The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde (1890)
“A man sells his soul for eternal beauty — and discovers that beauty without conscience is just a more elegant form of decay.”
Character Analysis
Dorian is constructed as a blank canvas — beautiful, impressionable, morally unformed — onto which Lord Henry's philosophy is painted. His tragedy is that he accepts this formation passively, then lives its consequences with terrible energy. He is not evil by nature; he becomes evil by choice and by philosophy. The portrait shows us who he actually is while his face shows us who he wants to appear to be. By the end, he has lost the capacity to feel genuine emotion — pity without sorrow, memory without remorse. The hideous corpse in the final scene is the truth the beautiful young man was always concealing.
Speaks with learned elegance — absorbs Lord Henry's style early but retains a quality of genuine feeling beneath it. His language becomes colder as the novel progresses; by the end, he speaks in abstractions about his own moral state.