PODG Ch. 11

Stephen Simmons-Uvin
Ap English/Mr. George
3/18/10
PODG Ch. 11

"There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful"(150).

This lifestyle that Dorian has adopted over this several year time period is not only unhealthy, but irrational and impossible. The average human being or any human being for that matter has the ability to distinguish right from wrong and moral from immoral, even if they do not necessarily abide by those principle values.That is why we feel like the world is in a war against us when we do something wrong and why we feel the need to help someone who needs to be helped. We are prone to experience certain emotions in specific situations, and rely on our conscience to pave the road of our tumultuous lives. However, Dorian now more than ever seems to not only ignore whats moral and immoral, but is completely oblivious to it. Previously, "the picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience" (96), and now represents his sick and corroding conscience. As the picture ages and decays, Dorian's conscience does as well, crippling his chances of ever becoming a rational human being once again. Dorian has escaped the bounds of human morality into a world comprised of foolish ideals and devilish pleasure. the average human would not be able to survive in a world without morals because there is no such world. So what then, is Dorian Gray?

"He felt a curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters--things of bestial shape and with hideous voices"(138).

Nature is beautiful, yet it possesses hideous things. Dorian is beautiful and he possesses this old, decaying, sickly-faced, piece of canvas that Dorian calls a painting. The point being that at the root of every evil there is beauty and glory, whether it be good or bad. Also that even those less beautiful things such as the painting and aspects of nature such as hurricanes and earthquakes are important, and not in fact "useless" as Wilde stated in the preface. Beauty is not something that spontaneously comes into existence, but erupts from the gruesome terrors which surround it, just as the most beautiful of flowers blossom from the most hideous of seeds. Dorian is a counterexample for Wilde's opinion of art in the preface. Dorian's situation proposes that art is not in fact useless because it grants him the one thing that he had desired since the very beginning of the novel: beauty, and the happiness that comes with it. This portrait means more to Dorian than the value of human life, and although it might reflect his hideous and devilish nature beneath his skin, it simply mirrors what Dorian is not: unbearable, agonizing ugliness.