The Picture of Dorian Gray Summary

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The Picture of Dorian Gray Summary

SHORT PLOT

The novel opens in Basil Hallward’s studio. He is discussing his recent portrait of Dorian Gray with his patron Lord Henry Wotton. He tells Lord Henry that he has begun a new mode of painting after his contact with Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty. He doesn’t want to introduce Lord Henry to Dorian because he doesn’t want Lord Henry to corrupt the young man. He says he is so taken with Dorian Gray that he feels the young man dominates all his thoughts. When Lord Henry meets Dorian Gray, he finds him to be totally un-self-conscious about his beauty. Lord Henry talks to Dorian Gray of his philosophy of life. Lord Henry covers for people’s selfish motives. Dorian Gray feels the weight of Lord Henry’s influence on his character. When they see the finished portrait of Dorian that Basil has painted, they are enthralled by the beauty that Basil has captured. Dorian bemoans the inevitable loss of his youth. He wishes that he could change places with the painting, that it could grow old and he could stay the same.

Lord Henry decides to dominate Dorian Gray just as Basil has told him Dorian Gray dominates him. They have dinner at Lord Gray’s Aunt Agatha’s house. She is a philanthropist and Dorian has been working with her. Lord Gray wittily ridicules the goals of philanthropy and Dorian is swept away by his logic.

Weeks later, Dorian tells Basil Hallward and Lord Henry that he has fallen in love with a young actress named Sibyl Vane, who acts in a run-down theater. He tells them he is engaged to Sibyl Vane. At the Vanes’ house, Sibyl tells her mother of how much she is in love with her young admirer, whose name she doesn’t know, but whom she calls Prince Charming. Mrs. Vane thinks her daughter might be able to get money out of the aristocratic young man. Sibyl’s brother James, on the other hand, hates the idea of a rich man using and then leaving his sister. It is James’s last night on shore before he ships off as a sailor. Before he goes, he vows to kill the man if he ever hurts Sibyl. He learns from his mother that his and Sibyl’s father was an aristocrat who vowed to take care of the family financially, but died before he could.

Dorian arranges a dinner with Basil and Lord Henry, after which they will go to the theater to see Sibyl Vane act. He tells the other men how amazed he has been by Sibyl’s acting talent. When they arrive at the theater and the play begins, they are all appalled at Sibyl’s horrible acting. The two other men try to console Dorian Gray, telling him it doesn’t matter if a wife is a good actor or not. He tells them to leave and he stays on in torment through the rest of the play. When the play is over, he goes back stage to talk to Sibyl. She tells him she doesn’t care that her acting was so bad. She says she realizes that she can no longer act because she is in love with him. Before, she could act because she had no other world besides the created world of the stage. Dorian tells her he is ashamed of her and disappointed in her. He tells her he only fell in love with her because of her artful acting. Now he feels nothing for her. Sibyl begs him not to leave her, but he refuses to listen and walks out. He wanders through the streets of London, as far as Covent Garden.

When he gets home, he looks at the portrait that Basil had painted of him. He notices to his horror that the look of the figure in it has changed. It looks cruel and scornful. He feels horrible remorse for what he has done to Sibyl and writes a long impassioned letter begging her forgiveness. The writing acts as a purgative for his emotions. When he’s finished, he is no longer eager to go see Sibyl. He lays the letter aside and lounges about. Lord Henry comes to visit him and tells him Sibyl Vane committed suicide the previous evening. Dorian is horrified at first and then decides that her suicide is a perfectly artful response to what happened. He loves the art of it and promptly gets over his heart ache. That night, he goes out to the theater with Lord Henry and impresses Lord Henry’s sister greatly.

The next night, Basil Hallward visits Dorian and is shocked to find out that Dorian is not upset over Sibyl’s death. He can’t judge Dorian, though, because Dorian looks so innocent in his youth. He tells Dorian that he has idolized him from the moment he first met him. He wants to show the portrait he painted of Dorian in an art show in Paris. Dorian refuses to let him see the portrait. When he leaves, Dorian decides to put the portrait away so no one can see it. He manages to get the portrait upstairs and place it in a room he lived in as a child. He becomes paranoid that his servant, Victor, is interested in the portrait.

Years pass. Dorian is twenty-five years old. He has become a complete aesthete, living his life in search of beauty and pleasure to the exclusion of all moral responsibility. He places no limits on the kinds of pleasures he allows himself. Basil Hallward visits Dorian, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. He has heard horrible rumors of Dorian and urges Dorian to reform. He is planning to leave London for Paris that night, but he came to see Dorian first because he has been hearing so many disturbing rumors about his young friend. Dorian decides to show Basil the portrait. When Basil sees the portrait, he is horrified. Dorian reminds him of his prayer on the day the portrait was painted, the prayer that he should change place with the portrait and never lose his youthful beauty. Basil begs Dorian to pray with him, urging Dorian to reform immediately. Dorian can’t stand seeing Basil like this. He stabs him several times and then leaves him in the room.

The next morning, Dorian calls an ex-lover, Alan Campbell, who is a scientist, to come and help him. Alan hates Dorian, but Dorian urges him to help anyway. When Alan refuses, Dorian threatens to expose their affair and ruin Alan’s reputation. Alan sends for chemicals and equipment, goes upstairs, and disposes of the body. That evening, Dorian goes to a dinner party, but has to leave early because he is extremely nervous. When he gets home, he looks in a cabinet and finds some opium. He leaves the house and goes to an opium den. He sees a young man, an aristocrat, whom he corrupted months ago. The young man is addicted to opium and has no connections among his friends any longer. Dorian leaves because he can’t stand to be around this young man.

When he’s leaving, he scorns a prostitute, another person whom he has presumably ruined, and she calls out to him the name Prince Charming. A sailor, James Vane, who is half-asleep, jumps up at the sound of the name and runs out after Dorian. He catches Dorian outside and threatens to kill him. Dorian tells James to look at his face under a light and he will see that he couldn’t possibly be the young man who betrayed James’ sister. James does so and sees that Dorian is too young to have been his sister’s lover. He releases Dorian. The prostitute comes out and tells James he should have killed Dorian because Dorian is in fact old enough to have been the Prince Charming of James’s sister’s memory. She says Prince Charming made a pact with the devil years ago to retain his youth.

The next weekend, Dorian has a party at his country house. The men are outside hunting and Dorian is cowering inside afraid because he thinks he saw James Vane’s face peeking through the window. Finally, he decides his fears are unfounded and goes out to join the hunting party. He is speaking to a young man when the young man shoots at a rabbit. Instead, it is a man in the bushes who is shot. The men think the man is a peasant who got in the way and find it nothing more than an inconvenience. That evening, Dorian’s groundskeeper tells him the man was a stranger, not one of the tenants on Dorian’s land. Dorian rushes out to see the body and is relieved to find that it is James Vane who was killed.

Back in London, Lord Henry comes to visit Dorian Gray. Dorian tells him he has decided to reform. He no longer wants to hear Lord Henry’s corrupt sayings. He has fallen in love with a country girl and, instead of ruining her life, he left her alone. Lord Henry tells Dorian he did this only for a new sensation of pleasure, the unaccustomed pleasure of doing good. Dorian is shaken in his resolve. When Lord Henry leaves, Dorian becomes upset over the idea that he will never be able to reform. Then he gets the idea that he should destroy the painting, which has by now become horribly ugly. When he stabs the painting, his servants hear his cry out in pain. They break into the locked room and find an old, ugly man in Dorian Gray’s clothes lying on the floor dead of a stab wound and a portrait of a beautiful young Dorian Gray hanging intact on the wall.

PLOT STRUCTURE ANALYSIS

Oscar Wilde plots The Picture of Dorian Gray on a model of descent.

Dorian Gray begins at the height of his beauty and innocence. Basil Hallward is also at the height of his artistry at the opening of the novel. The novel is the inexorable downward slide of the protagonist, however secret that downward slide is. When Basil Hallward recognizes the depths to which Dorian Gray has sunk, he attempts to pull him out of it and is killed for the attempt. When Dorian Gray attempts to bring himself back into moral rectitude, he fails.

The secondary plot structure of the novel is the triangular relationship among Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Lord Henry. In the first few chapters f the novel, Wilde sets up the triangle. Basil Hallward is enraptured with Dorian Gray’s beauty. Dorian Gray doesn’t yet recognize the power this gives him. He doesn’t even recognize the power of his beauty. Then comes Lord Henry, the man who brings Dorian Gray into self-consciousness and pulls him away from the influence of Basil Hallward. Basil Hallward dies trying to bring Dorian Gray back under his influence. The novel ends with Dorian making a last, pitiful attempt to convince Lord Henry to release him from his influence.

When Dorian Gray attempts to destroy the portrait, he is trying to destroy the link between art and morality, the link which Lord Henry has forever denied. The attempt kills him. Oscar Wilde suggests that there is a vital link after all between the beautiful and the good.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray Summary

This novel is the story of a young man who wishes to stay young and pure-looking forever. Dorian Gray is a young man who is absolutely beautiful and also innocent about life when the reader first meets him. His portrait is being painted by the artist Basil Hallward. While Basil finishes the portrait, his friend Lord Henry Wotton becomes enchanted with the young lad, Dorian Gray. Likewise, Dorian becomes intrigued by Lord Henry’s views about life – one of which is that one should experience all of life’s pleasures and there will be ultimate joy. Lord Henry also influences Dorian by telling him that youth is the one thing worth having.

After the portrait is completed, Dorian is in awe of how beautiful, young and perfect he looks. Lord Henry’s comments about youth affect Dorian so much that he wishes, “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!” Once Dorian makes this wish, he starts to engage in various questionable activities with Lord Henry – including associating with men and women, experimenting with drugs, and simply enjoying any type of pleasure that comes his way without a care in the world.

Dorian begins to descend into a world of sin; however, his looks never change. Instead, his portrait’s face changes to portray the evil Dorian has committed. Blood appears on the portrait’s hands after Dorian murders someone. Therefore, Dorian can do as he pleases and the portrait will show his sins, but he remains looking as pure and beautiful as the day the portrait was finished.

The novel goes into further detail about Dorian’s thoughts and deeds and has a twist at the end. I see it as a novel that shows the dangers when someone gives into their “dark side.”

Oscar Wilde Biography

Oscar Wilde was the son of Sir William Wilde and his wife Lady Jane. His mother was a successful poet and journalist. Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland on October 16, 1854. He was a very well-educated young man who attended college in both Dublin and Oxford. While at Oxford, he became very involved with an art movement called the aesthetic movement. Artists and writers dedicated to this movement believed in “art for art’s sake.” He was often ridiculed for his ridiculous style of dressing, which also was very feminine. While in college, Wilde started to become aware of his bisexuality. His literary career started when he graduated in 1879 and he moved to London. In addition to writing poetry, Wilde also worked as an art reviewer and magazine writer. He is most widely known for his plays: “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), “An Ideal Husband” (1895), and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895).

In his personal life, Wilde was a controversial figure. Although he was married and had two children, he also engaged in homosexual relationships. During the Victorian time period in which he lived, the idea of homesexuality was very taboo. He was actually imprisoned for two years when he was sued by the father of one of his lovers, Lord Bosie. Wilde was also widely criticized for the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray because of its homoerotic tones – several of the characters are implied to be homosexual or bisexual.

After leaving prison, Wilde moved to Paris and continued writing, but did not have as much success. Upon his release, Oscar wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a response to the agony he experienced in prison. After his wife Constance died in 1898, he and Lord Bosie reunited briefly, but Oscar mostly spent the last three years of his life wandering Europe, staying with friends and living in cheap hotels. He died on November 30, 1900, of meningitis.

In addition to being known for his controversial subjects, Wilde was also praised for his skill with social criticism. His writings displayed humor, intelligence and wit. With these excellent linguistic skills, he often told many truths about society and human nature through his writings.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray Summary

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A STUDY GUIDE CREATED WITH THE INTENTION TO ASSIST STUDENTS IN BETTER UNDERSTANDING THE LITERARY TEXT IN ADDITION TO READING THE ACTUAL TEXT.

COMMENT ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

The study of literature is not like the study of math or science, or even history. While those disciplines are based largely upon fact, the study of literature is based upon interpretation and analysis. There are no clear-cut answers in literature, outside of the factual information about an author's life and the basic information about setting and characterization in a piece of literature. The rest is a highly subjective reading of what an author has written; each person brings a different set of values and a different background to the reading. As a result, no two people see the piece of literature in exactly the same light, and few critics agree on everything about a book or an author.

In this study guide for a well-known piece of literature, an attempt has been made to give an objective literary analysis based upon the information actually found in the novel, book, or play. In the end, however, it is an example of individual interpretation, but one that can be readily supported by the information that is presented in the text. In your course of literature study, you or your professor/teacher may come up with a different interpretation of the mood or the theme or the conflict. Your interpretation, if it can be logically supported with information contained within the piece of literature, is just as correct as ours. So is the interpretation of your teacher or professor.

Literature is simply not a black or white situation; instead, there are many gray areas that are open to varying analyses. Your task is to come up with your own analysis that you can logically defend. Hopefully, these book notes will help you to accomplish that goal.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

KEY LITERARY ELEMENTS

SETTING

The novel is set in London at the end of the nineteenth century; one chapter is set at Dorian Gray’s country estate, Selby Royal.

LIST OF CHARACTERS

Major Characters

Basil Hallward

The artist who paints the portrait of Dorian Gray. He is so enamored of Dorian Gray that he feels himself dominated by Dorian. His art changes when he paints Dorian Gray. He is eventually murdered by Dorian Gray when he tries to urge Dorian to reform himself.

