Abstract

ABSTRACT Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has often been viewed as an extension of the escapist aestheticist doctrine of his critical essays and of his utopian vision put forth in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” Taking the novel as an instance of a bargain-with-the-devil tale, this essay explores the possibility that, in Dorian Gray, Wilde subjected his abstract utopianism to a concrete fictional experiment, finding it wanting in terms of its omission of the social consequences of self-development through Individualism.