For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is many things at once. The plot is a quintessential gothic tale about the corruption of a youth who is then empowered in his malevolence by a sinister portrait. It is a collection of long philosophical debates and monologues on art, love, beauty, and ethics. The book is series of quips and epigrams which characterize so well the personality of Oscar Wilde. It is beautifully written prose which contain both supreme visions of classical beauty and quiet, introspective moments painted as a surreal landscape of profound emotions. And finally, the work is a hypothetical experiment in aesthetics and sensation, pursuing both a revival of a new Hellenic ideal and an advanced form of Hedonism. The book can be described using the author’s own words:
[A] novel that [is] as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal.
The first character to appear on the page is the loquacious Lord Henry. He is an irreverent aristocrat who parrots Wildean paradoxes. These contradictions often come across as absurd or offensive, but they are ultimately a reflection on social commentary or human nature.
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.
The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
I can sympathize with everything except suffering, […] There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.
His flippant attitude towards everything in life likely contributed to the controversy of the novel. Lord Henry is a useless dandy who lives a life of leisure. He has an opinion on everyone and everything despite him doing little much of anything outside of socializing and attending performances. Strangely enough his corruption of the young Dorian Gray is merely verbal. He never actually acts upon any of his transgressive advice himself, but he excitedly suggests to Dorian thoughts and actions that eventually lead to the youth’s degeneration. In fact, he takes pleasure in treating Dorian like a vessel that he can fill with profane ideas which spur Dorian beyond the boundaries of acceptable moral behavior. He is fascinated by his ability to corrupt but is also detached from the process.
Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him—had already, indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.
He serves as a devil on Dorian’s shoulder, a Mephistopheles guiding Dorian on his path to damnation. Lord Henry provides the youth with hedonic literature, in the form of a mysterious yellow book. He encourages Dorian to chase all earthly pleasures and contends that extreme experiences are synonymous with greatness. Yet by the end of the novel, long after Dorian is past the point of no return, Lord Henry remains the same as he does in the beginning. He is a aging aristocrat who still does nothing but will say anything. In fact, when Dorian begins to reveal the extent of his grievous acts, Lord Henry simply brushes him off as being unserious and goes back to his typical useless banter. Despite Dorian’s troubles and regret, the decadent Lord tells him, “Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
If Lord Henry represents a devil on the shoulder, then the artist Basil Hallward is the angel. Basil acts as a moderating force in conversations with Lord Henry and tries to dissuade Dorian from capricious and severe actions. However, Basil is not truly an angelic character, but rather deeply flawed in his own right. He is an idolator who obsessed over Dorian Gray. Through this obsession he creates the great work of art that is Dorian’s portrait. Later, after giving the picture to Dorian, he makes his confession:
I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art….
Basil early on attempts to guard Dorian from Lord Henry. This would be a noble act if it was not for his own selfish reasons. His worship of the youth causes his art to suffer, because all he can paint is variations of Dorian. Once the magical power of the portrait dawns on Dorian, he too develops his own obsession with its beauty. He however does not want to divulge the dark mystery to the artist. He announces to Basil that he will no longer sit for portraits. While Basil discloses his hidden obsession, Dorian simply tells the painter, “There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.” Happy that Basil does not press him any further on the painting’s secrets, Dorian brushes aside Basil’s confession with a Wildean turn of phrase.
[W]hat have you told me? Simply that you felt that you admired me too much. That is not even a compliment.
Basil was idolatrous of Dorian. This is his downfall, and he suffers terribly for the sin. Later on, Dorian unveils the transformed portrait to the painter. The grotesque visage in the picture terrifies Basil, and he refuses to believe it is his original painting. Dorian with a twisted temperament reminds Basil that it was he who was there since the beginning and that he shares the blame in this whole sordid affair.
[Y]ou met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks.
Dorian Gray begins the story as a naive young aristocrat. He comes from a wealthy family and was raised in London’s high society. The Adonis-like character has a reserved and shy nature at first but opens up more as Lord Henry lavishes him with philosophy and irreverent banter. Lord Henry through words and Basil through his artistic worship instill upon the young man a sense of vanity, but also the realization that his youth will fade from its current zenith. Early on Lord Henry tell Dorian:
Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly…. Ah! realize your youth while you have it.
