The Picture of Dorian Gray Summary and Complete Study Guide

**Dorian Gray**: Starts as an innocent, beautiful young man who doesn't realize his own attractiveness. Lord Henry flatters and philosophizes, planting the idea that youth and beauty are everything. The moment Dorian sees his portrait and wishes to trade places with it, vanity takes root. His corruption isn't sudden—it's gradual moral decay masked by unchanging beauty. Each sin makes it easier to commit the next one. By the time he murders Basil, he's fully monstrous inside while looking angelic outside. The tragedy is that he could have stopped at any point but chose not to. The portrait becomes his conscience, and he hides it because looking at truth is unbearable. **Lord Henry Wotton**: Wilde's mouthpiece for witty, cynical observations about Victorian society. He speaks in perfect epigrams and paradoxes. He doesn't believe his own philosophy will actually ruin Dorian—he views corruption as an aesthetic experiment. His amorality is intellectual, not practiced. He remains a detached observer while Dorian lives out the consequences of his philosophy. Wilde both endorses Lord Henry's wit (the dialogue is delicious) and condemns his ethics. Lord Henry represents the danger of treating life as art and other people as characters in your personal drama. **Basil Hallward**: The artist who loves Dorian obsessively, though Victorian readers were supposed to miss the homoerotic subtext (they didn't). Basil puts "too much of himself" into the portrait because he's projecting his feelings onto Dorian's beauty. His murder is significant—Dorian kills the person who cared about him most, the one who saw him as more than just beautiful. Basil wanted Dorian to be good; Lord Henry wanted him to be interesting. Dorian chooses interesting over good, and Basil pays for it.

**Aestheticism on Trial**: Wilde belonged to the Aesthetic Movement—art for art's sake, beauty above morality. The preface to Dorian Gray states "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book." But then the novel shows what happens when someone lives purely for aesthetic pleasure: they become a monster. It's Wilde critiquing his own movement while defending it. He's saying aestheticism is fine in art but toxic in life. You can appreciate beauty without making it your entire moral framework.