What is the story behind Dorian Gray?
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a story about a youth whose beauty is unaffected by age or corruption since his soul is placed in his portrait. The cleavage of this dual nature in Dorian Gray deepens as he interacts with Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry ‘Harry’ Wotton, thereby showing their male homo-social world.
What is The Picture of Dorian Gray about short summary?
A corrupt young man somehow keeps his youthful beauty, but a special painting gradually reveals his inner ugliness to all. In 1886, in Victorian London, the corrupt Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders) meets the pure Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) posing for talented painter Basil Hallward (Lowell Gilmore).
How was Dorian Gray cursed?
Dorian Christopher Gray is the lead character of The Confessions of Dorian Gray series. Cursed by unknown forces with immortality at the age of eighteen his physical, spiritual, and moral wounds and degradation are transferred from his body to his cursed portrait.
Why does Dorian destroy the painting?
The portrait reflects this hypocrisy and drives him to his final, desperate act. He decides it is better to destroy the last evidence of his sin—the painting of his soul—than face up to his own depravity. The depravity he seeks to destroy is, in essence, himself; therefore, by killing it, he kills himself.
What does Dorian Gray teach us?
James’s Gazette, that Dorian Gray “is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment” (Wilde 248). Aestheticism does well to condemn the renunciation of desires, but it is an excessive obedience to these desires that is subversively dangerous.
What is the purpose of art in Dorian Gray?
The painting is made to serve a moral purpose, being transformed from an object of beauty into a vile record of guilt, something ‘bestial, sodden and unclean’ (chapter 10). This tainting of the picture perhaps constitutes, for the aesthete, Dorian’s greatest crime – namely the destruction of a beautiful artwork.
How old was Dorian Gray?
Basil explains that Dorian Gray is 20 years-old. Basil met him at a party two months earlier. When Basil first saw him, he felt a “curious sensation of terror”. He was certain that the young man’s personality would dominate him and that he would lose his independence.
What did Dorian blackmail Alan with?
Alan Campbell was an acquaintance of Dorian Gray’s while Dorian was first living in Mayfair and spending time with Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. After Dorian murders Basil in a fit of spiteful rage he blackmails Alan into destroying Basil’s body using his skills as a chemist.