CHARACTER DESIGN IN THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

by SHELDON W. LIEBMAN
Until the 1980s, The Picture of Dorian Gray was generally considered to be a deeply flawed novel. To
some critics, it was simply badly written.(1) To others, it was hopelessly confused, reflecting Wilde'
s uncertainty and irresolution.(2) To still others, it was negligible or, at best, second-rate because it
was merely an expression of the 1890s, in which case it was historically important but otherwise
unworthy of critical attention.(3) Within the last two decades, however, many readers have called
Dorian Gray a great book.(4) Indeed, its most recent critics have treated the novel as if it were
neither the product of Wilde's confusion nor merely a period piece. Its irresolution is taken to be an
expression of Wilde' s understanding of the human condition. And Dorian Gray' s broader
philosophical concerns are assumed to be those of a moralist who is fully aware of the failure of
Victorian (or, in fact, any conventional) morality and is exploring the consequences of its demise.
Interpreting rather than evaluating the novel, most recent critics have seen Dorian Gray as in some
sense a running debate between two of its major characters, Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward, and,
furthermore, a debate carried out in the mind of Dorian Gray. In the past, many readers concluded
that this opposition represented a plain choice between right and wrong: "conscience and
temptation," "good and evil," "positive and negative moral influences," or "love" and "egoism."(5)
Although this opposition was usually seen as a battle symbolically waged by Henry and Basil, it was
sometimes taken to be a conflict between warring psychological faculties ("conscience" vs. "libido"
or "intelligence" vs. "sensibility") and, for some critics, as Regenia Gagnier has noted, a projection
of the war in Wilde's own psyche.(6) The consensus among these critics was either that, in Wilde's
judgment, Dorian Gray chooses wrongly and pays the ultimate price for his serious moral error, thus
confirming the existence of cosmic justice, or that Dorian never really makes up his mind, thus
reflecting Wilde's "warring energies"--his "schizophrenia" or, less grandly, his "identity crisis" or, less
pathologically, his "immaturity."
Nearly thirty years ago, however, Houston A. Baker made the interesting point that in "The Critic as
Artist" Wilde calls not for a choice between "conscience and instinct," but for a "merging" of these
two faculties. And Dorian's fate, Baker continued, is a result of his inability to reconcile these two
aspects of his personality.(7) This approach to the novel is suggestive because it implies, first, that
the conflict between Basil and Henry is not simply a matter of good vs. evil and, second, that
Dorian's failure to integrate his opposing "selves" is not a consequence of his own psychological
inadequacy, but a condition of modern life.(8) From this perspective--and in my judgment, which I
shall try to substantiate in the following pages--Dorian Gray is torn between two mutually exclusive
interpretations of human experience: one, optimistic, religious, and emotional; the other,
pessimistic, cynical, and intellectual. In the course of the novel, the reader (if not Dorian) discovers
that neither interpretation is adequate and that, from Wilde's perspective, there are no alternatives.
Of course, this is essentially the majority view of the novel today, with which I have no quarrel. My
only complaint is simply (but significantly, I believe) that the opposition between Basil and Henry
has been seriously oversimplified by most critics, reduced as it usually is to a battle between ethics
and aesthetics.(9) (This formula also suggests that the novel is really, after all, a product of its time
and, because it fails to deal with more universal issues, is not relevant to readers in the twentieth
century.) Thus, my main point is not merely that Wilde' s characters stand for opposing values, but
that the belief systems they embody are complex as well as internally logical and consistent; that
the story in which these characters act on their values is a test of their viability and applicability to
real life, not just to the exotic worlds of decadent sensuality and drawing-room repartee; and that
Dorian, as the protagonist in this drama of universal moral conflict, is a major figure in the
development of the modern novel.
Briefly, the views of Basil and Henry can be understood in terms of the relationship between their
theory of cosmic justice and their concept of morality. Basil believes that the universe is a moral
order in which God (or at least Fate) punishes ...

Critical Essay on "the Picture of Dorian Gray"

Summary: The Picture of Dorian Gray presents three intriguing
characters, all of whom represent in different ways the relationship
between art and life, contemplation and action, beauty and ethics. The
worship of art and beauty may have its place, but it proves to be an
inadequate guide through the troubled maze of real human experience.

