The Picture of Dorian Gray

Summary

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject. Dorian Gray, barely of age, listens in the garden as Lord Henry praises youth and beauty as the only things worth having and urges him to live for sensation. Looking at the finished portrait, Dorian wishes that the picture might grow old while he stays young, and that he would give his soul for it. The wish is granted. Dorian falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a seventeen-year-old actress playing Shakespeare's heroines in a shabby East End theater, and becomes engaged to her, though her brother James, about to sail for Australia, distrusts the gentleman she calls Prince Charming. When Sibyl, now in love with a real person, acts Juliet badly, Dorian rejects her with contempt. At home he notices a new line of cruelty about the mouth of the portrait. He resolves to make amends, but Lord Henry brings word that Sibyl took poison at the theater the night before, and he persuades Dorian to treat her death as an artistic tragedy. Dorian locks the portrait in the old schoolroom at the top of his house. Under the spell of a yellow-covered French novel Lord Henry sends him, he spends the next eighteen years collecting perfumes, music, jewels and embroideries, studying ritual and the lives of his ancestors, while rumors gather about the ruin of young men and women who have been his friends. His face stays young; the portrait ages and coarsens. On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday Basil comes to plead with him, and Dorian shows him the picture. Basil begs him to pray, and Dorian kills him. He forces the chemist Alan Campbell, a former friend, to destroy the body. Seeking forgetfulness in an opium den by the docks, Dorian is confronted by James Vane, who lets him go because his face looks too young to be the man who wronged Sibyl; later Vane is accidentally shot by a guest at Dorian's country house, Selby Royal. Dorian tells Lord Henry he means to reform, having spared a village girl, but finds that the portrait shows only a new look of pretended goodness. He stabs the picture with the knife that killed Basil. His servants find the portrait restored to its first beauty and on the floor a withered, aged man with a knife in his heart, known only by his rings. A shorter version appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890; the library text is the revised and expanded book of 1891, with its Preface.

Top Lessons

• Words that shape a life

  Lord Henry's garden speech and his yellow book change Dorian more than any event, yet Lord Henry himself lives a quiet, conventional life. Wilde shows the power of persuasive talk and the responsibility of those who give it, while leaving Dorian answerable for what he chooses.

• Conscience made visible

  The portrait shows each choice as a mark on a face, and Dorian at last calls it conscience. The story imagines what would happen if a person could hide the effects of sin from others and from his own mirror, and it suggests that hiding them does not make them go away.

• Beauty and goodness

  Dorian lives as if beauty excused everything, and the Preface claims that books are only well or badly written. The novel itself places those claims under strain, since its plot follows the moral consequences of Dorian's acts to the end.

• Late repentance and false repentance

  Basil tells Dorian that it is never too late to pray, and Dorian refuses. Later he tries to be good by sparing a village girl, but the portrait shows that he did it from vanity. Wilde distinguishes regret for consequences from true repentance.

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Medical Lens

The novel is steeped in late-Victorian ideas about mind, body and inheritance. Lord Henry treats people as subjects for what the narrator calls the experimental method, describing a psychology of impulse and sensation that reflects contemporary physiological psychology. In Chapter XI Dorian wonders whether he inherited his ancestors' passions as if by contagion, a theme close to the heredity and degeneration theories then current. Opium appears from Lord Henry's opium-tainted cigarettes in Chapter I to the riverside den in Chapter XVI, where the narrator describes Dorian's craving in physical terms and the ruined Adrian Singleton shows its cost. Sibyl Vane dies after swallowing a theatrical preparation that Lord Henry guesses was prussic acid or white lead, and Alan Campbell, a chemist, later takes his own life. The portrait itself works as a figure of the body bearing what the mind conceals; readers sometimes describe Dorian in modern psychological terms, but such readings interpret a supernatural fable rather than a case history.

• Chapter IV

  Lord Henry reflects on studying Dorian by the experimental method and on psychology as a science of the passions.

• Chapter VIII

  Lord Henry reports Sibyl's death at the theater from a swallowed substance he supposes was prussic acid or white lead, and the inquest that will follow.

• Chapter XI

  Dorian walks the portrait gallery at Selby and imagines inheriting the sins and passions of his ancestors.

• Chapter XIV

  Alan Campbell, a chemist with his own laboratory, is forced to destroy Basil's body with chemicals; a smell of nitric acid remains.

• Chapter XVI

  Dorian drives through the night to an opium den by the river, gripped by a physical craving; he meets Adrian Singleton there.

• Chapter XX

  Dorian's body, found beside the restored portrait, is withered and aged beyond recognition.