The Picture of Dorian Gray: summary, characters and analysis

The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) was first published in 1890. It is the only novel written by the Irish author, who had a prolific work as a playwright and short story writer.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical novel that represents the obsession with the power of youth and beauty. It is, at the same time, a reflection on the nature of art and aesthetics.

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While the painter Basil Hallway portrays Dorian Gray, the conversation of Lord Henry Wotton induces the young man into hedonism and opens his eyes to the brevity of youth. Basil prints his obsession and adoration for Dorian's beauty on the canvas and bathes him in flattery. Troubled by those ideas, Dorian Gray is saddened when he sees the finished portrait:

How sad it is! Dorian Gray murmured, his eyes still fixed on the portrait. I will grow old, horrible, horrible. But this painting will always be young. You will never leave this June day behind… If it were the other way around! If I always kept young and the portrait grew old! I'd give… I'd give anything for that! I would give my soul!

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Shortly afterwards, the painter Basil Hallway sent the portrait to Dorian's house, feeling that he had put too much of his soul in it, and that he was therefore unable to commit it to an exhibition.

Dorian Gray falls in love with the young and beautiful actress Sibyl Vane. Since he has known her, he has attended the theater every night to see her perform in different plays, all of them by Shakespeare. The young man decides to invite her friends, Basil and Lord Henry, to the theater to meet her. But that night, Sibyl performs abysmally in the role of Juliet, causing half the audience, including Dorian's guests, to leave before finishing.

Dorian visits Sibyl backstage after the show and claims her. Sibyl explains that having met her true love, she could not represent him through false characters, less personified by bad actors. The young man, furious, tells her that with that bad performance she had killed her love, and ends the relationship abruptly.

Back at his house, Dorian stops to look closely at his portrait. As he stares at her, he notices an almost imperceptible change in the corner of her mouth: they looked like the marks of a cruel smile. It is the first time that he suspects that his wish could have come true. Afraid of the consequences, he hides the painting.

The next day, Dorian regrets what happened, and decides to apologize to Sibyl and fulfill her promise of marriage. But, on a visit, Lord Henry tells him that Sibyl has died. Indeed, the young woman commits suicide by drinking a glass with toxic materials, which awakens the thirst for revenge of her brother, James Vane.

To comfort Dorian, Lord Henry lends him a book on the sins of the world at different times. The protagonist was a "Parisian with a strangely combined romantic and scientific temperament," and "contained the story of her life, written before he had lived it."

Dorian took the book as a manual. Meanwhile, the physical ravages of his lifestyle and his increasingly vile actions were absorbed by the portrait of him, locked away in the basement. Until the age of 38, Dorian had managed to maintain his immaculate beauty and youth, with which he provoked others to enjoy pleasure without consequences, dragging them towards their final ruin.

Over time, Dorian gains a terrible reputation. After years without seeing him, the painter Basil Hallway recriminates Dorian at the comments of the people. Dorian tells him that it is his fault and takes him to see the painting. Basil is horrified at the terrible image and drags Dorian to the desk to pray for his absolution. But Dorian, on an irresistible impulse, stabs Basil treacherously.

Dorian gets rid of all incriminating evidence. Months later, with an uneasy conscience, he decides to take one last step to free him: kill the work and "everything it meant". Thus, he takes the dagger with which he had killed Basil and pierces the canvas. Dorian falls to the ground screaming. When the servants go up to the room, the body of an old man lies on the floor with a dagger in his heart.

Analysis and meaning

The Picture of Dorian Gray represents a tension between morality and hedonism. But this is not the only question, nor is it presented in isolation. Oscar Wilde's aesthetic notions are exposed in the novel and constitute a pivot in the construction and interpretation of the text. This concern for the interference of art and beauty in life is a constant in the work of the author, which is not disputed with a review of the axiological contradictions of the elite Victorian.

In an essay titled Philosophical background and intertextuality in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Diana María Ivizate González maintains that:

Wilde turns the portrait of Dorian Gray into a symbol of art as a mirror of men's actions. So the aesthetic effect: the love of physical beauty, appears accompanied by a moral significance, which will be followed by self-awareness.

What does Dorian represent? He represents the excess of aestheticism and hedonism. What drives him? Ivizate González says:

Dorian Gray is faced with this existential conflict since he has knowledge of the immanence of death. It is Lord Henry who awakens in him the horror of death and, even more, of growing old ...

The process we are witnessing with the character of Dorian Gray is certainly a process of debasement driven by the fear of inexorable death, but above all of the loss of beauty, source of its power and influence Social.

The spell that, for some reason, Wilde has no interest in explaining or justifying, offers the character of Dorian a power: that of acting as he wants without his actions being reflected, but also of seducing to bend the will of others to his favor. With this, Wilde introduces a complex question: the symbolic power that derives from the relationship between beauty and youth. There is, therefore, a very particular bet: the centrality of reflection on aesthetics.

Dorian Gray, whose beauty and youth arouses the admiration of all, blurs the humanity of him without anyone being able to perceive it. These questions constitute an existential paradox, a principle that undoubtedly arouses the greatest attention in romantic and post-Romantic literature and art.

This is how all the elements that we have described are threaded to consolidate a solid tissue. Through aesthetic reflection, Oscar Wilde manages to interrelate morality, hedonism, power, youth, beauty and the human and psychological condition in a masterpiece of literature western.

Characters of The Picture of Dorian Gray

The main characters of The Picture of Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde are three: Dorian Gray, the protagonist of the book and the portrayed; Basil Hallward, the portrait painter, and Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian's "bad influence."

Here is a brief description of the characters:

• Lady Brandon: lady introducing Basil Hallway and Dorian Gray for the first time.
• Basil Hallward: humble and religious painter of the upper middle class of the Victorian era. Dorian's friend and author of his portrait.
• Lord Henry Wotton: called by Dorian "the prince of paradox". He is an aristocrat and a hedonist par excellence. Lord Henry is lending him the book on the sins of the world that would lead Dorian Gray to repeat the same steps.
• Dorian Gray: He is the grandson of the last Lord Kelso. His mother was Lady Margaret Devereux, from whom she inherited his beauty. The nickname "Prince Charming", given by the actress and her then fiancée Sibyl Vane before she died, would be the one that would reveal her identity and make James Vane pursue him for revenge.
• Sibyl Vane: 17-year-old actress and Dorian's first victim.
• Mrs. Vane: mother of Sibyl and James Vane.
• James Vane: sailor, brother of Sibyl Vane. He is shot dead by Sir Geoffrey Clouston in a hunting event while trying to hide in the bushes to kill Dorian and avenge his sister's name.
• Victor: he is Dorian's butler or valet during the early years.
• Lady Agatha: Hosting a meeting between Lord Henry and Dorian in Chapter 3.
• Lord Fermor: Lord Henry's uncle named George. She gives him the information about Dorian's family.
• Duchess Gladys Monmouth: he has an older husband. She flirts with Dorian.
• Victoria Wotton: Lord Henry's wife who, after years, divorces him.
• Francis: she is Dorian's butler or valet who replaced Victor.
• Hetty Merton: a girl that Dorian rejects, not out of goodness but out of vanity: “Her hypocrisy had led him to put on the mask of goodness. She had tried self-denial out of curiosity. "
• Alan Campbell: scientist and former friend of Dorian. She was the one who helped Dorian dispose of Basil Hallway's body. He commits suicide days later.

Quotes of The Picture of Dorian Gray

• "Revealing the art and hiding the artist is the goal of art."
• Like all good reputations, every success brings us an enemy. To be popular you have to be mediocre ”.
• "-What are you? “To define oneself is to limit oneself”.
• "The only difference between a whim and a lifelong passion is that the whim lasts a little longer."
• What was youth at best? A time of inexperience, of immaturity, a time of fleeting moods and morbid thoughts. Why had he insisted on wearing his uniform? The youth had spoiled it ”.
• Basil Hallward's canvas contained the secret of his life, it told his story. He had taught her to love his own beauty. Would it also teach her to hate his own soul? "

Oscar Wilde biography

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854, and passed away in 1900. He was an important writer, playwright and poet, the highest representative of aestheticism. He achieved social recognition very soon thanks to his ingenuity, becoming an emblematic figure of the time.

He earned his BA with honors from Magdalen College, Oxford. He was married to Constance Lloyd, and had an intimate relationship with young Alfred Douglas, which was the beginning of his social descent. Indeed, at the height of his success, Wilde was imprisoned and sentenced to forced labor for two years because of his homosexuality. During prison, he wrote the famous and painful letter Of profundis, dedicated to his lover.

Upon leaving prison, he went to Paris, where he embraced the Catholic faith and adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth. There, he died of meningitis, in the context of severe poverty.

Among his most recognized works are: The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel), The importance of being called Ernesto (theater), An unimportant woman (theater), The happy Prince (story), The ghost of Cantervile (story), The decay of the lie (test), The Ballad of Reading Jail (poetry) and Of profundis (epistolary genre).