ABSTRACT
Critics generally describe Oscar Wilde as a transgressive, neo-Hellenic worshipper of beauty. The Picture of Dorian Gray unfolds a more complicated perspective. Dorian does establish a hedonistic cult of beauty, acting as its idolatrous priest as well as its embodied god. Despite his scorn for “Sunday-school literature,” however, Wilde cannot release his hero from moral responsibility. The novel adopts the symbolic structure of didactic idolatry tales in which the worship of beauty calls forth the wrath of a jealous God. Wilde thus enacts an unresolvable, antagonistic struggle between the desire to worship beauty and the fear of retributive punishment.
