Bad-Eyed and Beautiful

    Eternal youth.  This is a concept Dorian Gray from The Picture of Dorian Gray wants to master.  He wants to be forever young so that he can further cherish his youthful beauty and take action with no consequence.  However, Oscar Wilde, the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, uses Dorian to show how powerful (for good or for bad) youth can be.

   Dorian Gray is a young, wealthy man who's beauty strikes envy in most people who meet him.  He is also the key to letting Oscar Wilde show that youth is a temporary state of life that should be enjoyed to the fullest, but not embraced for all of life.  Early in the book Basil sees Dorian as a mythical hero with qualities that very few (if not any) people possess.  As the book progresses, Dorian is more and more influenced by Lord Henry, as he progressively celebrates the beauty of youth and egocentric pursuit of disagrees and self-pleasure.  Dorian is intrigued with these new feelings, and this causes him to act without consequence and stay in a never-ending phase of youthfulness.  Because of this, Dorian ends up becoming an enemy of many people and a root for many negative rumors that attack his legacy.  This change of people's view about Dorian lets Wilde express that being young is something that should be enjoyed, where people look their best and can mostly act naive and get away with it, but is something that doesn't last for too long, to prevent a ruin of people and reputation.

   Oscar Wilde writes with a creative style, where the beginning of the book is somewhat slow in unraveling Dorian's character.  As soon as Dorian is introduced to Lord Henry and starts following his lifestyles, his character development skyrockets and quickly turns into a negative journey, rather than one finding virtue.  This showcases Wilde's views on how fast youth, with its selfish pleasures and pursuits, can flee.  Loving Sibyl Vane is one of the many selfish pursuits of Dorian, and he ends up making this poor girl kill herself.  If only Sibyl knew that her immediate love for Dorian was actually an immediate infection, leading her to her death.  Sibyl and Dorian's naive love reminds me of a passage in The Love of Beauty by Plato when it says, "See you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; .."  Dorian's love for Sibyl served as her infection, and their desire to be together only hurt them both.