The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Summary
Dorian Gray, young and strikingly beautiful, sits for a portrait by the painter Basil Hallward and, under the influence of Basil's cynical friend Lord Henry Wotton, wishes aloud that the picture might age in his place while he himself stays forever young. The wish is granted without anyone quite noticing how, and over eighteen years Dorian pursues Lord Henry's philosophy of pleasure without consequence to its furthest ends, his face staying unmarked while the hidden portrait grows steadily more hideous with every cruelty he commits. He courts and then coldly discards the young actress Sibyl Vane, whose suicide over his rejection barely troubles him, and years later murders Basil Hallward outright when the painter finally confronts him with what the portrait has become. Sibyl's brother James Vane spends years hunting Dorian for revenge and comes within an accident of catching him before dying himself in a hunting mishap, a near miss that leaves Dorian only briefly rattled rather than genuinely changed. Attempting, in a final gesture toward redemption, to destroy the portrait that has become his conscience, Dorian stabs the canvas with the same knife he used on Basil, and his servants find him dead on the floor, withered and old and unrecognizable except for the rings on his fingers, while the portrait on the wall has reverted to the beautiful young man it first depicted.
Wilde surrounds the Faustian plot with Lord Henry's constant stream of epigrams, wit so polished it nearly overshadows the story's mounting dread, and the effect is a novel that works as seduction and as a warning against that same seduction. It moves briskly and reads easily on the surface, but the corruption underneath accumulates with real force, and Wilde never lets the reader forget that Dorian's charm is precisely the mechanism of the damage he causes.
Wilde later said the idea came to him after sitting for his own portrait by the Canadian artist Frances Richards in 1887, when he joked that he wished it were the portrait that would age instead of him.
Historical Context & Significance
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine published a shorter version of the novel in July 1890, censored by roughly five hundred words at the American editor's discretion without Wilde's knowledge, and Ward, Lock and Company issued an expanded twenty chapter book edition in April 1891. Reviewers reacted with open hostility: the Daily Chronicle warned it contained an element that would taint every young mind, and the Scots Observer demanded to know why Wilde must go grubbing in muck heaps, calling the book unclean and contaminating. The bookseller WHSmith pulled the magazine from railway station stalls entirely.
The novel's notoriety followed Wilde for the rest of his life, and passages from it were read against him at his 1895 trials. It fell into relative neglect for decades before a late twentieth century reassessment restored it to its current standing as Wilde's masterwork; The Guardian has called it arresting, and slightly camp, and a 2011 uncensored edition restored passages of homoerotic feeling between Basil and Dorian cut from the original 1890 printing. Adaptations range from a 1945 film that won Angela Lansbury an Academy Award nomination to the television series Penny Dreadful.