Beauty and Society – curse or blessing?

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde[1]

“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.” [2]

Is there anyone alive today who hasn’t wished to stay young and beautiful forever? To have one amazing picture of you bear the marks of your life, while you hold onto the youth and strength that seems so quick to fade away? Dorian Gray surely has, and unlike the rest of us, his wish is granted.

The picture his friend Basil Howard has painted for him grows old and is to bear the shame of the moral less life Dorian intends to live. This is quite surprising, for when we first meet Dorian, he is a young and innocent lad, unburdened by strange desires or philosophical thoughts. He smiles, he lives, he enjoys his day in the sun and repeats all this the next day.. until he meets Lord Henry Wotton.

Lord Henry, or Harry, as he’s known throughout the book, shamelessly promotes the aesthetic lifestyle. This lifestyle feels that life can be perfectly pointless, as long as it is beautiful. Beauty and enjoying life are the only things that are worth striving towards in life. Harry’s many lectures offer a lot of things to contemplate, not only for Dorian – but also for the reader.

“That is one of the great secrets of life – to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know”.[3]

The lectures that Harry gives Dorian throughout their book have a clear and immediate effect: Dorian happily follows the aesthetic lifestyle without moral regards. He falls in love, experiences loss, shame and many other different things, always striving towards the most beautiful aspects of life, always and always allowing himself to do what he desires, because

“We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. . . . Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.” [4]

Things take a turn for the worst for Dorian, the reader feels so much regret for the poor, naïve child at the beginning of the book. Dorian Gray offers a slight look into a lifestyle many of us are afraid to even contemplate, because these days everything must be useful. But that, luckily, is not the case. While usefulness is of course a plus, it is not all there is. Sometimes all we want and deserve is beauty. Maybe not to the same extremities as Dorian Gray, but the impulse lays in everyone. After all – to remain young and beautiful, is that not what everyone secretly desires?