Oscar Wilde論 : The Picture of Dorian Gray를 중심으로 especially in reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray = A Study of Oscar Wilde

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

So far Oscar Wilde has been regarded as a notorious aesthete whom English society in ninety-nineties accused violently of immoral behaviors. But, as will be seen by the careful readers of his literary works, Wilde was a sincere artist torn between the ideal of beauty & the ideal of morality. Wilde struggled to reconcile those two ideals, but failed. The Picture of Dorian Gray was the result of that failure. The main story of this novel is well known: the story of an innocent heautiful by(Dorian) who, influenced by Lord Henry(Wilde himself), degenerates into the most despicable vile criminal.
The characteristic merits of this novel are as follows: Wilde's device in this novel is the fable-form in which reality & fancy can mingle almost everywhere scattering here & there moral lessons; Wilde uses Lord Henry as his mouthpiece whose epigrammatic talks is really brilliant & charming; & Wilde uses the method of the double-character novel by which he can make Dorian's portait by Basil Hallward a symbol of Eternal Youth & Beauty.
But the defect of this novel is apparent to the careful reader. In general, it is difficult to suppose such concept as an eternal young beauty. Nevertheless, to maintain for ever that beauty Dorian commits several crimes which he fancies he could impute to his own portrait, so that it will hecome more & more ugly through the crimes while Dorian himself remains always young & beautiful. This paradoxical motif functions very effectively for the progression of the plot of this novel, because sin after sin Dorian becomes more & more ugly in moral consciousness while he remains as young & beautiful as ever in mere appearance, and at the last moment Dorian commits suicide his face is in fact wrinkled & ugly, while his portrait shines its brilliant young beauty.
I think Wilde had to choose between the ideal beauty & the ideaal moraliry, & subordinate one to the other as the serious writer as Dostoievsky did in Crime & Punishment or Brothers Karamazob. But Wilde wanted to maintain both of them. As a rsult of it, those two ideals excluded each other, & it was inevitable because Wilde could not stand firmly by morality, while he could not stand firmly by beauty ignoring morality at all on account of his puritanical temperament. Wilde wanted eagerly to avoid rupture with either of them. That was the psychological cause of the tragic defect of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
After two year suffering in Reading Gaol, Wilde realized that beauty can be really beautiful only when it goes hand in hand with virtue or sympathy. But it is another subject to be examined more fully elsewhere.