The Picture of Dorian Gray is chiefly a study of various Victorian art movements corresponding to different stages in the development of Victorian human nature.The characters,who are meant to be personifications of these art movements and psychological states,are not individuals but symbols that move in a shadowy world of wit and terror.Of central importance are the new art movement and type of person that indicate the terrible moral corruption at the end of nineteenth-century England.Dorians personality is split into two parts,which act and react independently and yet are linked together in a fantastic manner;the one is physical,the other spiritual,and the link is the changing portrait.As he degenerates,he becomes a perfect example of the decadent,and the picture,as it grows more and more evil,a perfect type of decadent art.Though he recognizes the need for soul which is dead,he cannot free himself of egotism and admit his moral error.Dorians role in the story is to be an object lesson to represent what hedonistic materialism might do to western civilization:a moral which the prurient will not be able to see in it,but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy.Lord Henry Wotton,an advocate of the hedonistic programme,regards the aim of life as being the self-fulfilment.Observation analysis and experiment are the scientific medhods he uses in his psychological study of mens behavior.He,who seeks to be merely the spectator of life while destroying Dorians state of innocence and plunging him into a state of experience,finds that those who reject the battle as life are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.Basil,the creator of the painting,represents an art movement that recognizes the evil within the self and deals seriously with it.He is guilty because he has put too much of himself into the painting,thereby,betraying his own idealistic concepts of art and,ultimately,playing a decisive role in Dorians decline and fall.Basils murder is unavoidable since he fails to find the balance between the aesthetic conduct and moral awareness.Sibyl is a character who knows nothing of evil.She is Wildes symbol of the old idea,embodying in herself the worlds purity.She represents the Hellenic ideal which cannot come of age and survive.Sibyl exists in a protective world of art while her projected marriage to Dorian coaxex her out of his world and causes her to come into contact with the demon universe in which she cannot emerge without dying.From a structural point of view,the contrast between the superficial mastory of the situation,based on forgetting,and the changing portrait which presents memory,creates a dynamic tension which focuses and readers attention on future interaction between the portrait and the man portrayed.In this way,the moral development of the hero becomes the central theme.The novel can only offer a pessimistic solution:individual and society,art and life,aesthetic conduct and moral awareness are irreconcilable and the tensions between them destroy all hope of a new life.