The Picture of Dorian Gray presents three intriguing characters, all of

whom represent in different ways the relationship between art and
life, contemplation and action, beauty and ethics. But neither Lord Henry
Wotton nor Basil Hallward nor Dorian Gray embodies the ideal to which
each aspires, and they all fail catastrophically in one way or another. The
Picture of Dorian Gray is not a novel for the optimist.
In his attempt, following Lord Henry's dictum, 'to cure the soul by means
of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul,' Dorian succeeds only
in satiating the one and corrupting the other.

Lord Henry is often pilloried by critics as a cynic who manipulates Dorian

into doing the things that he advocates but is too withdrawn and too
frightened to do himself. In this view, Henry is a tired man who wants to
live vicariously through a younger, more beautiful specimen who has the
ability (or so Lord Henry supposes) to experience life as Lord Henry
believes it ought to be experienced.
No doubt all this is true. But Lord Henry certainly has his appeal, since he
is the chief vehicle in the novel for Wilde's dazzling epigrammatic wit, and
his aesthetic ideal needs to be taken seriously. What, then, does Lord
Henry stand for? A clue to his governing aesthetic can be found in the
opening scene of the novel, which takes place in Basil's studio. The door
of the studio is open, and the rich sights, sounds, and smells of the
adjoining garden, as the light summer wind blows, are vividly described.
Henry is characteristically taking it easy by lying on the divan, but he is
aware of all the sensory life going on around him--the heavy scent of the
lilac, the almost unbearable beauty of the laburnum blossoms, the "sullen
murmur" of the bees. Just as importantly, he is aware of the shadows cast
on the curtains by the flight of birds, which reminds him of Japanese
artists, who "through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile,
seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion."
This passage suggests Lord Henry's ideal, which is to cultivate an
intensity of experience whilst paradoxically remaining undisturbed and
untroubled by it. This ideal is fully realized through thecontemplation of
art, which permits the observer the privilege of being at once involved
and uninvolved in the experience. It is in this sense that art is superior to
life, as Wilde so often claimed, and this is what Henry is driving at when
he instructs the malleable mind of Dorian on how to react to the suicide of
Sibyl. He must view it, says Lord Henry, from the perspective of art, as a
scene from some Jacobean tragedy. What he means is that tragic drama
has the power to evoke in the spectator a full and sympathetic response

but one that does not engulf him or her in actual grief. Lord Henry is here
a spokesman for the position Wilde staked outin his essay, "The Critic as
Artist":
Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the
exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We
weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter.
In this view, art shields people from the harshness of actual existence. It
is to be preferred to life because, as Wilde writes earlier in the same
essay, life, unlike art, lacks form:
Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There
is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to
culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it.
Dorian is convinced by Henry's argument. Changing his way of responding
to Sibyl's death, he recovers his equanimity (or so he thinks). Of course,
Dorian's fatal mistake, according to Lord Henry's philosophy, is to get his
emotions tied up with Sibyl in the first place, because that has inflicted a
wound on the invisible level of life (the level of soul, or conscience, as
reflected in the changing picture) that extracts a bitter price further down
the road.
It is to avoid wounds such as these that Wilde argues, in "The Critic as
Artist," for the superiority of contemplation over action, being (or more
precisely, becoming) over doing. And this is why art, he says, can have
nothing to do with ethics, since ethics applies only to the sphere of action.
This is why Lord Henry appears to withdraw from life and seek perfection
only in art.
And yet there is another side to Lord Henry's philosophy. In contrast to
the inward impulse is the push outward, the desire for the sensory world.
He advocates a life of passionate personal experience, to be enjoyed most
fully in youth, while the senses are at their sharpest. He will have nothing
of self-denial. As he tells Dorian, "Every impulse that we strive to strangle
broods in the mind and poisons us." Henry's "new Hedonism," in which
novel sensations are sought in order to keep the flame of life from going
out in the dullness of habit and routine, demands the courage to yield to
temptation (another Wildean paradox). "Resist it," he explains to Dorian,
"and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to
itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and
unlawful."
To remain a spectator of life and at the same time to fulfill every desire of
one's sensual nature is a paradox; it suggests the co-existence of
opposite values. It is the art of feeling life without feeling it, the art of

