The picture of Dorian Gray

11v2 Namhyung Kwon

           When I first bumped into this novel, I was 14, starting to get inspired and astonished by moral and legal acts, human nature and the devil living in one’s mind. Schools and parents kept telling what’s moral and some acts that we should not do. I, reluctantly, pretend to admit their words, but I always wanted to know the reason or criterion of deciding what’s moral and what’s immoral. <The Picture of Dorian Gray> somewhat strongly affected my inner mind at that time, even though I did not fully understand the whole philosophy of author, Oscar Wilde.

           The novel starts with descriptions of the studio of Basil Hallward, a famous painter. He and his friend, Lord Henry Wotton, were lying back on the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags smoking and having a chat about a drawing that Basil drew. Lord Henry thinks that it was his friend’s masterpiece and he keeps convincing his friend to send it to Grosvenor. Basil refuses the proposal, telling the story of Dorian Gray. He freaked out when his friend asked him to introduce Mr. Dorian Gray. He thought that his friend’s twisted and cynical characteristic would corrupt Mr. Dorian Gray’s pure simple and beautiful nature.

           “Simple and beautiful nature!” As I read down the novel I thought, ‘How can a person have simple and beautiful nature?’ or ‘What is simple and beautiful nature?’ I’ve never met a person having simple and beautiful nature at the same time. If a person has simple nature, he or she somehow disturbs others. If a person has beautiful or moral characteristic, it is never simple but always complex and complicated. Maybe the term “beautiful” does not mean being moral. Moral may be helpful to others but some critics do not think moral things as beautiful stuffs. In some novels and books, pure is both beautiful and simple. They claim that even pure evil is simple and beautiful. However, now I know that pure is not necessary beautiful and pure is not the standard of deciding its value.

           I’ve made a conclusion myself, as “having simple and beautiful nature is being perfect at every aspect that human can have and having highest value.” Having highest value at every feature can be considered as beautiful, since, perfectness is the ideal worth of human nature, and having highest value brings clear ends of controversy topic of being simple. My conclusion defines “Simple and Beautiful Nature” as perfect ideal characteristic of human being. It is not something about pure or clean, it is thing about being perfect by its existence.