The Picture of Dorian Gray

When we say a novel has strong "character development," we usually mean it as praise. I can say the same about The Picture of Dorian Gray, though not in the sense we're used to. Dorian doesn't develop — he decays, one step at a time. Wilde's real achievement is the way he arranges the steps of that decay, each one looking reasonable next to the last.

Dorian experiences Sibyl Vane's death as an aesthetic disappointment: his love ends because she acts badly, and her death becomes a scene to be admired. After he kills Basil, the first thing on his mind isn't remorse but how to dispose of the body. Every time, a moral problem is converted into a practical one and solved there.

The most striking thing about this decay is that Dorian never quite sees himself as a bad man. Even near the end, in the moment he believes he has done something good, he is still at the center of it: he spares Hetty Merton, but not for her sake — for the proof that he might still be someone worth saving. What's remarkable is that Wilde doesn't leave this reading to us. Standing before the portrait in the final chapter, Dorian asks himself whether the mercy was vanity, curiosity, or hypocrisy. Putting yourself before everything else may be one of the worst things you can do for yourself: Dorian's selfishness earns him nothing, while the person who thinks about others ends up with a more livable life. In a way, the egoism of the non-egoists works far better than his.

That I finished the book while reading Freud probably has something to do with this. The justifications Dorian produces for himself are textbook rationalization; the portrait is repression made literal — what you move out of sight, up into the attic, goes on changing there anyway.

Lord Henry is a book unto himself. A good number of the hundreds of aphorisms he delivers are more sensational than true, but Wilde builds them so well that the line lands first and you only question it afterwards. That's where Henry's real power lies: not in what he says, but in how he says it. There's also this — Henry never pays for a word of it. He talks scandal and lives entirely conventionally. He supplies the theory; Dorian runs the experiment.

Dorian's story belongs to another century, but the distance between the face a person shows outward and what he lives with inside doesn't feel foreign at all. The only thing that's changed is where the portrait hangs. Dorian's was hidden in an attic; ours sit somewhere rather more visible.