The Picture of Dorian Gray

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1890

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-9

Chapters 10-16

Chapters 17-20

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Symbols & Motifs

The Painting of Dorian Gray

The novel as a whole seeks to interrogate the norms and failings of the British aristocracy of the 19th century. The chief vice that Wilde skewers in this narrative is that of vanity, and the pursuit of formalized artistic pleasure above all else. The enchanted and morphing painting of Dorian Gray is the perfect instrument for Wilde to achieve his critique. Firstly, the likeness of Dorian Gray inside of the painting bears visual evidence of the man’s moral corruption, of which his physical body bears no signs. The fact that it is a painting—the aristocratic class’s most prominent art form—symbolizes the manner in which the wealthy skirt responsibility and project their own ugliness onto objects and items external to themselves, thereby exculpating themselves. The fact that the painting ultimately succeeds in reifying Lord Henry’s destructive and morally bankrupt devotion to art for art’s sake, as well as his blind elevation of beautiful objects through its ultimately pristine and beautiful appearance at the narrative’s end—while Dorian himself, as well as several others, have met with violent and painful ends—forwards the notion that aristocratic vices are slippery and difficult to nail down and resolve.

Abstract Beauty

The idea of an abstract sense of beauty is a recurring motif in the text. The phrase names that which Lord Henry (and ultimately Dorian) pursue—Lord Henry through his endless fountain of provocative dictums, and Dorian through the trajectory of his life. Sybil Vane is said to have achieved this abstract sense of beauty through her artful acting, and Lord Henry is of the persuasion that the pieces of art that grant the most unfettered access to this abstract sense of beauty are the most successful ones. Put another way, “the abstract sense of beauty” can be seen as the pleasure that, according to Lord Henry’s way of thinking, ideal works of art should proffer. It is Dorian’s pursuit of this pleasure that becomes his undoing. Therefore, through this motif, Wilde entreats his reader to literally dig beneath the surface of beauty: to pause before making the vain pursuit of the beautiful and its pleasures the paramount aim of one’s life.

The Parisian Book Given to Dorian by Lord Henry

Shortly after meeting Dorian, Lord Henry gives him a handsomely-bound book that chronicles the adventures of a young and glamorous Parisian man. Dorian returns to this book at several times throughout the narrative, which makes the book a recurring motif. At first, Dorian’s engagement with the book is that of celebratory rapture:

The hero [of the book], the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, [becomes] to [Dorian] a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book [seems] to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it (123).

This book can be interpreted as a twin of the enchanted painting. It is a work of art that successfully produces pleasure in Dorian, due to its ability to exercise artistic conventions in order to produce an image of beauty, which subsequently confers pleasure. It also presents to Dorian an idealized and beautiful version of himself, which is the same thing that the painting does. Such an object, under the purportedly moral theory that Dorian picks up from Lord Henry, is the pinnacle of artistic and moral achievement. However, by the end of the narrative, Dorian is cursing the book and beginning to blame it for helping to cause the enchantment and, subsequently, his own downfall. Through this arc, which again mirrors that of the painting, Wilde solidifies his assertion that, while it can be easy to attribute absolute moral value to beautiful works of art due to the pleasurable feelings that they produce, it is folly to mistake those pleasurable feelings as evidence of one’s own virtue, or even as evidence of the virtue of the work of art itself. For Wilde, neither aesthetic nor moral inquiry should stop at the surface level.