The Picture of Dorian Gray Read Online Free PDF Page A

metaphor – eventually revealing the picture in its most ‘hideous’ light: ‘The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful’ (Chapter XIII) – while the ‘mad prayer’ and the locked attic prevent the public from detecting what would clearly be manifest: Dorian’s sins, whatever they might be.
THE PORTRAIT
    The portrait of Dorian may be the vehicle for a fantastic plot device, the repository for ancestral memory, a metaphor or mask for erotic desire, or the alibi for a life of secret vices; but it is also a work of art, and therefore occupies an important place in Wilde’s text and
oetime
. For Wilde made his public debut as a ‘professor of aesthetics’, and made art, its relation to life and conduct, and its correct interpretation, the dominant theme of most of his writings and public pronouncements. These concerns are explored in
Dorian Gray
, a novel in which a painting rather than its subject is the eponymous character.
    From the first pages, Basil’s painting is the object of interpretation and potential misreading. Basil, its creator, is also its first interpreter. As seen earlier, he believes that his portrait of Dorian actually reveals more about himself than the sitter. As he protests: ‘We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography’; and because he believes the portrait reveals ‘the secret of [his] own soul’ he resolves not to exhibit it. Dorian’s response to works of art is similarly subjective. When he encounters the curious yellow book which Lord Henry lends him, he sees in its hero ‘a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it’ (Chapter XI). Similarly, when he attends a performance of Wagner’s opera
Tannhauser
, he sees ‘in the prelude to that great work of art apresentation of the tragedy of his own soul’ (Chapter XI). Dorian clearly demonstrates the maxim found in the Preface which Wilde wrote for the revised edition of the novel: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.’
    Works of art therefore act as subjective mirrors in Wilde’s novel. This is pre-eminently the case with Dorian’s relationship with his own portrait. On one level this is obvious and understandable. After all, there is more reason why Dorian’s extremely lifelike portrait should mirror him rather than its creator. However, the reflection here is more ‘moral’ than physical; it serves as a moral ‘ledger’, recording his transgressions according to the pseudo-scientific beliefs of the day. Dorian, who as we have seen is apt to read art subjectively, is first and foremost a ‘critic’ of his own portrait. When he first believes that the painting has altered in response to his actions he is once again reading his own life into a work of art: ‘Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to think of them. And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth. Cruelty! Had he been cruel?’ (Chapter VII). Given Wilde’s professed views on art and nature, art and life, and art and morality, it is significant that Dorian’s ‘monstrous’ reading is detrimental to the painting. Some of these views help to illuminate the central incidents
of Dorian Gray.
    Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’ (January 1889) is principally a ‘protest’ against realism in the aesthetic realm, disparaging ‘poor, probable, uninteresting human life’, while asserting that ‘All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them to ideals.’ For Wilde, art should be ‘a veil, rather than a mirror’. 25 These strictures against bringing life to art find their ‘moral’ counterpart in Wilde’s portrait of the art critic