Caitlin Rebecca Craig

Dorian, Lord Henry, and Basil: A Recipe for Disaster Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray introduces us to three extraordinary characters. Basil Hallward is a talented but conscientious artist who yearns to understand and believe in human nature and capture the soul in his paintings. Lord Henry is a bored, droll young man with a ready wit and a pessimistic outlook on life, heir to an innumerable fortune that fails to satisfy him. Dorian Gray is a charming, divinely beautiful boy with the power to bend people to his every desire with a single glance. At the start of the novel, these three characters’ separate distinctions have not caused any significant damage. However, through their interactions with one another, their unusual powers eventually blend to create the monster that Dorian Gray becomes. Upon his first encounter with Dorian Gray, Basil is immediately captivated by the lad’s perfection. He later confesses to Dorian, “Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream” (92). To Basil, Dorian’s appearance and charming personality combined present the most perfect image of art. As soon as he has seen Dorian, the artist feels an overwhelming need to possess the boy, who lends something vital to his art that he has never known before. He tells Harry, “I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself” (9). It is not only Dorian Gray’s good looks that inspire the painter, but also the way the boy makes him feel. Dorian is his muse, his magnum opus. Basil feels that he is present in his art even “when no image of him is there” (12). In this way, Dorian Gray’s fatal introduction to Basil Hallward is the beginning of the tragedy that culminates in the ruin of Dorian’s soul. Without Dorian, Basil’s art is incomplete, but after he has seen him, he is able to create the wonderful and dreadful picture that exposes the lad’s inner decline. Under Basil’s tutelage, Dorian’s innocence remains intact. However, he unwisely allows Lord Henry to learn of Dorian’s existence while they are both discussing Basil’s new painting of the boy. Basil at first refuses to tell his friend Dorian’s name, claiming, “When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them” (7). However, he yields to Henry’s wheedling and introduces him to his inexperienced young muse. At this point in the novel, Dorian has sparse knowledge of the world and very little experience, so allowing him to meet Lord Henry turns out to be a terrible mistake on Basil’s part. Lord Henry Wotton is a highly cynical character who constantly expresses opinions that glorify the material rather than the spiritual aspect of life. He is, however, as Basil points out, all talk. Basil tells him, “You are ashamed of your own virtues… You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing” (7). However, Lord Henry’s introduction to Dorian proves fatal. Lord Henry sees in the boy an opportunity to see his own hedonistic principles realized through another person, since he seems incapable of living out his fantasy himself. He thinks of Dorian Gray as an artistic experiment, rather than a human being. When Dorian becomes infatuated with Sybil Vane, Lord Henry muses to himself that being in love makes the boy “an interesting study” (47). In a sense, Dorian is simply the subject of a struggle over art between Basil and Lord Henry. At first, at the time the painting is created, he belongs to Basil, but once he begins to heed Lord Henry’s ideas, he becomes the horrific creature into which the picture evolves. Lord Henry sees Dorian and wants to steal him from Basil. His beauty and innocence, rather than serving as a shield, urge Lord Henry to corrupt him all the more. Although Lord Henry is undeniably aware of what he is doing to Dorian, perhaps a part of him wants to be proven wrong. Perhaps he is a pessimist because he is simply too afraid to believe in anything, in the same way that he is too frightened to actually live out his own experiment. If we are to believe Basil’s assessment of Lord Henry, he is all talk and no action, and randomly spouts opinions that he doesn’t necessarily even believe in. But Dorian foolishly puts his trust in Lord Henry (to his eventual undoing) and believes that he knows “all the secrets of life” (45) when really, he knows nothing. Dorian himself is incapable of forming his own opinions. He is the opposite of Lord Henry in that he cannot think for himself, but he actually does what Lord Henry suggests. He is constantly plagued by uncertainty and needs someone else to tell him what to do with his life. Ironically, when Basil confesses to Dorian the power that the boy holds over him, Dorian cannot “help but feel infinite pity for the painter who had just made this strange confession to him” and wonders “if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend” (93). Yet he is dominated by Lord Henry’s ideas, conveyed to him through the former’s beautiful, musical, Lucifer-like voice. Even when he supposedly falls in love with Sybil Vane, Dorian does it with Henry’s philosophies in mind. After hearing the news of Dorian’s betrothal, Lord Henry is “conscious – that through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray’s soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her” (47). What Dorian feels for Sybil can hardly be called love because he went out looking for it, in a sense. After her death he feels remorse but gets over it fairly quickly. He is troubled by this and asks Lord Henry, “Why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to? I don’t think I am heartless. Do you?” (81). Dorian’s minuscule grief stems from the fact that his obsession with Sybil is based on Lord Henry’s philosophies rather than his own instincts. He is infatuated with Sybil in the same way that Lord Henry is obsessed with him – as an artistic experiment. And indeed, both Dorian and Sybil end up committing suicide due to the selfishness of their experimenters. Once he realizes she no longer measures up to Lord Henry’s ideals, Dorian’s interest in Sybil wanes. She is “unworthy” to be his lifelong love. After his brutal treatment of Sybil in the theater, Dorian tries to ease his conscience, reflecting, “Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have someone with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble about Sibyl Vane?” (74). Again and again throughout the novel, Dorian reverts to Lord Henry’s ideas instead of forming his own. He confesses to Lord Henry, “I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me” (43). Dorian finds it impossible to “gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern” (78). He does not “know what to do, or what to think” (78). However, after Dorian murders Basil in a fit of rage, he begins to do things on his own initiative. Together, Basil and Lord Henry have created a monster that they can no longer control. Basil’s art made Dorian realize his perfections, leading to his vanity and a realization of his power over others, and Lord Henry made him a callous pleasure-seeker. In the first chapter of the novel, Basil argues that distinction of any kind creates danger. He philosophizes, “there is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction…it is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have it the best in this world…they live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor receive it from alien hands” (7). By the end of the story, Basil’s theory is proven correct. Basil’s talent in creating the fatal picture, Lord Henry’s bad advice, so eloquently and wittily expressed, and Dorian’s heavenly beauty all combine to unleash upon London a monster who destroys the lives of many innocents.