The Picture of Dorian Gray 1145about his fiancée’s never actually being Sibyl Vane,
the latter replies that “[s]he is all the great heroines
of the world in one. She is more than an individual.”
But it is Sybil’s failure to maintain her identities as
these heroines that ultimately leads Dorian to break
with her. The reality of her love for Dorian makes
it impossible for her to become a character in love
upon the stage. Her role under the floodlights each
night becomes just that: an artificial guise woodenly
acted. Reality thus destroys Sybil’s ability to art-
fully render various identities, and, with her ability,
Dorian’s love for her.
If the attempt to deliberately adopt various masks
is seen to be an artistic failure in Wilde’s novel, the
capacity of individuals to artfully render those expe-
riences and the influences that have composed them
at any given moment appears to be all-important. A
beautiful personality cannot be forcibly created; it
must be allowed to flourish and must also be artisti-
cally presented. It is Dorian’s tragedy that he seeks to
control the effects of the natural passage of time on
his physical being, and by so doing, he is unable to
experience identities that can only be made manifest
through time’s movement. Wilde’s conception of
aesthetic identity exists in the moment when art
recomposes nature. By refusing to acknowledge
nature and time’s effect upon him, Dorian is depicted
as being equivalent to an artist who has no material
from which to compose his subject. By divorcing
himself from life, Dorian removes himself from even
the possibility of a lived identity.
Lord Henry had warned Dorian against becom-
ing “an actor of a part that has not been written
for him” and stated that “[t]he aim of life is self-
development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that
is what each of us is here for.” Ironically, in attempt-
ing to escape the influence of time and nature
upon his identity, Dorian will become obsessed by
their depiction within the frame of his portrait. He
inevitably comes to see his own picture as “the most
magical of mirrors” and thus ends up as the very
actor against whom Lord Henry had warned him:
a self-caricatured reflection of his own portrayed
identity, rather than a personality individually devel-
oped and artistically recomposed at each moment.
It is precisely the aesthetic crime that Dorian had
accused Sybil of committing, and ultimately, like
Sybil, Dorian will find that crimes against an artistic
rendering of identity are a commitment to one’s own
self-destruction.
Paul FoxInnocence and experIence in The Picture
of Dorian Gray
It is the cynical, worldly wise Lord Henry Wotton
who advises the innocent Dorian in Basil Hallward’s
garden that “[t]he only way to get rid of a temptation
is to yield to it.” When, a few minutes later, Dorian
exclaims that he would give his soul to remain young
if only his portrait could age, he echoes another idea
only just expressed to him by Lord Henry: “Youth
is the one thing worth having.” In this way, Dorian
loses his innocence by yielding to his desire to
remain forever youthful in appearance. When Lord
Henry later sends the young man a novel as a gift,
the story influences Dorian so strongly that Wilde
states: “Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.
There were moments when he simply looked on
evil as a mode through which he could realize his
conception of the beautiful.” For Dorian, experience
becomes something to be embraced without regard
to morality and solely for its own sake.
Lord Henry’s influence continues through the
novel, but after receiving this book, Dorian seems to
master and extend his friend’s worldview and begins
to indulge in experiences that he has conceived
himself. Wilde does not explicitly describe many of
these experiences; like the society rumors that begin
to swirl around Dorian and his behavior, Wilde
most often only suggests what his protagonist is
experiencing. But the reader knows what Dorian has
become: He reacts to the death of his fiancée, Sybil
Vane, with cool detachment after the initial shock;
he destroys the reputations of those he meets and
influences; and ultimately he becomes a murderer,
killing his friend Basil and blackmailing a former
friend to dispose of the body. He views the portrait
as the voice of his conscience but begins to seek new
experiences simply to enjoy the changes he can see
revealed in it.
For Dorian, the “aim” of life becomes “experience
itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter
as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the
senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them,