A Summary and Analysis of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s one novel, published originally in 1890 (as a
serial) and then in book form the following year. The novel is at once an example of late
Victorian Gothic horror and, in some ways, the greatest English-language novel about
decadence and aestheticism, or ‘art for art’s sake’.
To show how these themes and movements find their way into the novel, it’s necessary to
offer some words of analysis. But before we analyse The Picture of Dorian Gray, it might be
worth summarising the plot of the novel.

The Picture of Dorian Gray: summary

The three main characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray are the title character (a beautiful
young man), Basil Hallward (a painter), and Lord Henry Wotton (Basil Hallward’s friend).
The novel opens with Basil painting Dorian Gray’s portrait. Lord Henry Wotton takes a shine
to the young man and advises him to be constantly in search of new ‘sensations’ in life. He
encourages Dorian to drink deep of life’s pleasures. When the picture of Dorian is finished,
Dorian marvels at how young and beautiful he looks, before wishing that he could always
remain as young and attractive while his portrait is the one that ages and decays, rather than
the other way around. When he proclaims that he would give his soul to have such a wish
granted, it’s as if he has made a pact with the devil.
Basil’s finished portrait is sent to Dorian’s house, while Dorian himself goes out and follows
Lord Henry’s advice. He falls head over heels in love with an actress, Sibyl Vane, but when
she loses her ability to act well – because, she claims, now she has fallen in love for real she
cannot imitate it on the stage – Dorian cruelly discards her. He had fallen in love with her art
as an actress, and now she has lost that, she is meaningless to him.
Sibyl takes her own life before Dorian – who has observed a change in his portrait, which
looks to have a slightly meaner expression than before – can apologise to her and beg her
forgiveness. But Lord Henry consoles Dorian, arguing that Sibyl, in dying young, has given her
last beautiful performance.
Dorian, shocked by the change in the portrait, locks it away at the top of his house, in his old
schoolroom. Inspired by an immoral ‘yellow book’ which Lord Henry gives to him, Dorian
continues to experience all manner of ‘sensations’, no matter how immoral they are. When
he next takes a look at the portrait in his attic, he finds an old and evil face, disfigured by sin,
staring out at him.
The novel moves forward some thirteen years. Dorian, of course, is still young and fresh-
faced, but his portrait looks meaner and older than ever. When Dorian shows the portrait to
Basil, who painted it, the artist – who had worshipped Dorian’s beauty when he painted the
picture – is shocked and appalled. Dorian stabs Basil to death, before enlisting the help of
someone to dispose of the body (this man, horrified by what he has done, will later take his
own life).
Dorian slides further into sin and evil, until one day, the brother of the dead actress, Sibyl
Vane, bumps into Dorian Gray and intends to exact revenge for his sister’s mistreatment at
the hands of Dorian. But when he follows Dorian to the latter’s country estate, he is
accidentally shot by one of Dorian’s shooting party.
Dorian becomes intent on reforming his character, hoping that the portrait will start to
improve if he behaves better. But when he goes up to look at the painting, he finds that it
shows the face of a hypocrite, because even his abstinence from vice was, in its own way, a
quest for a new sensation to experience. Horrified and angered, Dorian plunges a knife into
the canvas, but when the servants walk in on him, they find the portrait as it was originally
painted, showing Dorian Gray as a youthful man. Meanwhile, on the floor, there is the body
of a wrinkled old man with a ‘loathsome’ face.

