BOOKS & GAMES

Yay, an excuse to talk about my favorite gothic novel! On the surface, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to be a tragedy about what happens when you give yourself over to self-indulgence and sin. Dorian has been granted eternal youth so as to live out all his passions, and he spends his life becoming progressively more depraved until his conscience weighs upon him to the point of madness, and he destroys his own horcrux. Hedonism is bad, right? But it’s a little counter-intuitive for such a moral to come from Oscar Wilde. Why would Oscar Wilde, of all people, write a story that seems to condemn hedonism? Well… I don’t think he does. The book just doesn’t read that way. It’s a luxuriously self-indulgent, sensual book! I wouldn’t like it so much if it boiled down to “hedonism is bad.” I think that this book is a metatextual critique of Wilde’s own philosophy. The Picture of Dorian Gray is not really about beauty, or pleasure, or sin. It is about art. It is about the nature of art and it’s relationship to the artist, and to the audience. It is a cautionary tale not about the dangers of hedonism, but the dangers of taking art too seriously. At least, that seems to be what it is according to its author. I’m not saying that I know definitively what the author’s intentions were, or that authors’ interpretations of their work are the only true and correct ones. Ultimately, an author’s interpretation of his or her own work is just one interpretation among many, and any true piece of art can be interpreted many different ways. But, looking at Dorian Gray through the lens of its own author might be the best way to answer this question. So, I am going to analyze that. For fun! At first glance, Wilde’s preface doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story. It’s a really short philosophical argument. Actually, it reads more like a pretentious internet comment, by making a bunch of beautifully-worded controversial claims and then sitting back and waiting for you to respond to them, almost as if it’s daring you to argue. "The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. […] It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless." There’s a lot more philosophical rambling that I cut out, but the short of it is this — art exists for its own sake. It exists to be admired, to be enjoyed. It exists to be beautiful, and that’s it. Anything that anyone else gets from it is simply what they get from it, and it says more about them than it does about the art. Creating art for any other primary purpose misses the point, if it isn’t outright dangerous. Now, generally in literary analysis it’s a faux pas to psychoanalyze the author based on their work (which Wilde would probably agree with, since he writes that art should “conceal the artist”). There’s a lot of weird philosophy in this book, mostly put forth by the character of Lord Henry Wotton. Although Wilde identifies Lord Henry as something of a caricature of himself, we cannot say whether anything Lord Henry says is what Wilde really thinks. But this? The preface is written without the voice of a character or the context of a story. This is the author speaking as himself, in his own words, and therefore we can conclude that this is what he really thinks. That means that the only thing we can really say about Wilde and his philosophy based on this book alone comes from this preface. Why is this preface even here? Why is it attached to this book? It might just be a futile attempt to cover his own ass, since he says things like “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book” and “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.” That’s basically facing down the inevitable controversy that this book would generate and saying, “don’t look at me, it’s just a story. It’s your fault for taking it seriously.” But, it’s probably also presented here as a framework within which to interpret the following story. Or, actually, wait, we’re not supposed to interpret it because it exists for its own sake, right? But why else would the this be the preface to Dorian Gray, if the story wasn’t meant to prove the preface’s point? One more bit of metatextual content I want to bring up: Wilde said this about his characters: "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be — in other ages, perhaps" So, all three of Dorian Gray‘s main characters are meant to represent the author himself from various perspectives. Basil, the innocent and lovelorn painter, is how Wilde perceives himself. Lord Henry is how society perceives Wilde; he smoothly makes controversial philosophical statements about hedonism and beauty and whatnot, but doesn’t actually believe most of what he’s saying. And what a cryptic thing to say about Dorian, the naive-boy-turned-corrupt libertine. I guess I could interpret that as Wilde saying that he’d theoretically like to have the sheer daring and shamelessness needed to actually live out all of Henry’s philosophies. So… if that’s the case, then that puts a big question mark over Dorian’s entire character. If the message of the book is “hedonism is bad,” then why would Wilde want to be Dorian, even hypothetically? Dorian’s depravity is clearly a bad thing, right? Why would Wilde write him that way, then? Because the book’s moral isn’t about hedonism, it’s about art. Wilde warns the reader, “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” But… that’s exactly what I plan to do. Sorry, Oscar. So, let’s actually talk about the story now. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a weirdly paradoxical work for the reasons I just spelled out — it seems like it should be condemning hedonism, but it doesn’t quite. It seems like it is a story about a man whose life steadily ruined by pleasure-seeking at the expense of all else, and yet… it’s just so decadent, this book. It’s full of philosophy about hedonism and the nature of good and evil, and it’s hard to tell just how much is espoused by its author and how much is condemned. Often the philosophy comes through Lord Henry, but sometimes it’s just there in the narration. And I love this book for that reason. I love thinking about stuff like that, so much. I love that this book practically smells like opium and tastes like rich chocolate. The reason why I’m so interested in Wilde’s relationship to his own work here is because I agree with a lot of the philosophy presented in it. I know that Dorian Gray is being corrupted by Lord Henry’s influence, and I can see how that happens. But… still. This book is interesting to me because it seems to simultaneously espouse and decry the philosophy presented in it, which is why I think it’s a critique. “Let’s let this philosophy play a bit, and see what it does.” What if someone really did live the kind of life that Wilde himself was accused of living? When is hedonism healthy, and when is it not? Where are the limits? Henry is Wilde’s caricature of himself. A lot of readers hate him for just how infuriating he is. All Lord Henry really does is spout controversial and kind of offensive statements. I’m sure we all know at least one person like that on the internet. Henry’s like the super intellectual version of a troll; he just says stuff to make people deeply uncomfortable and see how they’ll react. But he’s also persuasive — he’s a Mephistophelian character with a “low, musical” voice. He views Dorian almost like a science experiment. He admits that influence is evil, but then actively goes after an impressionable and naive boy to turn him into… well, whatever that portrait looked like in the last chapter. In chapter 2, he makes a long speech about how a man should “live out his life fully and completely […] give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.” In short, screw Victorian morality. Life is to be experienced, so drink deeply of all it has to offer instead of wasting it constraining yourself. His best line, in my opinion, is: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, 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.” —Chapter 2 I kind of agree with this. Kind of. I’ve written a whole answer on this quote before, so let me sum up — I do think that temptation is impossible to resist. The more you attempt to repress your desires, the more intensely you feel those desires. The best thing to do to avoid being tempted by genuinely dangerous things is to either satisfy the temptation using some safer outlet or otherwise redirect it, or to avoid potential temptations altogether. The second line of this quote makes it clear that what Henry is really saying here is, “don’t let society’s stupid restrictions keep you from living your best life.” And… yeah. If society shames you for being gay, whip out the rainbow colors! A lot of things (especially “sexual deviancy”) are only “temptations” because society and culture says that they’re wrong, not because they’re actually morally wrong. That’s an important distinction. We’ll get back to that. I believe that the difference between a temptation and a desire is that you can only be tempted by something dangerous and forbidden. If feeling lust as a young woman (or man) is considered morally wrong, then sex is a “temptation” — as soon as it’s considered a normal part of existing as a human, then it’s suddenly not a “temptation,” it’s just desire, and is a lot easier to deal with. You can find a safe outlet for it without feeling any shame, and without making any dumb mistakes out of sheer desperation. Another thing Harry says is, “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for.” —Chapter 2 Yes! I have no argument here. None at all. However, reading between the lines, it seems as though Harry’s definition of “realizing one’s nature perfectly” is just experiencing everything in life and living it to its fullest, literally without distinguishing between good and bad experiences, or good and evil deeds. “Every experience is of value,” he says at one point. I don’t define self-development this way. My definition is complete self-awareness. If you’re self-aware, then you can be as self-indulgent as you want because you know where your limits are. Drinking at a party is fine, but you have