THE PICTURE OF

DORIAN GRAY
Birthname:Oscar Wilde
Birthplace:Dublin, 1854
Education:Trinity College(Dublin) and a degree in Classics at
Oxford University
Influenced:He was a disciple of Walter Pater and accepted the
theory of “Art for Art’s Sake”
Personal attitudes:He adopted “the aesthetic theory” becoming a
dandy and distinguishing himself for his eccentricity
Prose works: A series of short stories such as The Canterville
Ghost, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, The Happy Prince and
Other tales and the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Drama:The importance of Being Earnest and Salomé
Reputation:He was sent to prison for homosexual offences
Last years of life:He went into exile in France where he lived in
poverty
Death:He died of meningitis in Paris
 AESTHETICISM
EUROPEAN INFLUENCES

Parnassians: Théophile Gautier: the poet

should be as objective as possible ; art
should have no relevance to life = no moral
nor social function

Charles Baudelaire: leader of the

Decadent Movement→ disenchantment
with the world; boredome and malincholy;
fascination with evil and perversity.
 AESTHETICISM IN ENGLAND

Swimburne (1837-1909): unconventional

and transgressive nature; pleasure to
shock the foundations of the pious
Victorian society; suggested the abolition of
monarchy
Walter Pater (1839-1894): pleasure is the
main purpose of life, to be found in beauty.
The ideal of beauty is in art→ it serves no
moral or social purpose; it is self-sufficient;
it has only to be beautiful→ form more
important than content and subject matter
 Difference between Victorian and
Aestethical values

The Victorians believed that art could

be used as a tool for social education
and moral enlightenment, as
illustrated in works by writers such as
Charles Dickens.
The Aestheticists believed that art
did not need to possess any other
purpose than being beautiful.
 MEMORABLE QUOTES

“My life is a work of art”

“There is no such thing as a moral or

immoral book. Books are well written or
badly written. That is all!”

“Life is for pleasure and pleasure is

unlimited indulgence in the beautiful”
In De Profundis: “ pleasure for the beautiful
body, but pain for the beautiful soul”
“ There is no sin except stupidity”

“In examinations the foolish ask questions that

the wise cannot answer”

“There is only one thing in the world worse

than being talked about, and that is not being
talked about”

“Education is an admirable thing. But it is well

to remember from time to time that nothing
that is worth knowing can be taught”

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And

the artist is the only person who is never
serious”
Dorian Gray is a young man whose beauty fascinates an artist,
Basil Hallward, who decides to paint him.
While the young man’s desires are satisfied, including that of
eternal youth, the sings of age, experience and vice appear on
the portrait.
Dorian lives only for pleasure, making use of everybody and
letting people died because of his insensitivity.
When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian
kills him.
Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his
spiritual corruption, and stabs it, but he mysteriously kills
himself.
In the very moment of death the picture returns to its original
purity, and Dorian’s face becomes “withered, wrinkled, and
loathsome”.
This story is told by an unobtrusive third-person
narrator; the perspective adopted is internal
from the point of Dorian who appears in the
second chapter; and this allows a process of
identification between the reader and the
character.
The settings are vividly described with words
appealing to the senses, the characters reveal
themselves through what they say or what
other people say of them, according to a
technique which is typical of drama.
DORIAN GRAY is the protagonist, the typical dandy, who thinks
man should live his life, realising his wishes and his dreams.
Dorian believes youth is synonymous with beauty and
happiness.

BASIL HALLWARD is the artist ; initially he is attracted by

Dorian’s beauty, but then he discovers how the handsome
young man is corrupted. At the moment of his discovery,
Dorian kills him.

LORD HENRY WOTTON is a friend of the painter; he belongs to

the aristocracy and his way of speaking is abrupt and satirical.
When he sees the picture of Dorian, he wants immediately to
meet him. Lord Henry will direct the beautiful guy to pleasure.
.
This novel takes place in London and represents
Victorian society.
The settings are vividly described with words
appealing to the senses; for example this is how the
story starts: “The studio was filled with the rich
odour of roses, and when the light summer wind
stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came
through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or
the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering
thorn”.
The novel initially takes places in Basil’s studio and in
the garden of his house.
This story is profoundly allegorical; it is a nineteenth-century
version of the myth of Faust, the story of a man who sells
his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be
satisfied.
This soul becomes the picture, which records the signs of
experience, the corruption, the horror and the sins
concealed under the mask of Dorian’s timeless beauty.
The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished
and reality cannot be escaped; when Dorian destroys the
picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that
is, death.
The horrible picture could be seen as a symbol of the
immorality of the Victorian middle class, while Dorian and
his pure appearance are symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy.
Finally the picture, restored to its original beauty, illustrates
Wilde’s theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal.
 IMPLICATIONS

Final stabbing
of the picture

Impossibility of a
Triumph of art
life without moral
over life
responsibility
Psychological interpretations of
“The Picture of Dorian Gray”
 Structure of the mind or personality

Freud distinguished three structural

elements within the mind, which he
called id, ego, and super-ego.

All objects of consciousness reside in the ego.

The contents of the id belong to the
unconscious mind.
The super-ego is an unconscious screening-
mechanism which seeks to limit the blind
pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the
imposition of restrictive rules.
conscious mind =what you are
aware of at any particular moment

preconscious =what we might today

call "available memory:" anything that
can easily be made conscious

unconscious. It includes all the

things that are not easily available to
awareness
 Id = instincts or drives. Freud also called
them wishes ( pleasure principle)
Ego = the conscious self created by the
dynamic tensions and interactions between
the id and the super-ego (reality principle).
Superego =that part which contains the
'conscience', a socially-acquired control
mechanisms (usually imparted in the first
instance by the parents) which have been
internalised . It is not completed until about
seven years of age.

Conscience= internalization of ego ideal = rewards and

punishments and warnings positive models presented
to the child
 Instincts
the neurological representations of physical
needs
Life instincts →perpetuate the life of the
individual, by motivating him or her to seek
food and water, and the life of the species,
by motivating him or her to have sex. The
motivational energy of these life instincts
that powers our psyches, he called libido,
from the Latin word for "I desire.“
Death instincts→ Life can be a painful
and exhausting process. Death promises
release from the struggle.
 The Picture of Dorian Gray

Id → Life instinct = achieving pleasure

Ego → The Yellow Book - Joris-Karl

Huysman’s decadent nineteenth-
century novel À Rebours ; Lord Henry.

Superego →The portrait; James

Vane = consciousness; social
restraints.
 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Hyde represents the ever-demanding
destructive powers of the Id
Jekyll represents the conscious ego,
whose original tendency was by no
means towards the vicious, but rather
towards the 'loose', a neutral desire
for certain kinds of personal freedom
Superego → the dictates of social
conventions; the Victorian
professionist.
 Dr Jekyll shows a failure to integrate the
sources of energy and will which become
personified in Hyde: because Hyde (who
had been a necessary part of Jekyll's
whole psyche), is unacknowledged by
Jekyll and, therefore, he becomes split off
and relations between the two are
antagonistic

Jekyll's familiar desire to 'make another man'

stems from problems in the organisation of
his own personality
Dr. J. and Mr.H. The Pict. of D.G.
challenging Victorian prudery and hypocrisy

Respectable façade Beautiful aspect

Possibility to follow Shameful and criminal
bad instincts without habits do not alter
spoiling reputation(it is physical appearance -
Hyde who acts) it is the portrait that
changes
Mirror where J. Picture which reflects
discovers Hyde’s Dorian’s evil soul
aspect = his evil soul Is fascinated by his
Likes his other self but image but feels
feels remorse for the disgust when
murder contemplating the
image of his evil
actions