In “Dorian Gray the Escape Artist,” Jesse Sherman explores the relationship between the central character in Oscar Wilde’s novel and the aestheticism of the fin de siècle. Sherman notes Wilde’s “fastidious attention to detail.” Such detail also illuminates this essay, as the author interweaves selective summary of Wilde and paraphrases of literary critics with close description that supports his analysis. As an entry into the scholarly conversation, this essay invokes both the apparent emotional restraint and the layered detail of Victorian England: it is a remarkably civil conversation between the critics and Wilde and between Sherman and the critics as they all ponder the symbolic significance of Dorian Gray. In the process, Sherman inverts the accepted image of Dorian Gray as an aesthete, suggesting rather that he was addicted to the diversions that aestheticism offered.