The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.”

Although Lord Henry always speaks in a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek manner, he also often very boldly proclaims his own shallowness, as if it is profound insight and a virtue. This quote exemplifies his character’s manner. He explicitly proclaims his opinion that true beauty and true intellect are incompatible. 

“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. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”

Basil speaks obliquely about his homosexual attraction to Dorian Gray. Veiled by his words is the belief that if others were to see his painting of Dorian Gray, they would impose an “autobiographic” lens on it and recognize his sexual desire for Dorian, which is the true reason that Basil does not wish to exhibit the painting. He says that he wishes that Dorian’s beauty could be appreciated in an “abstract” sense, free from the sexual narratives of society. But he knows that it will not be addressed as such, and feels that he must hide either his own desire or the implication of homosexuality that the beautiful portrait would invite. 

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral [...] from a scientific point of view [...] Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. […] The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. […] [People] have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.”

This quote is spoken by Lord Henry. He believes that selfishness and self-realization are the highest aims that man can strive for. He defines his own moral standpoint in terms that many of his contemporaries would view as amoral or immoral, and is unapologetic about it. 

“Beauty is a form of Genius—is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. […] It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. […] It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

Lord Henry reverses a commonplace binary: the belief that beauty is purely superficial and shallow, while intellect is more permanent and substantial. Through the character of Lord Henry, Wilde is able to both challenge popular conventions as well as spin a cautionary tale about the perils of excessive vanity.  

“‘How sad it is!’ murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. ‘How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful, it will never be older than this particular day of June [...] If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!’”

This quote makes Dorian’s proverbial deal with the devil plain. In this moment, he is willing to give his immortal soul in order to remain physically young and beautiful for all of his days. Through this narrative, Wilde parses the naive passions of youth, and invites readers to consider the consequences of arrested development—the physical, mental, intellectual, and moral kinds. 

“Lord Henry watched [Dorian] with a subtle sense of pleasure. How different he was now from the shy, frightened boy he had met in Basil Hallward’s studio! His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul, and Desire had come to meet it on the way.”

Lord Henry admires the change that he has helped shape in Dorian. He glories in Dorian’s embrace of his own beauty and its accompanying vanity. To Lord Henry, this new realization and awareness represents Dorian coming into his fullest self. 

“As for the lives of one’s neighbors, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one’s moral views about them, but they are not one’s concern. Besides, Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.”

Lord Henry proudly proclaims his iconoclasm. Specifically, he proclaims that blind allegiance and conformity to the popular ideals and morals of the time are immoral, and that his own brand of vain narcissism is actually a higher moral calling than that which most of his contemporaries undertake. He displays his pomposity, his confidence, and also his privilege here: It is essentially easy for him, as a male member of the aristocracy, to spout such iconoclastic and provocative views. He will never suffer any social or economic consequences due to his unorthodox views. 

“I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.”

This quote is spoken by Dorian after Sybil Vane has had a disastrous performance as Shakespeare’s Juliet. Dorian prized Sybil for her ability to act—that is, he prized her for her ability to create a beautiful fiction. Sybil’s renunciation of the theatrical arts in favor of her true, lived love for Dorian is the effective inverse of Dorian’s value system. Through this passage, Wilde asserts that an immoderate devotion to the artifice of beauty in art makes people morally and emotionally bankrupt. 

“The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. He winced, and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry’s many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?”

Dorian has caused the suicide of Sybil Vane through his cruel, reckless, and total abandonment of her. The enchantment of the painting is making itself plain, as his painted likeness bears the physical scars of his moral misdeeds, while his actual body remains beautiful and unsullied. Through this conceit, Wilde invites the reader to think carefully about the often taken-for-granted notion that physical beauty is the herald of moral purity. 

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence […] Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.”

Lord Henry asserts that the inchoate nature of most tragedies renders them essentially useless. It is only those tragedies which carry with them “elements of beauty” and render themselves legible by falling in line with theatrical or dramatic conventions (in this case, the purported romanticism of Sybil’s suicide) that rise to the level of moral importance. It’s a convoluted way to prize vanity and the application or realization of artistic convention as the ultimate goal of life. 

“To you at least [Sybil] was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare’s plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, so she passed away.”

Lord Henry presses on with his thesis even further, and more explicitly. He declares that Sybil’s true value resided in her ability to skillfully realize Shakespeare’s theatrical scripting, and not in anything that she completed while not playing a part. 

“Why inquire too closely into it? For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. […] What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.”

Dorian admires the enchantment that exists between himself and the painting: He delights in his ability to essentially commit any and all manner of transgression (against both bourgeois/traditional morality, and against the lives of other people) and retain his physical beauty. Through this trope, Wilde indicts not only the character of Dorian’s vanity but also the superficiality and depravity his surrounding society. 