The Picture of Dorian Gray: analysis

The Picture of Dorian Gray has been analysed as an example of the Gothic horror novel, as a
variation on the theme of the ‘double’, and as a narrative embodying some of the key
aspects of late nineteenth-century aestheticism and decadence.
Wilde’s skill lies in how he manages to weave these various elements together, creating a
modern take on the old Faust story (the German figure Faust sold his soul to the devil, via
Mephistopheles) which also, in its depictions of late Victorian sin and vice, may remind
readers of another work of fiction published just four years earlier: Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (which we’ve analysed here). Indeed, the discovery of
the body of Dorian Gray as a wrinkled and horrifically ugly corpse at the end of the novel
recalls the discovery of Jekyll/Hyde in Stevenson’s novella.
To find the novel’s value as a book of the aesthetic movement, we need look no further than
Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which he states, for instance, that ‘there is
no such thing as a moral or immoral book’ (what matters is whether the book is written well
or not) and ‘all art is quite useless’ (art shouldn’t change the world: art exists as, and for,
itself, and no more).
Lord Henry Wotton is very much the voice of the aesthetic movement in the novel, and
many of his pronouncements echo those made by the prominent art critic (under whom
Wilde had studied at Oxford), Walter Pater. But whereas Pater talked of ‘new impressions’,
Lord Henry (or Wilde, in his novel) took this up a notch, calling for new ‘sensations’.
We tend to speak conveniently of ‘periods’ or ‘movements’ or ‘eras’ in literary history, but
these labels aren’t always useful. Both Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Gaskell, the author of Mary
Barton and North and South, were ‘Victorian’ in that they were both writing and publishing
their work in Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901).
But whereas Gaskell, writing in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, wrote ‘realist’ novels about the
plight of factory workers in northern England, Wilde wrote a fantastical horror story about
upper-class men who are able to stay forever young and spotless while their portraits decay
in their attic. They’re a world away from each other.
Wilde’s novel is a good example of how later Victorian fiction often turned against the values
and approaches favourited by earlier Victorian writers. It was Wilde who, famously, said of
the sad ending of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, which Dickens’s original readers in the
1840s wept buckets over, ‘one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell
without’ – what, crying? No. Wilde’s word was ‘laughing’. The overly sentimental style
favoured by mid-century novelists like Dickens had given way to a more casual, poised,
nonchalant, and detached mode of storytelling.
At the same time, we can overstate the extent to which Wilde’s novel turns its back on
earlier Victorian attitudes and values. Despite his statement that there is no such thing as a
moral or immoral book, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a highly moral work, as the tale of
Faust was. Dorian’s life is destroyed by his commitment to a life of pleasure, even though it
entails the destruction of other lives – most notably, Sibyl Vane’s. Far from being a book that
would be denounced from the pulpits by Anglican clergymen for being ‘immoral’, The
Picture of Dorian Gray could make for a pretty good moral sermon in itself, albeit one that’s
more witty and entertaining than most Christian sermons.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is, at bottom, a novel of surfaces and appearance. We say ‘at
bottom’, but that is precisely the point: the novel is, as many critics have commented, all
surface. Lord Henry is so taken by the beauty of Dorian Gray that he sets about being a bad
influence on him. Dorian is so taken by the painting of him – a two-dimensional
representation of his outward appearance – that he makes his deal with the devil, trading his
soul, that thing which represents inner meaning and inner depth, in exchange for remaining
youthful on the outside.
Then, when Dorian falls in love, it’s with an actress, not because he loves her but because he
loves her performance. When she loses her ability to act, he abandons her. Her name, Sibyl
Vane, points up the vanity of acting and the pursuit of skin-deep appearance at the cost if
something more substantial, but her first name also acts as a warning: in Greek mythology,
the Sibyls made cryptic statements about future events.
But there’s probably a particular Sibyl that Wilde had in mind: the Sibyl at Cumae, who, in
Petronius’ scurrilous Roman novel Satyricon (which Wilde would surely have known) and in
other stories, was destined to live forever but to age and wither away. She had eternal life,
but not eternal youth. Dorian’s own eternal youth comes at a horrible cost: without a soul,
all he can do is go in pursuit of new sensations, forever chasing desire yet never attaining
true fulfilment.
It will, in the end, destroy him: in lashing out and trying to destroy the truth that stares back
at him from his portrait, much as he had destroyed the artist who held up a mirror to his
corrupt self, Dorian Gray destroys himself. In the last analysis, as he and his portrait do not
exist separately from each other, he must live with himself – and with his conscience – or
must die in his vain attempt to close his eyes to who he has really become.

About Oscar Wilde

The life of the Irish novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is as
famous as – perhaps even more famous than – his work. But in a career spanning some
twenty years, Wilde created a body of work which continues to be read an enjoyed by
people around the world: a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; short stories and fairy tales
such as ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’; poems including The Ballad of Reading
Gaol; and essay-dialogues which were witty revivals of the Platonic philosophical dialogue.
But above all, it is Wilde’s plays that he continues to be known for, and these include witty
drawing-room comedies such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and
The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as a Biblical drama, Salome (which was banned
from performance in the UK and had to be staged abroad). Wilde is also often remembered
for his witty quips and paradoxes and his conversational one-liners, which are legion. They
include, ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes’, and ‘I have nothing to declare except my
genius’ (when travelling through customs in America).
Wilde’s life – his generosity to others, his double life as a family man and someone who
engaged with extramarital affairs with other men, and his subsequent downfall when he was
put on trial for ‘gross indecency’ – has been movingly written about in Richard Ellmann’s
biography of Wilde and in the 1997 biopic Wilde, with Stephen Fry in the title role.

