The Picture of Dorian Gray (Original 1891 Edition): Annotated

by Oscar Wilde

He scanned it curiously, wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man's life.

Then he drew the screen aside and saw himself face to face. It was perfectly true. The portrait had altered.

Painting

that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, more terrible reason?

It had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane.

But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls.

It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more—at least not before me.

Going against Henry’s philosophy

"the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.

but by which I have not been wounded."

Henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's ...

Conscience makes egotists of us all.

Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are."

No; there was no further change in the picture. It had received the news of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself.

Painting

Yes, life had decided that for him—life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins—he was to have all these things.

The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.

As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.

When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood.

What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.

Now, I don't know what has come over you. You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry's influence. I see that."

If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment— about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six— you would have found me in tears.

What the fuck

"But what is the matter? Of course I won't look at it if you don't want me to,"

I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art…

There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it.

The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself.

looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass.

PAINTING

He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.

PAINTING

"make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty."

the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.

No winter marred his face or stained his flowerlike bloom.

For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.

he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life,

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face.

Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?

Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul."

There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth.

"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."

"It is the face of my soul."

done! He felt strangely calm, and walking over to the window, opened it and stepped out on the balcony.

His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain.

How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.

He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken or grow mad.

other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and

You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me—no living man, at any rate.

What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible it was!—more

that? I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good.

It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.