Wilde's Warning

Journalist Jack Weinberg wrote "don't trust anyone over 30." He dedicated this slogan to the hippie generation, a new generation. Yet, The Picture of Dorian Gray also displays this theme and it was published 74 years before Jack Weinberg coined the phrase. Dorian Gray is a novel that is devoted to youth and its fleeting existence. It explains how youth (the mid-teen to late twenties era) is an obsession in our culture for irrelevant purposes. I believe Oscar Wilde was trying to show to the values of aging and a lived life.
Dorian devoted his life to his youth. He saw his own beauty and was so enchanted he wanted to maintain it forever. Most of us, including Dorian, would believe eternal youth would be constant learning, loving, and fun. But, Oscar Wilde shows us the realities of this seemingly glorious lifestyle with Dorian's, extreme loneliness, despair, and his eventual death. Dorian devoted his life to mastering the arts and living vicariously, yet he never aged and never enjoyed the beauties of elderly life. Oscar Wilde shows us an idea very similar to Plato's writings. They both believed that life was meant to be lived, not devoted to copying others. Dorian followed the contrary belief of Plato and Oscar Wilde, and paid the inevitable price.
Oscar Wilde warns us of the pitfalls of eternal youth mainly through Dorian's character development. In the beginning of the book Dorian is cheerful, cheeky, youthful, and enthusiastic. Youth starts to eat at
Dorian, however, and he snaps, killing Basil with a steak knife. He continues deteriorating as he visits opium dens and closely evading death. The last third of the book shows us Dorian's complete degradation. This is when Oscar Wilde reveals his true thoughts about youth; it is meant to be lived once. Eventually Dorian dies, due to his insanity, and Wilde is proven right. Youth is only a part of life, not life's entirety.