Influence and the Soul in The Picture of Dorian Gray

When Oscar Wilde first wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, he was faced with backlash from critics who may or may not have been familiar with the term “unreliable narrator.” They accused him of writing an “immoral book.” At first, he contested that claim by saying that the moral of the book was clear; in fact, he thought that to be the biggest flaw of the novel. But then, he argued that there was no such thing as an immoral book. 

In response to his critics, Wilde published the Preface, in which he claims that “All art is quite useless” (viii), and thus, it can’t influence action. Which is a bit ironic, since the main character of The Picture of Dorian Gray is highly influenced by his own portrait and by a book given to him by a friend. Both pieces of art influence his decision to live an immoral life. 

While the novel has been analyzed to mean different things, “everything from an attack on late-Victorian hypocrisy to a story of the domination of an older man by a beautiful youth” (Houston A. Baker Jr), its real-world response and Wilde’s consequent rebuttal indicates that its arguably main message lies in the danger of taking art too seriously and succumbing to its influence. 

Early on in the novel, Hallward cries, “We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty” (12). It is for this very reason that Hallward doesn’t want to show the world his portrait of Dorian Gray; it reveals too much of himself. Wilde mentions in his Preface: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (viii). To relate to the larger world what you have interpreted in art is a mistake. Wilde suggests that society reads too much into art and lets its beauty thwart reality. 

When Dorian sees his own portrait, it is the first time he recognizes his own beauty. His mind then hyper focuses on art and its beauty, which is what draws him to Sybil Vane, who he falls in love with while watching her on stage. But after he proposes and Sybil Vane learns what she thinks is true love, she cannot manage to imitate it on stage:

I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!—and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is […] You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. […] You are more to me than all art can ever be. […] I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. […] it would be a profanation for me to play at being in love. (95) 

When Dorian sees Sybil giving such a bad performance, he immediately falls out of love: “Without your art you are nothing” (96). Sybil Vane represented Gray’s opportunity to turn away from art and into reality, and Dorian almost takes the opportunity, but Sybil had already taken her own life. 

Lord Henry comments on her suicide by saying: “The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. […] The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away” (114). The message is that staying in an artistic facade is better. And somehow even more real. At one point, Lord Henry says, “I love acting. It is so much more real than life” (88). Later, Dorian muses, “Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part” (194). Dorian thinks this as if it’s an original thought, but that only shows the depths of Lord Henry’s manipulation and influence.

According to Lord Henry: 

to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. (19)

At the point of time when Lord Henry starts to influence Dorian, Dorian is an empty vessel. He is without a soul, taken from him by Basil Hallward’s portrait. Basil Hallward reduced Dorian to only an aesthetic value, finding in him “the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colors” (12). Basil in essence reduces him to a surface being without a soul. Dorian manifests this in his wish to maintain his youth, and “His soul is no longer his own: it has been appropriated by art” (Oates 426). 

Arguably, Dorian Gray doesn’t necessarily have a lot of agency in the novel. Basil Hallward took away his soul and transferred it to the painting, and Lord Henry is inserting his own soul into Gray’s body by his own definition of influence. But while Basil transferred Dorian’s soul because he was obsessed with creating beauty, Henry is obsessed with subverting it. And later, Dorian “felt a curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices” (149).

Dorian is still entirely obsessed with Art and an artistic way of life, even while recognizing that it isn’t always beautiful. He originally had an “artistic basis for ethics,” which Lord Henry points out when Dorian says “I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous” (107). But then he accepts it, even embraces it, all the while using aesthetics as a standard of judgment. In contrast with Sybil Vane, whose soul was “freed from prison” when she opened her eyes to the inauthenticity of art, Gray’s soul is still imprisoned, with Lord Henry as the warden. Lord Henry believes that art is a form of imitation (93), and Gray is the art that is imitating Henry’s words. 

Dorian “succumb[ed] to the spell of beauty” (Oates 427), and allowed it to take an influential role: “[The painting] had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul?” (Wilde 101). He thus opened himself to influence: he sold his soul to art (his portrait), let it become his reality, and opened himself up to the devil (Lord Henry).

[On a side note, there is a lot of religious imagery to suggest a slight Genesis retelling. For example, Dorian and Lord Henry meet in a garden reminiscent of Eve and the snake meeting in the garden of Eden. But that’s a potential topic for another essay.] 

I’ll leave you with this quote from Joyce Carol Oates’ essay: 

The value of Wilde’s allegory lies in the questions it asks rather than in the experience it transcribes. For Dorian Gray gives us hardly any experience at all-it is surface and symbol and too tidily constructed.  Dorian, Henry, and Basil fade, but their voices remain, asking certain unanswerable questions that are as appropriate for our time as they were for Wilde’s: Is the Fall from innocence inevitable? Is the loss of illusion tragic, or comic, or merely farcical? Is the artist by his very nature inclined to manipulate and pervert his subject? And is his doom bound up with the fact of his artistry, his autonomy? Henry declares that if a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart, but Wilde’s novel-and Wilde’s experience-suggest otherwise. (427-8)