Lord Henry Wotton

The aristocrat who corrupts Dorian Gray with his ideas that morality is hypocrisy used to cover people’s inadequacies. He decides early on that he wants to dominate Dorian Gray.

Dorian Gray

The object of fascination for everyone. He is the most beautiful man anyone has ever seen. He prays that he should change places with a portrait painted of him when he is quite young. He prays that he will stay young forever and the portrait will show signs of age and decadence. His prayer comes true and he remains beautiful even while being corrupt.

Minor Characters

Lady Brandon

A society lady who has a "crush" at which Basil Hallward meets Dorian Gray.

Lady Agatha

A philanthropist who tells Lord Henry of Dorian Gray.

Lord Fermor

Lord Henry’s uncle, who makes his money on coal mines and lives the life of luxury.

Lord Kelso

Grandfather to Dorian Gray. He arranged for his daughter’s husband, Dorian’s father, to be killed in a duel.

Margaret Devereaux

Dorian Gray’s mother, a great beauty who married a penniless soldier. She dies giving birth to Dorian.

Duchess of Harley

A guest at Aunt Agatha’s luncheon. She is well liked by everyone.

Sir Thomas Burdon

A guest at Aunt Agatha’s luncheon. He is a Radical member of Parliament who likes to eat with Tories since they serve better food.

Mr. Erskine of Treadley

A guest who attends Aunt Agatha’s luncheon. He is "an old gentlemen of considerable charm and culture."

Mrs. Vandeleur

One of Aunt Agatha’s friends. She is "a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymnbook."

Lord Faudel

A guest at Aunt Agatha’s luncheon. He is a "most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity."

Dartmoor Wotton

Lord Henry’s elder brother, who is contemplating marrying an American woman.

Victoria, Lady Henry

Lord Henry’s wife, who eventually leaves him for another man and sues him for divorce.

Sibyl Vane

An actress with whom Dorian falls in love. She loses her acting ability when she falls in love and Dorian rejects her because of it. Then she commits suicide.

Mrs. Vane

Sibyl Vane’s mother, also an actress, who has difficulty expressing a non-dramatic emotion.

James Vane

Sibyl Vane’s brother, who goes off to become a sailor, but not before he vows to kill his sister’s lover if he ever finds out that the man hurts her. He stalks Dorian Gray years later and is shot by accident during a hunting party.

Victor

Dorian Gray’s manservant. Dorian begins to suspect Victor of recognizing the idea of the portrait and eventually fires him.

Leaf

Dorian Gray’s housekeeper.

Mr. Hubbard

Proprietor of a frame shop. He helps Dorian move the portrait to the upstairs room.

Mr. Alan Campell

An ex-lover of Dorian Gray. He is a scientist. When Dorian kills Basil Hallward, he calls Alan Campbell to come and destroy the body so no evidence will remain.

Lady Gwendolyn

Lord Henry’s sister, who is ruined by her association with Dorian Gray.

Lady Narborough

An older woman who entertains Dorian at her dinner party the night after he disposes of Basil Hallward’s body.

Adrian Singleton

A young man who is ruined by his association with Dorian Gray. He is an opium addict.

Duchess of Monmouth

A woman with whom Dorian Gray conducts a flirtation. She attends his country house party.

Duke of Monmouth

Husband to the Duchess and collector of insects. Sees Geoffrey Clouston, the Duchess’s brother, who accidentally kills James Vane.

Hetty Merton

A country girl whom Dorian Gray woos and then leaves before ruining her innocence.

CONFLICT

PROTAGONIST

Dorian Gray, a man who is jolted out of oblivion at the beginning of the novel and made aware of the idea that his youth and beauty are his greatest gifts and that they will soon vanish with age.

ANTAGONIST

Lord Henry Wotton, the bored aristocrat who tells Dorian Gray that he is extraordinarily beautiful. He decides to dominate Dorian and proceeds to strip him of all his conventional illusions. He succeeds in making Dorian live his life for art and forget moral responsibility.

A secondary antagonist is age. Dorian Gray runs from the ugliness of age throughout his life. He runs from it, but he is also fascinated with it, obsessively coming back again and again to look at the signs of age in the portrait.

CLIMAX

The climax follows Sibyl Vane’s horrible performance on stage when Dorian Gray tells her he has fallen out of love with her because she has made something ugly. Here, Dorian rejects love for the ideal of beauty. The next morning, he changes his mind and writes an impassioned letter of apology, but too late; Sibyl has committed suicide.

