(Side note: In a recommendation a boss of mine wrote for me she said that I could be a Jane Austen character if I weren't so well-adjusted. Just about everyone I know said that I'm not really well adjusted. I just am really good at faking it.)
Not much has changed. The census is this year. It is time to be counted. I've been writing again. Sometimes I do it when I'm supposed to be paying attention. Sometimes that's in politics class. What does it say that in the class that is supposed to be teaching me about what I want to do with my life, I can't stop writing about people and things that don't exist. Does it help that I do it in other classes too?
And now, for a presentation on the role of art in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Through an examination of the way that Dorian Gray is treated as a piece of art throughout the novel, we can see the truth of these statements.
At the beginning of the novel there are two Dorian Grays – the one in the portrait and the real live breathing one. The portrait is two dimensional. It is all surface and symbol and no soul. It is also an interpretation, Basil’s interpretation and impression of Dorian Gray the person. Dorian Gray, the person, however, is Beauty personified. He lives and breathes. He interacts with the world around him and the world acts on him, but he is beautiful and people merely treat him as a work of art. For women he is clever and charming and beautiful and rich. For Lord Henry, he is a sort of experiment.
Once Dorian gives his soul to the painting of him in exchange for eternal youth it as though he is trying to become a work of art – an amoral symbol that exists only on the surface. Lord Henry encourages this. He calculates his statements to inspire Dorian to a life of pleasure and pleasure only. There is no good, there is only what you enjoy. Basil, at first, seems to see only the idea of Beauty in Dorian. Society, too, goes along with this idea of Dorian as simply Beauty.
Dorian however paves a path of destruction where ever he goes. He has no moral code, only a double life and a status to maintain. It is only when Dorian takes Basil’s life that he begins to fall apart. Humans cannot exist as merely amoral, beautiful symbols. They cannot be art. They act on the world around them, and the world acts on them. Though Dorian does not change on the outside, he does change inside. When Basil sees what has happened to the portrait he painted, he knows what is inside Dorian and is filled with an abject horror.
Dorian cannot exist as merely art, and he cannot die as merely art. In stabbing the portrait, he stabs himself, and when he regains his soul, he regains the appearance of one who has been as corrupted as he has. It is the act of annihilating another that undoes him. Despite his lack of morality and his lack of a soul, he cannot escape the manifestations of guilt and fear that plague him. When he attempts to destroy the work of art, the portrait, he destroys himself because he has become the portrait and it has become him.
We see this too with Sybil Vane. She is, to Dorian, a work of art. She is beauty and fictional characters and manifestations of Shakespeare’s ideals. When she becomes human, when Dorian creates in her these real feelings of love, she can no longer portray ideals. [“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures…he lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry they cannot realize.”] Dorian then no longer loves her. He cannot appreciate her as a person, but only as art, and that destroys her.
Humans are not supposed to be art. It is true that they have surfaces that can be beautiful personified, but there lies beneath that surface a soul and a heart and a brain. There is curiosity and love and fear and death and sex. There is action. In order to be merely symbols, we will annihilate ourselves. [see: suicide bombers]
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