Is im/morality in books a modern source of discussion?

When we review the censorship of past years, we tend to smirk. Did the French really ban "Tropic of Cancer", forcing eager readers to smuggle it out of the country in their underwear? We re-read these books and fail to find anything truly disturbing in them.

Someone once speculated that successive generations become more permissive with time. Black people and women now have the vote when it was considered inconceivable less than a century ago. Schools are no longer segregated and people tend to forget the more salacious points in the Old Testament.

Yet, Salman Rushdie was the target of death threats after publishing "The Satanic Verses". There are people who condemn the Harry Potter novels for promoting witchcraft and the complete lack of mentioning religion or God in their pages, just as people condemned the Narnia tales for the constant reference to Christianity. (There is no pleasing people, it seems.)

So discussions of morality definitely come into play, even in modern times. The religious right always have their eyes peeled for what they presume to be attacks on their beliefs and are quick to retaliate.

What made "The Picture of Dorian Gray" so shocking? Is it still shocking today? Oscar Wilde stripped the original Lipincott entries of much of their overt homosexuality and still the critics and public denounced the work as being immoral.

True, the novel doesn't condemn Dorian's actions. In fact, Wilde's prose seems to revel in Dorian's excesses, his flamboyant and varied interests, his hobbies and habits as much as Dorian himself does. When Dorian attempts to do a good thing, i.e., releasing a girl who reminded him faintly of Sybill Vane, Lord Henry Wotton mocks and derides his effort. Virtue is depicted as being tedious and boring while vice and excess are applauded.

His frustration that he can't make himself a better person is eclipsed by his realization that the portrait is a damning condemnation of his decrepit and soiled nature. He desires to get rid of it just as he got rid of Basil Hallward. The painting is a visual accomplice to his crimes, one that can point the finger at him as clearly as Alan Campball could have done.

Dorian's suicide is therefore a ghastly accident. He didn't intend to kill himself; he only wanted to destroy the witness and testimony of his own inner evil.

So where does the morality of this book come in? It is in the details, between the lines, wherein we read the emptiness of Dorian's life now that his soul has parted company from his body. He has sought to cure his soul through his senses and found the method totally lacking. No matter what Lord Henry Wotton tells him, Dorian's lifestyle has left him unfulfilled. The fact that the antihero dies at the end, slain by his own hand, is hardly to be considered a triumph of morality. It is the rest of the novel preceding it, showing the utter blasting ruin evil leaves behind it, that depicts the true degradation of Dorian's life and the novel.