dorian Gray, there are innumerable moral lessons, or not; innumerable beautifully constructed phrases; innumerable paradoxes.