The Picture of Dorian Gray

Summary

Imagine making a wish so reckless, so absolute, that you forget you made it until it comes true.

A young man stands before his own portrait, newly finished, and feels for the first time the terrible weight of his own beauty. “If it were I who was to be always young,” he says, “and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

The wish is granted. The young man stays young. The portrait does not.

This is The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Artist and the Influence

Oscar Wilde published his only novel in 1890, first as a magazine story, then expanded into a book. It scandalized Victorian England. Critics called it poisonous, unclean, a work that would taint anyone who read it. One reviewer suggested the author should be prosecuted.

Wilde was delighted.

The story begins in a London studio, heavy with the scent of roses. Basil Hallward, a painter, has just finished his masterpiece—a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty. Basil is obsessed with his subject. “I have put too much of myself into it,” he tells his friend Lord Henry Wotton. He refuses to exhibit the painting, afraid it reveals too much of his own soul.

Lord Henry is intrigued. He wants to meet this young man who has so captivated the artist.

“Don’t spoil him,” Basil pleads. “Don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad.”

Lord Henry smiles. He always smiles.

The Corruption Begins

Lord Henry Wotton is Wilde’s greatest creation—a languid aristocrat who speaks entirely in epigrams. “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it,” he purrs. “There is no such thing as a good influence.” “I can sympathize with everything except suffering.”

He is charming, amoral, and utterly convincing. When he meets Dorian Gray, he sees a blank canvas of his own—a beautiful boy who has never thought about anything.

Lord Henry begins to talk. He speaks of youth, its brevity, its preciousness. “You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully,” he tells Dorian. “The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. But we never get back our youth.”

Dorian listens, transfixed. Something awakens in him. When he sees Basil’s finished portrait, he understands for the first time what he possesses—and what he will lose.

“How sad it is!” he cries. “I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young.”

And then he makes his wish. His terrible, binding wish.

Sibyl Vane

Dorian falls in love. Her name is Sibyl Vane, a seventeen-year-old actress performing Shakespeare in a shabby East End theater. She is exquisite. When she plays Juliet, Dorian weeps. When she plays Rosalind, he laughs with pure joy. She calls him “Prince Charming” because she doesn’t know his real name.

He decides to marry her. Lord Henry finds this amusing. Basil is worried.

But then Dorian brings his friends to see her perform, and something has changed. Sibyl acts badly—woodenly, without feeling. She has discovered real love, she explains, and now the make-believe passions of the stage seem hollow to her. “You have killed my love,” she tells him, radiant with joy.

Dorian is appalled. He loved her art, not her. Without her genius, she is ordinary.

He leaves her with words so cruel they could cut glass. He tells her she has disappointed him. That she is shallow. That he never wants to see her again.

That night, returning home, he looks at his portrait and sees something strange. A touch of cruelty has appeared around the mouth. A hardness that wasn’t there before.

The wish has begun its work.

The Bargain Fulfilled

Sibyl Vane kills herself. Dorian feels remorse—briefly—until Lord Henry talks him out of it. “She was less real than Juliet,” Harry says. Think of it as art, as tragedy. Don’t let it spoil your life.

Dorian agrees. He hides the portrait in an upstairs room, locked away where no one will see it. And he begins to live.

The years pass. Dorian Gray becomes a legend in London society. His face remains untouched by time—the same golden hair, the same rose-red lips, the same innocent eyes. Meanwhile, rumors follow him like shadows. Young men who become his friends are ruined. Women who love him are destroyed. He collects sensations the way other men collect art: perfumes, jewels, music, drugs, experiences that cannot be named in polite company.

“There were moments,” Wilde writes, “when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.”

And through it all, the portrait ages. It grows lined, cruel, hideous. It becomes a mirror of Dorian’s soul—every sin recorded, every cruelty etched into the painted face. He visits it sometimes, in the locked room, to see what he has escaped. To see what he has become.

The Murder

Eighteen years pass. Dorian is thirty-eight but looks twenty. Basil Hallward, still his friend, confronts him about the terrible rumors. Surely they cannot be true? Surely the innocent boy he painted could not have become this creature of whispers and scandal?

Dorian laughs. “You want to see my soul?” he says. “Come upstairs.”

He shows Basil the portrait. The painter is horrified. The thing on the canvas is monstrous—a face of corruption and evil, barely recognizable as the boy he once loved.

“It is the face of my soul,” Dorian tells him.

And then, seized by a sudden hatred—for the artist who created this mirror, for the man who sees him as he truly is—Dorian picks up a knife and murders Basil Hallward.

He stabs him again and again, until the blood pools on the floor and drips through the carpet.

Then he locks the door and goes downstairs. He checks his watch. He reads poetry. He blackmails a former friend, a chemist, into destroying the body with acid and fire. The chemist, Alan Campbell, does what he’s told—and later kills himself.

Dorian attends parties. He charms hostesses. He remains beautiful.

The Reckoning

But something is changing. Dorian begins to feel the weight of what he’s done. He cannot escape his conscience—it hangs upstairs, in the locked room, waiting for him.

He tries to be good. He spares a village girl he might have ruined. He performs small kindnesses. Perhaps, he thinks, the portrait will improve. Perhaps the face will grow less hideous.

He goes to look. The portrait has changed—but not for the better. Now there is a cunning, hypocritical look around the mouth. His attempt at virtue was just another form of vanity.

“It was his beauty that had ruined him,” Dorian realizes. “His beauty and the youth that he had prayed for.”

He decides to destroy the painting. It is the only evidence against him, the only record of his crimes. If he destroys it, he will be free.

He picks up the knife—the same knife that killed Basil Hallward—and stabs the canvas.

The End

The servants hear a terrible cry. When they break into the room, they find a portrait on the wall—beautiful, youthful, exactly as Basil painted it decades ago.

And on the floor lies a dead man. He is withered, wrinkled, loathsome. They only recognize him by the rings on his fingers.

It is Dorian Gray.

What It Means

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fable about consequences—about the impossibility of escaping them. Dorian wants to live without leaving marks, to indulge every appetite without paying any price. For years, he succeeds. The portrait pays instead.

But the portrait is his soul. He cannot destroy it without destroying himself.

Wilde was writing about his own era—the hypocrisy of Victorian morality, the worship of surfaces, the terror of aging and ugliness. But he was also writing about something timeless: the human desire to be seen as beautiful, innocent, untouched, even as we know ourselves to be otherwise.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” Wilde wrote in the preface. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

But The Picture of Dorian Gray is a deeply moral book. Its morality is simply this: we cannot escape what we are. We can hide it, lock it away, pretend it doesn’t exist. But it waits for us, in some upstairs room, growing more hideous with every passing year.

Until the day we finally look.

This has been The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.