“As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean—middle-class virtue, and all that kind of thing.”

Lord Henry snobbishly dismisses the morals of the “middle class,” diminishing people who faithfully and successfully undertake their duties to their fellow man and family as “commonplace” and “tedious.” From his privileged station in life, Lord Henry feels righteous and also deliciously rebellious in his rejection of these values, which he sees as beneath him. He seems to be completely aware of the transgression of such a standpoint, and indeed finds it entertaining. 

“The painter felt strangely moved. The lad was infinitely dear to him, and his personality had been the great turning-point in his art. He could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. After all, his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away. There was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble.”

Basil faithfully enacts Wilde’s assertion of the widespread social norm of uncritically assigning moral fortitude and innocence to the good-looking. Basil is so enraptured by Dorian’s physical beauty here that he can only believe the boy to be unassailably “good” and “noble.” His own eventual death by Dorian’s hand proves the foolishness of this automatic presumption, and ultimately reveals the immoral superficiality of such a belief.  

“Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. […] The picture had to be concealed. There was no help for it.”

This passage reveals Dorian’s full commitment to the vanity that he was initiated into by both Basil and Lord Henry. He fears the ravages of time on his body, and embraces the enchantment that outsources the decay of his physical body to the painting. He therefore commits to leading a life of deception in service to the ultimate value of vanity and the preservation of his physical body. To Wilde, this represents a crowning moment of immorality. 

“But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system […] no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.”

Wilde essentially asserts that Dorian nurtures no longstanding, in-depth dedication to any philosophy or intellectual pursuit. Instead, Dorian dabbles superficially in various schools of thought, and only returns to “the senses” as the means to access vitality and the proverbial meaning of life.

“For weeks he would not go there, would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart […] Then, suddenly, some nights he would creep out of the house, go down to dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. On his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.”

The joy that Dorian derives from the enchantment that exists between himself and the painting has begun to fray. The painting has kept judicious track of all of Dorian’s sins against his fellow man, and Dorian’s likeness in the painting has transformed monstrously in direct correlation to those sins.

“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. […] But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth—I can’t believe anything against you. And yet [...] I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, and I don’t know what to say.”

Even after about 20 years, the spell that Dorian’s beauty cast upon Basil when he first met Dorian has not broken. Basil stubbornly relies upon Dorian’s enduring physical beauty in order to declare the man a paragon of morality. He foolishly and naively refuses to believe any ill word spoken about or against Dorian because he cannot and will not believe that someone in possession of Dorian’s superhuman good looks could possibly be guilty of any moral wrong. This misguided belief will prove literally fatal to Basil. 

“The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not dreamed at all. His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”

Dorian has slept in a peaceful oblivion, following his murder of Basil. Wilde subtly indicts his protagonist, asking the reader to witness Dorian’s utter selfishness—the way that he is ultimately unbothered by his taking of another man’s life. Whether this is due to the symbiosis that exists between Dorian and the painting (in which the painting bears the horrific consequences of Dorian’s misdeeds), or to Dorian’s narcissism and self-centeredness is left up to interpretation. 

“What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible it was!—more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.”

After murdering Basil, Dorian’s hand in the painting has become splattered with blood: the quintessential image of guilt. Still, though, Dorian is less concerned with the reality of what he has done and with the end of Basil’s life, and more concerned by the ugliness of both the painting and of Basil’s corpse. For Wilde, this wild and immoral superficiality is a result of worshiping artificial beauty over the lives of others.  

“Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead, Dorian Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city, and now and then he repeated to himself the words that Lord Henry had said to him on the first day they had met, ‘To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.’ Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.”

This passage depicts Dorian toward the end of his life. Lord Henry’s adage of curing the soul by means of the senses and vice versa has lost its blind appeal. Dorian still clings to the adage, however, and Wilde asserts his own moral point of view by linking the moral bankruptcy of the adage to drug use and dependency. 

“Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason.”

This quote further reveals the failure of Dorian’s quest. Here, he ends up thirsting after the very thing that he gave his soul in order to avoid: ugliness. His excess of physical beauty has insulated him from a true experience of the complexity of life—both its ugliness and its beauty. 

“As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. […] A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change [in th painting], save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite.”

Near the end of his life, Dorian attempts to reform himself. He meets another girl like Sybil—beautiful, but belonging to the lower class. By letting her down gently, Dorian hopes to redress the cold cruelty that he showed to Sybil. He hopes to undo his wickedness and become “good.” However, this action is too little, too late. It is a mark of his own rampant grandiosity that he believes that his paltry offering of repentance could cure the lifetime of sin and selfishness that he has lead. The painting continues to reflect his inner ugliness.