While Wilde’s own homosexual inclinations were well known in his day, there is no explicit mention of homosexuality in the novel. In conservative 1890s England, such openness in print would have made the novel unpublishable. Some critics attacked the novel—even in its present form—as unmanly. Still, the homoerotic relationships between the male characters are vital to the novel. Initially, Basil’s affection for Dorian, which has about it the obsessive and adoring qualities of romantic love, produces the painting that forms the heart of the novel. Certainly, Lord Henry’s relationship to Dorian is also marked by a profound affection and is likened to a seduction: “He would seek to dominate him—had already, indeed, half done so.” Meanwhile, when Dorian gives in to a life of sin, there is a strong suggestion that his numerous friendships with young men contain a homosexual element. Nowhere is this element more boldly suggested than through the character of Alan Campbell, whom Dorian blackmails into helping dispose of Basil’s body. Given the era’s tightening legal strictures against homosexual acts between men and the passage of a sodomy law that came to be known as the Blackmailer’s Charter, the implication here is that the indiscretion Dorian threatens to expose is of a homosexual nature. Despite the dangers often involved in these affairs, Wilde viewed homoerotic relationships between men as a paragon of social virtue. Returning to the teachings of ancient Greece, where men and boys shared in sexual relationships, Wilde asserted that there was nothing nobler than this love, which he considered a pillar of Western culture and art.

The idea that there is no morality in art, only beauty (or an absence of beauty, in the case of bad art), is the central tenet of a movement known as aestheticism, which sought to free literature and other forms of artistic expression from the burden of being ethical or instructive. Wilde himself was associated closely with this creed, as the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray makes clear. But the novel that follows grapples with the philosophy of art for art’s sake in a complicated way. After all, the protagonist suffers from the lessons he has learned from the yellow book that has “poisoned” him. Lord Henry insists that a book can do no such thing, and we are left to decide how much blame one can place on a book and how much blame must be placed on the reader. Indeed, in one respect, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to be a novel of extremely moral sensibilities, since Dorian suffers because he allows himself to be poisoned by a book. In other words, he defies the artistic principles that structure the yellow book. One must wonder, then, if there is such a thing as a book without some sort of moral or instruction.