Talk to The Picture of Dorian Gray like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
The Picture of Dorian Gray, in detail
Dorian Gray is a beautiful young man who, on the day his portrait is painted, makes a wish — or perhaps a bargain, though no one is present to take the other side of it — that the portrait should age in his place. The wish comes true. Dorian remains perpetually young and beautiful while the painting absorbs every sin, every moral failure, every cruelty, gradually warping into something grotesque. He locks it in an attic and lives as he pleases.
Wilde's novel is an extended argument — playful, brilliant, and finally serious — about aestheticism, the philosophy that art is its own justification and beauty the only value worth pursuing. Lord Henry Wotton, the brilliant corrupter who plants the initial ideas in Dorian's head, is Wilde's mouthpiece for wit and paradox, and the novel is frankly more pleasurable in his scenes than in Dorian's later crimes. The philosophical provocations in the early chapters — about youth, pleasure, sin, and society — are more interesting than the Gothic horror that follows, which is somewhat mechanical by comparison.
There is a coded homosexual reading of the novel that Wilde could not make explicit and did not quite suppress. The relationship between the painter Basil Hallward and Dorian, and the way Lord Henry seduces Dorian intellectually, carry an erotic charge that the novel acknowledges through indirection. The 1890 version was censored and edited; the 1891 book version restored much of what had been cut. The novel was used as evidence against Wilde at his 1895 trial, with his own dialogue quoted back at him to imply his guilt.
As a reading experience, The Picture of Dorian Gray is uneven but memorable. The first half, dominated by Lord Henry's epigrams and the social world Dorian inhabits, is genuinely funny and intellectually alive. The second half, as Dorian descends into debauchery and murder, is more Gothic and less interesting as philosophy, though it builds to a conclusion that earns its weight. It is best read as a fable that Wilde could not quite contain within the moral form he had chosen — the ideas keep escaping the story.
The big ideas
- 1.
Lord Henry Wotton is the novel's most intellectually alive character, but Wilde shows that beautiful ideas do not have beautiful consequences — and Henry never has to face his.
- 2.
The portrait is both a supernatural device and a literalization of something psychologically real: the way we can keep living as if our choices have no cost while the cost accumulates elsewhere.
- 3.
The novel's aesthetic philosophy — beauty first, morality later — is both defended and destroyed by the story; Wilde was not naive about the argument he was making.
