The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde and the pact with the image
A portrait that ages in place of its sitter: Oscar Wilde's novel of 1890-1891 between aestheticism, the Faustian myth and the poisonous book.
The Picture of Dorian Gray first appeared in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, a Philadelphia periodical. The following year Oscar Wilde republished it as a book, expanding it from thirteen to twenty chapters and prefacing it with a series of aphorisms, among them the famous «All art is quite useless». The magazine version had provoked violent criticism for its alleged immorality.
A wish spoken before a painting
The painter Basil Hallward has just finished the portrait of a young man of extraordinary beauty, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton, brilliant and cynical, persuades the youth that youth is the only good worth possessing. Before the canvas Dorian makes a wish: that the painting should grow old in his place. The wish, mysteriously, comes true.
Wilde never explains how this happens. There is no demon, no formula, no contract signed in blood. Yet the structure is that of the Faustian pact: a man obtains a superhuman gift and pays for it with his soul. Wilde knew the Gothic tradition well: he was the great-nephew of Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer, an 1820 novel devoted precisely to a diabolical pact.
The portrait as a mirror of the soul
Every one of Dorian's sins leaves its mark on the portrait, not on his face. After the suicide of the actress Sibyl Vane, whom he has cruelly rejected, a line of cruelty appears on the painted mouth. Over the years the picture, hidden in a locked room, grows ever more repulsive, while its model keeps his beauty intact.
The image that reflects the true nature of its owner belongs to a long tradition of magic mirrors and doubles. Wilde turns it into an allegory of conscience: the portrait is the soul made visible, which Dorian can hide from others but not from himself. When, years later, he shows it to the painter Basil, the gesture ends in murder.
The poisonous book
Dorian's life is also shaped by a book that Lord Henry gives him: a French novel in a yellow cover, in which a young Parisian tries to experience every possible sensation. Wilde does not give its title, but critics have linked it to Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours of 1884, and Wilde himself admitted in a letter that this book had partly suggested the idea to him.
The book is described as poisonous: Dorian buys many copies, bound in different colours, and reads it like a breviary. It is a powerful image of the influence literature can exert, but also a theme that Wilde's accusers turned against him during the trials of 1895, when pages of the novel were read out in court as proof of his immorality.
The ending restores order brutally. Dorian, determined to rid himself of the witness to his sins, stabs the portrait with a knife. The servants find on the floor an old man with a ravaged face, recognisable only by his rings, and on the wall the painting restored to its original splendour. Wilde, who in his preface denied the existence of moral or immoral books, thus gave literature one of its most powerful moral fables.