The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Another one of those books you might think I would have read by now, but no. This short novel is included in the same volume of Selected Works by Oscar Wilde that contains the three short fairy tales I read recently, so I turned to it next. Coincidentally, as I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray during a recent trip to Baltimore and New York City I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen in a dozen years or so. I told him I thought he looked the same and he told me he has a portrait of himself aging in a closet somewhere. That’s about as much as I knew about The Picture of Dorian Gray, only enough to get the reference.

The story begins with the artist Basil Hallward working on a portrait. His friend, Lord Henry Wotton, watches him work and inquires about the subject. Basil tells him the subject is a new friend of his, Dorian Gray. Basil is quite taken with the young man, idolizes him even, and is reluctant to have Lord Henry meet him, or even know his name. He’s worried that Dorian will fall under Lord Henry’s spell and the young man will be corrupted. Furthermore, although the nearly completed portrait is clearly Basil’s finest work, he announces he won’t show it publicly, because, he explains to Lord Henry, “without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry.” Basil is worried, that is, that the portrait reveals too much about him.

But then, before Lord Henry leaves the studio, Dorian Gray himself appears. He and Lord Henry talk and Dorian does fall under his influence. Lord Henry is charming and worldly. He speaks in the kinds of epigrams we think of as Wildean. He says to Dorian, “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing… A new Hedonism–that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season…” Basil finishes the portrait. Lord Henry proclaims it, “one of the greatest things in modern art.” Dorian though is wistful. He says, “How sad it is! 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.”

There is no scene of the magic happening, but from those fateful words Dorian’s destiny, and the course of the novel is set. What follows next is a long episode of Dorian taking up with Lord Henry and falling in love with an actress, Sibyl Vane, who he sees playing Shakespeare every evening at the theater. She and her mother are eager for a match. Sibyl calls him “Prince Charming” as he hasn’t told her his name. Her brother, James, who is about to sail for Australia, is skeptical and warns his sister about the man, he hasn’t yet met. Dorian invites Basil and Lord Henry to come to the theater to see Sibyl perform, but when they do, she’s terrible. It seems that Dorian had rashly promised to marry her, and after she had experienced what she believes is true love she finds the pretend kind impossible to fake on the stage. Basil and Lord Henry leave before the play is through. Dorian waits to the end then goes back stage and breaks up with her. The next morning he notices that the expression of the mouth of his portrait has changed a little, reflecting the cruelty with which Dorian had treated poor Sibyl. Then Lord Henry arrives with the news that later the previous night Sibyl had killed herself in her dressing room. The Sibyl Vane episode ends with Dorian having the tell-tale portrait moved upstairs to the unused room that had been his nursery and to which only he has the key.

Here I began to wonder how the novel could progress. Would it be a series of lengthy scenes like the one with Sibyl Vane showing Dorian’s gradual degradation but growing tedious as we approached the inevitable? Instead, Wilde finds an ingenious solution. Lord Henry loans Dorian a book. “It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being indeed simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian , who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those denunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.” The next chapter (Chapter XI) begins, “For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book.” So Wilde is able to have eighteen years pass quickly describing Dorian’s orgy of sensual exploration. He explores Catholicism, then intellectualism, then perfumes, then music, then jewelry. “Then, suddenly, some night 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.”

He betrays friends and stories spreads. But others find it impossible to imagine that a person so outwardly beautiful could be inwardly ugly. Finally, Basil Hallward visits him demanding to know whether what people are saying of Dorian is true and wanting to borrow the portrait for a show in Paris. Dorian, made to feel guilty at the accusations, blames Basil for painting the portrait and enticing Dorian to make the fateful wish that the picture would show his sin, not his face. Dorian takes Basil up to the locked room, shows him the portrait, then, in a rage, stabs Basil, killing him. It’s shocking but what comes next is worse. Dorian disposes of the body by blackmailing a former friend, a chemist, Alan Chapman, forcing the chemist to devise a way to destroy the body and burn the remains without removing it from the locked room. Later we learn that Alan commits suicide by shooting himself. Basil had been planning to leave that night for France so Dorian is sure that long before anyone notices Basil’s disappearance, it will have become impossible to trace back to him.

Dorian’s descent continues. He visits an opium den. A woman there calls him “Prince Charming.” Who should hear her but James Vane, searching all these years for the man who caused his sister’s death. That name, Prince Charming, is all that he knows of the man. James confronts Dorian, prepared to avenge his sister, but Dorian convinces James it couldn’t be him. He reasons that Sibyl’s Prince Charming must be nearing forty now but he shows his face and James sees a man of no more than twenty. James lets him go, but learns the truth soon after and begins to stalk Dorian.

At a country house, Dorian sees James looking in a window at him. The next morning during a shooting party, the host shoots James accidentally as James lay in wait in the grass. Nobody recognizes the victim.

Dorian seems to get away with everything, Sibyl, Basil, James, everyone else he has harmed and corrupted throughout this life. But the portrait accuses him. In the final episode, told quickly, Dorian explains to Lord Henry that he has determined to change his ways. He had started a romance with a country woman named Hetty. He loved her and they had planned to go away together, but Dorian broke it off, sparing her, her thinks, of a life with him. He calls the act virtuous, his first, but Lord Henry points he has broken her heart, causing her pain, and did it not out of compassion for her, but out of his own selfish wish to redeem his past. Dorian realizes it is too late. Alone with his portrait he sees Lord Henry’s verdict is true. The portrait looks even worse than before. In a last desperate act he stabs the painting alone in the locked room. A scream is heard in the street. When the servants are finally able to enter the room, lowering themselves down from the roof and coming in through the window, they find the curse reversed. The portrait is restored to its original condition and a horrible, misshapen man with a knife in his heart lies dead on the floor, A man they can only identify as Dorian Gray by the rings he wears.

It’s a thrilling little novel. Highly melodramatic. Full of little shocks and horrors. It feels like something from Edgar Allen Poe, though also filled with Wilde’s arch humor and beautiful writing. The plotting of bringing James Vane back at the end was satisfying. And on the first page there’s a reference to the later mysterious disappearance of Basil Hallward I missed at first read. Very smart.

There’s a little confusion both in the book and in popular culture about the portrait. It’s not that the portrait simply ages as Dorian stays young, as in the joke my friend made about his own unchanging looks. It’s that the portrait reflects Dorian’s soul rot as his body remains beautiful. But Wilde seems to conflate the two, as though there’s something morally pure about youth and beauty, and something tragic and sick about old age, sin reflected in every aging body. Could a handsome young man not be selfish and mean? Truthfully, Dorian is already rather narcissistic and callous at the beginning of the novel. Could an old and no longer beautiful man not be morally good? I like to think he could.

A note on the title. It’s not The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I was thinking of those two other portrait novels of the time: Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Oscar Wilde’s novel, from 1891, is not about the portrait disintegrating in the locked room, the novel is the picture of a young man in his entirety, body and soul, and all that he does with both.