Eventually Dorian discovers the magical secret of the portrait that Basil painted. His sins will corrupt and age his image in the picture, but he will forever keep his physical youthful appearance. His initial reaction is shame as he locks the portrait away in an unused room from his childhood. It is like hiding one’s true self by keeping dark secrets in the deep recesses of one’s mind. The picture is a hidden side of Dorian’s soul that he trepidly conceals from the outside world lest his sins become revealed to everyone. However, these fears of Dorian are subsumed by his overwhelming desire to push the boundaries of human experiences. He has flashes of remorse, but quickly presses forward on his hedonic journey.
Yes, Basil could have saved him. But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.
A turning point in his moral debasement comes from a curious unnamed yellow book given to him by Lord Henry. It follows the experiences of a young Parisian attempting to realize all passions and modes of thought from the previous centuries. It is an enigmatic device, because Wilde goes to great length to describe the effects the book has on the reader, while never exposing what is written on its pages.
One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.
The yellow book is like a play within a play. Just as its anonymous character pursues his passions, so too does the protagonist of Wilde’s novel. The introduction of this book to the story acts as a prologue to Chapter 11. Herein Dorian relentlessly pursues the collection of specialized aesthetic fixations. It ranges widely from perfumes to South American instruments to ecclesiastical vestments. He fills his house with rare objects from all corners of the globe as he dives blindly in a consumerism that was only available to the upper echelons of Victorian England. Like Dr. Faustus in Marlowe’s play, he receives a grand supernatural power, yet squanders its potential; he wastes his eternal youth on fine frivolities. Times passes freely during this period, and Dorian spends it in society befriending, corrupting, and bringing ruination upon others. He develops a vanity not only for his good looks, but also for his fall from grace as he pursues a worship of the senses.
He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.
This ultimately leads to an utter inversion of the relationship between the beautiful and the good.
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
The debasement of Dorian’s soul continues in a downward spiral as the plot progresses. At times he has moments of reflection or attempts to change his course, but he finds that the path he has started is leading towards an inevitable doom. He is left to conclude near the end that it would have been “[b]etter for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it.” Instead, he escaped consequences and was able to freely push his broken soul to the absolute limits of damnation.
The plot of the novel is highly entertaining and intriguing. A great example of the narration is the Sibyl Vane story arc which is drenched in symbolism and irony. She is an actress literally named vain, and she exclusively plays heroines from Shakespearean tragedies. Dorian’s introduction to the cheap theater where she acts comes from a street encounter with the slimy owner.
A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. ‘Have a box, my Lord?’ he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous servility.
Here Dorian first sees Sibyl playing Juliet. Despite of dilapidated theater and aged actors poorly playing their parts, Dorian becomes enamored with the shows there. He is utterly captivated by Sibyl’s beauty and stage presence. She is a sacred object to Dorian. The youth idolizes his newfound love in Sibyl and expresses it to Lord Henry. In typical Lord Henry fashion, he suggests, “It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian[.]”
Sibyl lives with her old mother who is an eccentric spirit. She views the world as a stage and always speaks as if she is acting. The irony is that once Dorian confesses his love to Sibyl, she loses the ability to act out love in the Shakespearean plays. Now that she has felt real love, she is unable to fake it on the stage. This ultimately leads to her demise which Dorian views as the ending of a beautiful Greek tragedy. He recalls her as “a wonderful tragic figure sent on to the world’s stage to show the supreme reality of love.” However, this sequence of events marks a turning point in Dorian’s degradation. He goes from mourning Sibyl and revering the romantic ideal she represented to callously discarding her actions as worthless.
Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty.
Throughout the novel there are moments of morbidly beautiful atmosphere. Here Wilde artfully describes the vast depths of emotional thought in a time of solitude. One particularly striking example is a description of waking from a slumber.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.
Night gives way to twilight which in turn gives way to dawn.
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
Gradually the transition to morning is complete.
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.
Wilde’s prose is highly ornate at times; jewels of the English language for the reader to treasure. This style also appears in some of the discussions surrounding art. The author offers a powerful metaphor explaining how the painter Basil Hallward is inspired artistically by the youthful Dorian.
The new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was!
Wilde has an ability to create settings in his writing that are brought to life with these descriptive flourishes. There is a haunting opium den full of ne’er-do-wells where misery hangs in the air like thick smoke and a frosty morning hunt on a rural estate. All these moments are memorable thanks to Wilde’s gorgeous style.
