I've never read the book. What did Dorian Grey do that was so immoral and sinful?
07.06.2025 15:31
After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.
—Chapter 14
“Those words mean nothing to me now.”
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To summarize, Dorian is a self-absorbed and cruel person who has little regard for other people, and destroys the lives of everyone who ever loved him. I think that this is what taints the portrait, not his hedonism or any unspoken sex acts. The only person who escapes any suffering from associating with Dorian is Lord Henry, because Henry is already callous and insincere. He was the one who taught Dorian to go through life with an almost misanthropic detachment, to regard everything as though it were a delightful play that no longer matters once it’s over. As a result, Dorian’s life is meaningless. He may have lived it to the fullest under Henry’s definition, by indulging in all of his passions, but it amounts to nothing and causes nothing but suffering for everyone involved.
—Chapter 12
Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his ear by those grinning lips. The mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything.
The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray’s eyes. Then he stretched out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. He read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table. Having done this, he got up and went over to the window.
How, exactly, does Dorian ruin people? There has to be more to it than just associating with him. We learn in Chapter 14, after Basil’s death, that Dorian uses blackmail and emotional manipulation to control his victims. Dorian contacts an “intimate friend” of his, Alan Campbell, who is a chemist. Dorian wants Alan to use chemicals to dissolve Basil’s body and destroy all evidence. Alan is obviously horrified by this request, so Dorian applies some pressure:
“Yes.”
For the first time, an external factor turns a male mammal into a female - EL PAÍS English
[…]
Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him.
“Hush! Don’t say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My God! Don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?”
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Why does Dorian kill Basil? We’re not given much of a reason beyond “mad passion,” a random onset of hatred:
Again, we’re not told what Dorian threatens Alan with, but it’s not too hard to fill in the blank. Dorian had a sexual relationship with Alan, and will tell someone (possibly whoever is sponsoring Alan’s research, or his family) if Alan does not help him cover up his murder. After Alan destroys the evidence, he feels so guilty that he takes his own life, making him one of several suicides that Dorian is directly responsible for. It’s likely that Dorian did something similar with all the other people he had relationships with.
“Years ago, when I was a boy,” said Dorian Gray, crushing the flower in his hand, “you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks…
—Chapter 13
I love the image of Dorian idly sniffing the flower and then crushing it in his hand. He enjoys Basil’s passion for him in an indifferent and detached way, then casually destroys it.
“Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!” There was no answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window. “Pray, Dorian, pray,” he murmured. “What is it that one was taught to say in one’s boyhood? ‘Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities.’ Let us say that together. The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.”
He also always puts his own needs and emotions first, and acts extremely entitled about it. He says about Basil, whom he murdered, “You don’t know what he had made me suffer.” He seems to think (or at least, he tells himself) that acts of violence or cruelty are justified if the person made him feel bad. The whole reason he’s blackmailing Alan into disposing of a body is because he’s incapable of taking responsibility for anything. How many of Dorian’s partners realized too late just how immature and narcissistic he is, and tried to get out, only for Dorian to punish them?
It’s pretty obvious what’s going on here: Dorian seduces both men and women, luring them in with his pretty face and charming manner, and then he hangs them out to dry. He also doesn’t give a damn about any of the people he was once so close to. He doesn’t do anything for them once they’ve paid the price for his sins, doesn’t check up on them, he just moves on to the next one. When he runs into Adrian in Chapter 16, he just feels uncomfortable, because he’s being faced with the consequences of his own actions. Dorian chews people up and spits them out, and then feels no remorse. He probably was never really friends with any of them at all.
— Chapter 7
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The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes. He had taken the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so.
At this point, Dorian has well and truly gone off the deep end. The state of the portrait makes that clear (and remember, the description we’re given is of the portrait before Dorian murders someone). He’s an evil person. And Basil finally realizes that, once it sinks in that the picture is the same one that he painted.
My takeaway from this is that, pre-murder, Dorian was an abusive boyfriend. That’s already pretty obvious given how he treated Sibyl, but throughout this scene, Dorian hits quite a few abusive partner beats that are subtler than the blackmail. Specifically, the “you made me do this” lines that he keeps throwing at Alan:
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There’s also this:
We’re mostly not told, which is a smart move on Wilde’s part. Dorian Gray’s sins remain ambiguous, so that you can project anything you want into his place. Whatever you think is the worst and most dastardly thing Dorian could possibly do, assume he did it.
This passage tells us both very much and very little. We know that Dorian is promiscuous, and that his reputation is so toxic that just associating with him can ruin yours. We don’t know exactly what Stavenley told Basil about Dorian that was so horrible, and given that it’s the Victorian era, it could be anything from light bondage to sexual assault. Exactly what Dorian does that ruins all of these young people is left to the imagination. It’s implied that Dorian had sexual relationships with all of the men listed; this book is steeped in nineteenth-century queerness (and it’s Oscar Wilde writing), but it would also take something of that caliber to completely ruin powerful aristocrats. We actually meet Adrian later in the story — he’s not dead, but he’s wasting away in an opium den. His friendship with Dorian cost him dearly.
