The Four Tragedies in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
An Essay by Jesko Veenema, June 2024
To A., who shall never lose her sense of beauty.
The main characters of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, are well-constructed representatives for different ways to experience and express beauty. While the personal tragedy of Dorian Gray might be interpreted as a moral story, a warning against aestheticism, by superficial readers who are unfamiliar with Wilde’s immoral conception of art (which is summarised in the preface, and expounded in his essays), I believe it to be more profitable and in accordance with the author’s intention to view the main characters of the novel – Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray and Sibyl Vane – as four case studies in aesthetic life; while we shall not deal with the side characters, all of whom have no particular relation to beauty, and mostly belong to the common, narrow-minded, inaesthetic and profane part of humankind.
As Wilde points out, “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book”. Therefore, I believe we ought not to interpret these four cases as critiques, warnings or praises concerning the type of aestheticist represented by it; also, because their attitudes are only natural to their disposition, and not consciously adopted; and because all four cases are tragic. So, for all their differences, these four characters have two things in common: Beauty or aesthetic experience makes their life meaningful and dominates them (and in this sense, all of them might be called aestheticists); and all of them have a tragic error which brings them down eventually.
Basil Hallward takes a somewhat religious, pious attitude towards beauty. Beauty is his goddess, is sacred to him. To him, the sacred worship of beauty is restricted to his work as a painter. Finding therein his highest purpose and self-fulfilment, Basil’s capabilities are fully consumed by it, making him a brilliant artist, but a rather commonplace, though sensible person in any other sphere of his life. In everyday life, he adheres to the regular morality of his time and place, thereby representing moral conscience in contrast to Lord Henry and acknowledging inaesthetic reality; in his obsession with Dorian Gray, however, Basil knows no limits.
To Basil, art is the sphere of the sacred, of beauty, strictly separated from other spheres of life; painting is his way of service; and Dorian is to him an incarnation of beauty, the visible appearance of his goddess. Meeting him is, for Basil, a kind of revelation which may reasonably be compared to religious revelations. Dorian inspires him to his greatest work, as his muse. Basil’s admiration for Dorian may be compared to idol worship; and therefore, aware of its immoral nature, Basil is ashamed of it (which is why he does not want the picture to be exhibited or sold). Basil’s tragic error is to have concentrated all his power on Dorian, as the idoliser on his idol; and therefore, unable to spiritualise his life himself, Basil becomes dependent on Dorian; he has handed his soul over to him. His tragedy is the loss of his idol, and his punishment is being murdered by that very same person. Were it not for his idolatry, it would not have come to it; and Basil would not have overlooked Dorian’s immorality for so long.
Lord Henry lives without such attachments. He does not restrict the domain of beauty, but expands it to all areas of life, giving him much room for self-realisation and leaving none for anything else. Henry is utterly immoral, which is not to say, he is evil – he is beyond good and evil, always using aesthetic instead of ethical standards. He simply is no moral being, neither accepting moral judgement from others nor imposing it on them. Henry does not care about reason or truth either, as he demonstrates by his paradoxical, self-undermining witticisms. He does not care whether his opinions are true, but only if they are interesting, and therefore, beautiful.
Lord Henry is a dandy, and consequently, cannot be an artist like Basil. His way of life, his self-representation and -realisation, his expression of personality – that is his art. Art is not a sphere of life among others to him, but it takes up the whole of life, therefore blinding out its inaesthetic aspects. Henry’s advantage over Basil is his carelessness derived from total commitment to aestheticism. In Basil, the artist and the man, the aestheticist and the moralist, though each of them has his own sphere, sometimes get into conflict; whereas Henry is always true to himself, always contradicting himself in terms of truth (which he does not take seriously), but always in accordance with himself in actual decisions or feelings. A certain ease and playfulness, developed only by strictly committing to aestheticism, makes Henry so likable and seductive, for example towards Dorian.
While Basil concentrates his power onto his work and especially Dorian, Henry spreads his attention widely and to no particular object. Therefore, he is never really attached to anybody or anything, and is more in control of his pleasures than Basil. Henry has a more distanced, scientific relation to his experience, and might be called a ‘gay scientist’. His tragic error, however, is precisely that he has nothing to hold on to, and has no way of dealing with the inaesthetic, the ugliness of life. Therefore, he ultimately remains superficial. In his later years, Henry is unable to come to terms with old age and death, the only ugly facts of life he cannot ignore. His tragedy is to never find peace in face of these realities, and also to have nothing sacred to turn to, finding himself all alone after his divorce and the deaths of Basil and Dorian.
