The Picture of Dorian Gray

ELI5/TLDR

A beautiful young man, having learned from a talkative peer that youth is the only thing in life worth having, prays that his portrait should grow old in his place. The portrait, being more obliging than portraits usually are, agrees. He then spends the next eighteen years discovering what a man can do when his face refuses to keep the accounts, and the portrait, in the locked upper room, discovering what a face looks like when it is obliged to keep them all. It ends, as these things must, with a knife; though not, perhaps, in the hand one had expected.

The Full Story

The Preface, which is really the thesis

Before the novel begins, Wilde posts a little sermon of twenty-odd aphorisms at the door. It is his defence against the critics who had just greeted the serialized version as a work of moral leprosy, and it takes the form, as his defences generally did, of declining to defend anything at all.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.

All art is quite useless.

One should not mistake this for throat-clearing. It is the key in which the novel is to be played. Wilde announces that art has no ethical business and that those who insist on finding one will be the ones exposed. Having said so, he then writes a novel in which a man tries very hard to live by exactly this creed, and is destroyed by the attempt. Whether this is a contradiction or the perfect consistency of a man who trusted his own ideas enough to test them to death is a question the novel would rather leave open.

Three men in a studio

The studio is full of the scent of roses, the distant murmur of London, and three men shortly to ruin one another in perfectly good taste. Basil Hallward, the painter, has just finished a portrait of a young man of such disarming beauty that he cannot bring himself to exhibit it, having — as he confesses to his friend Lord Henry Wotton — put too much of himself into it. The young man’s name is Dorian Gray. Basil has painted him with the particular unspeakable devotion of a man who has found, rather late, the face he had been looking for, and has decided not to give it a name.

Lord Henry, stretched on a divan among cigarettes and paradoxes, listens with the languid interest of a man watching a cat play with something not quite dead. He is an aphorist of the first rank, a husband by accident, a corrupter of youth by vocation. When Basil asks him not to meet Dorian — not to influence him — Lord Henry agrees with the bright insincerity of a man who has already decided otherwise. Dorian walks in a moment later and the thing is done.

What follows, in the garden and then the studio, is the novel’s great overture. Lord Henry, almost absent-mindedly, preaches his first sermon to Dorian on the one subject worth a sermon.

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.

Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth.

Dorian, who has never been told such things before, listens the way one listens to music for which one has been secretly waiting. Basil finishes the portrait. Dorian sees it for the first time and sees at the same moment that his own face will one day cease to look like it. He makes, there and then, the speech that ruins his life.

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! There is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

Heaven, which pays closer attention to such remarks than one might suppose, takes him at his word. Nothing in the room changes. The bargain is signed before anyone has realized a contract was open.

Sibyl Vane, and the first line at the mouth

Dorian falls in love, or believes he does, with a seventeen-year-old actress named Sibyl Vane, who plays Shakespeare’s heroines nightly in a squalid theatre off the Euston Road. In Dorian’s view she is not so much a woman as a rotating cast of immortal parts — Juliet one evening, Imogen the next, Rosalind on Thursdays. He is in love with all of them at once, which he mistakes for being in love with her. He proposes. She accepts. She calls him Prince Charming, having never asked his name.

He brings Basil and Lord Henry to watch her perform, meaning to exhibit his triumph. She is dreadful. She has discovered that afternoon that she is in love with a real man, and concluded that theatrical love is a lie and she will have no more of it. Dorian, who had loved the lie and not the woman, goes backstage and tells her so with the clean cruelty of which only a very young man is capable. He steps over her and goes home through the London dawn. Somewhere between his departure and the morning, Sibyl Vane swallows something she should not have.

The next day Dorian notices, for the first time, a faint cruelty about the mouth of the portrait. He has just enough time to feel afraid before Lord Henry arrives with the news that she is already dead, and with his usual gift of turning catastrophes into opinions. Dorian, he explains, has not killed Sibyl Vane; Sibyl Vane has had the good taste to die for him, and he should feel a certain aesthetic gratitude. A real tragedy is a thing that happens to one the way a play happens to one, and one should never spoil it by moving one’s hands. Dorian listens. Dorian nods. Dorian decides that the girl he proposed to on Tuesday and broke on Wednesday and whose corpse he heard of on Thursday is, on reflection, a rather fine piece of theatre. He goes to the opera that evening. He is enchanted.

