Historical Context
The Victorian era (1837-1901) was characterised by industrial expansion, cultural flourishing, and the expansion of the British Empire. At the time Wilde was writing his novel in 1891 the Education Act made elementary education free, a significant step towards increasing literacy.
The old landed aristocracy was slowly being ousted from power by the industrial middle class. However, there remained an upper-middle-class of titled people. They populate the salons in The Picture of Dorian Gray. These people possess their titles, their homes and their money through inheritance. The men usually inherited a seat in the House of Lords, giving them the opportunity to vote on political matters and so maintain a certain power. They also owned a town house in London as well as their countryside estate, as did Dorian Gray.
Literary background
Romantics embraced nature as an alternative to industry early in the 19th. century; in the middle of the century, the Aesthetic movement succeeded Romanticism. Adepts believed in the motto popularised by French poet Théophile Gautier: "Art for art's sake." Victorian society was practical and valued art that carried a useful social cause or a moral message. However, for the Aesthetics, beauty was enough in itself. Wilde was influenced by this movement through the art critic Walter Pater, who helped shape the movement in Britain.
Wilde incorporated the Aesthetics' philosophy of beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray, while also criticising it in the same work. Lord Henry Wotton represents aesthetic philosophy in the novel and he encourages Dorian to adopt it as a lifestyle. However, Wilde also shows how Dorian ruins many others' lives by living out this philosophy.
Just as Romanticism at the beginning of the century opposed industrialisation, the Gothic literature revival in the 1880s exposed the dark side of the romantic movement. Where romanticism saw the good in emotion, Gothic literature showed the dangers of excess passion and irrationality.
Gothic literature was a mature tradition by the time Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, and he was one of a number of authors in the period, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who adapted Gothic techniques for philosophical and critical ends. Wilde's novel applies several Gothic clichés, like the doubled self, forbidden knowledge, intense passions, and life-threatening hidden secrets. The author was inspired by the themes of Faust and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and there are allusions to these texts in the plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Discussion
One of the eye-catching gothic themes which Oscar Wilde applied in The Picture of Dorian Gray was the doubled self. The novel alludes to Goethe's Faust and Stevenson´s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which probably inspired the plot.
The theme of duality is embodied in the characters as class divisions. Dorian´s girlfriends, Hetty and Sibyl, are both from an inferior class, while those he frequents in the salons, such as Lord Fermor and Lord Henry, are aristocrats. Wilde also uses class divisions to underline the cynicism of the upper classes as represented by Henry, a declared hedonist whose livelihood depends on inheritance, compared to the girls who were romantic idealists, but had to work for their living.
The author employs binary comparisons of location to criticise Victorian society. Dorian has a country house and a town house. He uses the latter to attend dinners, the opera and plays; the former is where he gets up to activities frowned upon by formal society. The protagonist also uses the sleazier neighbourhoods in London to indulge his need for intoxication, all the while living in the upmarket part of town attended to by a French butler. The dual life he leads is underlined by the author in the juxtaposition of two chapters where we see Dorian emerge from the wharf, a haunt of drunken sailors and prostitutes, to join an aristocratic salon full of witty conversation. This double life is a direct comment on the prevailing social falsehood of the time. As Dorian himself explains to Basil, they live in “the native land of the hypocrite”.
The central duality in the novel is the portrait, Dorian´s double. Victorian society valued art that taught a useful moral message. Wilde, however, adhered to the Aesthetic movement whose adepts believed in "Art for art's sake." This implied that beauty was enough in itself and that art need carry no moral lesson. However, the author reverses Aesthetic values since he chooses to depict the increasing immorality of Dorian's behaviour through a work of art. Victorian respectability demanded outward appearance over inner reality, but Wilde gave the lie to this deception by depicting the opposite: a painting faithfully portraying the physical appearance of Dorian's inner sinfulness. His mirror reflection is that of narcissistic beauty; the canvas displays the ugly image of his soul. Wilde uses this double view of Dorian to subtly criticise the duplicity of Victorian society and possibly also to portray the limitations of his own aesthetic values since, in the end, art delivered a moral lesson.