Dorian Gray is the man who is not exposed to old age and death, and consequently Henry envies him in his later years. In the beginning, Dorian does not know beauty, he represents it. While Basil and Henry are aesthetic subjects, Dorian and Sibyl Vane are merely aesthetic objects in the beginning. They are beautiful, but do not experience beauty themselves, they are unconscious of their beauty, and that makes them so especially beautiful. Like Adam and Eve before the fall, they are unconscious of their appearance. Henry, the full-blooded aestheticist, makes Dorian see beauty as the purpose of life, and his own youth and beauty as the best starting point for such a life. Dorian suddenly becomes, as in a conversion, aware of his own beauty, and, like Adam after the fall, he becomes sinful as well, because he becomes vain. When his wish for eternal youth becomes true, there are no limits to Dorian’s aesthetic possibilities, in combination with his social standing; he can yield to any pleasure he desires.
In Dorian’s psyche, we find aspects of his friends Basil and Henry; and, different from both of them, he changes much over the course of the book. In the very beginning, Dorian is influenced by Basil and adheres to his commonplace morality. If art was a sphere distinct from other parts of life to Basil, art was nothing to Dorian in the beginning. Dorian is polite, good-hearted and cheerful. When Henry inspires him to make his life about beauty, Dorian first concentrates all his attention to a single person: Sibyl Vane. She represents beauty to him, just as he represents it to Basil. After the tragic end of their relationship, Dorian resolves never to attach himself to someone again in this way and becomes more and more alike Henry.
Unlike Henry, Dorian must never come to terms with old age and death. What is his tragic error, then? It is his immorality, his sinfulness – and even though he bears no outward mark of this evil, he himself cannot endure the bad conscience which is represented by the ugliness of his portrait. His tragic error is to have taken appearance over actual being, outward beauty over inward beauty. Though nobody else can see it, Dorian cannot escape the ugliness of his own soul which the picture clearly shows. He turns against the picture, in the attempt to destroy his ugliness, and thereby necessarily destroys himself. If his story is a warning, it is not one against aestheticism in its purest version as intended by the great Walter Pater, but one against a superficial variation of it which does not take the beauty of the soul into account as well. Wilde has noted elsewhere that the aim of art is to make appearance the realisation of the soul, of the personality, reminiscent of the Greek ideal of kalokagathia. Or maybe the novel denies the possibility of any other kind of aestheticism and only cherishes natural, unconscious beauty.
Sibyl Vane, being unconscious of her appearance, is such a naïve, natural kind of artist, similar to Dorian, whose beauty originally corresponded to his good nature. Dorian believes her to be a supreme artist, a brilliant actress. But it turns out later that Sibyl has never really been acting, but really lived in the stories which she performed, like a playing child who makes no difference between fiction and reality; whereas everyone else in the shabby theatre is bad and knows it all to be fake. She was an aesthetic object only, not an aesthetic subject: Because to be an aesthetic subject one has to have some distance from the object, it seems. For her, the plays simply were life; not art, which requires some sublimation, some sort of higher consciousness, some conscious playfulness, perhaps. This consciousness, again, can spoil one.
Dorian would have been wise to treat her as an object, and nothing more – just as he himself has been treated by Basil, who pretends to be his friend, but who rejoices mostly in painting him. Dorian should have just gone to the theatre to watch Sibyl, but instead decides that he must marry her. He believes her natural way to be the ultimate art of aesthetic living but is disappointed to find her to be no real artist at all. He makes her aware of the unreality of her world and she is unable to live outside of it. When Dorian, her only connection with reality, breaks off, Sibyl is left with nothing. She suddenly finds herself robbed of beauty and has no grasp of reality to get on with her life – and therefore, ends it. Her tragic error is to be unconscious and naïve.
Though each of these four tragedies is interesting in its own right, it is of course clear that the novel centres around Dorian. He is the most complex and ambivalent character and develops more than the others. Moreover, at each point of his development he resembles one of the other three characters. In the very beginning of the novel, Dorian is as naïve and beautiful as Sibyl; then, after becoming an aesthetic subject, he is as attached and moral as Basil; and after the loss of Sibyl, he is as scientific, self-controlled and insatiable as Henry. Over the next years and especially after murdering his old friend Basil, Dorian attains a stage of moral corruption unknown to Henry, who is less experimental than he pretends to be. This moral corruption makes him even more restless. In a last attempt to turn around his fate, Dorian resolves to become virtuous, a resolution Henry immediately recognises for the mere pretention it is. Driven into mania, Dorian yields to his last way out of his misery: self-destruction.
As all four fates are tragic, there really is no positive lesson to derive from Wilde’s novel, not even the negative that one should not derive meaning from beauty. Those who are sensible to it cannot properly live without it. There are many constructive ideas in Wilde’s works concerning the ideal aesthetic life: It is the Hellenistic ideal which does not make a difference between beauty and virtue, between outward and inward beauty, as does modern man. But Wilde probably recognised that humans often fall short of this ideal, at least in our day and age.