the introduction of the picture of Dorian Gray set in 19th century England, Lord Henrynry Watton is visiting his friend Basil Hallward, who is painting Dorian Gray's portrait. Henrynry admires the painting, but Basil worries he let his feelings for Dorian seep into the image. During the rising action, Henrynry chats with Dorian as the young man poses for his portrait.
Henrynry praises Dorian's beauty. When Dorian sees the finished portrait, he wishes he could stay young and that the portrait would grow older in his place. Henry would give his very soul for this to happen.
Attending performances at a shabby theater in a poor section of London, Dorian falls in love with actress Sybil Vane. Sybil doesn't even know Dorian's real name, calling him Prince Charming. Nevertheless, Dorian tells his friends they will marry.
And Sybil is happy, but her brother James is suspicious. When Henrynry and Basil go with Dorian to watch Sybil act, her performance is terrible. Sybil tells Dorian she used to act to escape life, but but now her life is wonderful with his love, and she no longer can act as she formerly did. What Dorian loved about her was her acting, so he breaks off their engagement.
When he gets home, he finds a new line in Basil's portrait. Cruelty is now visible in the painted face. Henryartbroken, Sybil commits suicide. Dorian is horrified when he learns about her death the next day, but Henrynry talks him into seeing it as something artful, a learning experience.
Dorian locks the portrait away where no one will see it. Dorian gets a package from Henrynry that includes results of the inquest into Sybil's death, along with a French novel. Dorian reads this book all day, and he becomes obsessive and profoundly influenced by it.
Dorian enters an extended period of self-indulgent, decadent, scandalous acts as years pass. On the evening before his 38th birthday, Dorian runs into Basil, who warns Dorian about the scandalous stories circulating about him. Dorian says he keeps a diary of his soul, and he leads his friend to the church. to see the portrait.
Basil is horrified at its monstrous ugliness. Dorian reminds Basil how he wished the painting would age instead of him. In the climax of the novel, suddenly overcome by anger and loathing, Dorian stabs Basil to death.
In the following action, Dorian contacts Alan Campbell, a scientist with whom he used to be very close, and blackmails him into getting rid of Basil's body. Late that night, Dorian goes to an opium den, and then James Vane, who wants to to kill Dorian for causing his sister's death, corners him. However, when Dorian shows the man his youthful face, James concludes it couldn't be Dorian, apologizes and lets him go.
A week later, a terrified Dorian stays home for three days before joining a group of hunters to shoot game. His friend shoots at a hare, accidentally fatally wounding a man hiding in the bushes. It is James'vain. Reflecting on all the lives he has ruined, Dorian decides to change his life and destroy. the painting.
In the resolution, Dorian stabs his portrait, cries out, and falls to the floor. Servants enter through a window to find Basil's portrait of Dorian, which is once again young and beautiful. A withered, repulsive old body lies near the painting.
Only the rings on the corpse's hands identify the dead man as Dorian Gray. Five characters paint the intricate, witty, gothic picture that is the picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray and his beauty are at the heart of the story, which is named for him. Dorian is young, pure, and stunningly beautiful when the novel opens, as the image Basil Hallward paints of him.
But Dorian stays forever young, while Basil's painting of him ages, and shows signs of each immoral act Dorian commits. Dorian becomes warped as time passes, becoming shallow, self-centered, and self-destructive. Henry may be physically lovely, but he leaves a trail of broken hearts, ruined reputations, and dead bodies behind him. Beloved and sought after by men and women alike, Dorian speaks to messages about purposes of aesthetic beauty and the ruin of self-serving pleasure. Basil Hallward is a mature artist who painted Dorian's portrait.
Henry's concerned with good reputation and character, but also with creating and capturing beauty. Wildee opens his preface with,"'The artist is the creator of beautiful things.'" Basil facilitates Dorian's supernatural status by painting this beautiful portrait, and his worship of Dorian underscores its creation. However, it is up to another character to bring Dorian fully into being. Lord Henrynry I. In the preface to this novel, Oscar Wildee writes, The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. Lord Henrynry is a critic who explains beauty art, and life in a way that fundamentally changes Dorian.
Basil may capture Dorian's beauty on canvas, but Henrynry explains it in a way that awakens Dorian to its significance. Henrynry is a cynical dandy who lives with his life on display to the world and dedicated to pleasure. Sybil Vane, Dorian's primary love interest, is a symbolic character. In ancient Greece, sibyls were oracles at holy sites.
The gods spoke through them. Sybil Vane is an actress. The divinities who speak through her are human artists.
She and Dorian are living art. Sybil is young and poor, acting because she desperately needs to escape her reality through acting. Once Dorian loves her, her performances suffer, as she no longer needs acting to escape.
Sadly, she lives in vain, dying young, as a result of her naivete and relationship with her art. Henryr blossoming love for Dorian functions as the wind moves a weathervane, changing her view of life, and thus her previously all-consuming dedication to her acting. James Vane is Sybil Vane's protective younger brother.
