Dorian Gray II

Hypocrisy: Dorian Gray and Sibyl Vane
Dorian Gray blinding people with his beauty and poisoning them: they see him as inspiration but he destroys what they create.
Dorian’s obsession with Harry. He is in denial of it.

Influence on Dorian Gray: Did Harry totally corrupt him? Is it Basil’s fault for creating the painting? My theory: If Basil had not reacted to his painting as he did, but reacted the way he did later in front of Dorian, then Harry would not have been enticed to corrupt Dorian. Is it, in fact, a result of his bloodline? A karma that was passed down from one family member to the next. Hereditary doom, fate? “Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in Basil Hallward’s studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed his life?” Or “were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realise?”

Is Harry jealous of Dorian’s beauty? Are they romantically involved? They bought an apartment together (which Dorian later released) and they would get away together every winter. It would seem that their’s is the only long lasting homosexual relationship portrayed in the novel. I am under the impression that Dorian had shared a serious 18mo. relationship with Allan (who later committed suicide) and the note used to threaten Allan to help him cover up the murder of Basil was a threat to tell the world about their homosexual relationship.

I do think that Harry and Dorian loved each other, but their relationship was based more on a love of art, of creating and seeing art. Harry was always intrigued by Dorian because he could create his own art through his own influence and manipulations. Dorian became more and more like Harry and would use his influence and manipulation to “direct” his own art on other people, lovers, friends, etc. It is their need to manipulate and to direct life that brings these two men together.

Dorian Gray collecting strange instruments, jewels, precious stones, textile and embroidered work, ecclesiastical vestiments… searching. Still seeing “the tragedy of his own soul”. Passions for music, “everything connected with the service of the church”…
They are all “modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne”. but then, that guild and fear, sometimes loathing of himself turns into a “pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own”.

Dorian Gray: Art

"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the aritst, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself".

"there is nothing that Art cannot express".

Fear of Dorian knowing the truth about the portrait:

"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. 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 of beauty".

Harry:

"They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer".

Harry explaining Basil to Dorian:

"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common-sense. The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise".

Dorian Gray I

Right from the get go Lord Henry identifies beauty as ending "where an intellectual expression begins". According to him, one cannot be both beautiful and intelligent. He goes on to say that "Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and it destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid". Excluding, of course, the church (Although he then says that they don't think in the church..).

Lord Henry is a fascinating character in that he is absolutely all paradigms. He seems to appreciate beauty and respect and model intellect. He is also quite the opposite of his dear friend Basil. Basil is an artist, an intellectual but responds to Lord Henry with "It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands". He continues to say that we all suffer for what the gods have given us. Pretty much saying that we're all skrewed.

It also interests me that throughout the novel Basil exclaims that Lord Henry is a good man, never saying a moral thing and never doing a wrong thing. However, he is also afraid that Lord Henry will poison Dorian Gray. This inference is absolutely different from Lord Henry's representation of himself, although he comments in chapter one that when one mentions an idea, "the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices".