english

• The Picture of Dorian Gray


  Title of the novel
• e, is similarly saved from aging by the supernatural transformation of his portrait, but while his appearance is now beyond mortality this freedom seems to drive Dorian to try to experience every kind of excess, to not care about consequences, to destroy lovers and friends through his influence and callousness
• In this way that novel suggests that while mortality will always destroy beauty and youth, that beauty and youth in fact need to be destroyed—that immortal youth beauty, such as is preserved in art, is in fact monstrous in the real world
• As Dorian's soul shrivels and he begins to seek and admire ugliness, his own beautiful face comes to seem to him just a hateful reminder of the innocence he has lost
• Beauty


  • Skin-deep in Dorian's circle of friends
  • He is welcomed and adored because of his beautiful appearance
  • Even when his sins ruin lives, he always has a certain power because of his attractiveness
  • Dorian is at his peak when he is unaware of his own beauty, but when conscious of it, his life becomes about surface and appearance
  • His taste for fashion grows; he loves tapestries and jewels, very flat, decorative objects
• The novel of course revolves around the portrait of Dorian but this is just one of the damaging surfaces that Wilde depicts
• Characters' identities and fates are entirely decided by their outward appearance
• Veils of societal roles and costumes are worn by everybody in the novel and are made more fatal by the way the characters describe and stereotype each other, never letting each other escape from their narrow identities and appearances
• To Lord Henry, even knowing Dorian's sinful behavior, he remains the beautiful boy that he met in Basil's studio because appearance always wins out
• Art


  The purpose of art is to conceal the artist
• Whether or not this is some kind of warning from the narrator, we as readers don't know, but what follows certainly seems to illustrate his point
• It presents art in many forms and the danger of it when it is taken too literally or believed too deeply
• Once Basil has attributed to the painting the power of capturing the spirit of Dorian Gray, and once Dorian has attributed to it the power to host and represent his own soul, the painting has a dangerous life of its own
• Dorian's romance with the actress Sybil Vane is composed of the romantic characters she played and the drama of each nightly performance
• The danger of seeing life only through the lens of art is that one must stay at a distance or risk ruining the illusion, just like a mirage
• The set up of Dorian's world in society and in his own home is full of pictures, stills and images through which we see life frozen or removed
• It is the ever-present pressure of art—of being a piece of living art himself, and of seeing real life mirrored in the portrait—that destroys Dorian
• As a piece of art itself, the novel invites us to question its form and purpose, as the argument of the preface suggests
• Influence


  The power of one to affect another
• Basil is influenced by his model Dorian, and Dorian's influence is also more far-reaching, actually seeming to change Basil's ability for painting, and to change the painting itself in an almost supernatural way
• The same curse befalls Sybil Vane, when she is so influenced by Dorian, and by love, that she is transformed and can no longer act
• Lord Henry's philosophies and paradoxes have a hypnotic power on some people, and cause Dorian to seek knowledge and believe in these theories enough that he lives by them
• Lord Henry's suggestion that the soul and the senses can mutually cure each other, for example, arises in Dorian's mind and, out of context, misguides him into thinking that opium could soothe his soul
• Lord Henry's philosophies frequently criticize women and marriage, and the era of Dorian Gray's London society, and indeed Oscar Wilde's, becomes vivid to us in his dialogue
• Though there are no explicitly homosexual relationships, there are definitely homoerotic ones, and words like "admiration" and "fascination" begin to acquire a double meaning in the text
• Colors symbolic of purity and innocence and sin and gore populate the story at crucial moments
• The painting


  It represents beauty, mortality, time, and art, all the major themes of the book, and its degradation literally presents to us the dangers inherent in these ideas
• Dorian Gray: '"I have seen her in every age and every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to their century."'
• Mrs. Vane: 'Mrs. Vane fixed her eyes on him, and intensified the smile. She mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience. She felt sure that the tableau was interesting.'
• Lord Henry Wotton: '"I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life."'
• Dorian Gray: '"I am changed, and the mere touch of Sybil Vane's hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories."'
• Lord Henry Wotton: '"What a place to find one's divinity in!"'
• Sybil Vane: '"The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows and thought them real."'
• Dorian Gray: '"So I have murdered Sybil Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to himself, "murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for that."'
• Lord Henry Wotton: '"The girl never really lived and so she never really died."'
• Basil Hallward: '"One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your on time."'
• It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and trouble the brain.
• And, certainly, to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
• What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood?
• Lord Henry Wotton: '"She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious."'