1. Dorian Gray is a well cultured and a very handsome young man living in London, England. The commoners and the wealthy are intrigued with his beauty and perfect appearance—he can attract males as well. An artist named Basil Hallward [Basil is homosexual like Oscar Wilde, the author (he incorporated himself in the novel]) finds Dorian Gray as a perfect subject for a new painting and paints him. After the painting of the perfect Dorian Gray was finished, the painted was handed down to its rightful master. As time passes, Dorian’s internal ugliness begins to show in the portrait while his actual self never ages and remains flawless. Needless to say Dorian is a very arrogant and narcissist towards himself and when a girl whom she loved broke her heart and committed suicide, Dorian still lead a life of a steel heart. When she died, the portrait contained a scratch. At the end of the novel when Dorian is a disgusting person at heart, the portrait turns into a repulsive man and he calls up the artist, Basil, and asks what he has done to the painting. Basil told him he has never touched the painting but Dorian can’t accept it. Instead he stabs him with a knife and kills him. Worried, Dorian black mails a friend to dispose Basil Hallward’s body. After that event the portrait is at its most hideous point. Dorian Gray is furious and stabs the portrait at the heart. Soon, the maids in the mansion hear a loud shriek of a man. They curiously enter Dorian’s room and find a gorgeous and spotless painting of a handsome young man and on the floor is an old man with a knife in his heart.
2. Internal ugliness will show. This is the simplest theme I could come up with in the novel. Dorian Gray was handsome and attractive but his heart was disgusting and horrifying. The painting that Basil painted was a symbol of this heart. I believe that is why when Dorian stabbed the painting, it actually stabbed his heart.
3. Oscar Wilde’s tone was very calm but mystifying. His use of syntax and diction made the novel much more compelling and dramatic. [Some of the things he says are quite philosophical.]
‘Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with a palid face and tear-stained eyes looked at him, as he walked over to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained window.’
‘All art is quite useless.’
‘Life always has poppies in her hands.’
4. Oscar Wilde has to be one the best authors that use imagery—it is amazing how a simple few words can turn a mind full of vibrant images. Again, syntax and diction added to the richness of the novel. Reading his imagery passages was like taking a decadent bite of rich chocolate—the more we taste, the more sensation and thoughts we get. Sounds funny, but it was like this while reading.
‘The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.’
‘The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive.’
‘Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my life. .. Pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.’
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