Themes
The Purpose of Art
When The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in
1890, it was decried as immoral. In revising the text the following year, Wilde included a
preface, which serves as a useful explanation of his philosophy of art. The purpose of art,
according to this series of epigrams, is to have no purpose. In order to understand this claim
fully, one needs to consider the moral climate of Wilde’s time and the Victorian sensibility
regarding art and morality. The Victorians believed that art could be used as a tool for social
education and moral enlightenment, as illustrated in works by writers such as Charles
Dickens and George Gissing. The aestheticism movement, of which Wilde was a major
proponent, sought to free art from this responsibility. The aestheticists were motivated as
much by a contempt for bourgeois morality—a sensibility embodied in Dorian Gray by Lord
Henry, whose every word seems designed to shock the ethical certainties of the burgeoning
middle class—as they were by the belief that art need not possess any other purpose than
being beautiful.
If this philosophy informed Wilde’s life, we must then consider whether his only novel bears
it out. The two works of art that dominate the novel—Basil’s painting and the mysterious
yellow book that Lord Henry gives Dorian—are presented in the vein more of Victorian
sensibilities than of aesthetic ones. That is, both the portrait and the French novel serve a
purpose: the first acts as a type of mysterious mirror that shows Dorian the physical
dissipation his own body has been spared, while the second acts as something of a road
map, leading the young man farther along the path toward infamy. While we know nothing
of the circumstances of the yellow book’s composition, Basil’s state of mind while painting
Dorian’s portrait is clear. Later in the novel, he advocates that all art be “unconscious, ideal,
and remote.” His portrait of Dorian, however, is anything but. Thus, Basil’s initial refusal to
exhibit the work results from his belief that it betrays his idolization of his subject. Of course,
one might consider that these breaches of aesthetic philosophy mold The Picture of Dorian
Gray into something of a cautionary tale: these are the prices that must be paid for insisting
that art reveals the artist or a moral lesson. But this warning is, in itself, a moral lesson,
which perhaps betrays the impossibility of Wilde’s project. If, as Dorian observes late in the
novel, the imagination orders the chaos of life and invests it with meaning, then art, as the
fruit of the imagination, cannot help but mean something. Wilde may have succeeded in
freeing his art from the confines of Victorian morality, but he has replaced it with a doctrine
that is, in its own way, just as restrictive.
The Supremacy of Youth and Beauty
The first principle of aestheticism, the philosophy of art by which Oscar Wilde lived, is that
art serves no other purpose than to offer beauty. Throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray,
beauty reigns. It is a means to revitalize the wearied senses, as indicated by the effect that
Basil’s painting has on the cynical Lord Henry. It is also a means of escaping the brutalities of
the world: Dorian distances himself, not to mention his consciousness, from the horrors of
his actions by devoting himself to the study of beautiful things—music, jewels, rare
tapestries. In a society that prizes beauty so highly, youth and physical attractiveness
become valuable commodities. Lord Henry reminds Dorian of as much upon their first
meeting, when he laments that Dorian will soon enough lose his most precious attributes. In
Chapter Seventeen, the Duchess of Monmouth suggests to Lord Henry that he places too
much value on these things; indeed, Dorian’s eventual demise confirms her suspicions. For
although beauty and youth remain of utmost importance at the end of the novel—the
portrait is, after all, returned to its original form—the novel suggests that the price one must
pay for them is exceedingly high. Indeed, Dorian gives nothing less than his soul.
The Superficial Nature of Society
It is no surprise that a society that prizes beauty above all else is a society founded on a love
of surfaces. What matters most to Dorian, Lord Henry, and the polite company they keep is
not whether a man is good at heart but rather whether he is handsome. As Dorian evolves
into the realization of a type, the perfect blend of scholar and socialite, he experiences the
freedom to abandon his morals without censure. Indeed, even though, as Basil warns,
society’s elite question his name and reputation, Dorian is never ostracized. On the contrary,
despite his “mode of life,” he remains at the heart of the London social scene because of the
“innocence” and “purity of his face.” As Lady Narborough notes to Dorian, there is little (if
any) distinction between ethics and appearance: “you are made to be good—you look so
good.”
The Negative Consequences of Influence
The painting and the yellow book have a profound effect on Dorian, influencing him to
predominantly immoral behavior over the course of nearly two decades. Reflecting on
Dorian’s power over Basil and deciding that he would like to seduce Dorian in much the
same way, Lord Henry points out that there is “something terribly enthralling in the exercise
of influence.” Falling under the sway of such influence is, perhaps, unavoidable, but the
novel ultimately censures the sacrifice of one’s self to another. Basil’s idolatry of Dorian
leads to his murder, and Dorian’s devotion to Lord Henry’s hedonism and the yellow book
precipitate his own downfall. It is little wonder, in a novel that prizes individualism—the
uncompromised expression of self—that the sacrifice of one’s self, whether it be to another
person or to a work of art, leads to one’s destruction.

