- This document discusses symbols, motifs, and allegorical meanings in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. - The portrait of Dorian Gray represents his inner soul and becomes increasingly ugly as he commits more evil acts, acting as a conscience. - References like "The Yellow Book" represent the corrupting influence of Lord Henry's philosophy on Dorian. - Motifs like homoerotic relationships and the color white track Dorian's descent from innocence to degradation. - The opium dens symbolize the state of Dorian's degraded mind and soul. - Overall, the story acts as an allegory for the myth of Faust, with Dorian selling

1. Symbols, Motifs
& Allegory:
The Picture of
Dorian Gray
Schwartz 2017

2. Symbolism- The Picture
● The White Whale. The One Ring. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Some literary
symbols are so potent, they take on a whole life of their own.
● Even if you've never read this book, chances are you know exactly what the
deal with the infamous picture is. Articles about celebrities' age-defying
secrets name drop Dorian. There's a Dorian Gray syndrome. Dorian Gray
pops up in scholarly articles about psychoanalysis, and about narcissism in
politics.
● The portrait is a kind of living allegory, a visible interpretation of Dorian's soul.
Early in the novel this painting seems to be infused with nostalgia for lost
youth, and the scary frailty of human life:

3. Symbolism- The Picture
For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his
mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of
mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own
soul. And when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring
trembles on the verge of summer. When the blood crept from its face, and left
behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of
boyhood. Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one pulse of his
life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and
fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the
canvas? He would be safe. That was everything. (8.25)

4. Symbolism- The Picture
But we can read this symbol, ultimately, as a commentary on the ways in which
evil can often be hidden away from sight. Basically, the picture represents Dorian's
inner self, which becomes uglier with each passing hour and with every crime he
commits:
Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It
might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for
it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow's feet would creep
round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness,
the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old
men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the
twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to
him in his boyhood. The picture had to be concealed. There was no help for it.

5. Symbolism- The Picture
● This picture is the image of Dorian's true nature and, as
his soul becomes increasingly corrupt, its evil shows up
on the surface of the canvas.
● It seems that Dorian himself isn't completely free of the
picture's influence: as it becomes uglier and uglier, Dorian
pretty much loses it.
● It becomes a kind of conscience, and it reminds Dorian
constantly of the evil at the heart of his nature.

6. Symbolism- The Yellow Book
● No, this isn't a reference to the now basically obsolete Yellow Pages. Dorian
Gray isn't looking for the phone number of a local Domino's circa 1992.
● Instead, this is a thinly veiled reference to J.K. Huysmans' À Rebours
("Against Nature"), an incredibly important novel of the Decadent period. In
both the original text and Wilde's summary of it, its incredibly wealthy
protagonist devotes his life to seeking as many aesthetic sensations as he
can, regardless of what society says.
● This protagonist is a representation of what Dorian could become—a robotic
being with no true emotions and no true relationships—looking for only the
next new sensation:

7. Symbolism- The Yellow Book
One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some
mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous
book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble
the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music,
so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated,
produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of
reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and
creeping shadows.(10.21)
Upon reading it, Dorian sees aspects of his own life reflected back at him in this
character's life. However, Wilde made some notable changes (like the explicit
mention of the protagonist's lost beauty, which just makes Dorian even more
scared that he'll lose his looks) to make it more fitting to his novel.

8. Symbolism- The Yellow Book
● Most importantly, the yellow book represents the "poisonous" influence Lord
Henry has on Dorian; Henry gives the book to Dorian as a kind of experiment,
and it works horrifyingly well:
There was a horrible fascination in them all. He saw them at night, and they
troubled his imagination in the day...Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he
could realize his conception of the beautiful. (11.37)
● Its hedonistic, decadent message makes it a kind of guide book for Dorian,
who lives his whole life in pursuit of its ideals.
● Ultimately, as we're reminded, it's Lord Henry's fault for poisoning Dorian with
the book, which comes to stand in for all of Henry's extravagant, selfish,
dangerously seductive philosophical ideas.

