Signs of the Times

Given Norris’ account of The Responsibility of the Novelist as the purpose to tell the truth and use novels as the architecture of life at the time it is written, I begin to understand more Wilde’s purpose and outcome of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde has captured life at the time he wrote this novel, portraying the vanity of the people and their desire to retain youth and beauty even at the cost of their own soul. Though his depiction is quite exaggerated, he definitely communicates his message by connecting Dorian to his portrait. Wilde builds for us a character that in his time achieves what his peers most desire, but reveals it to be the absence of true life and therefore the most detestable of desires. Dorian’s peers begin to not recognize him for his actions, because they are so far from who he truly was. In Wilde’s text Lord Henry gives us a glimpse into this perspective, “As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it,” (p. 79). Here I believe Wilde is plainly being truthful with the reader, that you are only spoiled if you do not grow. This contradicts the desire of those around him and faces directly the will of Dorian Gray to stay eternally youthful. Dorian wants to arrest that very growth that would give him wisdom and a realistic place in the world.
Wilde, through the work of a novel, has secured his place and his opinion in the world and placed his stamp of disapproval on the vanity of his time. He was rebuked and misunderstood, possibly because he called out the detestable nature of what he saw. This gives his work the measure of truth and therefore he has fulfilled the responsibility of the novelist to call it like it is.