Lord Henry Taunts Dorian example essay topic

"Those who find ugly meaning in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault". (Oscar Wilde). Dorian Gray is an example of a typical ideal aristocrat during the time which Oscar Wilde lived. Throughout the novel, Dorian goes through stages in his life that leads to his self-absorbed and corrupted character.

His curiosity of life strives him to explore these stages. He believes he is living in an age of continual crisis, searching for a deeper meaning in his life. It the beginning of the novel, Basil Hallward paints a portrait of Dorian Gray, revealing his inner-most obsession. "I know you will laugh at me", says Basil, "but I really can't exhibit it.

I have put too much of myself into it". (Wilde, 20) When Basil's elitist "friend", Lord Henry Wotton sees the painting, he is much appreciative of Dorian's beauty. Dorian is so pure and innocent-he doesn't know anything about the anxiety of life. He has all the beauty of a child in him, but then Lord Henry enters into the picture with his influential goal for life and its meaning.

"Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad". Lord Henry taunts Dorian and continues to remind him of all the sin that is building up and that even though his body is not aging, his soul is deteriorating fast. Lord Henry is the beginning of his corruption, but he isn't the entire reason for this development. Sibyl Vane's death happened on the verge of his transformation.

She is the entire innocence, beauty, and purity that are in him. When she dies, she takes his whole childhood away. He feels empty without his innocence and he filled this emptiness by answering to his corrupted transformation. It is after her death that he recognizes his sins-he realizes how horrible he had treated her on the night she confesses her undying love for him. The most important thing is that it is his choice to go along with Lord Henry and his luring thoughts. From this point on, he starts ruining his life and soul.

He gets a bad reputation in society, murders Basil, and starts taking opium. Even his last hope for salvation-Hetty-doesn't save his soul from the shadow, which has suppressed all that is shameful in his life. As a result, he stabs the painting. The painting is all of Dorian's hate, fear, and sadness reduced onto a canvass. He gives up his soul over his body, and ends up losing it all. His body is only a shell that protects him from showing his shameful self.

His shell is his superficial self; it is the soul underneath this shell that he finds his true self. Without his soul, he has nothing and no meaning in life. The value of true beauty relates to both the novel and the 19th century. "To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtue is not real to him.

His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He comes as an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. That time of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- -that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.

Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own should starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of the race.

Perhaps we never really had it. The terror in society, which is the basis of moral, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us". (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 34) Influence and corruption are similarly linked, in that they conform the way one thinks and looks upon the world. Like a puppet, Lord Henry stands in the distance, holding back Dorian's strings.

When he meets his His undeveloped and na " ive morals thrive on Henry's philosophical teachings, similar to those of the Enlight ment. However, Basil Hallward is skeptical about Dorian's new friend. He fears Lord Henry will have a significant influence on Dorian, a negative one nonetheless. "Don't spoil him. (Oscar Wile, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 31) After their first meeting, Dorian becomes upset with Lord Henry and his speech about the fleetingness of beauty. Highly educated and of elite social class, he instructs Dorian to use his beauty to attain great achievements, such as power, money, love, and class.

"Some day when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passions branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly Now wherever you go, would charm the world. Will it always be so? You have a wonderfully, beautiful face, Mr. Gray... Beauty is a form of genius-is higher, indeed that genius, as it needs to explanation.

-Lord Henry (38).