Henry distrusts the aristocratic suitor whom Sybil and their mother know as Prince Charming, vowing to kill him if he ever harms Sybil. James joins the navy and leaves for Australia just before Dorian dumps Sybil, and she takes her own life. Years later, James returns to England and finds Dorian, intending to kill him.
Dorian points out that he is much too young to be the person James seeks. Realizing he's been tricked, he returns later to kill Dorian, but manages to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and is accidentally shot by one of Dorian's guests. James becomes the second person in his family to die violently through a connection to Dorian Gray.
The Painting Flowers, the theater, and the book. Attractive, evocative symbols full of deeper, sometimes darker meaning in the picture of Dorian Gray. By far the most important symbol in the novel is Basil's portrait of Dorian. The centerpiece of the plot, the portrait interacts with Dorian throughout the narrative.
When Dorian does something immoral, the results show up on the painting, while Dorian's own face stays unmarked and beautiful. The picture takes the Victorian ideal of art to its logical extreme. If art is useful because it teaches some kind of moral lesson, how perfect must this painting be since it's a barometer of ethical changes?
Basil's final glimpse of his masterpiece occurs when he says that to know Dorian, he must see his soul. This viewing is the artist's undoing. His horrified reaction to the portrait leads Dorian to murder his friend.
Flowers descriptively sprout up throughout the book. Dorian turns to flowers to relieve his soul after Henrynry awakens him to the power and brevity of beauty. Dorian buys or orders orchids at key moments, both for appreciation and for levity from terrible horrors, such as when he's blackmailing Alan Campbell into disposing of Basil's body for him. Flowers symbolize beauty and how briefly it lasts, a fleeting beauty in stark contrast to the enduring ugliness that is captured in Dorian's portrait. The theater, as art, serves as a form of escapism.
Lord Henrynry advises that people should give in to temptation through indulgence, and Dorian uses art as one means of escaping the ethical concerns of his conscience. The theater is where Dorian's beloved Sybil Vane is primarily seen. It is the backdrop against which she artistically...
plays the characters that seduce Dorian into loving her. But once she and Dorian fall in love, it is the setting in which Sybil, no longer able to act, destroys his love forever. It is the place of Dorian's indulgence while Sybil's performances excel, but also where he rejects Sybil when her performances are no longer up to his standards.
The theater symbolizes the way all the main characters play roles in their own personal dramas. Then, There's the book. Specifically, the yellow book Lord Henrynry sent Dorian. This novel changes Dorian's life. Henry buys multiple copies, rereads it, and lives its philosophies.
This book, which he carries with him wherever he goes, represents Henrynry's influence over Dorian. Generally, controversial French novels were bound in yellow during this period, so this book represents the influence of French literature. These yellow bound books were considered sensational at best and decadent and immoral at worst, promoting both sexual and philosophical deviance.
The book drives Dorian to live like he's part of the period's aesthetic, hedonistic movement. Mirroring the unaging man with his twisted aging portrait, Oscar Wildee's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is full of themes that are dualities, including appearance versus reality, art versus life, reputation versus character, and pleasure versus virtue. What is real?
What is appearance? And what matters most? Oscar Wildee engages the theme of appearance versus reality in a number of ways.
When the portrait of Dorian is first displayed, appearance and reality are synchronized. But they begin to diverge as soon as Lord Henrynry awakens Dorian to his beauty and vanity. And Dorian wishes that his portrait would age in his place.
Also, Sybil Vane, the great love of Dorian's life, is an actress devoted to appearing to be something other than what she is. Before Dorian, she was skilled at acting because she believed love had no place in her life. Once Dorian changes her reality through loving her, she can no longer encompass the characters she used to play so well. Closely related to the theme of appearance versus reality is the theme of art versus life.
Art, for Oscar Wildee, requires style, conscious display, and an elevated aesthetic quality. It should be beautiful. When Sybil loses her artistic ability due to Dorian's love, she loses Dorian.
This makes it immediately clear that Dorian loved her because of her art. Art supersedes life here. And Lord Henrynry also argues repeatedly for the power and superiority of art. When Sybil Vane dies, he urges Dorian to think of her death as an artful literary tragedy.
Dorian accepts this guidance, moving from mourning and back to pleasure. Art then consoles in this novel, just as it reshapes reality. Reputation is the story others tell about a person. Character is that person's real nature. The picture of Dorian Gray examines what happens when there's a collision at their intersection.
Reputation versus character. Many people hear stories about Dorian. His bad reputation precedes him. Yet because so many believe one's character affects one's features, anyone who sees Dorian rejects these stories because of his pleasing physical appearance, no matter how lurid or often repeated.
Finally, pleasure versus virtue takes many forms in this novel. Art, beauty, sex, and drugs. Wilde explores pleasure's temptation and its relationship to virtue.
Though it is never made explicit in the best-known version of this novel, one of the implied main pleasures that is everywhere is homosexual desire. Both Basil and Lord Henrynry admired Dorian's beauty openly, and for extended, even romantic, amounts of time. Because homosexual relationships were illegal in this period, the story was revised to make its sexual content less overt.