The paragraph-Dorian Gray

At first glance, Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" might appear as a novel of unnecessarily elaborate dialogues that lack the clear purpose of leading the storyline.

After all, when Lord Henry talks to Dorian for the purpose of persuading and charming him, he sites beautifully, but wickedly distorted quotes to convey his points. Since his phrases are so long and sometimes contain incomprehensible humors, the readers get tired of seemingly pointless digressions. However, knowing about the writer's life and what he fought against for all of his later life, the elaborate dialogues do not appear only as 'pointless digressions'.

The value Oscar Wilde considered important was 'beauty', in other words, 'aesthetics'. In the Victorian age, every 'moral' thing had a purpose; for instance, sexual intercourse was to produce offspring, not to get pleasure.

Oscar Wilde, as the one who loved men and criticized what people said as 'immorality', played with his sweetly flowing dialogues to hide hints of homosexuality, to wake the readers' senses, and to 'please' readers. Therefore, it is perhaps more accurate to assume that the enormous amount of seemingly useless sentences convey more meanings than readers would normally predict; such as the longing for beauty and distaste for morality. In this sense, the ironies and humors Lord Henry created, for example: "I have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. Except, of course, in middle-class life. But then the middle classes are not modern."
altogether seem like a digression from main point, reminding reader of the murmuring of unimportant parts, but actually the casual intention of Oscar Wilde, to hint his thoughts and philosophy in the novel.