The Picture of Dorian Gray: What the Portrait Reveals About Responsibility

The portrait in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray gives visible form to what Dorian’s youthful face conceals. It ages in his place and takes on the marks of his cruelty. Its first change is barely perceptible, which makes the scene more disturbing. Dorian has to look closely enough to recognize what he has done. Then he has to decide what to do about it.

This reading guide discusses early plot developments and leaves the ending unspoiled.

The first change comes after Dorian rejects Sibyl Vane

Dorian falls in love with Sibyl through the characters she plays. When she gives a poor performance as Juliet, she tells him that falling in love has made it impossible to pretend that she feels the same passion onstage. Dorian hears her explanation as a disappointment and ends their engagement. The part of Sibyl he valued most was her ability to make him feel something from his seat in the theater.

Back home, Dorian notices a trace of cruelty around the painted mouth. He pulls up the blind and checks his own face in a mirror. The mark is visible in the canvas even in daylight, while the mirror shows the same young man as before. That sequence puts two kinds of evidence side by side. The mirror tells Dorian what others can see. The portrait gives him a reason to reconsider how he treated Sibyl.

Beauty gives Dorian an alibi

Wilde has already shown how easily Dorian mistakes a performance for a person. The portrait turns that error back on him. Other people can look at his face and assume they know something about his character, just as he watched Sibyl play Juliet and assumed he knew who she was.

Dorian also wants to believe his own version of events. When he first sees the change, he blames Sibyl for disappointing him, then remembers her crying and his own coldness. His first encounter with the altered portrait moves between self-defense and regret. The canvas makes it harder for him to settle comfortably on the story in which he was the one wronged.

Lord Henry makes evasion sound clever

Lord Henry’s wit is part of his appeal. It gives Dorian polished language for feelings and impulses he might otherwise have to examine. After rejecting Sibyl, Dorian borrows Henry’s sweeping ideas about women to persuade himself that her pain matters less than his own.

That is a good moment to test one of Henry’s aphorisms against the scene around it. His theory is easy for Dorian to repeat. Sibyl’s explanation of what happened onstage asks him to listen. The portrait changes after he chooses which account to take seriously.

Why Dorian hides the portrait

At first, Dorian considers letting the picture guide his conduct. Later, he moves it to the old schoolroom, where he can control who sees it. The shift from looking to hiding matters as much as any change in the painting. He can still consult it whenever he likes, while keeping the evidence away from anyone who might challenge his account of himself.

On a reread, put Chapter VII beside Chapter X. In the first scene, Dorian opens the blind to get a better look. In the second, he asks for a key. Those two ordinary gestures trace the change in what he wants from the portrait. First he wants to know whether it is telling him the truth. Then he wants to decide who gets to see it.

If you’d like an annotated copy for a reread, look for the Penguin Classics paperback edited by Robert Mighall. You can also read Wilde’s novel free at Project Gutenberg.

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