This, not the portrait, is the moment he becomes Dorian.

The yellow book, and the accumulation of a life

A few days later Lord Henry sends him a French novel — the one every reader of the period recognized as Huysmans’s À rebours, though Wilde never names it — and Dorian does not look up again until the room has gone dark. Over the years he will buy nine copies in nine different bindings, to suit the colour of his moods. It is the book in which a young Parisian tries to reduce his life to a connoisseurship of sensation, and Dorian, who has been waiting for exactly this manual, uses it as one.

What follows is the novel’s strangest chapter and its quietest. Wilde lets eighteen years pass without a plot. In their place he gives us a catalogue. Dorian studies perfumes — what frankincense does to the temperament, what ambergris does to desire, what spikenard does to the heart. He collects jewels: the chrysoberyl, the olive-green chrysolite, the pomegranate-coloured ruby. He collects embroideries from Delhi and Persia, church vestments from the sacristies of bankrupt orders, obsolete musical instruments from the islands. He flirts with Darwinism, with mysticism, with Catholicism — not for the creed, which he has no intention of accepting, but for the lace and the censers and the small theatre of it. Lord Henry’s great sermon on the new Hedonism, which had taken three minutes to deliver, Dorian lives in full for nearly two decades. A reader paying attention will notice the chapter is precisely as long as it needs to be: long enough to feel the difference between having a philosophy and being replaced by one.

Meanwhile London begins to whisper. Men fall out with him and do not say why. Young men of good family are seen leaving his company changed. One or two kill themselves; another goes to the colonies; a third is ruined in ways the clubs decline to specify. Dorian himself remains, by the testimony of anyone who sees him, a young man of about twenty. In the locked room upstairs, the portrait grows year by year into the face those twenty years would produce.

Basil, and the knife behind the ear

On a November evening Basil Hallward, now perceptibly older than his subject, comes to say goodbye before a long journey, and to say more haltingly what the town has lately been saying about Dorian. He begs him, with the clumsy tenderness of a man still in love after eighteen years, to deny it; to pray; to be what Basil once painted him as. Dorian, on an impulse, offers to show him instead.

He takes him up the stairs, unlocks the door, and pulls the cloth off the portrait. Basil, at last, sees the ledger of the soul he once believed he was painting — his own signature on the canvas above a face he cannot recognize as any face he has drawn. He begs Dorian to pray with him. Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow. Dorian, who has been looking not at the portrait but at Basil, feels a hatred rise in him of a pure animal kind — a hatred for the man who made him see himself — and, his eye falling on a knife that was left in the room some days before for the cutting of a cord, takes it and drives it into the great vein behind Basil’s ear. He does it again, and again, until the thing stops moving. The house is quiet. The only sound is the slow drip from the table to the carpet.

He locks the door. He goes downstairs and writes a polite note to a former admirer, the chemist Alan Campbell, whom he blackmails into dissolving what is upstairs into nothing. The subplot resolves very quickly; one can almost hear Wilde hurrying it along. It is the moral hinge of the book, and aestheticism, which cannot afford to linger over bodies, turns it almost too fast.

The opium den, and Prince Charming

Years later, Dorian, sleepless and frightened in ways he would not admit to being frightened, takes a hansom to an opium den in the East End — a place where the fog is thick enough to hide in and no one asks after one’s name. He is recognized by a sailor: James Vane, Sibyl’s brother, who had sworn eighteen years ago over her coffin to cut the throat of the man who destroyed her.

James drags him into an alley and holds a revolver to his head. Dorian asks only that James look at him. James looks. The face he sees is the face of a boy of twenty. It cannot possibly be the man who ruined his sister two decades ago; such a man would be forty by now. James apologizes and lets him go. A woman from the den steps into the street afterwards and tells him, flatly, that that was indeed Prince Charming, and that he has looked like that for as long as she has known him. James runs after him. Dorian is already gone.

