What does Dorian Gray's portrait represent?

The portrait of Dorian Gray represents the moral self -- the part of a person that accumulates the damage of every selfish act, every cruelty, and every betrayal, while the visible self appears untouched.

Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, first in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and then in a revised book form in 1891. The portrait is the novel's central device and its most sustained metaphor: a painting that ages and corrupts in place of the man it depicts, growing more monstrous with each sin while Dorian himself remains young and beautiful.

What does the portrait represent at the moment of the wish?#

At the beginning of the novel, the painter Basil Hallward completes what he considers his finest work -- a full-length portrait of the young Dorian Gray. In a moment influenced by Lord Henry Wotton's philosophy of aesthetic hedonism, Dorian wishes that the portrait would age instead of him. The wish is granted.

At this moment the portrait represents the Faustian bargain: youth and beauty purchased at the cost of the soul. Dorian has traded his moral development -- his capacity to be changed, taught, and humanised by the consequences of his actions -- for a permanent surface. He will never look in a mirror and see what he has become. The portrait will.

What does the portrait's corruption represent?#

As Dorian pursues a life of pleasure without consequence, the portrait records what he refuses to see in himself. Its first change comes after his treatment of Sibyl Vane, the actress he professes to love and then abandons cruelly when her performance disappoints him. A line of cruelty appears around the painted mouth.

The portrait's progressive deterioration represents a precise moral accounting. Every sin leaves a mark. Every cruelty deepens the corruption. Wilde is making a specific argument about moral cause and effect: that actions have consequences for the self even when the external world cannot see those consequences. Dorian cannot escape what he has done -- he can only hide it.

This hiding is the central psychological drama of the novel. Dorian locks the portrait in the old schoolroom at the top of the house. He covers it. He fears anyone seeing it. The portrait represents the self he cannot bear to inhabit.

What does the portrait represent in relation to Aestheticism?#

Wilde was the foremost spokesman for the Aesthetic movement, which held that art exists for its own sake -- that beauty is its own justification and that moral instruction has no place in art. Lord Henry Wotton, the novel's most articulate voice, is the embodiment of this philosophy.

But The Picture of Dorian Gray is not a straightforward celebration of Aestheticism. It is a critique. Dorian takes Wotton's philosophy literally: if pleasure is the highest value, then he should pursue pleasure without guilt. The portrait is Wilde's counter-argument. You cannot separate the aesthetic from the moral self as cleanly as Wotton suggests. The painting proves this -- it is a beautiful object that records ugly truths.

The literary scholar Richard Ellmann, whose biography Oscar Wilde (Knopf, 1988) remains the definitive account of Wilde's life, argued that Dorian represents Wilde's exploration of what it would mean to live entirely by the logic of Wotton's philosophy. The answer, as the novel demonstrates, is destruction.

What does the ending mean?#

At the novel's conclusion, Dorian stabs the portrait in an attempt to destroy the evidence of his corruption. Instead, the portrait reverts to its original beauty and Dorian himself is found dead -- aged, withered, and bearing all the marks of corruption the portrait had been carrying. The moral accounting that was suspended is paid in full, instantly and completely.

The ending represents Wilde's argument that the moral self cannot be permanently separated from the person who inhabits it. The reckoning is merely deferred. For a companion piece on what this looks like when a creator is destroyed by his own creation rather than the created, what the monster in Frankenstein represents covers the same theme from a very different angle.

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Further reading#

For the life of the man who wrote the novel and the trials that destroyed him, who Oscar Wilde was and why he was put in prison covers the biographical context.

To read the novel itself, free: The Picture of Dorian Gray is in the Foxing catalog.

Wilde's other major works are also free on Foxing: The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband are the best places to go next.

For a reading list that includes Dorian Gray alongside other books about moral consequences, five books that will change how you think about morality has recommendations across the public domain.

Sources#

• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ward, Lock and Company, 1891
• Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, Knopf, 1988
• Isobel Murray, ed., The Oxford Authors: Oscar Wilde, Oxford University Press, 1989