There has been much controversy over Dorian Gray’s and, thus, Oscar Wilde’s immorality in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Despite Dorian’s tragic death clearly echoing a cause and effect sentiment, the novel never suggests that good does triumph over evil like a typical Victorian novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a departure from the 19th century realistic and didactic literature. This debate is also deeply rooted in modern aestheticism: art for art’s sake. Critics note that Wilde is heavily influenced by Walter Pater and his aestheticism, and the perversity of the novel is a reflection of the immoral aestheticism of both Wilde and Pater. Wilde, however, is not simply championing an aesthetic of sin and hedonism. In the novel, Wilde suggests a new kind of writing before modernist writers. He believed in the potential transformation from the dichotomous virtuous hypocrite into a whole person that includes both good and evil sides of a human being. Both Dorian and Wilde fail in this endeavor of self-development into a free being incorporating the repressed dualistic human nature. This book, however, clearly shows that Wilde as a belated Romantic has attempted to suggest a new way of writing, synthesizing good and evil, transgressing life and art against fixed values and rigid morals and daring to act out such forbidden things as homosexuality in the Victorian society. (Kookmin University)