Oscar Wilde, who is a late Victorian novelist, playwright, short story writer, critic, and poet, is one of the notable figures of aestheticism along with Walter Pater and John Ruskin. The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891, is Wilde’s only novel that revolves around the concepts of art, painting, artistic sublimity, and death. Within the frame of aesthetic beauty and aesthetic experience, Wilde’s novel presents a critical question about the idea of death caused by art and artistic beauty. Dorian Gray, who is an aesthete and Basil Hallward’s model of his painting in the novel, kills himself in the very end because of his obsession with beauty, youth and art. Both his perception of art and his relationships with Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton imply that Dorian Gray’s aesthetic environment is also a component of his aesthetic experience in which Dorian Gray poignantly develops an indispensable connexion to the painting. The main argument of this study focuses on Dorian Gray’s involvement in the process of aesthetic experience by violating or disrupting the ways of aesthetic distance that cause his death at the end of the novel.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aestheticism, Aesthetic Distance, Aesthetic Experience