The Picture of Dorian Gray

For the design of the ebook, we used Wix, website building platform to emphasize the aesthetic beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray. We chose color scheme of the website to be black and white, to reflect the opposing force of darkness and beauty in the novel.

In the main page, four pictures are layered side to side: actual cover of the novel, painting of Lady of Shalott, cover of yellow book, and real photograph of Oscar Wilde. These photographs all possess similar look on their faces: distant and glimpse of sadness. By putting these pictures on the cover page of our ebook, ebook also foreshadows the dark downfall of Dorian Gray.

 

For the cover of ebook, attached below, we have integrated picture of Dorian Gray and his painting with design of yellow book. Yellow book was a periodical in Victorian age that deal with aesthetic radical ideas. Even though Oscar Wilde criticized the yellow book back in the age, The Picture of Dorian Gray holds very similar ideals of aestheticism. Thus, cover of ebook of Wilde’s novel merges yellow book and Dorian Gray’s painting.

 

In pages 1 and 2, we fused William Morris’s topography and paintings of Dorian Gray respectively. We included William Morris’s design because it aligns with the focus of aesthetic beauty in the novel and the text we have selected for annotation.

Wilde’s distinct persona and trademarked style is what allowed him to now be regarded as one of the original celebrity figures. Wild’s morals upheld many philosophical ideas of modernism that varied greatly with the out-dated traditions of the Victorian era. He introduced a new idea of the representation of individuals contradicted the old Victorian way of representation. This contradiction is clearly seen in many of his works, especially in the author’s own novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. By closely observing his work, we can clearly see and understand that he wasn’t famous for just sashaying the London streets. Unlike other well-known individuals, Oscar tried to flip the idea and show his inside to the public rather than concealing it from the people. Jonathan Goldman asserts this new concept in his book, “Wilde disdained the division of exterior and interior, preferring—in a gesture foreshadowing much of twentieth-century celebrity—to view the individual as a public image that circulates on the market. By turning his insides out and wearing his subjectivity on his lapel, as it were, Wilde turned himself into a commodity” (Goldman). Wilde clearly integrates many of his ideals and feelings into his works. We chose to incorporate the cover of Goldman’s book entitled Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity to demonstrate Wilde’s success in declaring his genius.

 

“It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” (Wilde Ch.1)

This quotation is strongly linked to different interpretations of the Lady of Shalott by many artists. Also in the Yellow Book each volume has a different cover page representing a different part of the artist. On the homepage each image has a different feel to it. In relation to the quote by Lord Henry, there is some part of the artist that each image portrays.

"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.”

The word should stands out here in reference to an ideal situation where the artist is separate from his work. This website is our art masterpiece, displaying traces of our predilections as individual and as a group especially in the colours, animations and even the font of the text.