Delphine Perrin
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Literary essay.
"The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold. It can be poisoned or made perfect. There’s a soul in each one of us. I know it."
This is a sentence Dorian Gray says to his best friend, Lord Henry, a few hours after he realises that his behaviour of the last eighteen years has been absolutely terrible.
First I shall explain the way Dorian Gray lost his ability to be good and how he found it again eighteen years later.
After Sybil Vane’s death, the young lad was first seized by terrible remorse. After abandoning her in the theatre with most cruel words, he reconsidered his action during the night and was ready to forgive her and marry her, as he had promised. So the news of her suicide was of course quite an unpleasant shock to him.
Unfortunately Lord Henry was there to influence him with his corrupt and selfish personality. He taught him to simply consider the event as an interesting and thrilling experience, nothing more. From then on, this will be the way Dorian will consider, and therefore accept, all his actions.
One evening, eighteen years later, James Vane, Sybil’s brother, who has vowed to take revenge on Dorian, finally manages to discover him. As Dorian sees him, it is as if he perceived his own consciousness, which has been neglected for so many years. It is indeed a great shock to him, and he faints. Afterwards, as he returns home, he first tries to reassure himself by thinking that it was merely an illusion, that he is protected by his big house, his servants and his young face.
As he keeps thinking about it though, his assurance begins to alter: "And yet, if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms," What sort of life would his be, if day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners," And then, suddenly, he realises all his sins: "As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, ...Oh! In what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend!(...)He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin."
Soon after that realisation, Dorian goes hunting with a few friends. As one of them points his gun at a beautiful bird, Dorian tries to stop him from shooting it at the last moment; the bird suddenly seemed too beautiful to be killed. As the lad’s friend fires, a man is struck dead by mistake in a bush: it is James Vane.
Without knowing it, Dorian tries to save his last chance of being forgiven for the selfish, cold-blooded crime that afterwards made him commit all the others with the help of Lord Henry’s corrupt influence. If he had managed to save Sybil’s brother, maybe he could have found a way of being at least partly forgiven, but now it is too late and he knows it.
Dorian knows he is safe from being killed and therefore also from being forgiven with the softest of punishments he could have got. He must now save his soul all by himself; one could say that he succeeds in the end, as he stabs his picture, the symbol of his sins, to make it young and beautiful again.
From the beginning, when he realises the first changes on the picture, Dorian knows that the soul exists. The soul is a "terrible reality", because it is stronger than any physical phenomenon of belief or disbelief. Whatever you do, it always remains in the depth of your heart and you will always depend on it, as you depend on your reality.
If you poison it by neglect or ignorance, you try to sell it for what seems a cheap and easy price, but you cannot sell and separate from a reality that you are a part of; the unavoidable price of "buying" it back is very, very, high.
Mis sur Internet le 17.2.2001