Besides sharing a strong aestheticizing impulse, Oscar Wilde and Henry James both lampooned Victorian morality to make way for what Wilde called a New Ethics. The quintessential fin-de-siècle aesthete, Wilde asserts in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.” The novel that follows this preface unfolds in the form of a fairy tale of sorts and raises moral questions on nearly every page, and yet established boundaries between the moral and the immoral do indeed blur and shift. Thus this strange late-century, proto-postmodern work ventures an experiment in aestheticizing morality, in transforming Victorian deontology into an ethics that provides more scope for beauty and unorthodox choice.