Assignment: Week 6 Reading Reflection: Love and Literary Analysis (Dorian Gray)

Introduction: I selected this assignment because it offered an opportunity for me to integrate all I had been learning about literary analysis and apply it on a complete novel. Through The Picture of Dorian Gray assignment, I have been able to focus not on summarizing a plot but on exploring ways on which love, beauty, and responsibility are conveyed using word choice, focus, and narrative structure. My assignment shows progress as a literary critic because I have been able to relate an analysis on a specific text on issues such as obsession, admiration, and deterioration.

Work:

Aesthetic Admiration and the Fragility of Love in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wilde conveys many types of love in The Picture of Dorian Gray, often revealing a
connection between admiration and obsession, or admiration and self-interest. An early example
is in Basil’s love for Dorian: “There is something in your face that makes me feel that I have a
soul, a soul that is sensitive to beauty and harmony” (Wilde 23). This illustrates Basil’s
admiration as a kind of aesthetic love, one that is based on appreciation, beauty, and artistic
possibility, and not personal connection. Basil’s love is real but suggests that in the novel, love
can be as much perception and fabricated moral authority as true understanding or responsibility.
Basil’s love embodies reverential awe, which Wilde evokes through his careful word
selections. Words like “sensitive,” “beauty,” and “harmony” suggest a tone of near worship, as
though Dorian had a physical presence that evoked an almost spiritual sensation. Wilde also uses
focalization to shape this perception. Readers first experience Dorian through Basil’s eye,
revealing his almost angelic and morally idealized appearance. By presenting love through
Basil’s eyes, Wilde reminds us that admiration elevates the loved, but at the same time reduces
them to a projected image of our ideal unlike one that shares discourse or intimacy.
The relevance of the passage’s placement within the narrative structure is significant.
Basil’s keen infatuation positions Dorian as an object of affection that raises the emotional stakes
of the later thinking about corruption and vanity in the novel. The scene foreshadows how love,
no matter its context – aesthetic, romantic, or self-directed – becomes a mode of inter-character
subjectivity resulting in obsession, manipulation, and moral degeneracy. The tension between

genuine devotion and narcissistic gratification is highlighted in Basil’s aesthetic devotion while
Dorian experiences his own growing self-love.
Wilde’s handling of love mirrors the culture and society at large. The performative nature
of beauty and admiration is prominent in the upper class. Love is implicated in power, class, and
sociocultural expectation. Basil’s aesthetic love is not only soft but also the embodiment of the
fragility of love in this world, its performative qualities. Ultimately, as with almost all passages
in the text, this passage and its reading reminds us a sustaining love rarely exists. Love is easily
distorted by vanity, obsession, and social performance. Wilde’s consideration of aesthetic
admiration, from diction to focalization to placement of the narrative, compels readers to
interrogate the authenticity of love and moral choices one can make when one idolizes beauty