Themes in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Themes in The Picture of Dorian Gray

1. Art and aesthetics

   • A binary to religion in Dracula
   • Art is an expression of everything and the painting illustrates that point
   • "The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows and thought them real"
     • Plato's analogy of the cave
   • "the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect" 85
   • "He is all my art to me"

2. Youth and beauty

   • It's superiority but its mortal fate
   • "time is jealous of you, and warns against your lilies and your roses" 23
   • "It has its divine right of sovereignty" 22
   • "ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues"

3. Influence and manipulation

   • Like Dracula, it's presented as a bad thing and also how it changes someone.
     • Whilst Dracula's victims became vampires, LH's become LH
   • "Because to influence a person is to give them one's own soul"
   • "it was a poisonous book" 104
   • "Don't spoil him" 16

4. Good vs Evil

   • Superego=Basil/Id=LH
   • Also an internal battle in DG - psycomachia
   • "Each of us have heaven and hell in him"
   • "Let it be for good, not for evil

5. Morality and sin

   • "To cure the soul by means of the senses"
   • Questions the reality of morals and the ugliness of sin though the painting
   • "sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face"
   • "the terror of society, which is the basis of morals" 19

6. Romanticism vs reality

   • "His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery"
   • the "dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass...the dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass"
   • "I want to make Romeo jealous"

7. Women and men

   • Behaviour highlights the paradox of men's behavior
     • "Her [Gladys] clever tongue gets on one's nerves"
   • "She is very clever, too clever for a woman." 151
   • "decorative sex"
   • "the husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes" 148

8. Redemption

   • "The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also" 132
   • "Down on your knees!" 158
     • execution or prayer?

9. The Double

   • The painting and Dorian are the double - at first positive and enlightening but then powerful and evil
   • "the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul"
     • hidden in the schoolroom
   • "it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas" 132

10. The guilty conscience

    • "It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him" 182
      • Compare oxymoron to Drac's "un-dead"
    • The journey to the Opium Den