Concetti Chiave
- The novel begins with Lord Henry Wotton influencing Dorian Gray's perception of beauty as the highest value in life.
- Dorian Gray wishes to remain youthful like his portrait, leading to a life of indulgence and moral decay.
- The portrait reflects Dorian's sins, culminating in his attempt to destroy it, resulting in his own death.
- Beauty is portrayed as both an ideal and a destructive force, leading to Dorian's obsession and ultimate downfall.
- Wilde uses Dorian's story to critique the superficial pursuit of beauty and pleasure, highlighting their potential to ruin one's soul.
Plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray
The novel begins with Lord Henry Wottom watching his friend Basil Hallward painting the portrait of a handsome young man called Dorian Gray. Lord Henry wants to know the subject painted in the picture. Dorian arrives later, meeting Lord Wotton, who explains his point of view of the world, making believe the young man that beauty is one of the most important things of life.Dorian and Lord Henry are both thrilled by the beauty of the portrait and the first one wishes that he can always stay as young as the picture and declares that he would give his soul for making this happen. In fact, the image of himself becomes ugly under Dorian's sins. He rejects Sibyl Vane, an actress who falls in love with him but she is not requite and soon she is not able to act anymore, so she kills herself.
When Dorian realizes that the portrait holds the sign of his sins, he hides it in the attic.
Over the next eighteen years he experiments with every kind of vice. At the end, realising that his was a horrible life, he tries to distroy the picture with a knife, but doing it he kills himself.
The theme of beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dorian Gray is the epitome of the physical beauty and this has pros and cons: he can deeply fulfil himself with refinement, sublimity and preciousness since he is able to capture every nuance of them but he will also get old and deteriorate. This fact, as well as the consciousness of the ephemerality and the passage of time, will be his main fear, anxiety and obsession.
As a matter of fact, in the same time he and Lord Henry start a relationship based on a mutual admiration, idealisation and a sort of twinship, Dorian breaks up with Sybil Vane because she is no longer magnificent as she is supposed to be so she ruined the novel of Gray’s life.
For this reason she will be punished and she will kill herself but Dorian does not consider himself the cause of this tragedy. The blame is still on Sybil: she was supposed to be a great artist and his love for her was based on that; when this aspect vanished, love became vane and the woman superficial, delusional and unworthy.
With this mental and philosophical twist, Wilde wanted to underline Gray’s psychosis, coldness, guile, narcissism, lack of shame and empathy.
Beauty is an high ideal, an unattainable concept that will ruin someone’s soul if it is pursued too intensely or blindly, as the epilogue of the novel suggests: Dorian Gray is death but the picture returned to its original form.
Pleasure is superficial but it dissimulates his aspect to appear the essence of life, the ultimate purpose of someone’s identity. It inebriates the human being, it languishes more and more, it is insatiable. For its immense nature, not a single man can regulate and manage it.
“Beauty is a mask and youth is a mockery”: this is Wilde’s comment on the events. As in the Greek tails, it seems that the author gives readers the explanation of his novel, the moral that at the end should emerge. It is, at the same time, evoked the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray about Art, Beauty and the defence of Literature.
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