Thus, life comes to imitate the meaning humans give to art. Humans bring meaning to art, which in turn influences life. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.” This passage goes in hand with the idea we saw in Wilde’s other work: life imitates art. Wilde describes the relationship between Dorian’s life and the book: “The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of. Humans must provide meaning that will work through art to change them. Perhaps Wilde’s point is that art cannot actively “poison” or influence, but if humans choose to let it poison them, it will transform them. The book may not have poisoned him rather, Dorian allowed himself to be poisoned. Likewise, while Lord Henry claims that books do not contain influence or convey meaning beyond what the reader brings, the text seems to contradict this at times, stating explicitly that “Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.” Simultaneously, the text informs the reader that “ never sought to free himself from it.” This points to culpability on Dorian’s end. What the preface says and what the preface accomplishes stand in contrast. Num Pages: 1216 pages, 16 b/w illus, 16 b/w plates. While the preface does seem to state the author’s view explicitly, it also provokes the reader to look for meanings. The Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde is the only truly complete and authoritative single-volume edition of Oscar Wildes works, and is available in both hardback and this paperback edition. It is difficult to tell what Wilde truly believes or what he wants to communicate. Wilde presents juxtaposing ideas: books can be poisonous, or they cannot. Oscar Wilde wrote a lot, from criticism, articles, and reviews to novels, poetry, short tales, plays, and even childrens writing. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.” The narrator seems to confirm this by saying that “Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book.” In the preface, Wilde insists that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book” and that “those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.” Later, Lord Henry echoes Wildes’s point: “As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that… The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” On the other hand, Dorian maintains that the book does poison him: “It was a poisonous book. Considering the preface of Dorian Gray in hand with the “poisonous book” that Lord Henry gives Dorian, I wondered where the “poison” in the story truly originated.
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