OUTCOME

Dorian Gray becomes mired in the immorality of his existence. He places no limit on his search for pleasure. He ruins people’s lives without qualm. His portrait shows the ugliness of his sins, but his own body doesn’t. His attempts at reform fail. He even kills a messenger of reform--Basil Hallward. Finally, he kills himself as he attempts to "kill" the portrait. He dies the ugly, old man and the portrait returns to the vision of his beautiful youth.

SHORT PLOT/CHAPTER SUMMARY (Synopsis)

The novel opens in Basil Hallward’s studio. He is discussing his recent portrait of Dorian Gray with his patron Lord Henry Wotton. He tells Lord Henry that he has begun a new mode of painting after his contact with Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty. He doesn’t want to introduce Lord Henry to Dorian because he doesn’t want Lord Henry to corrupt the young man. He says he is so taken with Dorian Gray that he feels the young man dominates all his thoughts. When Lord Henry meets Dorian Gray, he finds him to be totally un-self-conscious about his beauty. Lord Henry talks to Dorian Gray of his philosophy of life. Lord Henry finds all of society’s conventions from fidelity in marriage to charity toward the poor to be hypocritical covers for people’s selfish motives. Dorian Gray feels the weight of Lord Henry’s influence on his character. When they see the finished portrait of Dorian that Basil has painted, they are enthralled by the beauty that Basil has captured. Dorian bemoans the inevitable loss of his youth. He wishes that he could change places with the painting, that it could grow old and he could stay the same.

Lord Henry decides to dominate Dorian Gray just has Basil has told him Dorian Gray dominates him. They have dinner at Lord Gray’s Aunt Agatha’s house. She is a philanthropist and Dorian has been working with her. Lord Gray wittily ridicules the goals of philanthropy and Dorian is swept away by his logic.

When he’s leaving, he scorns a prostitute, another person whom he has presumably ruined, and she calls out to him the name Prince Charming. A sailor, James Vane, who has half-asleep, jumps up at the sound of the name and runs out after Dorian. He catches Dorian outside and threatens to kill him. Dorian tells James to look at his face under a light and he will see that he couldn’t possibly be the young man who betrayed James’ sister. James does so and sees that Dorian is too young to have been his sister’s lover. He releases Dorian. The prostitute comes out and tells James he should have killed Dorian because Dorian is in fact old enough to have been the Prince Charming of James’s sister’s memory. She says Prince Charming made a pact with the devil years ago to retain his youth.

THEMES

Main Theme

The main theme of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the relationship between beauty and morality. Oscar Wilde plays on the Renaissance idea of the correspondence between the physical and spiritual realms: beautiful people are moral people; ugly people are immoral people. His twist on this theme is in his use of the magical contrivance of the portrait. The portrait of Dorian Gray bears all the ugliness and age of sin while Dorian himself remains young and beautiful no matter what he does. The portrait even holds Dorian’s guilty conscience, at least until he kills Basil Hallward.

Minor Theme

The minor theme of the novel is the idea of the amorality of art. If something is beautiful, it is not confined to the realm of morality and immorality. It exists on its own merits. This idea is expressed by Lord Henry in its decadent aspect and by Basil Hallward in its idealistic aspect. Dorian Gray plays it out in his life.

MOOD

The mood of the novel is a counterbalance between the witty, ironical world view of Lord Henry and the earnest and straightforward world view of Basil Hallward. Dorian Gray goes back and forth between these two poles. The novel does too. At times, it is the world of urbane wit making light of the moral earnestness of philanthropists. At times, it is the melodramatic world of lurid opium dens and tortured suicides.

OVERALL ANALYSES

CHARACTER ANALYSIS

Basil Hallward

Basil Hallward is perhaps an old-fashioned representative of the aesthetic movement. He lives his life artfully, making a mystery when there is usually predictability, for instance, in his habit of taking trips without ever telling people where he’s going. He dedicates his life to art and, when he sees Dorian Gray, decides to found a new school of art, one devoted to the youthful beauty of his subject. His home is filled with beautiful things. He has clearly devoted his life to the pursuit of the aesthetic as a way of life.

He is an old-fashioned aesthete in the sense that he is willing to give up art for the sake of moral responsibility. When he sees Dorian has become upset over the portrait he paints of the boy, he is willing to destroy the painting. This is a painting he has just said is the best work of his artistic career. Basil Hallward is the only one in Dorian Gray’s life who beseeches him to reform himself. In this respect, Basil Hallward is the moral center of the novel. The novel opens with him and the plot action sees a sharp downward turn when he is murdered. Basil Hallward play a small role in the novel, only appearing at three points in Dorian Gray’s life, but his influence is great.

