Whispers of Vanity: Unmasking the Hopes and Dreams in Wilde’s Classic

Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray is an aesthetic book that is a treat for anyone who enjoys philosophy, literature, and the arts. The book goes into all of these in great detail, while providing the reader with some of the most intense internal conflicts in classic literature. It is a fascinating, absurd, and horrifying story about how a person’s individual interests and vanity can affect not only their life, but that of everyone around them. Oscar Wilde’s focus on beauty, ugliness, youth, old age, and all that comes in between makes this one of his most important pieces to date as well as an essential book to read; by putting all of the reader’s own desires, hopes and dreams in the spotlight, the book calls out our own morality and the importance that we attribute to the vainer things in life, while comparing it to the frivolous, majestic, bon-vivant and careless lifestyle of the careless, the vexed, the one and only: Dorian Gray.

To understand how this wonderful book relates to the hopes and dreams that are attached to our mode of living, we must first and foremost know what the story is about. The story begins when the artist Basil Hallward presents Lord Henry, his close friend, to Dorian Gray, his most recent muse and fascination. Dorian Gray is captivating young man, known for his remarkable looks and charming way of being. This beauty not only captivates Basil Hallward, who decides to dedicate a large portion of his time to painting Gray, but also Lord Henry, a man of high society who is equally fascinated by Dorian’s youth and beauty. Lord Henry is a very philosophical man, always keen on presenting his interlocutors with debates and creating turmoil within every conversation he has, promoting in himself a sort of intellectual superiority for having access to the greatest books. But despite this interest in intellect, he is still a mere mortal and therefore also very focused on appearances. In fact, he influences Gray, on one of their first encounters, to realize that “when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything, [(…]) Youth is the only thing worth having” (Wilde 2012, 26).

Upon this encounter, where the artist is painting the young man, Basil realizes that this is the best painting he had ever created, and therefore gives the piece to Dorian, his muse. Upon reflecting on the painting, Dorian realizes how truly beautiful and young he is, and wishes to never age himself, and let the man on the painting age and wither away. Locking the painting away, deciding to never see it again, Dorian moves on with his young, promising, desirable and beauty-filled life.

Fast forward some time, with a formed friendship between Dorian Gray and Lord Henry, one filled with debate and conversations, Dorian falls in love with a beautiful, young actress with the name of Sybil Vane. Vane plays several different classical characters, all of which with such love, sincerity, beauty and earnest that Dorian proposes to her, on a whim. He soon finds out, however, that the person he was in love with is not the innocent Sybil, but the characters she plays. Hurting her to her core, he breaks off their engagement in a very blunt, coarse way.

Once he returns home, in a fit of introspection, he decides to take another look at the mighty painting that Basil Hallward had painted. Upon this, he finds that the man on the canvas had become uglier than before, forcing him to realize how harshly he has treated the poor girl and attempts to repent. However, the next morning, on preparing to meet her and apologize, he hears that Sybil Vane has tragically died, assumedly taking her own life, due to the heartbreak. Sybil Vane, a girl whose personality was not half as vain as her name, was destroyed by a man who many could consider to be the vainest of them all.

Indignant with all that had occurred, Dorian attempts to move on with his life when Lord Henry offers him a book, one which soon becomes Dorian’s Bible. The book follows the story of a Frenchman who lives life attending to his every whim and desire, seeking pleasure and new sensations above all else. For the next two decades, in a life full of sin, disgrace, shame, pleasure, bliss, luxury, thrill and immorality, Dorian travels to several places in order to live a life filled with new sensations, as Lord Henry and the book had advised him.

He returns to his home in London once he is more prominently talked about within his circle. Although he is the object of gossip, people can never truly hate him because his beauty and youth are unmatched and purely supernatural. While his body rejoices and remains the same as 18 years ago, the picture locked away in the hidden room withers and turns as hideous as one can be.

Eventually, his old friend Basil confronts Dorian on his new ways of life and is aghast when Dorian shows him the painting in his ugliest form, demonstrating Dorian’s true soul. Basil begs Dorian to repent for his sins and to find morality in an immoral life. In a sort of tantrum of agony, rage and frustration, Dorian stabs Basil to death, refusing to forgive him for having created such a horrible creature as the one in the painting.

