The Picture of Dorian Gray

‘All art is quite useless.’
Oscar Wilde

This tale of macabre desires is one that has troubled me a lot and not because of what many criticize it for: homoeroticism. The homosexual tendencies of the story may have upset the critics and reading masses of the 19th century but this is no real cause for upsetting a 21st century person. To look around these days and study your environment, you’d think that the cupid is a real bad shooter. The gay culture has sprung out with such independence recently that to think that Oscar Wilde was ultimately sentenced to hard labour only because he had put together sentences in The picture of Dorian Gray is quite laughable. For those of you who are foolish and bigoted enough to overlook this classic piece of literature because of the homosexual bender (no pun intended) (well, ok, maybe just a little), you are better off reading these Oscar Wilde trial proceedings and going to sleep telling yourself that he really had it coming.

To those who have heard of the book and not yet got it or made up their mind, Hello.

The picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of (duh) the picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray is a young man who poses and is much adored by Basil Hallward, an artist. Basil is much in awe of Dorian because of his infantile personality and innocent outlook of life. He recons that the best portrait he has ever painted is that of the handsome Dorian and discloses this confession to Lord Henry Wotton, a friend. Lord Henry is quite the corrupting serpent and it’s his cynical and hedonistic advice, ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it…resist it and the soul grows sick with longing’ that breaks Dorian’s virtue. He explains to Dorian how when his youth turns to age, his charm would be lost and time in its jealousy would wipe out every merit he contains. This really disturbs Dorian because he suddenly finds himself under the avalanche of words and time. So disturbed is he that when he is shown the completed portrait of himself, he speaks as if in a trance, hypnotized by the painting:

"How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible,
and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young.
It will never be older than this particular day of June.
. . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was
to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old!
For that--for that--I would give everything! Yes, there is
nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul
for that!"

And it is really his soul that he has to part with in order to make the arrangement mentioned above. For, the new hedonist and aesthete breaks the heart of a poor actress that he was in love with, Sibyl Vane, and upon going home finds that his mad wish has come true; the painting before him gets a cruel feature to it once his cruelty to Sibyl was undertaken. He is delighted but loses this delight when he finds out the next morning that his spite with Sibyl made the poor girl commit suicide.

Lost of the true love that he saw in Sibyl, Dorian gets a mad streak of sin in him and goes on to commit every form of indulgence that London could offer him. He hung around opium dens, had apparent sexual relationships with young boys and saw them dishonoured, commits murders (one of them Basil’s) and still manages to retain his youth. However, there is a horrifying end to the tale as things don’t go as planned and Dorian gets the bitter end of his contract with an invisible devil.

The book troubled me, like I said, not because of the horrid vices that Dorian undertakes but because of the extent to which Dorian can go back home and not be troubled by seeing his aging and depreciating portrait. All of us face ourselves in the mirror everyday and even this brief acquaintance with ourselves sends us packing to mountains, fitness-centres, barbers, schools, doctors and so on. This is because all too often, it is far too unfair to look at ourselves eroded by time. In this light, to imagine a murderer, a criminal, a rapist and snob (all rolled into one) and scrutinize his decaying soul is something which is quite unnerving because he is all too aware of his ageless beauty and the powers it entails. Dorian lived a double-life like Jekyll & Hyde but here the horror is sharper because he doesn’t lose control of his personality for one minute and has the precision of a cold-hearted man.

Many of us have thought of Faust like pacts with the Devil once we see the supremacy it could bring us. The picture of Dorian Gray is an important work because it has no such Devil, Dorian always had the choice to redeem himself by stopping but he chose not to do so, which, truth be told, most of would have done as well.
Instead of making you walk in the shoes of a troubled man…the book makes you walk in the shoes of the Devil himself.
The Devil that is Man.

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