<The picture of Dorian Gray : Sins and human nature>

11v2 121004 Kwon Namhyung

           A well-known story, the picture of Dorian Gray written by Oscar Wilde, is a novel that handles issue of good and evil. The novel is semi-autobiography of author himself, and it contains profound philosophical agony of evilness. In the novel, picture gets wicked whenever Dorian done evil actions. Some critics states that the picture is visual image of sin. Sins visualize in the picture and Dorian’s face becomes disgusting. Oscar Wilde did divide good and evil and described evil and sin as negative aspect that all human have.

           Compared to the novel “Demian”, Oscar Wilde expresses his feelings to the concept of good and evil as two individual concepts. In Demian, Herman Hesse, claims that there is no precise criterion of good and evil. He says that human should never be restricted by good and evil since the concept is very vague. Oscar Wilde mainly has very different perspective and he reflects it in his novel. Dorian meets tragic death in the end. However, even Oscar did not mention good always win. He divided the character into two groups; good and bad. There are some neutral characters, but readers can consider them as good side since they did not show any sins in the novel. Characters in the bad group, for instance, Dorian, meets tragic end like any other novel, however, characters in the good group did not end up living happily ever after. They all end up dying due to their weakness compared to bad characters. Oscar’s perspective towards good and evil is not simple as it is shown in the novel.

           Oscar Wilde introduced another concept to explain about the concept of good and evil. The concept is beauty. In the novel Henry mentions that beauty exceeds evil. He made a point that beauty is even better than goodness. To Lord Henry good and evil is not the matter considering reality. To him, the real conflict is individual and society that is surrounding him. Here, Oscar makes a point of moral and ethics. Moral and ethics is not about good and evil when the concept was initially raised. It was a concept to protect the surrounding society to remain silent from one individual to ruin it. Under this concept, good and evil does not matter anymore. Only beauty and ugly is the matter.

           People call Dorian’s attractive face a beauty of the beast. People look at the beauty firstly even when they are looking at a beast. As the novel turns out to be a semi-biography of author himself, Oscar Wilde thinks that beauty could exceed evil and sins could be forgiven by beauty. However, he did admit that evilness and sins makes beauty into a beast by describing how portrait changed. Aforementioned, the picture is visualization of sins and Oscar did admit that beauty does not last long in front of evilness.