Dorian Gray & the horrible way of being perceived

I knew the basic story of The Picture of Dorian Gray before I ever actually read it. Dorian is beautiful, someone paints his portrait, he somehow gets to stay young while the portrait gets older and uglier, and obviously this arrangement does not end particularly well for anyone involved. I went into it thinking the creepy part would be the painting. A secret portrait upstairs slowly turning into some horrifying version of you sounds like the obvious nightmare here. But after reading it, I actually think the portrait might be the most honest thing in the entire book. It never lies to Dorian. Everyone else does, including Dorian himself.

What bothered me much more was how easily he becomes obsessed with himself in the first place. There isn't some huge traumatic event that turns him into the person he becomes. He doesn't wake up one morning evil. He is basically just a beautiful young man who meets someone who tells him, very convincingly, that being young and beautiful is the best thing he will ever have and that every day he gets older, he is losing it. And apparently that is enough to ruin his life.

Before Lord Henry gets into his head, Dorian doesn't even seem particularly obsessed with his own appearance. Everyone around him is. Basil is practically worshipping him while he paints him, but Dorian himself doesn't seem to fully understand that his beauty is supposed to mean something until Lord Henry tells him it does. Suddenly he looks at the portrait and realizes that this painted version of him will always look exactly like this while the real Dorian gets older. For the first time, aging isn't just something that happens to people. It feels like something being taken away from him.

And I kept coming back to one question: would Dorian Gray have become Dorian Gray if nobody had ever told him he was beautiful?

Because there is something kind of horrible about being taught what you're supposed to be afraid of losing. Dorian was beautiful before Lord Henry told him he was beautiful. Nothing about his face changed during that conversation. The only thing that changed was the way he understood it. Once beauty became part of his identity, he couldn't just have it anymore. He had to keep it.

That part felt a little too familiar.

I'm in my twenties, and somehow I already know about preventative Botox. I know what retinol is. I know we're supposed to wear sunscreen on our hands because apparently one day our hands are going to expose us for the elderly women we secretly are. I have watched girls my age talk about smile lines like they're a medical emergency. We take hundreds of pictures of ourselves, decide we looked better two years ago, zoom into our own faces until they don't even look like faces anymore, and casually absorb this idea that there is a very specific window in which we're allowed to be at our prettiest. And then, while we're still very much inside that window, we start worrying about when it's going to close.

That's why I couldn't completely laugh at Dorian for being terrified of aging. His reaction is ridiculous, obviously. Murder is perhaps an overcorrection. But the original fear isn't all that foreign. Someone tells him that aging means losing value, and he believes him. I don't think we're nearly as far removed from that as we'd like to think.

For a while, I wanted to blame Lord Henry for basically everything. He was also probably my favorite character to read because every time he opened his mouth I had the same experience: wait, that's actually kind of profound followed approximately three seconds later by wait, what the fuck are you talking about? He is so good at making terrible ideas sound intelligent. That's what makes him dangerous. He doesn't order Dorian around. He just gives him a worldview where selfishness sounds sophisticated, pleasure sounds like philosophy, and resisting temptation somehow makes you the boring one.

But I don't think blaming Lord Henry completely works either, because then Dorian gets to spend the entire book as somebody else's victim. And he isn't.

People influence us. Sometimes enormously. Someone can teach you to be insecure about something you had never thought to dislike about yourself. Someone can normalize behavior you once would've thought was terrible. Someone can convince you that something is love when it isn't, or that something is normal when it isn't, or that a part of yourself is more important than you ever believed it was. I think we all carry little pieces of other people's voices around with us. But eventually you have to decide whether you're going to keep letting those voices run your life. “Someone taught me to think this way” can explain a lot. I don't think it can excuse everything forever.

Sibyl Vane is where Dorian really lost me. He thinks he's completely in love with her, but the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that he ever actually knew her. He loves watching her perform. Every night she becomes someone else; Juliet, Rosalind, Imogen and Dorian gets to sit there and be amazed by her. Then Sibyl actually falls in love with him, and suddenly pretending to be in love onstage feels ridiculous to her. She has experienced the real thing now. She doesn't want to fake it anymore.

So she performs badly. And Dorian immediately stops loving her.

That was probably one of the saddest parts of the book for me, because Sibyl becomes more real and Dorian likes her less for it. The second she stops being the beautiful little fantasy he discovered in a theater, he has no use for her. He wasn't in love with Sibyl as much as he was in love with what Sibyl made him feel. She was talented and beautiful and extraordinary, and being the person who had discovered her probably made him feel extraordinary too.

I think people do versions of this all the time. Obviously not usually with Shakespearean actresses and magical portraits, but we fall in love with who we think somebody is. We fill in the blanks ourselves. We decide what their behavior means, imagine who they could become, romanticize the parts we like, ignore the parts that don't fit, and then sometimes get angry when the actual human being refuses to follow the script we wrote for them. There is a difference between loving someone and loving how perfectly they fit inside your imagination. Dorian doesn't seem to understand that until there's an actual dead girl involved.