The personification of concepts is another stylistic choice that adds to the satisfaction of reading this work. When characters engage in debates about a subject, they describe Time, Death, Beauty, Genius, and the like as people with motivations and moods. For example, Lord Henry notes that:
Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
It is deeply humanizing to read intellectual conversations on these subjects that delve into the whims and fancies of a concept. It reifies the humanity of these ideas, and it is refreshing in an age where academic discussions revolve around deconstructing topics ad absurdum.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel and what makes The Picture of Dorian Gray a unique piece is the discourse on art. The preface of the novel alludes to many of the central themes surrounding art which Wilde then goes on to expand on these ideas throughout of the novel via the dialogue. Like most of the philosophical debates, they center around idealized forms of the subject. Basil describes Dorian’s inspiration in the painter’s art as an intangible force.
And it had all been what art should be—unconscious, ideal, and remote.
The book has critiques on art that readily reveals the intent of author. When the “ethical sympathy” of an artist is present in the work, then the artist has failed in Wilde’s eyes. In a similar vein, it is also a failure when the artist inserts himself into the piece.
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
This line is interesting, because the three central characters of the book all have aspects of the author present in them, especially Lord Henry with his numerous Wildean paradoxes and quips. While this could be a self-deprecating line, Wilde can take solace in Basil’s reasoning about the ability of art to hide the author’s inner thoughts.
Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour—that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
Not only does art obscure its inspiration, but it exists without morality. Dorian accuses Lord Henry of poisoning him with an immoral book. The Lord flatly responds that the work had no hand in Dorian’s sinful choices.
Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile.
This reasoning by Lord Henry is a defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The story had many critics when it was first published in England for being obscene. Wilde holds that art exists by itself in a vacuum and this morality is downstream from the idealized form of any art.
A hallmark of Wilde’s writing, whether it is The Picture of Dorian Gray or his plays, is his verbal wit. The dialogue is so darn quotable. Oscar Wild was the child of two Anglo-Irish intellectuals, but his Irish side really comes out when he mocks a target. Characters, traditions, polite society, the human condition, and many more all fall victim to his barbs. Here is a selection of witticisms from the novel.
With an evening coat and a white tie […] anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.
[S]he is a peacock in everything but beauty.
My dear fellow, she tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.
The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves.
Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
[The Englishman] hoisted the Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought. The inherited stupidity of the race—sound English common sense he jovially termed it—was shown to be the proper bulwark for society.
Not “Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer of man to a most just God.
The character Lord Henry delivers the majority of Wildean jabs, but other characters also play their role as a mouthpiece or a target. Sometimes it feels that certain minor characters are created just for a particular line Wilde wanted to write. This approach can be summed up by a quote from Dorian addressing Lord Henry:
You would sacrifice anybody […] for the sake of an epigram.
It is a complex piece. The density of the text can take some adjustment to if one is not accustomed to reading older books. The sentence structure sometimes approaches grandeur as the author describes a Hellenic vision of classical beauty. There is a great deal to be gleaned from a rereading of the text. In the conversations, Wilde flips back and forth so readily between dandies engaging in superfluous banter and deep philosophical deliberations. Finally, The Picture of Dorian Gray can be challenging or divisive to a contemporary Western reader. In an age where the remaining vestiges of traditional decorum are under constant cultural assault, it is difficult to read a book written from the perspective of an author who railed against such social norms in an era where they were firmly established. Lord Henry will decry prudence with tirades such as:
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
The West lives in an age of plenty and its denizens can yield to almost any impulse of temptation nowadays. It is enslaved to base desires of lust, gluttony, vanity, and sloth while lacking in the classical aesthetics also romanticized by the author. Ultimately, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a moral Christian tale. Lord Henry succeeds in his corruption of young Dorian and the youth lives out the new Hedonism extolled by the aristocrat. It is like a grand experiment in aesthetics that unsurprisingly ends in failure. The characters of Lord Henry, Dorian, and Basil are all autobiographical of Oscar Wilde to a certain extent, and the quips, arguments, and monologues of Lord Henry align closely with the dandy persona Wilde cultivated in his lifetime. Like Dorian Gray, Wilde too was ill-fated by his decadent actions, though that all happened long after this novel’s publication. While at a surface level many of the statements from Lord Henry and eventually the corrupted Dorian can sound inflammatory to a reader tired of decadence, it is important to place them in the larger context of the novel and Wilde’s life. Furthermore, there is wisdom in not taking everything so seriously. Those who are unable to laugh at themselves are rigid and therefore not anti-fragile. Absurdity is part of the human condition and the words of Oscar Wilde offer levity in response
Link to the text via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174-h/174-h.htm