By iayetta83
I said in another post that, if The Picture of Dorian Gray has a moral, it’s that one must strike a balance between self-indulgence and self-denial. Maybe that’s the point it’s making about hedonism, but the entire context of hedonism in this book is a bit of a red herring. Lord Henry thinks this story’s about hedonism, but Henry is like a stage magician, distracting you with charismatically edgy and loquacious philosophizing so that you don’t see the real reason why Dorian dooms himself. Dorian is doomed not because he’s a hedonist or because he’s bisexual, but because he’s a heartless asshole who refuses to take responsibility for anything.
“It is useless.”
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“Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan. You know what they are. The thing is quite simple. Come, don’t work yourself into this fever. The thing has to be done. Face it, and do it.”
BASIL DESERVED BETTER! #JusticeForBasil
The first evil thing that Dorian does, the inciting incident that leads to his fall from grace, is his rejection of Sibyl Vane. Adaptations love to make Dorian and Sibyl’s breakup Henry’s fault, either because he gives Dorian really bad romance advice or because he takes Dorian to a brothel or something. But in the book, it is thoroughly Dorian’s fault. He realizes that he fell in love with Sybil’s acting, not with her as a person, and once he sees the person she really is, he loses interest in her. His rejection of Sibyl comes right after she makes an impassioned confession of love for him, and it is extremely cruel:
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A groan broke from Campbell’s lips and he shivered all over. The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already come upon him. The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead. It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him.
I think the best image of the nature of Dorian’s evil (ha) comes from the scene just before he murders Basil.
We get more evidence for this when Basil comes around in Chapter 12 to see what Dorian’s deal is. He mentions multiple people, mostly men, who have gotten close to Dorian and whose lives were ruined as a result:
This tells us that Dorian was already a shallow person with a cruel streak, independent of Lord Henry’s influence, before shit starts to hit the fan. His reasons for breaking up with Sibyl have nothing to do with Henry’s pontificating about hedonism, it’s just his own superficiality and lack of empathy. It’s possible, even likely, that most of Dorian’s sins are not grand Biblical depravities, but casual acts of cruelty that slowly chip away at his soul.
Basil’s prayer for Dorian’s forgiveness shows that he still loves Dorian. He’s also not a cynic – he believes that everyone deserves a chance at redemption, as a Christian is supposed to. And Dorian recoils a bit. “What? I can’t be redeemed, Basil! I’m Evil-with-a-capital-E!” And, as if to prove it, Dorian stabs him. Dorian experiences the wild hatred for Basil in that moment because Basil’s reaction is dissonant. It contradicts Dorian’s worldview, and maybe makes him feel guilty for the first time in a while. Rather than deal with that, Dorian kills the last person who sincerely believed he could be better.
“I entreat you, Alan.”
“You refuse?”
We’re not explicitly told why Dorian suddenly feels such hatred for Basil, but here’s my theory:
If you see Dorian, don’t date him. No matter how pretty he is. It’s not worth it.
He spoke rapidly and in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him.
“…you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination, Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You mean nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. […] Without your art, you are nothing. […] A third-rate actress with a pretty face.”
We are given some more specific information, though, enough that we can put some of the pieces together. Spoilers follow; I highly recommend that you go and read the book before reading my analysis. It’s a great book, and you’ll probably figure out some of the answer to your question yourself.
“Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. He told me. He told me right out before everybody. It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him?”
Instead, Basil encourages Dorian to ask God for forgiveness, to redeem himself:
Make of that what you will.
—Chapter 13
So, what does Basil do? Does he run and scream? Does he curse Dorian? Express regret that he and Dorian ever met? These are the reactions that Dorian is expecting. He’s probably gotten such reactions before, from other people whose hearts he’s broken. Remember, Dorian’s been taught to be cynical by Lord Henry, so, Dorian’s cynicism is deeply-entrenched by now. He values beautiful things because he does not value people, and maybe assumes that everyone is as bad as he is deep down. I think he expects Basil to hate him.
Dorian probably treats all his partners like this! He treats them badly and then makes them feel like it’s their fault. He threatens them with social ruin if they don’t do what he wants (and his own reputation is already in the gutter, so he won’t take much damage if he tells everyone about the kinky things he and his partner did in bed). And then he hits them with that “look of pity,” as if to say, “this will hurt you way more than it hurts me.”
“I am so sorry for you, Alan,” he murmured, “but you leave me no alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is. You see the address. If you don’t help me, I must send it. If you don’t help me, I will send it. You know what the result will be. But you are going to help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now. I tried to spare you. You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern, harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me—no living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate terms.”
“I tried to spare you. You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern, harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me—no living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate terms.”
Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and opened it. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell back in his chair. A horrible sense of sickness came over him. He felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.
Dorian Gray turned slowly around and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. “It is too late, Basil,” he faltered.
A few paragraphs before, we get this subtle but poignant bit of foreshadowing:
“It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow’?”