Dorian Gray Essay

Time is Only Jealous Beauty and its preservation are two of the most prominent human desires. Even today the extent of human vanity continuously expands and the measures humans take to preserve beauty continue to become more drastic. Human vanity and the grotesque actions taken to satisfy it provide innumerable opportunities for psychological analysis, and no other work of literature is human vanity more explored than in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Beauty and the importance of it is the found as the central idea for literature of the 1890’s time period and in The Picture of Dorian Gray through beautiful objects, people and experiences. As the novel opens the importance and centrality of beauty to this novel become evident immediately. The lush descriptions of the environment, and detailed observations about the characters, and the appreciation that they articulate for beautiful objects, people, and experiences all suggest that beauty has a meaningful place in the novel. Throughout this book, ordinary scenes are brought to life by the use of Oscar Wilde’s in depth descriptions. Readers are able to attain such descriptions and the importance of beauty through the adjectives and indirect meanings Wild displays from start to finish. He even notices “It was a small Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round crystals and tasseled in plaited metal threads.” (Wilde, 152-153). Unlike other authors whom would not exemplify the hidden meaning of such a small object, Wild deeply explains the details found from the architecture of this small seemingly insignificant box. The same importance of beauty resonates through the characters in the novel. One character that exemplifies beauty and the intensity of vanity in the novel is Lord Henry. Lord Henry is the radical aesthete. He lives out all of the precepts of the aesthetic movement as outlined in