Dorian Gray Biographical Analysis Wilde Religious Struggle

In Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Gray,” the title character leads a secretive narcissistic and hedonistic life that gives his soul a hideous character while his exterior remains pristine and charming. Like his character, Oscar Wilde himself led a charming and charmed life—but his trial for homosexual acts ended with a conviction and prison sentence. In prison he was forced to confront his own conscience, which he did and depicted in “De Profundis” (Pearce) Wilde already had a sense of morality, having flirted with a conversion to Catholicism throughout his youth—a rarity in Protestant England (Pearce). Yet, he also enjoyed the hedonistic lifestyle and was torn between morality and licentiousness. For Wilde, Dorian represented his own reality; a creature torn between two worlds—one of the spirit, the other of the senses.

It is noted midway through “Dorian Gray” that Dorian—like Wilde—had once had an interest in Catholicism: “It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize” (Wilde). Perhaps a little more than Dorian, Wilde seriously thought about converting to Catholicism while at Oxford for his studies (Malik). He wanted often to be in the presence of John Henry Newman, but when his Protestant father threatened to “financially disown him if he converted,” Wilde wrote: “‘I have suffered very much for my Roman fever in mind and pocket and happiness’” (Malik). Wilde lost the courage to follow through on these spiritual pursuits in his own real life—for a time. He would have to pursue them in writing. “Dorian Gray” thus represents Wilde’s own struggles with a guilty soul in need of cleansing. For Gray, there is no cleansing—only the revelation of horror as the painting magically depicts his true, tragically corrupt inner state, disfigured beyond repair by his sins of pleasure and murder. The story can be said to reflect Wilde’s own consciousness of his soul being corrupted by hedonism, having denied itself the saving grace that comes through Christ (Pearce).

This religious awareness or attraction is in Dorian, whom Wilde describes in these words: “He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled, lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the “panis cælestis,” the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his breast for his sins” (Wilde). Yet, perhaps with some irony, Wilde also states that Dorian “never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail” (Wilde). Dorian is described as dallying with various ideas—Catholicism, Darwinism, music, aesthetics, but ultimately with Hedonism, which causes his undoing. For Wilde, the attraction to Catholicism never really left—and a struggle within persisted for much of his life as he sought with one hand to embrace a hedonistic lifestyle and with the other to write the kind of morality stories that spoke to his spiritual thirst for salvation.

However, to some degree it is the same, too, in Dorian, who could never for long shake off the fact that the painting of himself exists and that it shows his true state: “He was afraid. Sometimes when he was down at his great house in Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was still there” (Wilde). Wilde surely had a similar fear—and indeed his soul’s true state would be publicly revealed during his trial—and the shame of imprisonment could not be escaped. He would be forced to reckon with himself, and it is during that reckoning that he comes to embrace the spiritual redemption he had sought but then avoided in his youth. Wilde himself stated in a letter to friends “that what he had written in prison [De Profundis] would one day be read by the world” (Pearce). Dorian would be afforded no opportunity in his own story, since up to that point Wilde himself had not been forced to confront his own soul.