He then calls on another friend of his, a doctor, blackmailing him to help dispose of the body. Giving the doctor the time and space to take care of the body he had violently killed, Dorian goes to an opium den. Here, he enters a minor conflict with Sybil Vane’s older brother, James, who tries to avenge his sister’s death. Scared, for having killed a man and been threatened by another, Dorian Gray flees to his estate, where he expects peace and quiet. Dorian eventually finds James there, waiting and lurking on him, prepared for anything. However, in a hunting accident, before Dorian can do anything to protect himself, his own hunting party accidentally shoots James Vane. This finally provides safety for Dorian. While this happens, the doctor friend finds no way of coping with what he had done for Dorian and he, too, takes his own life, for what the bon-vivant had forced him to gruesomely do.

Once Dorian Gray returns to his home, in a huge house filled with only him, his servants, and an obnoxiously painful reflection of his own life in a locked room. The room is his crime scene, the murder location of one of his closest, oldest friends. Dorian confronts himself, realizing all that he had done, counting all the people who had died because of him. Realizing all the blood that lies on his sinful hands, Dorian picks up the same knife he had used to kill Basil Hallward and tries to destroy the painting. Upon hearing a crash, his servants enter the forbidden room and find their master, with a knife in his heart, uglier than ever before, lying absurdly on the floor, putting an end to an unbearable, insufferable, despicable life.

In a strangely horrifying way, Wilde has managed, in this short novella, to present us with an incredibly internally tortured man. This is a man who pays no attention to his consequences, who lives his own life searching for that which he and only he desires, without moral concerns, and freely and candidly attending to his own dreams and hopes to live a carefree life.

The biggest message to obtain from The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to be quite cliché in a much more sophisticated, philosophical, and beautiful way; something which can essentially be summed down to “be careful what you wish for”. We learn that although each one of us has, indeed and rightly so, their own aspirations – which in this case was to do certifiably nothing – there are other things to consider in the life we lead. There are people who walk with us in our life, like the young innocent Sybil Vane, who are hurt by the words we speak. There are friends of ours, like Basil Hallward, that take an interest in us and genuinely care about our wellbeing. There are people like Dr. Campbell, who get unwillingly involved in our own messes and for some reason end up having to clean them up all while dealing with their own internal conflicts – and sometimes, like Dr. Campbell, they do not survive them.

Of course, a short paragraph on the ongoing theme of beauty and ugliness is also worthy. It is significant to understand how beauty has always played such an important role in our societies. From 19th century society where word of mouth was the main way of communication to now, where we are constantly bombarded by information and pictures of beauty, we can acknowledge that Dorian Gray would never have survived in the 21st century. This is because he would never be able to properly hide the dreadful picture: the digital footprint in today’s day would never allow one to fully hide away a picture which unsettles one as much as the painting did for Dorian Gray. His constant efforts to hide a picture which, to him, symbolizes the deterioration of his own soul ends up corrupting him, for fear of how ugly he could become. In reality, he was already becoming an ugly creature by hiding it in the first place.

At the end of the day, it is about the importance we give to people like Lord Henry, to the pretentiousness of living a grand, dreamy life, without a realistic vision of what life is actually like. There are certain dreams, hopes, and wishes that are better off in our own heads, because sometimes they catch up to us and, like they did Basil Hallward, eat us up, day by day, until there is nothing left.

It is a magnificent piece that makes each of its readers carefully rethink their past actions, thinking about their own existence and what role they play in life. Are you a Basil Hallward, a Sybil Vane, a Lord Henry, a Dr. Campbell, or perhaps even, a Dorian Gray? If you fit in with the latter then I pray that you can recollect yourself, change your ways, read this novel, and let Wilde’s incredibly philosophical statements reinvent yourself, hopefully for the better.

On his first encounter with Lord Henry, the tragic day, Dorian claimed that “when I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself” (Wilde 2012, 26) and indeed he did. Only, at that time, he probably did not yet know all the people, the hopes, and the dreams who would be killed along with him.

Bibliography

Wilde, Oscar. 2012. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Books.