The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, is a satire, a cautionary tale about the excesses and destructiveness of the aristocratic class. Vanity is a tempting and socially-sanctioned vice within the aristocracy that leads to a reckless and destructive selfishness, a selfishness which in turn reveals the moral decay of the aristocracy itself. All of the wealthy people around Dorian, who blindly worship and celebrate him on the basis of his looks alone, are equally implicated in the man’s sordid destructiveness and downfall. Without their endless supply of flattery and quarter for his frivolous and uncontrolled vanity, the story of Dorian Gray could not come to fruition. Wilde forwards his notion that the malady of Dorian Gray is not his alone, but symptomatic of an aristocratic ethos that prizes physical beauty over moral and intellectual development: with disastrous and deadly consequence.

Tellingly, the most pronounced victim of Dorian’s reckless vanity is the penniless Sybil Vane, whose station in life prevents her and her family from securing justice through legal means. Dorian is only allowed to sustain his life and lifestyle by virtue of his looks, but also by virtue of his seemingly endless riches, which grant him both immediate respectability and status, and the means to cover his tracks and broker power.