“The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

Introduction

Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was written during the years that Wilde was writing fairy tales and short stories such as “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime” (1887), which the novel resembles in milieu. Aside from the fairy tales and “The Canterbury Ghost” (1887), the novel is his only prose fantasy. His dramas appeared from 1892 onward, and The Picture of Dorian Gray prefigures them in its witty dialogue and portrait of London social life.

Analysis

The story centers on three figures: an artist (Basil Hallward), his clever but impudent friend (Lord Henry Wotton), and a young, attractive, and impressionable man (Dorian Gray). Basil paints a full-length portrait of young Dorian and presents it to him as a gift. Lord Henry, who meets Dorian for the first time at Basil's studio, talks at length about the supreme value, but transience, of youth. Immediately drawn to Lord Henry's theories, Dorian observes the just-completed portrait of himself and remarks on “how sad it is” that he “shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. . . . If it were only the other way!” (Weintraub, 30) In the first section of the book, therefore, Wilde sets up a framework to examine some fundamental ideas about art and beauty: the transience of beauty, the inevitability of aging and death, the goal of the artist to “capture” beauty in art, and the corruptive influence of ideas, among others.

Wilde uses Lord Henry—whom Wilde later declared to be a depiction of how the public perceived Wilde—to provide the corruptive theories and ideas. Throughout the book Lord Henry utters clever aphorisms and paradoxes in Wilde's celebrated wordplay. Dorian is infatuated by Lord Henry and appears receptive to his theories and values. Readers soon see evidence of the corruptive influence of those theories and values in Dorian's behavior (Sedgwick, 40). Dorian becomes smitten by a young actress in a seedy theater. He returns with Basil and Lord Henry to watch her perform, but this time he is disappointed by her acting. After the performance the actress declares to Dorian that he has helped her see how false is her world of acting—the false world of the stage—and she declares her love for him. Dorian, however, spitefully dismisses her, claiming that she had thrown away her artistic genius and poetic intellect. Now, she “simply produce(s) no effect.” (Sanjuan, 28)

Upon returning home, Dorian observes a slight change in the portrait Basil had painted of him. Dorian notes a “touch of cruelty in the mouth.” It becomes evident that the painting shows the outward signs of sin and of aging, while Dorian himself does not change appearance. Although first horrified by this, Dorian eventually learns to take advantage of the situation. The narrative traces an ever-worsening degradation of Dorian Gray's soul. He lives for sensations and self-gratification, without regard for the consequences of his actions for others. He is seemingly unbound by any sense of morality—indeed, the very notion ...