Everyone Wants an Extravagant Lifestyle: Is Your Soul worth Losing to the Seven Deadly Sins
Oscar Wilde’s fictional novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is about a young, charming man that is in conflict with the cultural anxieties of living an extravagant, seductive, moralistic, and self-confident life style along with two friends with similar conflicts. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that reveals many aspects of cultural anxieties instilled in three characters. The cultural anxieties complicate the virtues of every character in the novel and lead each of their lives into the vices of their virtues. All the characters have the anxieties for living great lives. However, all their lives turn for the worse including death. Each character wants more or less than their role, place, and identity in society. The anxieties of the Late Victorian Era were “sexual restraints, low tolerance …show more content…
He shows lust thru his work by painting the character Dorian Gray with passion and desire. During the times of the Late Victorian Era, homosexuality is immoral. Basil’s immoral secret would put him in a situation of blackmail or scandal if his secret were reveled. He is not at sin thru the way the other two characters are deadly to one self from the cultural anxieties. His sins are only from the negative vices of generous virtues rather than the excess vices like Dorian Gray and Lord Henry poses. He disinclined activities or exertions from his true nature of homosexuality because of fear from the cultural anxieties. His sloth like attitude identified that he did not accept himself as a homosexual. This attitude led him to be indecisive that Dorian Gray was subjective of violating the cultural anxieties. In addition, his laziness to see the truth led to his gruesome death; killed by the one person he admired the most, his so-called friend Dorian