And somehow even Sibyl's death becomes something beautiful to him. Lord Henry basically hands Dorian a way to experience her suicide like the final scene of a play. It's tragic. It's dramatic. It's poetic. And that's much easier than admitting that a real girl is dead and that Dorian was unbelievably cruel to her immediately beforehand. That became one of the strangest things about Dorian to me: he gets really good at turning real things into aesthetics. People become experiences. Cruelty becomes indulgence. Death becomes tragedy. If he can make something beautiful enough in his head, he doesn't have to sit with how ugly it actually is.

Except, unfortunately for him, there is a disgusting painting upstairs keeping receipts. The portrait obviously represents his soul, but I liked thinking about it less as some grand symbol and more as evidence. Dorian gets something the rest of us don't: every terrible thing he does leaves a visible mark somewhere, just not on him. He can walk downstairs looking twenty-something and angelic after doing something awful while the proof is literally rotting away behind a locked door. And everyone believes his face.

That might be the most interesting thing in the entire book to me. People hear horrible rumors about Dorian and then look at him and basically decide he couldn't possibly be that bad. He's too young. Too beautiful. Too innocent-looking. His face becomes an alibi.

We still do this. We love pretending we don't, but beautiful people get assigned entire personalities based on their faces. Someone looks sweet, so we assume she probably is sweet. Someone is attractive and charming, so bad behavior becomes complicated instead of simply bad. Beauty isn't just something Dorian enjoys. It protects him. People have a hard time reconciling the beautiful man standing in front of them with the ugly things they've heard about him, and Dorian gets to hide inside that gap.

The portrait is the only thing that doesn't fall for it. Which made me wonder whether Dorian is actually scared of becoming a bad person or just scared of knowing that he is one. I don't think those are exactly the same thing. There is a difference between feeling horrible because you hurt somebody and feeling horrible because hurting somebody means you have to reconsider the kind of person you believe yourself to be. Dorian spends a lot of time being horrified by what the portrait says about him. He spends considerably less time trying to repair what he has done to everybody else.

Even when he finally tries to be good, he immediately runs upstairs to see whether the painting got prettier. I almost laughed. He spares Hetty and basically expects the universe to hand him a little gold star for personal growth. Look! I did one good thing! Am I beautiful inside again? And when the portrait doesn't reward him, he is horrified. But that is exactly the problem. He isn't really thinking about Hetty. He is still thinking about Dorian Gray. Even his redemption is about how badly he wants to believe he's redeemable.

That led me to the question I probably thought about most after finishing the book: who are we when nobody can catch us?

We like to imagine that we're good because we're good. Maybe sometimes we are. But I also think consequences keep human beings in line much more than we'd probably like to admit. We care what people think of us. We care about our reputation. We don't want people we love to know the worst things we've done. We want to be able to tell ourselves a coherent story about who we are, and usually in that story we're at least trying to be a decent person.

Dorian doesn't have to worry about any of that in the normal way. Nothing shows on him. Years of cruelty, excess, fear, secrets and guilt never touch his face. He gets to separate what he does from what everybody sees. At first that sounds like freedom. By the end of the book it sounds exhausting.

Because imagine actually getting Dorian's wish. Imagine being twenty-something forever while everyone around you keeps moving. Your friends get older. People you love get wrinkles. Their hair turns gray. Eventually they die. Photographs taken fifty years apart show everyone changing except you. At some point, being young wouldn't even feel beautiful anymore. It would feel wrong. You'd have to explain yourself. Hide... start over. The thing you were terrified of losing would eventually become the thing trapping you.

That's the funniest and cruelest part of Dorian's wish: he gets exactly what he wants.

And it ruins him.

By the end, when Dorian tries to destroy the portrait, I don't think he's really trying to destroy a painting anymore. He's trying to destroy the only witness he can't charm. Everyone else gets the beautiful face, the youth, the reputation, the performance. The portrait gets everything else. It knows every version of him he doesn't want anyone to know exists. Then he stabs it, and finally there is nowhere left to put any of it.

When the servants find him, the portrait is beautiful again and Dorian is old and horrifying on the floor. They can barely recognize him. Everything he spent his life separating gets put back together. His face finally belongs to his life.

I expected to finish The Picture of Dorian Gray thinking it was a book about vanity. I don't really think that anymore. Wanting to be beautiful isn't Dorian's great moral failure. Neither is wanting to stay young. I would love to stay young and hot forever. Sign me up. The problem is everything else he wants along with it. He wants pleasure without responsibility, experiences without consequences, admiration without deserving it, forgiveness without accountability, and eventually goodness without actually doing the uncomfortable work of becoming good.

And unfortunately, I think that's why the book still works. We don't have magical portraits, but we do have versions of ourselves we maintain. There is the person we actually are, the person other people think we are, and the person we desperately want to believe we are. Sometimes those three girls get along. Sometimes they absolutely do not.

We have camera rolls and Instagram profiles and stories we tell about ourselves. We have explanations for things we're ashamed of and reasons why something wasn't really our fault. We have flattering pictures and carefully remembered versions of events. We can curate ourselves so thoroughly that sometimes I wonder how much of being a person is actually being one and how much is maintaining the story of one.

Dorian just had the luxury of putting everything that didn't fit his story into a locked room.

And I think that's the part of the book I can't stop thinking about. If every lie, every selfish decision, every time we hurt somebody, every moment we knew better and did it anyway physically appeared somewhere that only we could see, what would we actually do with it? I'd like to think we'd look, but I also understand why Dorian locked the door.