Better late than never DG blog

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel with many faces. Author Oscar Wilde warns against trying to maintain eternal beauty by introducing us to Dorian Gray, a dashingly handsome, wealthy, and intelligent young man. Basil Halward, an artist who takes on the task of perfecting a portrait of Dorian Gray, instantly becomes mesmerized by the simple sight of him. He paints and paints and paints, but eventually throws the painting away because he thinks that he has put too much of himself into it. Lord Henry, an immoral, witty son of a gun thinks that this piece is brilliant. He necessitated that the painting be his, but Basil would not allow him to take it for he thought it was meant for Dorian and Dorian only. 

Lord Henry is enraged by this. His opinion of the painting quickly changes after he realizes it is something that he cannot obtain. Later on Dorian proposes to an actress named Sibyl. He breaks things off with her once he realized that she quit acting for him, which is why be fell in love with her in the first place. Harshly stating, "Yes," he cried, "you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now..." And so on and so forth. You get the gist. Shortly after this horrible break up Sibyl commits suicide. Dorian begins to go downhill from this point forward. As he proceeds to live a life of corruption and sin, he sees the portrait of himself getting uglier and uglier. Something cannot be beautiful if it is not true. It is not beautiful if it is bad, or corrupt, or sinful. Plato would not see the beauty Basil Halward saw in Dorian. He would see an awful, ugly, wretch of a man.