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Oscar Wilde: Virtues and Vices
Oscar Wilde: Virtues and Vices
Wilde's main virtues include his courageous demeanor that goes along with his
exceedingly high creative ability. However, Wilde's wicked behavior would include his
wildness, callousness and obduracy. When combining both of his vices and virtues,
Wilde's greatness fell and he became known as a disgrace. Due to his
assertiveness,callousness and obduracy,Wide ignored what others said and stuck to
aestheticism.
His wildness, and creativity led to his wonderful plays and his only novel, but
also got in him trouble when people found out how he felt.
In relation to the book, Dorian was majorly influenced by Lord Henry. He
decided to only seek pleasure in his life. It was typical for in Dorian's social class to be
able to get away with many things and do things secretly. His behavior was easy to get
away with because of his youth, beauty, and wealth. No one believed that Dorian was
capable of doing these things. Dorian was concerned with little but himself, he did not
care who he hurt or how he hurt them. Dorian easily killed Basil because he was so
overloaded with anger towards Basil for giving him the depiction of his soul.
Oscar Wilde wrote about this topic, he once stablished:
I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is
unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.
Despite the book does not contain these reflections, this could be a possible
interpretation: Basil represented the beginnings of his evil because the portrait was
painted by him and it showed the real Dorian, with the painting Dorian became aware
of beauty he became shallow. He, unconsciously thought Basil was the one who
started his change. He had also introduced Lord Henry to him, but Dorian admired
Henry so, he did not blame him, at first, but at the end, Dorian realized that the book
that he had given to him, had poisoned his life. Basil was maybe a symbol of the real
Dorian. He was the only one that knew his true values and personality and also kept
telling him he had to showed who he really was and not the part Henry had made. This
might be another reason for which he killed him. It was unbearable to know that the
only person who knew how he first was, now saw him like that, Basil made him think
about how he had changed, in addition, he was very interested in showing the portrait,
and Dorian couldnt let him see it, otherwise, he would discover the pact that he had
made with it. Dorian fell so easily into crime and vice because he only cared about
beauty, so he thought that as along as he took care of the portrait, everything would be
fine and he could do whatever he wanted without suffering the consequences. Lord
Henry encouraged this lifestyle.
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