to know your alcohol tolerance. Dorian buys into this philosophy pretty hard. By chapter 11, his whole life has become one of pleasure, and… I’m still not disagreeing with a lot of the philosophy put forth by this novel: “The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stranger than themselves […] But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.” —Chapter 11 This is why I love this novel, okay? I agree with this too. I have a fine instinct for beauty myself. Here, Dorian considers that maybe people in his society consider sensuality to be animalistic and savage only because they haven’t engaged with it at all, so it appears strange and dangerous. I also think that sensuality has been unfairly demonized for far too long, sometimes to the point where enjoying anything is sinful. I think it’s important to confront one’s passions (i.e. desires and emotions) and find a way to deal with them that’s both safe and satisfying. Like Dorian, I don’t have much patience for asceticism, or at least for the notion that it’s the most moral and spiritual way to live one’s life. Dorian attends church sometimes just out of curiosity, just becuase he finds it enjoyable or interesting, and he jumps around between different spiritualities the same way he collects jewels, textiles, and perfume: “But he [Dorian] never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system […] no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. […] He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.” —Chapter 11 Jeez, I feel called out by this. This concept of jumping around between different belief systems, using belief as a tool… that’s basically Chaos Magic in a nutshell. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” definitely sounds like something Lord Henry would say. And I certainly don’t think that sensuality and spirituality are mutually exclusive, in fact, I think that the former can be a means of experiencing the latter. I worship Dionysus, for crying out loud. Often, the answer I give when someone on Quora asks me why I believe in magic or gods or anything else without evidence is “pleasure.” And yet… my life could not be more different from Dorian’s. Perhaps the darkest part of my mind is something like Dorian, but in real life, I look like a stereotypical Victorian ingenue who’s always the first to die in a gothic novel like this one, and I’m quite pure and unsullied. I don’t do anything but sit in my dorm room and write on Quora all day. At parties, I freeze up and don’t speak to anyone. I might develop a taste for alcohol next year, but for now I don’t really like the taste of it. I’ve never done any kind of drug and don’t plan to, I just eat a lot of sugar. I have no love life or sex life. I value pleasure becuase I can’t enjoy myself for the life of me, because I worry about everything all the time and waste energy on it. I’m actively working on that. I’m not Dorian, and that’s probably why I can get away with hedonism. See… here’s the thing with our protagonist. He takes Harry much more seriously than he should. Harry doesn’t actually believe what he’s saying. He just says stuff, to be controversial and shocking. That’s what he does. But Dorian buys it, hard. Harry’s waxing lyrical about how there’s nothing in the world but youth and Dorian has the whole world at his fingertips because he’s pretty, makes Dorian obsessively concerned with his appearance. He barters his soul on a whim. And, then he proceeds to live the kind of lifestyle that Harry advocates for but doesn’t have the balls to actually commit to. He’s beautiful, rich, and able to do whatever he likes, which he often does. He has it all, but the truth is, he’s not really getting anything out of any experience. He goes through life like a passive spectator. This is probably because of the hedonism paradox, but it could also be because Dorian uses hedonism and collecting beautiful things as a means of escapism: "For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him a means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to bear." — Chapter 11 Congratulations, Dorian, you ruined it for yourself. I like beautiful things. I have more resin statues than I have space for. I have more perfumes than I actually wear. I spend a lot of my free time scrolling through artwork on Pinterest. I genuinely like museums and ballets and operas. I like dressing up in fancy Goth outfits even without an occasion. I like soft blankets. I like neoclassical music. I like decorating for holidays and making elaborate table displays and giving everything a distinctive theme. I deeply appreciate beauty. I don’t think it poisons me. I collect all these things because they make me happy, and that’s all. I think that pleasure is a worthy goal for its own sake. But it has to be for its own sake, not for the sake of avoiding your problems, or the feeling of your sins crawling on your back. It’s like the difference between having a few drinks at a party for the fun of it, and becoming an alcoholic because you can’t come to terms with your psychological issues. Collect beautiful