The Portrait of Dorian Gray Critical Analysis - Essay Example

?The Portrait of Dorian Gray critical analysis. The famous tale of the young man who has his portrait painted, only to find that it absorbs all the signs of ageing while his physical body remains always young and beautiful is one of the most memorable novels of the late nineteenth century. The author, Oscar Wilde, was caught up in a scandalous court case because of his homosexuality, which was outlawed at the time, and there has since been considerable debate in the scholarly literature about themes of self-love and physical attraction between men. The story can be read as a depiction of transgressive love between men, but it contains also some very deep messages about morality which are surprisingly close to the strict, Victorian values of the time. This paper explores the contention that The Portrait of Dorian Gray is a cautionary tale intended to uphold Victorian family values and warn against the extremes of any kind of passion. Judging by the title of the novel, Dorian Gray is the central character in the book. The artist Basil’s infatuation with him is based on Dorian’s physical appearance, since he is described as “a young man of extraordinary personal beauty” (DG, p. 2. He is likened to a Greek god – such as Adonis, or the mythical boy who fell in love with his reflection, Narcissus (DG, p. 3). It is no coincidence that he is likened to these pre-Christian icons. The artist, Basil, declares to Dorian “As I said to Harry, once, you are made to be worshipped” (DG, p. 130). Basil is an idealistic person, devoted to his work, and celebrated in wealthy circles because of his talents. In every respect he represents a classically educated, admirable person, who lives out his dreams of beauty in his painting activity. At the beginning of the novel Dorian is morally neutral, and he evidently has little experience of love relationships, because he struggles to understand Basil’s idolatrous kind of love, and wonders himself if he will ever experience such a feeling in his life. He remonstrates with Basil, urging him not to talk of worship since the two men are friends, but this shows that Dorian has not fully grasped what it means to be consumed with admiration for a person of great beauty. Basil unwittingly corrupts the innocent Dorian by turning his head with extreme flattery. Another possible role model for Dorian is the older, cynical figure of Lord Henry Wotton. This character deals with the restrictive morality of the time by reinterpreting it as something inferior, that holds back human beings from realizing their full potential. Lord Henry Wotton takes an opposite line of argument by undermining notions of deep love, and recommending a lifestyle that revels in promiscuous relationships. He maintains that “The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination” (DG, p. 55). This character corrupts Dorian by giving him immoral reading material and encouraging him to experiment with habits that break social conventions. Faced with these two conflicting views of the world, Dorian is perplexed, and so he sets out on a journey of discovery, planning to work out things for himself. His gravest sin is not the impulsive wish to remain youthfully beautiful, but it is desire for knowledge, the original sin of Judaeo-Christian tradition: “The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them” (DG, p. 145). Following the aesthetic tastes of Basil and the pleasurable habits of Henry leads Dorian to confuse evil with beauty: “There were moments when he [Dorian] looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful” (DG, p. 165). Somehow Dorian blends the opposite examples of his friends into a monstrous combination that creates within him an irresolvable tension: “The unresolved conflicts in the plot of the novel reflect deep division in his own identity” (Carroll, 2005, p. 288). The stress of trying to embody these opposite world views is very difficult for Dorian to bear, and it is interesting that he understands the transformation of the painting as a kind of punishment for the wrongs that he knowingly undertakes. Contemplation of beautiful things lifts up Dorian’s soul, but he is drawn to sit in front of the painting after he has been spending time in “dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields” (DG, p. 158). The picture provokes a mixture of revulsion and remorse in him, and so it fulfils a moral function, reminding him of the inevitability of death, and the grossness of his immoral behavior. Sitting in front of the painting is like doing penance. Underneath Dorian’s depravity, then, there is a very strong sense of what is right and what is wrong, and a need to expiate his sins in some symbolic way. The persona that Dorian adopts is clearly located in the upper class, and dismissive of the poor, so that when the brief relationship with Sybil Vane comes to an end, he has no qualms about abandoning her and moving quickly on to the next amusing escapade. It has been noted that there is a very obvious linkage in Dorian’s mind between his aesthetic sense and criminality: “Envisaged as a poster boy for a ‘new Hedonism,’ Dorian ranges freely between aesthetic pursuits (like the study of perfumes, music, jewels, and embroidery) and criminal ones, beginning in the opium dens of the East End docklands and climaxing in murder” (Joyce, 2002, p. 505). According to Joyce, this has led to some critics assuming the The Tale of Dorian Gray seeks to promote the idea of an aesthetics of crime, even though the criminal activity in the novel is clearly a cause of much pain to Dorian, and ultimately leads to his ignominious end in a paroxysm of shame and guilt. At the end of the novel Basil realizes just how wrong it has been to worship an ideal image of a person, because he sees the hideous, aged face on the canvas and exclaims “Christ! What a thing I must have worshipped, it has the eyes of a devil” (DG, p. 178). Basil instinctively turns to the Christian faith of his boyhood to seek salvation from this dreadful monstrous creature. He accepts responsibility for his creation, and urges Dorian to pray with him. One possible resolution to the inner conflict that Dorian experiences would have been for the two men to beg God’s forgiveness, like Faust, and be forgiven to live a better life in the next world, even if not in this one. As it turns out, however, Dorian is no longer the beautiful creature that Basil once admired. He has taken on some of the attributes of each of his two mentors, and so he has become ideally beautiful and hideously ugly both at the same time, as if to demonstrate that human nature spans both of these extremes and everything in between. The painting represents what Dorian has become inside and he knows this when he says of the picture: “It is the face of my soul” (DG, p. 178). Basil’s sin was to swing from idolatry to fear, but Dorian cannot feel these emotions because he is too wrapped up in his own jaded view of the world. Even to the very last, Basil is concerned about Dorian, but the monster kills him in rage. Dorian’s murder of Basil, more than any of his sins, is the key event that marks him out as an evil character: “As an aesthete devoted solely to sensual pleasure, Wilde’s protagonist repudiates the idea of affectional bonds, and it is that repudiation which produces the mood of guilt and horror in which the novel culminates” (Carroll, 2005, p. 288). . The death of Dorian himself is a kind of desperate bid for release from an intolerable life of pain and guilt. Felski argues that the book prefigures modern existentialism because it “bears witness to the artist’s sense of alienation from dominant social structures and his own class identity” (Felski, 1991, p. 1095) The story describes the horror of crime, not only in the way it causes needless death and suffering, but also in the way it corrupts the otherwise beautiful body and soul of the aesthetically aware individual. Far from glorifying or glamorizing crime, Wilde’s story spells out its gruesome consequences by making them visible in the painting. Dorian’s meditation on the changes in the picture’s appearance takes the reader into the hidden space of the soul, and reveals what terrible, ugly devastation a man’s actions can inflict upon his inner being. The picture returns to its serene former state, hinting that Dorian’s heart is purified once more by the blood that has been shed, and the Victorian moral world can carry on in its usual way now that the drama is over. References Carroll, Joseph. “Aestheticism, homoeroticism, and Christian guilt in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005), pp. 286-304. Felski, Rita. “The counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans and Sacher-Masoch.” PMLA 106 (5), (1991), pp. 1094-1105. Joyce, Simon. “Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties.” English Literary History 69 (2002), pp. 501-523. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Read More