9. Symbolism: Sex, Drugs and… Opera?
● You've heard your grandparents moaning about it: "Kids these days, with their
dates and their crazy drugs and always blasting opera music late at night." Well,
maybe not. But if your grandparents had been born in the 1810's and you were a
rowdy young scalliwag in the 1890's, you bet they would have been clutching
their pearls over your tickets to see Carmen.
● In any case, these pastimes are symbols of the decadent, hedonistic lifestyle
Lord Henry lures Dorian into; they're all different ways of living through (gasp!)
sensory exploration. Opium, scandalous love affairs, and theatrical spectacle are
Dorian's distractions from his conscience, and he indulges in all of them as a kind
of escape.
● Lord Henry's philosophy, that we should all give in to what tempts us, is played
out in Dorian's indulgence in all of these luxuriant, sensual pleasures.

10. Motifs: Homoerotic Male Relationships
● The homoerotic bonds between men play a large role in structuring the novel.
Basil’s painting depends upon his adoration of Dorian’s beauty; similarly, Lord
Henry is overcome with the desire to seduce Dorian and mold him into the
realization of a type.
● This friendship between men fits into Wilde’s larger aesthetic values, for it
returns him to antiquity, where an appreciation of youth and beauty was not
only fundamental to culture but was also expressed as a physical relationship
between men.
M

11. Motifs: Homoerotic Male Relationships
● As a homosexual living in an intolerant society, Wilde asserted this
philosophy partially in an attempt to justify his own lifestyle.
● For Wilde, homosexuality was not a sordid vice but rather a sign of refined
culture.
● As he claimed rather romantically during his trial for “gross indecency”
between men, the affection between an older and younger man places one in
the tradition of Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.

12. Motifs: The Color White
● Interestingly, Dorian’s move from figure of innocence to figure of degradation
can be charted by Wilde’s use of the color white.
● White usually represents innocence and blankness, as it does when Dorian is
first introduced. “His rose-white boyhood”
● It is, in fact, “the white purity” of Dorian’s boyhood that Lord Henry finds so
captivating.
● Basil talks about whiteness when he learns that Dorian has sacrificed his
innocence, and, as the artist stares in horror at the ruined portrait, he quotes
a biblical verse from the Book of Isaiah: “Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I
will make them as white as snow.”

13. Motifs: The Color White
● White is also used several times in reference to the
character of Sybil Vane, who is seen as pure and
innocent.
● “Turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her”
● When Dorian tells Sybil he no longer loves her becasue of
her bad performance, it is said that: “She trembled all over
and shook like a white narcissus”
● The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily.
Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.”

14. Motifs: The Opium Dens
● The opium dens, located in a remote and derelict section
of London, represent the sordid state of Dorian’s mind.
● He flees to them at crucial moments.
● Although he has a canister of opium in his home, he
leaves the safety of his neat and proper parlor to travel to
the dark dens that reflect the degradation of his soul.

15. Allegorical Meaning
● An allegory is a story with (count 'em) two levels of
meaning. First, there's the surface of the story. You know,
the characters and plot and all that obvious stuff. Then
there's the symbolic level, or the deeper meaning that all
the jazz on the surface represents.

16. Allegorical Meaning
● This story is profoundly allegorical; it is a 19th-century version of the
myth of Faust the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that
all his desires might be satisfied.
● This soul becomes the picture, which records the signs of experience,
the corruption, the horror and the sins concealed under the mask of
Dorian’s timeless beauty. The picture is not an autonomous self: it
stands for the dark side of Dorian’s personality, his double, which he
tries to forget by locking the picture in a room.

17. Allegorical Meaning
● The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and
reality cannot be escaped; Dorian cannot avoid the punishment for all
his sins.
● The horrible, corrupting picture could be seen as a symbol of the
immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class, while
Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are symbols of bourgeois
hypocrisy.