The Picture of Dorian Gray (spoilers)

The battle with age and conscience

This novel is a philosophical look at age and conscience, certainly. It’s about morality, vanity, and vice. It’s also about what we show to the world, what we see in the mirror, juxtaposed with what we hide. Dorian Gray is a young and intensely handsome man and the artist Basil Hallward is entranced by him. Basil paints the perfect Picture of Dorian Gray. Basil’s Dorian is glorious, virtuous, and ideal.

Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to the novel: “The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass…The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”

Dorian Gray wanted to preserve the youth and beauty of his form, not stuck in a picture but forever embodied in his living form. He wanted Sybil Vane to be the actress both on the stage and in her life. He wanted the two of them could have maintained their artistic, beautiful forms together. Her failure to do this made him angry. He raged at her and he felt the remorse of it too late.

Dorian was able to separate himself, or rather, to separate his form (his body) from his soul. He was still both—both body and soul, form and conscience—but one moved alive in the world while the other (represented by the portrait) stayed hidden in a dark room in his house. The body stayed young and beautiful, and felt none of the negative consequences of his corrpution. Yet even as he still felt the agony of his conscience, his face remained flawless, while the Picture absolutely reflected the ugliness of his soul. He found in the end that, while he could remove the physical traces of his corruption from his body, they remained etched in his soul. The death of his body restored beauty to the portrait, as if the soul had never truly been disembodied.