【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 for everlasting youth. For the next eighteen years, pushed by Wotton’s malign influence Dorian seeks pleasure and experience, and seeks out to satisfy his hunger for a life of sensation, and finally mits murder. However, his moral lapses and growing degeneracy leaves no trace elsewhere but on the painting. During this time the portrait, hidden from view in Dorian’s attic, mysteriously ages and bee repulsive, reflecting the effects of Dorian’s excesses, while Dorian himself remains unchanged, which bees more and more frightful with each evil conduct Dorian mits. He feels unrest at the thought of the revealing painting and grows to abhor it and its creator as well. In a fit of irrational rage, he killed the artist. Then to get rid of the corpse, he blackmails his former friend, a chemist, into disposing the body to conceal his crime. His ultimate attempt to destroy the painting results in his own death。 the portrait then resumes its original appearance, and the hideous corpse found lying before it is only with difficulty identified as that of Dorian Gray. For Wilde, the purpose of art would guide life if beauty alone were its object. Thus Gray39。s portrait allows him to escape the corporeal ravages of his hedonism。 Wilde sought to juxtapose the beauty he saw in art onto daily life. Reviewers immediately criticized the novel39。s content and decadence, and Wilde vigorously responded in print. Writing to the Editor of the Scots Observer, he clarified his stance on ethics and aesthetics in art “If a work of art is rich and vital and plete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly will see its moral lesson.” He nevertheless revised it extensively for book publication in 1891: six new chapters were added, some overt decadence passages and homoeroticism excised, and a preface consisting of twenty two epigrams, such as “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” was included. Contemporary reviewers and modern critics have postulated numerous possible sources of the story, a search Jershua Mc Cormack argues is futile because Wilde “has tapped a root of Western folklore so deep and ubiquitous that the story has escaped its origins and returned to the oral tradition.” Wilde claimed the plot was “an idea that is as old as the history of literature but to which I have given a new form”. Modern critics have considered the novel to be technically mediocre: the conceit of the plot has guaranteed its fame, but the device is never pushed to its full.On the other hand, there were some critics surprisingly reading it as an ethical parable and even praising it for its high moral import. In fact, Wilde felt perplexed and infuriated at the reception of the book. Actually in the novel he consciously contained a moral lesson, “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment” (Wilde,1962:259), as he admitted in a letter to readers of The St. Tames Gazette. Moreover, he wrote in the same letter, “My difficulty was to keep the inherent moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect, and it still seems to me that the moral is too obvious.” (Wilde, 1962:292) So why most critics regarded the novel as immoral confused him. Symbolism of CharactersPervading in his literary works are epigrammic wit, amusing irony and paradoxical quotes with humorous skepticism and cynical charm. Especially in “the picture of Dorian Gray”, Wilde instills himself and his aesthetic doctrines into the three characters involved in such a tactful way that the book has since bee one of his most celebrated works, a brilliant example of his power as a storyteller and of his flamboyant wit as an aesthetic writer. For the novel, Wilde has said, “it contained much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be”. (Wilde, 1962: 352) Under the mask of the three characters, Wilde freely displays his contradictory views on the subject of art and popular morality, both of which seem convincing and he does not clarify his inclination.The three characters in question, Dorian Gray, a young with heartthrobbing physical beauty。 Basil Hallward, a painter devoted to art heart and soul。 and Lord Henry Wotton, an aristocratic dandy who tempts Dorian Gray into moral degeneration .Although the characterization of the novel to be not fully developed, the general aspect of the characters and the tenor of their conversation remind that Mr. Wilde’s objects and philosophy are different from others. Just as Merlin Holland says in his memoir of his father, “our view of Wilde must always be a multicolored kaleidoscope of apparent contradictions in need not of resolution but of appreciation.” (Raby, 1997: 16)Lord Harry plays the part of Old Harry in the story and lives to witness the destruction of every other person in it. He may be taken as an imaginative type of all that is most evil and most refined in modern civilization—a charming, gentle, witty, euphemistic Mephistopheles, who deprecates the vulgarity of goodness, regarded beauty and youth as the supreme. And also he was a man of great insight and eloquence, who could decorate his fallacies make them look like truths. Through Lord Henry, Wilde had expressed his numerous paradoxes. There was another important reason to explain why the world thinks Lord Henry is Wilde. Wilde adopted a dandical and showy pose in real life as the character Lord Henry Wotton. Henry’s philosophy about love, marriage was considered quiet the extreme of decadence, so did Wilde’s distance from his wife and two sons. Lord Henry kept seeking to be merely the spectator of life, yet a notorious spectator. “…the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” “Men marry because they are tired。 women, because they are curious。 both are disappointed”. (Wilde, 1994:168) Those cynical words uttered by Wotton were re