Shortly after, James Vane is killed in a shooting accident at Dorian’s country estate — a stray shot from one of Dorian’s guests during a pheasant drive. Dorian is, very briefly, horrified, and then not at all. The world has arranged another small convenience for him.

The end, which is the aphorism coming true

He resolves, at last, to reform — though reform is not quite the word, since he has no intention of confessing anything. In the country a young girl called Hetty Merton falls in love with him, and he decides to spare her. He reports this good deed to Lord Henry over dinner with some pride. Lord Henry finds it touching in roughly the way one finds a dog’s trick touching, and observes that probably Dorian spared her only because he wanted the new sensation of renunciation, and that goodness performed for the sake of its own novelty is still only a species of pleasure.

Dorian goes home troubled. He climbs to the locked room, hoping to see that a single line of cruelty has been rubbed out by his single act of mercy. He pulls the cloth. The portrait has only added a new line: at the mouth, the small curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The blood on the painted hand seems fresh. It is as if the portrait has been waiting for him to try.

He feels, then, the final clarity — that his good deed was only vanity wearing the costume of a good deed, and that the ledger upstairs is in fact the only honest thing in his life. He looks at the knife with which he killed Basil, cleaned to a brightness. It had killed the painter; it can now kill the painter’s work. He takes it up and strikes the portrait in the heart.

There is a cry so horrible that the frightened servants wake and creep out of their rooms. They eventually break in the door. What they find is what the novel has been walking toward from the first sentence: upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty; and on the floor, a dead man in evening dress, with a knife in his heart, withered and wrinkled and loathsome of visage, whom they recognize at last only by the rings on his fingers.

The ledger has been paid in full.

Claude’s Take

Register change: back to plain English.

The central conceit is immortal, which is why everyone who has not read the book thinks they have. The portrait as visible moral ledger is one of the best symbols any English novel has produced, and it works because it is literal: it answers the question of what the soul would look like if you could see it, and then shows you. Lord Henry is one of the great seducer-raisonneurs in the language. The final fifty pages are economically frightening in a way most Victorian gothic is not.

Dorian Gray is often filed as a witty novel about vanity, which is a little like filing the Book of Job as a witty book about weather. It is the tragedy of pure aestheticism, and Wilde gives the creed its full seductive force before showing the bill. Lord Henry’s sermon on youth in the garden is not a straw man; it is the real article, and anyone who has ever spent too long in front of a mirror or a feed will recognize the pull of it. The book’s answer is not that the creed is wrong in some cheap way but that it costs exactly what it says it costs. That is a harder and braver book than Wilde is usually credited with writing.

What creaks: Chapter XI’s catalogue does sag if you are not in the mood for prose opera; the women are thin even by 1891 standards (Sibyl is a device, her mother is stage business, her brother is a revenge plot with a pulse); and there is scattered Victorian Orientalism and antisemitism — especially around the Jewish theatre manager — that a modern reader should notice rather than glide past. The Alan Campbell blackmail subplot resolves offstage with a wave of the authorial hand, which is the moment one suspects Wilde himself was bored of his own plot machinery.

The queer reading is not a reading, it is a fact. The novel was used as evidence against Wilde at his 1895 trial for “gross indecency,” and reading it now one sees why. Basil’s adoration of Dorian is the coded version of something the law would not let Wilde say aloud in 1891, and the book’s moral architecture — beauty as forbidden object, catastrophe as wages — reads differently when one knows the man who wrote it would be sentenced to two years’ hard labour and die broken in a Paris hotel. The tragedy of the book is now partly Wilde’s own, and impossible to unread.

What a modern reader should take away is that Lord Henry’s gospel is more seductive than Wilde’s defenders usually admit, and that the book is a serious repudiation of it — serious enough to grant the gospel its full force before turning over the canvas. The portrait is not a cheat. It is what Wilde thought the soul actually looked like when you stopped paying attention to it.