1146 Wilde, Oscar
it was to know nothing.” Wilde writes that Dorian
“would often adopt certain modes of thought that
he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon
himself to their subtle influences, and then, having
. . . caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual
curiosity, leave them with . . . curious indifference.”
Dorian seeks experiences as an artist; he selects
those that will heighten his sense of living, and he
will indulge in neither puritanical abstention nor
vulgar degeneracy. He is indifferent to the results of
his actions, choosing them only for curiosity’s sake,
and he wishes to be swept along in the moment,
to abandon himself to influences he has not before
known. Experience, then, is the chief end of life for
Dorian Gray.
There are also innocents in Wilde’s story. Sybil
Vane is naive in her attitudes toward love and
Dorian’s claims of affection; it is her brother who
suspects the behavior of her so-called gentleman
and threatens to murder Dorian if she is ever hurt
by him. Toward the conclusion of the novel, Dorian
decides to change his amoral lifestyle and tells
Lord Henry about Hetty, an innocent village girl
he has romanced but then decided to “spare.” She
is described as “flower-like,” and on the morning
they were to have eloped, Dorian breaks with her,
believing he has allowed her to remain uncorrupted.
His friend points out that Dorian has simply left
the girl with desires that can never now be satisfied,
remembering her gentleman lover. Her inevitable
marriage to one of her own class will leave her
despising her husband and unhappy throughout
her life.
Innocence is a condition to which Dorian wishes
to return at the novel’s conclusion. It is his hope-
less rage when realizing the impossibility of such
a return that makes him attempt to destroy his
portrait, the constant reminder to him of the reality
of the state of his soul. Knowledge comes through
experience and, once happened upon, can never be
forgotten. Dorian perceives his portrait as the voice
of his conscience, and conscience in the novel is the
memory of what time has wrought on his moral life.
Wilde’s protagonist can finally no longer accept this
ever-present voice and attempts to silence it once
and for all.
Paul Fox
nature in The Picture of Dorian Gray
The events of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray occur almost wholly in the late 19th-century
metropolis of London, but nature is still a theme
fundamental to Wilde’s novel. The opening words of
the story describe Basil Hallward’s art studio as he
completes the portrait of his handsome young friend
Dorian Gray: The room “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.” But to the aesthete Lord Henry Wotton, the
sight of the garden from Basil’s studio is reminiscent
not of nature but of a Japanese screen print; he sees
it artistically rather than naturally. Nature appears
to Wilde’s aesthetic characters to be an unfinished
product, simply the raw material that art alone can
transform into something beautiful.
Lord Henry’s imaginative capacity to see nature
through the eyes of an artist is reflected in Wilde’s
own stylized descriptions. Many of these descriptive
passages in the text employ specifically floral images
(for the late 19th-century reader there existed
a complete lexicon of floral symbolism): When
Dorian falls in love with the actress Sybil Vane and
kisses her for the first time, he believes that “my life
had been narrowed to one perfect point of rose-
coloured joy. She trembled all over, and shook like
a white narcissus”; Lord Henry suggests to Dorian
that “[t]ime is jealous of you, and wars against your
lilies and your roses”; under his friend’s influence,
Dorian’s own “nature had developed like a flower,
had borne blossoms of scarlet flame.” These descrip-
tions, like that of Basil’s garden as a Japanese screen
print, exemplify the aesthetic belief that art can, and
should, render the natural more beautifully.
Dorian’s engagement to Sybil is broken off
because of her failure to maintain the artful rendi-
tion of natural emotion in her acting. When Dorian
first sees her on stage, he becomes infatuated with
the absolute authenticity of her performances, but
with Sybil’s experience of love, of natural feeling, she
can no longer produce its semblance in her art: she
fails dramatically in her role as Juliet before Lord
Henry and Basil, who have been invited by Dorian
to meet his fiancée for the first time. Rather than