The Most Important Chapter in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

The Picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde, is a story about a handsome youth whose undefiled appearance rivals his soul until an artistic acquaintance, Basil Hallward, introduces him to one of decadent behavior, Lord Henry Wotton. Wotton, in turn introduces Gray to the way of Hedonism, the practice and belief of unrestrained behavior for one’s own pleasure, which ends up defiling the soul of Gray and ultimately destroying him.

Perhaps the most important chapter in the novel is chapter eleven. From an aesthetic  standpoint, the chapter is a literary masterpiece. Besides the always fluid fashioning of phrases and sentences forged in the furnace of Wilde’s mind, in which he fastidiously pays homage to nuance and phrasing of words, the chapter in itself is a Victorian-era encyclopedia. As Wilde delineates the Hedonistic, desultory lifestyle of Gray, he transverses musical instruments, perfumes, gems, fabrics, and art from all over the world. He alludes to authors and composers along with their respective works and in describing the material, Wilde unearths particulars of personalities from Philostratus to Catherine de Medici to Franz Peter Schubert. The chapter is unquestionably the work of a literary composer who was attentive not only to narrative but also to the details of a narrative.

It is generally known Wilde himself practiced Hedonism and was even imprisoned at one point for sodomy-like behavior . If The Picture of Dorian Gray is Wilde’s confession, which may be concluded, he, at least while writing the book, still seemed conflicted. He lauds “a new Hedonism that was to recreate life” and laments “the harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having in our own day, its curious revival,” but he also notes the precariousness of an indulgent life, “He (Gray) had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.” The confliction of his soul’s malady  is demarcated when Wilde, troubled by the monotony of everyday life, pens, “There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when though the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality…Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers , and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same weariness round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew…” Wilde wanted the novel. But at what value? Perhaps even to the degradation and absconding of his soul.

An interesting element of Hedonism is that it is a paradox; that is, the more a person indulges to his flesh the less satisfied he is. Again, Wilde attests this with his line about Gray, “He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.” We can observe this too in the life of Wilde, Gray’s creator, and in the real-life person of Solomon. In a way chapter eleven is analogous to Ecclesiastes chapter two; as Gray shifts from one endeavor to another in the ever pursuit of happiness, so Solomon does as well. Writing his own eternal confession, Solomon reveals he sought entertainment, wine, building projects, possessions, servants, and notoriety to champion his pursuit, but in retrospect he notes it all terminated in vanity. Because of this endless futility, he candidly recorded, “Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

The lesson Solomon ultimately ascertained was that God is not against us seeking pleasure, it is only that our pleasure should come from a pursuit of Him and not from idols (Ecclesiastes 12:1). This truth in itself should bring comfort to the believer, because no man has the same opportunities as another. For if satisfaction was based on the material, many would not triumph, but God has not ordained humanity this way, and so our depraved souls thirst for God, and it is only when we consider Him that we are content. Nothing else or no one else will satisfy.

1. "The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ivan Albright, 1945, closeup" by kevin dooley is licensed under 

      CC BY 2.0