PLATO’S MYTH OF THE CAVE REFLECTED IN WILDE’S PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
PLATO’S MYTH OF THE CAVE REFLECTED IN WILDE’S PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Summary/Abstract: Wilde’s delight in provocation, and his exploration of alternative moral perspectives, mark his most important work of fiction,”The Picture of Dorian Gray”. The novel’s Preface presents a series of attitudinizing aphorisms about art and literature which end with the bald statement:”All art is quite useless.” The narrative that follows is a melodramatic, Faustian demonstration of the notion that art and morality are quite divorced. It is, nevertheless, a text riven by internal contradictions and qualifications. Aestheticism is both damned and dangerously upheld: hedonism both indulged and disdained. Dorian Gray is a tragedy of sorts with the subtext of a morality play; it is self destructive, darkly sinning central character is at once a desperate suicide and a martyr.

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