Lord Henry Wotten

Lord Henry is the radical aesthete. He lives out all of the precepts of the aesthetic movement as outlined in the Preface to the novel. He refuses to recognize any moral standard whatsoever. He spends his time among aristocrats whom he ridicules in such a witty fashion that he makes them like him.

When the novel opens, he and his opposite in aestheticism are discussing the protagonist, Dorian Gray. Basil Hallward earnestly enjoins Lord Henry to leave Dorian Gray alone, not to interfere with him, not to exert his influence on the youth. Lord Henry ignores Basil’s plea entirely. He never has a qualm about doing just the opposite of what Basil begged him to do. He immediately begins to exert his influence on the beautiful Dorian Gray, an opposite influence to that which Basil Hallward would wish for. He makes Dorian Gray self-aware, self-conscious, and even self- involved. He gives Dorian Gray an inward focus and ridicules Dorian’s attempts to find an outward focus in philanthropy. He takes Dorian Gray around to all the fashionable salons and drawing rooms of the London aristocracy showing him off, encouraging him in his self-gratifying pursuits.

When Dorian Gray attempts to reform himself at the end of the novel, Lord Henry remains true to his long-established purpose. He ridicules Dorian’s attempts to deny his gratification for a greater good and thus makes Dorian feel it is futile to attempt to reform. At the beginning of the novel, Basil Hallward scoffs at Lord Henry’s amoral aphorisms, saying that Lord Henry always says bad things but never does anything bad. Basil Hallward feels that Lord Henry’s amorality is just a pose. By the end of the novel, when Lord Henry takes Dorian’s last chance of reform away from him, the reader might assume that Basil Hallward was wrong. Lord Henry is immoral in his supposed amorality.

Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray is the beautiful object of two men’s attentions. He dominates the imagination of Basil Hallward and he is dominated in turn by the imagination of Lord Henry. He becomes the embodiment of Lord Henry’s ideas of the aesthetic life.

When he is under the influence of Basil Hallward at the beginning of the novel, he falls in love with Sibyl Vane and is willing to sacrifice all social standing for her. He falls in love with the artfulness of her acting. When he tells Basil Hallward and Lord Henry of his passion, the two older men are alarmed, but Basil Hallward begins to think it is a good thing for Dorian Gray to devote himself to love. Instead, when his love loses her acting ability because of love, he rejects her cruelly and she commits suicide. It is in his reaction to her death that the reader recognizes the direction Dorian Gray will take, which of his two mentors he will follow. He follows Lord Henry’s amoral aestheticism, recasting the tragedy of her death as a beautiful work of art in life and therefore finding self-gratifying pleasure in her suicide. From that moment onwards, his course is set.

Dorian Gray isn’t a well-rounded character. Like Basil Hallward and Lord Henry, he is a type. He represents an idea, the idea of art in life. Once he makes his prayer that he change places with his portrait, to live life without aging while the portrait bears the marks of age, he follows a fairly unwavering course. He goes from lover to lover, male and female, and ruins the reputation of each in turn. He has no allegiance to anyone he knows. He pursues pleasure dispassionately. He cares nothing for the morality of conventional society. He cares nothing for their censure of him. He is sure he will always be accepted in enough places to satisfy him.

For Dorian Gray, sin is ugliness and therefore sin is horrible. He holds a morbid fascination with the portrait which grows older and uglier with each sin Dorian commits. He doesn’t have a developed moral sense which would recognize a moral imperative--the idea that some things are wrong no matter whether one ever has to pay any consequences for them. He only regards acts as wrong when he can see their affects on the countenance of the figure in the portrait. When Basil Hallward comes back into his life and tries to convince him to reform, he drags Basil upstairs to see the portrait. At that moment, he does seem to experience remorse. Yet, even there, it is the remorse of the undeveloped moral sense, the remorse of the child who recognizes he’s done something wrong only when he is caught in the act. Here, he shows Basil Hallward the evidence of his bad deeds out of a desire to shock and hurt his mentor. When Basil prays for him, he kills Basil, unable to accept the kind of love Basil is showing him.

When Dorian Gray tries to reform himself after killing Basil, he does so as a way to rid himself of the ugliness of the portrait. When he gives up Hetty, the country girl whom he has seduced, he assumes he is working toward his redemption. For Dorian Gray, redemption means beauty regained. He hopes to see the portrait changed, but instead sees it is uglier still. It is then that he recognizes that in order to repent, he has to confess publicly to his sins. This he will never do. Confessing publicly would mean losing the reputation he has cultivated for years. He cannot lose his public face because that is all he is. He is nothing but face. The death of the ugly portrait is the death of Dorian Gray.

