JOE ANGULO CALDERON IDIOMAS 3ER AÑO

The picture of Dorian Gray

After Basil produced his best work, the portrait of his young friend, Dorian is left wondering what
Henry had told him about youth and how the portrait would someday make fun of it.
I would sell my soul so that the portrait would age and I would not, recited the young Dorian that
day, without suspecting the consequences that those words would bring.
It will be a few years before Dorian Gray enters a second-rate theatre and falls in love with the
beautiful young actress Sibyl Vane. Since Dorian Gray meets her, she attends the theatre every
night to see her perform in different plays, all of them by Shakespeare. A few days later, Dorian
decides to invite her friends, the painter Basil Hallway and Lord Henry to the theatre to meet the
girl who had stolen her heart.
The night Dorian, accompanied by painter Basil and lord Henry, attends the theater, Sibyl acts
lousy, like a beginner Juliet, causing half the audience, including Dorian's guests, to retire before
the play is finished.
Dorian Gray visits Sibyl Vane behind the scenes at the end of the play saying she shouldn't have
acted if she was ill. Sibyl, on the other hand, replies that now that he knows the true love of Prince
Charming, as he called Dorian, he could no longer represent love through false characters that
were also personified by bad actors. Dorian, furious, tells her that this bad performance had killed
her love and inspiration for her, ending the relationship abruptly and leaving Sibyl crying on the
floor.
At home, Dorian pauses to look closely at the full body portrait that his friend and painter Basil
Hallway had made of him. Basil Hallway had sent it to him because he could not expose it because
he had poured too much of his soul into the painting and therefore decided that it would be
owned by the model, Dorian.
Looking at the canvas, Dorian noticed an almost imperceptible change in the singing of the mouth:
they looked like the marks of a cruel smile. This is the first time he suspects that the spell he cast a
few years ago on the painting might have come true. Fearing the consequences, Dorian hides the
painting behind a screen.
Until the age of 38, Dorian had managed to maintain her immaculate beauty and youth with which
she provoked others to enjoy the pleasure without consequences, dragging each of them towards
their final ruin.
Gray had been poisoned by a book. In certain moments he saw evil only as a means that allowed
him to put into practice his conception of the beautiful
One night, the painter Basil Hallway, after several years without seeing him, recriminates Dorian
about what people said about him. Dorian finally tells him it's his fault and takes him to see the
painting he had painted. Basil is horrified when he sees the painting and drags Dorian to a desk to
pray for his acquittal. Dorian feels that the painting conveys an irresistible impulse to murder the
creator of the canvas. And he does it by stabbing him several times while Basil was still praying
with his head down.
After several months, Dorian had discarded all the evidence incriminating him, but his conscience
was still not clear: In the same way that he had killed the painter, he would kill his work and
everything it meant. He would kill the past and, when he was dead, he would regain his freedom.
He would end that monstrous life of the soul and, without his hateful warnings, he would regain
peace. He wielded the gun and stabbed the portrait with it.
Paragraphs of the book:

● "There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral, immoral from
the scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural
thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there
are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor
of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize
one's nature perfectly, that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves,
nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.
Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own
souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.
The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of
religion--these are the two things that govern us. And yet--". p.10

In this paragraph the author shows us a point of view about influences, he says that no
matter how much we try, whether by advice or because it is the right thing to do, good deeds are
no more than the reflection of the will of others in ourselves. Sometimes losing the originality
and stopping doing maybe the things we would like just to please others, leaving even our soul
hungry or unsatisfied.

● "The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The
basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our
neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise
the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in
the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the
greatest contempt for optimism. P. 41

There are many reflections that the author leaves us with the character of Lord Henry, I
chose this paragraph because I share what he says and it resembles the “Maquiabélico”
thought, which I find interesting. Our behavior or interest in a person is thinking about what we
can get from them, from the most superfluous object to the deepest feeling, in my opinion.

● Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile. Its bright hair
gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue eyes met his own. A sense of infinite pity, not for
himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him. It had altered already, and
would alter more. Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and white roses would die. For every
sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. But he would not sin. The
picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would
resist temptation. He would not see Lord Henry any more--would not, at any rate, listen to
those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil Hallward's garden had first stirred within him the
passion for impossible things. He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends, marry her,
and try to love her again. Yes, it was his duty to do so. She must have suffered more than he
had. Poor child! He had been selfish and cruel to her. The fascination that she had exercised
over him would return. They would be happy together. His life with her would be beautiful
and pure. P.50
 In these lines I see as a metaphor that we would only be able to realize if we did right or
wrong, stopping for a moment and look inside our souls. We know we did wrong when we
observed the consequences in others, but it would be interesting to see how each act of evil or
goodness is reflected in ourselves.

Appreciation:

It is a novel that portrays the obsession with the power of youth and beauty, and the idea that
these exempt us from the responsibilities we have over our actions, which leads the protagonist,
Dorian Gray, to gradually lose consciousness of his actions and decisions. It’s a critique of the
hedonism of Victorian society, how it can corrupt the most innocent being, and despite showing us
a beautiful face, inside our being deteriorates.