The Picture of Dorian Gray

Although Dorian Gray is the protagonist of the novel, he can be seen more as a vessel for Lord Henry Wotton’s predation and provocations. Dorian has almost supernatural good looks, which causes both Hallward and Lord Henry to fall for him. Though Hallward paints him as the ideal of beauty, Lord Henry believes that Dorian should embody beauty in a more physical way. Dorian falls prey to Lord Henry’s seduction, a seduction that shows him a moral system where he can have everything he wants simply because he’s rich, beautiful, and destined. This moral system privileges formal objects of artistic beauty (including his own body) as the means to access pleasure, which reigns supreme over all else.

Dorian enjoys a brief window in which he is the celebrated prince of his aristocratic circle. But his life quickly unravels due to the recklessness and venality of his excessive vanity. Through the character of Dorian Gray, Wilde achieves the climax of his cautionary tale about the dangers of worshipping youth and beauty above all else to the destruction and decay of empathy, enduring love, and nuanced intellectual thought. Wilde also indicts the decadence and selfishness of the ruling class through both the figure of Dorian Gray himself and the blind admiration that he inspires through his looks alone.  

Basil Hallward is a relatively flat character. He’s one-dimensionally devoted to both his art and to Dorian throughout the narrative. He therefore proves Lord Henry’s assertion that talented artists “exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are” (56). Fittingly, although Basil Hallward creates the thing after which the entire novel is named, the space he occupies as a character is very limited. The one aspect of his character that invites nuance is his homosexual love and desire for Dorian, which is only broached cryptically. His shrinking, sad presence can therefore also be read as an analog for the experience of the white homosexual man during the period: forced into obscurity and fear of discovery by the dominant sexual mores of the time.