things because they make you happy, not because you hope they might fill the gaping void in your soul left behind by a portrait. Dorian definitely isn’t happy: “I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.” —Chapter 18 Dorian’s whole life has been what I call “empty pleasure,” pleasure that is ultimately unfulfilling because it’s covering up a problem instead of being enjoyed for its own sake. If you indulge for the sake of avoiding something, you’re not enjoying the thing for what it is, you’re just desperately trying to take your mind off the thing you want to avoid nagging at the back of your brain, and the result is that you can’t really enjoy anything. Another example is gorging yourself on a delicious feast because it’s delicious, as opposed to binge eating. Or having sex with several people that you feel genuine affection for, as opposed to people you can’t even remember the names of. “Empty pleasure” is bad for the soul, but pleasure itself is not. The threat of “empty pleasure” is what has caused pleasure itself to be demonized for so long. It’s not the pleasure that’s bad, it’s the avoidance. Pleasure can’t be spiritual at all if its so superficial. Dorian’s hedonism is hollow and meaningless, and it corrupts his soul. Confront your damn problems, don’t lock them in your attic! Once you’ve done that, you can really get the most out of life. Thank you for allowing me all of that gratuitous philosophizing. Where was I? Oh, right — this book is a warning about art. Right. Lord Henry’s last real contribution to Dorian’s corruption is giving him the mysterious “yellow book.” This book is… well… honestly I’m not really sure what it’s about even though parts of it are described. The “yellow book” is often speculated to be À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I don’t really know anything about the book, but what matters is the effect that it has on Dorian in-universe. It cements his hedonistic philosophy that had already been implanted by Lord Henry, and it seems to really drive him over the edge. "Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of beauty." — Chapter 11 So, there is no good and evil, only beauty. Dorian doesn’t really have a concept of good and evil anymore, just experiences in life, just whether things are beautiful or not. This is another pretty big problem with Dorian’s approach towards hedonism — he has no moral compass. This idea that the book is “poisonous” seems to directly contradict the point that Wilde makes in the preface. “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Why the contradiction? Dorian has made the mistake of taking art too seriously. The yellow book is “poisonous” not because of anything about the book itself, but because of how Dorian responds to it, because he takes it too seriously. The book wouldn’t be immoral if he just enjoyed it at face-value and didn’t take it to heart, would it? The fact that he becomes so obsessed with it is another nail in his coffin. The first nail in the coffin comes much earlier. The scene where Dorian dumps Sibyl is critical. First, there’s Sibyl’s explanation of her perspective on her art: "The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came — oh, by beautiful love! — and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. The stillness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. […] You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You had made me understand what love really is. My love! My love! Prince Charming! Prince of life! I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be." — Chapter 7 Up until she met Dorian, Sibyl had been living through her plays. She quite literally “became” Juliet or Ophelia or whoever she was playing inside her mind, completely suspending her disbelief, because she just didn’t have much of a life outside of her acting. This made her a phenomenal actress, because watching an actor who’s that immersed in their role is also immersive for the audience. But when she met Dorian, life suddenly became more real to her and more meaningful to her than art. Sibyl completely lost that suspension of disbelief, and her acting skills along with it. Dorian dumps her for saying so: "…you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination, Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You mean nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. […] Without your art, you are nothing. […] A third-rate actress with a pretty face." Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Both Sibyl and Dorian have made the fatal mistake of taking art too seriously. On Sybil’s end, she’s been living through her art in a way that’s unhealthy. She doesn’t have a life or an identity beyond the persona that she adopts on stage. It’s like if your entire life was online, and the only people you’ve ever been in love with are fictional characters, and you didn’t have any life to speak of beyond that — oh. Okay, well, at least I have a sense of myself. Sibyl doesn’t have an identity of her own, so she borrows her identity from Shakespeare characters. Dorian, meanwhile, has fallen in love with this false identity. He doesn’t actually care about the person Sibyl actually is, because there’s nothing really there. When Sibyl feels like she’s finally found herself and become a person, Dorian is disgusted with her because she can no longer act, and she’s no longer interesting to him. Sibyl became an art piece and Dorian loved that art piece, not the person beneath. This scene is so often misrepresented in adaptations. In most adaptations, the breakup is Harry’s fault, usually through giving him bad romance advice and teaching him to devalue women. For example, in the 2009 adaptation, Harry tempts Dorian to go to a brothel instead of seeing Sibyl perform, and Sibyl is concerned that she’s just another whore to Dorian. That becomes the focus of their breakup. Blaming the breakup on Harry makes it about hedonism; Sibyl feeling like Dorian is exploiting her for sex makes it about hedonism. It’s not about hedonism, it’s about art, which of course relates back to the preface. In the book, the breakup is entirely Dorian’s fault. It’s also the first time we see any real cruelty out of Dorian, which is then reflected by the portrait. Because this has nothing to do with Harry’s influence, I consider it proof that Dorian was never really that good of a person to begin with. He completely lacks empathy for Sibyl. This is what results in tragedy. Sibyl commits suicide because she’s the pretty and innocent blond ingenue who’s always the first to die in a gothic novel, and Dorian officially begins his downward slide. Sibyl’s death is absolutely Dorian’s fault in every way. He doesn’t dive headfirst into hedonism until after that happens, and his hedonism is “empty” because he’s trying to numb the pain of Sibyl’s death. And it’s all downhill from there. When Basil finally comes to see Dorian again, he’s appalled by Dorian’s reputation. Apparently, everything Dorian touches rots from the inside, so to speak. Sibyl becomes the first of many. Every person he’s involved with ends up too ashamed to show themselves in public, if they don’t commit suicide. “…you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. […] Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?” [Basil proceeds to describe several men whom Dorian was “inseparable” with who then ended up with disgraced reputations.] They say that you corrupt everyone with whom you become intimate” —Chapter 12 Dorian’s reputation is so sordid that all of the young women and men who become “intimate” with Dorian (interesting word choice) all end up ruined in some way or another. The same is said of Alan Campbell, the young chemist Dorian blackmails into deposing of Basil’s body. Apparently, they were “almost inseparable, indeed. Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.” Do I really need to spell this out? What does Dorian blackmail Allan with? We don’t know. It’s never said. But it’s heavily implied to be something about the very gay stuff that they almost definitely did together. But — and this is what made the book so scandalous for its time — Dorian isn’t depraved because he’s bi. He’s just a bad person, unambiguously, and all of the poor young people who become involved with him suffer for it. He civilly discusses with Alan that he needs a body disposed of, Alan refuses, then Dorian casually admits to murder, and when Alan still refuses, he blackmails him with a “look of pity,” almost like he’s saying “this hurts me way more than it hurts you.” And then poor Allan can’t live with himself and commits suicide. Dorian is a genuinely evil person. After he kills Basil, he’s well and truly gone off the rails. He has a freaking horcrux, and he goes mad from the ever-mounting terror that someone might discover his secret. So, that brings me to Basil Hallward. Poor, poor Basil. Basil knows his fatal flaw, and here we come back to taking art too seriously: "Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. […] I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art…. […] One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and your own time. […] …I know that as I worked on it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it. […] Well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon as I had gotten rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence, it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking and that I could paint. Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work that one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour — that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more than it reveals him." —Chapter 9 This is all one paragraph, by the way, and the whole thing spans an entire page. It is probably the gayest paragraph of the entire body of Victorian literature. Basil is clearly infatuated. He becomes so obsessed with Dorian that it’s almost unhealthy. This anguished declaration of love obviously echoes the preface, which is to be expected if Wilde sees Basil as a representation of himself. “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.” Basil is afraid that the portrait doesn’t reveal Dorian as he is, instead revealing Basil’s salacious crush on Dorian. But he ultimately comes to the same conclusion as the preface — that art conceals the artist and simply exists for its own sake. Anyone is able to project onto art and see anything they want in it, but art simply is what it is, and taking it too seriously results in peril. Perhaps the true tragic figure of this book isn’t Dorian, it’s Basil, for having invested so much in this portrait. He doesn’t paint it for the sake of creating a beautiful thing, but for the sake of glorifying his crush. He treated Dorian like a god, and could not see past his projection of perfection to see that Dorian was becoming a monster until it was much too late. When Basil sees what has become of the portrait, he acknowledges that this is the only thing anyone is punished for in this novel: “I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished” (Chapter 13). Dorian himself kind of becomes an art piece. He literally switches places with the portrait. The portrait shows the corruption of Dorian’s soul, and Dorian himself becomes a projection of both Harry “poisonous” philosophy and Basil’s unhealthy projection. He is admired intensely. He exists just to be beautiful, like an art piece, and no one can really see past his beauty. The novel’s premise is based around the idea that people’s sins are written across their face, and that beauty = goodness. No one can believe anything bad about Dorian when they see him because he just looks so innocent and angelic. Before he learns the truth, Basil is disturbed by Dorian’s reputation but just can’t believe it: “But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth—I can’t believe anything against you” (Chapter 12). Similar comments are made by other characters. Dorian is just too pretty to be as evil as he is. The subversiveness of the book comes from that premise. How often are beautiful people able to get away with anything in society, just because people tend to assume they’re innocent? So obviously, Dorian is completely narcissistic. Even Harry is incredulous when Dorian all but admits to having murdered Basil, thinking that he’s not capable of murder: “Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders […] I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.” Comparing crime to art is really interesting, to say the least. Most people would say that there’s nothing artistic about crime, but Harry isn’t most people, he’s a troll. And the only reason he gets off scot-free in this book is because he never commits the sin of taking art too seriously! Apparently, according to him, Dorian cannot commit a crime because he’s basically an art piece, and he just doesn’t have any need to kill someone. There’s another comment that Harry makes towards the end that suggests that he views Dorian as an art piece: “I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outisde of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” —Chapter 19 This echoes an earlier comment that he made about Basil being boring because everything that’s interesting about him, he puts into his art. Dorian’s life is vibrant because he directs all that same creative energy into living instead of into an art piece. Dorian himself is an art piece. And yet, while Harry is saying this, Dorian is feeling Basil’s murder weighing upon him. The title refers not to Dorian himself, but to the portrait — a piece of art. The portrait drives the story, and even Dorian himself realizes this. Dorian’s undoing is that he can’t live with the guilt of his reckless murder and probably all his other sins, especially when he has a literal conscience staring back at him. He literally would have gotten away with murder just for being pretty, if he didn’t have a conscience. It’s far too late for him to redeem himself, so he decides to destroy the conscience. And… we know how that turns out. TL;DR: The true “moral” of this book is really hard to parse out, which is maybe why we shouldn’t attempt to read the symbol and just take the whole book at face-value, right? There’s a lot going on here. There’s the inability to face up to one’s problems and deal with them in a way that’s healthy, resulting in any form of enjoyment being “empty.” There’s the idolization of beauty, always assuming the best of beautiful people even when they’re really quite awful. And there’s art — treating art like life or life like art is always going to come back to bite you in the end. That would make this a cautionary tale about what happens when art isn’t appreciated for its own sake, and is projected on so much that one confuses it with life, or sought as a source of morality. Art is not moral, it just is — reading (or writing!) a book from the perspective of a serial killer will not make you a bad person. This book is not a bad influence, it just is. Even after having written all of that, I’m still not really sure what Wilde was trying to say about hedonism, so let’s ask him. According to Wilde himself, the moral of The Picture of Dorian Gray is, “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.”