PLOT STRUCTURE ANALYSIS

Oscar Wilde plots The Picture of Dorian Gray on a model of descent.

THEMES ANALYSIS

Under debate in The Picture of Dorian Gray from beginning to end is the relationship between beauty and morality. Oscar Wilde sets up the triangular relationship along the lines of this debate. Basil Hallward takes the position that life is to be lived in the pursuit of the beautiful and the pleasurable, but he is unwilling to divorce the good from the beautiful. Lord Henry, on the other hand, goes through life throwing one aphorism after another together to prove the non-existence or the hypocrisy of morality. In the character of Dorian Gray and in his relationship to the his magical portrait, Oscar Wilde dramatizes this debate.

In the Renaissance, people believed in the idea of correspondences. They saw correspondences between the heavens and the earth. When something went wrong on the social scale, they looked to the skies for similar upsets. In the literature of the Renaissance, storms always accompany social upheaval. In like manner, there was seen to be a correspondence between beauty and virtue. If a person was beautiful, it was assumed that she or he was also virtuous. If a person was ugly, it was a assumed this person was corrupt. The face told the story of the soul.

Oscar Wilde takes this Renaissance idea of correspondences and sees how it works in the world of the aesthetes. The aesthetes of the 1890s were intent on developing a positive philosophy of art. Art was not the classical notion of a mirror held up to life. Art was to be regarded as autonomous. In its own right, it was to be celebrated. It was no longer to be subordinated to life as a mirror is subordinate to the object mirrored. If a comparison was granted, art was superior to life. It was timeless, unchanging, and perfect.

In detaching art from its representational function, the aesthetes were also detaching it from its moral aim. Victorian writers had long held art up as valuable for its ability to instruct and correct its readers. The aesthetes wanted no moral task assigned to art. Art existed for its own sake, not as moral instruction, and not as a mirror held up to life. Aesthetes might have overstated the point. In the Preface to Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde sounded the keynote of the aesthetic movement when he wrote "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book" and added, "No artist has ethical sympathies." Ironically, his novel is just that. It is a moral book.

Wilde uses the magical contrivance of the portrait as a way to play on the Themes of art in life, life as art, and the amorality of art. For the aesthetes, if something is beautiful, it is not confined to the realm of morality and immorality. It exists on its own merits. This idea is expressed by Lord Henry in its decadent aspect and by Basil Hallward in its idealistic aspect. For Lord Henry, there is no moral imperative. The true lover of beauty is safe to pursue art and pleasure and should think of conventional morality as the enemy of beauty. For Basil Hallward, the beauty should be pursued because it idealizes the viewer. It makes the world a better place. The world is made morally good when it enjoys the beauty of art.

Dorian Gray is the beautiful one who plays out the ideal of art in his life. For Basil Hallward, he is the one who can make his contemporaries better people. For Lord Henry, he should pursue pleasure and beauty for no end other than self-gratification. Dorian follows the way of Lord Henry. Oscar Wilde keeps in the forefront of the novel the ideal which Basil Hallward sets up with the use of the portrait. The portrait of Dorian Gray bears all the ugliness and age of sin while Dorian himself remains young and beautiful no matter what he does. The portrait even holds Dorian’s guilty conscience, at least until he kills Basil Hallward.

Art bears the sins of the age. The portrait of Dorian Gray bears all the traces of his sins. It loses its innocent look and begins to look contemptuous and then downright vicious. Dorian Gray, on the other hand, retains the innocent look of youth and so people have a great deal of difficulty believing the stories about his bad habits. Dorian Gray’s portrait even bears the weight of his guiltiness. Since he doesn’t have to pay for his sins in the loss of his looks, it is easier for him to leave them behind and never repent of them. When he is confronted by Basil Hallward, he is confronted by his creator. Without Basil’s portrait of him, Dorian would have had a very different life. He kills Basil when Basil begs him to reform. Dorian hates the creator, the one who enabled him to sin as he has in the first place, and so he kills him. After Basil’s death, though, Dorian cannot go on as he did before.

Without his creator, he loses his ability to leave all his sins to mark the portrait. He gets nervous and edgy. Vengeance comes out of his past in the form of James Vane and stalks him. When he is let off the hook by James’s accidental death, he doesn’t feel relief. He attempts to go Basil’s way after all, but it is too late. He has no moral grounding to support moral choices. The only end possible for him is to kill the art that has poisoned his life. In doing so, he kills himself.