Motifs
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The picture of Dorian Gray, “the most magical of mirrors,” shows Dorian the physical
burdens of age and sin from which he has been spared. For a time, Dorian sets his
conscience aside and lives his life according to a single goal: achieving pleasure. His painted
image, however, asserts itself as his conscience and hounds him with the knowledge of his
crimes: there he sees the cruelty he showed to Sibyl Vane and the blood he spilled killing
Basil Hallward.
Homoerotic Male Relationships
The homoerotic bonds between men play a large role in structuring the novel. Basil’s
painting depends upon his adoration of Dorian’s beauty; similarly, Lord Henry is overcome
with the desire to seduce Dorian and mold him into the realization of a type. This
camaraderie between men fits into Wilde’s larger aesthetic values, for it returns him to
antiquity, where an appreciation of youth and beauty was not only fundamental to culture
but was also expressed as a physical relationship between men. As a homosexual living in an
intolerant society, Wilde asserted this philosophy partially in an attempt to justify his own
lifestyle. For Wilde, homosexuality was not a sordid vice but rather a sign of refined culture.
As he claimed rather romantically during his trial for “gross indecency” between men, the
affection between an older and younger man places one in the tradition of Plato,
Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.
The Color White
Interestingly, Dorian’s trajectory from figure of innocence to figure of degradation can be
charted by Wilde’s use of the color white. White usually connotes innocence and blankness,
as it does when Dorian is first introduced. It is, in fact, “the white purity” of Dorian’s
boyhood that Lord Henry finds so captivating. Basil invokes whiteness when he learns that
Dorian has sacrificed his innocence, and, as the artist stares in horror at the ruined portrait,
he quotes a biblical verse from the Book of Isaiah: “Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will
make them as white as snow.” But the days of Dorian’s innocence are over. It is a quality he
now eschews, and, tellingly, when he orders flowers, he demands “as few white ones as
possible.” When the color appears again, in the form of James Vane’s face—“like a white
handkerchief”—peering in through a window, it has been transformed from the color of
innocence to the color of death. It is this threatening pall that makes Dorian long, at the
novel’s end, for his “rose-white boyhood,” but the hope is in vain, and he proves unable to
wash away the stains of his sins.

Symbols
The Opium Dens
The opium dens, located in a remote and derelict section of London, represent the sordid
state of Dorian’s mind. He flees to them at a crucial moment. After killing Basil, Dorian seeks
to forget the awfulness of his crimes by losing consciousness in a drug-induced stupor.
Although he has a canister of opium in his home, he leaves the safety of his neat and proper
parlor to travel to the dark dens that reflect the degradation of his soul.
James Vane
James Vane is less a believable character than an embodiment of Dorian’s tortured
conscience. As Sibyl’s brother, he is a rather flat caricature of the avenging relative. Still,
Wilde saw him as essential to the story, adding his character during his revision of 1891.
Appearing at the dock and later at Dorian’s country estate, James has an almost spectral
quality. Like the ghost of Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, who warns
Scrooge of the sins he will have to face, James appears with his face “like a white
handkerchief” to goad Dorian into accepting responsibility for the crimes he has committed.
The Yellow Book
Lord Henry gives Dorian a copy of the yellow book as a gift. Although he never gives the title,
Wilde describes the book as a French novel that charts the outrageous experiences of its
pleasure-seeking protagonist (we can fairly assume that the book in question is Joris-Karl
Huysman’s decadent nineteenth-century novel À Rebours, translated as “Against the Grain”
or “Against Nature”). The book becomes like holy scripture to Dorian, who buys nearly a
dozen copies and bases his life and actions on it. The book represents the profound and
damaging influence that art can have over an individual and serves as a warning to those
who would surrender themselves so completely to such an influence.