touching whilst remaining untouched. Paradoxes such as these lead often

to the sphere of mysticism. Indeed, the book that Lord Henry gives
Dorian, and which fascinates and influences him so deeply, sometimes
seems to him like a work of mystical philosophy. But neither Wilde nor
any of his characters were mystics. It is the concrete material form,
shaped into beauty, which holds their attention. As Wilde put it,
attributing the thought to Walter Pater, in "The Critic as Artist": "Who . . .
would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible
Being which Plato raises so high""
If in his personal life, as opposed to what he advises Dorian, Henry
embraces the first rather than the second part of the paradox-detachment rather than involvement--his protg Dorian leans to the
other side. Totally under Lord Henry's spell, this refined young man with
high ideals adopts his mentor's words to the best of his ability. He tells
Basil that he understands what Henry says about art and the "artistic
temperament," and he quotes Henry approvingly that "To become the
spectator of one's own life . . . is to escape the suffering of life." And even
though Dorian has few original thoughts in his head, he still manages to
think in lofty terms about the new Hedonism leading to the birth of a new
spirituality, dominated by an instinct for beauty.
But Dorian does not succeed in living the paradox. More involved in the
world than Lord Henry and giving full rein to his love of beauty and his
quest for novel sensations, he allows himself to become a poisonous
influence on those around him. He becomes indifferent to the effects of
his actions, which not only destroy others (in ways never specified) but
also leave him fatally marred, despite the illusion--for that, ultimately is
what it is--generated by his unchanging youthful, beautiful appearance.
Detachedcontemplation becomes callous disregard. In his attempt,
following Lord Henry's dictum, "to cure the soul by means of the senses,
and the senses by means of the soul," Dorian succeeds only in satiating
the one and corrupting the other. In terms of the Art/Life dichotomy, he
deserts the calm serenity of art in favor of the sordidness of life. This
becomes crystal clear as Dorian takes the hansom cab to the opium den
the day after he murders Basil:
Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real,
became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one
reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of
disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in
their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art,
the dreamy shadows of Song.
The third main character in the novel, Basil Hallward, can also be
analyzed in terms of this dichotomy between art and life, detachment and

involvement. He confesses to Dorian in chapter 9 that when he first began

to paint portraits of him, he managed to retain the proper artistic distance
from his subject: "it had all been what art should be, unconscious, ideal,
and remote." But then when he painted Dorian not in classical costume
but as himself, his personal feelings entered into the painting; he
revealed too much of himself in it. This is why he initially decides he
cannot exhibit the painting.
When Basil allows himself to become infatuated with Dorian, he commits
the same error (from Lord Henry's perspective, that is) that Dorian does
with Sibyl Vane. He allows himself to be drawn out of the sphere of Art
into that of Life, and no good results from it. As Dorian later reproaches
him, "You met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good
looks." Basil, then, must bear his share of responsibility for encouraging
Dorian on the path that proves so destructive for him as well as others.
However, Basil, unlike Lord Henry and Dorian, does not divorce his
principles as an artist from his moral and ethical awareness. This is what
makes him the most sensible, and perhaps also the least interesting, of
the three main characters. His is the voice of conscience that speaks to
Dorian when the younger man is intent on ignoring his own conscience.
Basil is shocked by Dorian's callous demeanor after Sibyl Vane's death,
and his moral concern about Dorian's dissolute life is what precipitates
Basil's murder, since Dorian cannot bear to listen to Basil's insistence that
Dorian should pray for repentance.
It is in this moment, through the agency of Basil, that a thematic
framework quite different from the concerns of art and life, contemplation
and action, beauty and ethics, enters the novel. This is the Christian
scheme of sin, followed by repentance and the possibility of redemption.
When Dorian finally does feel remorse and desires to change his life, he
moves into a different sphere than Lord Henry, who refuses to take
seriously anything Dorian says on that subject. Lord Henry, apparently
ignorant of the course that Dorian's life has taken, believes him still to be
as perfect as his handsome appearance suggests. This failure of Lord
Henry to respond to the events of the real world is presented in extreme
form when Dorian all but confesses to the murder of Basil; Lord Henry's
response is prompted by his aesthetics, rather than any moral or practical
concern. He says that Dorian does not have the vulgarity to commit a
murder. This last glance at Lord Henry may be Wilde's way of
demonstrating that Lord Henry's detachment involves him in illusions no
less damaging than those which Dorian has for long entertained about his
own life. The worship of art and beauty may have its place, but it proves
to be an inadequate guide through the troubled maze of real human
experience.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray, in

Novels for Students, Vol. 20, Thomson Gale, 2005