Oscar Wilde ended up writing a moral book after all. The novel shows the lesson that has been told over and over in story after story. Guilt will always out. There is no escape from a guilty conscience. All crime must be paid for.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray Summary

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Plot summary

Dorian Gray was the orphaned grandson of Lord Kelso. His mother, Margaret Deveraux, a great society beauty, died in childbirth shortly after Dorian's father was killed in a duel. It was said that Lord Kelso paid a Belgian duelist to cause the fight.

The novel begins with Dorian as a young man. Kelso is dead, and Dorian has inherited much of the Deveraux fortune. He is now the protege of Lady Agatha, Lord Henry Wotton's aunt, and together they entertain and raise money for the Whitechapel poor.

Until Dorian finally meets Lord Henry he is naive of his own good looks and personality. His innocence is unspoiled and his knowledge of the world resembles that of a child. To his friend, the artist Basil Hallward, Dorian is simply a motive in art, a privately worshipped icon in the painter's idealistic world. Dorian is described as "…wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes and his crisp gold hair. . . . All the candour of youth was there, as well as all of youth's passionate purity.”

One afternoon, while sitting for a portrait in Basil's studio, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton. Wotton's low musical voice enchants the lad as he stands upon a dais in the afternoon sunlight. Dorian is convinced by him that his looks are in fact his most important virtue.

The constant flick and dash of the artist's brush melt away, as Lord Henry's doctrine of self-development wakens Dorian to mad hungers. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it . . ." murmurs Lord Henry. "Resist it and the soul grows sick with longing."

Dorian is transfixed by this philosophy. Flooded with feelings he cannot comprehend, he leaves the studio and goes out into the garden. Lord Henry joins him and under the shade of a laurel tree the boy listens to a second panegyric on youth: "The Laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. . . . But we never get back our youth. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. . . . Youth, youth, there is absolutely nothing in the world but youth."

When they return to the studio, Dorian is shown his finished portrait. On seeing it, the sense of his own beauty falls on him like a revelation. The full reality of Lord Henry's warning of the brevity of youth and life's aim of unbridled hedonism, cuts through Dorian's boyhood innocence. In a flash he cries:

I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. 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!

In the heat of the moment Hallward, astonished at Dorian's impassioned plea, attempts to destroy the canvas. But before the steel palette knife can do its work Dorian shouts, "No Basil, no . . . it would be murder!"

Under the guidance of Lord Henry, Dorian becomes increasingly self-absorbed and heartless. Yet he discovers and falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a pretty actress. On the night of his introducing Basil and Lord Henry to her, the actress plays poorly; she is no longer able to act out the false love of Shakespeare's heroines whilst filled with a true love for Dorian. Disappointed and bitterly embarrassed for his friends, Dorian ends their relationship.

When the lad returns home at dawn, he notices a subtle change in the painting; there is a touch of cruelty in the mouth. As he looks curiously upon his image, he is unaware that that same night, with her engagement in ruins, Sibyl has committed suicide.

With the passage of time, the portrait ages and spoils. The hair thins, the cheeks grow sallow. It is clear the image is aging instead of Dorian. Incredibly, the portrait also bears burden of his shame.

Under Lord Henry's influence, Dorian continues to live a hedonistic lifestyle, with strong hints of homosexual behaviour. The face of his portrait grows uglier with each moral transgression. Basil comes to warn Dorian of the scandalous rumours that are sweeping London about him. Wholly indifferent, Dorian smiles to himself, and decides to show Basil the painted "diary of his life". Hallward is perplexed as Dorian explains to him that not only God can see one's soul, "for tonight, with your own eyes, you will see my soul."

Together they go up to the old nursery at the top of the house, and as the purple pall is torn from Hallward's painting, the artist falls to his knees and begs Dorian to pray for forgiveness. The loathsome image is sickening. Every vile act, every hideous sign of age oozes from the canvas. Dorian picks up a discarded knife and in a fit of rage, murders his old friend. Blood immediately appears on the picture, staining the bloated hands of its subject. Turning from the scene, pressing his forehead to the cool glass of the window, with Hallward's blood still dripping on the carpet, Dorian determines to hide forever this monstrous mirror.

Towards the end of the novel, Dorian realizes he was wrong to have followed Lord Henry's doctrines. He decides to change, to make amends and to rise above his mentor's cynical epigrams that cut the beauty of life to pieces. But his attempts at reform are shallow and superficial – and in turn the painting gains a cunning and hypocritical look.

At last Dorian plans to rid himself of his terrible sins by destroying the portrait. Realising that only a full confession will absolve him, yet fearing the consequences, he decides to kill the last vestige of his conscience – for it is conscience that has brought him to where he stands now. He stabs the canvas. The servants hear a terrible scream and rush to the nursery, but:

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

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