What is The Picture of Dorian Gray about short summary?
Robert Miller
Published Mar 01, 2026
What is The Picture of Dorian Gray about short summary?
The Picture of Dorian Gray is about a young man named Dorian Gray who has a portrait painted of himself. He wishes the portrait Basil painted would become old in his place. Dorian then sells his soul so he can be beautiful forever, but not on purpose. Dorian’s wish comes true.
What is the main idea of The Picture of Dorian Gray?
The main theme of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the relationship between beauty and morality. Oscar Wilde plays on the Renaissance idea of the correspondence between the physical and spiritual realms: beautiful people are moral people; ugly people are immoral people.
Why is The Picture of Dorian Gray banned?
Wilde used The Picture of Dorian Gray as his autobiography claiming, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be- in other ages perhaps.” Not only was this book banned because of the sexual undertones, it eventually helped send Wilde to a couple of years of …
What happened at the end of the picture of Dorian Gray?
By Oscar Wilde The novel ends, like it begins, with the painting. The grotesque deformities of the picture come into being in Dorian’s own body, while painted Dorian is restored to its original image of spotless beauty. In the end, Dorian gets everything that was coming to him; his choices brought about his own doom.
What is hedonism in Dorian Gray?
Pleasure is the indispensable principle of the philosophy of Hedonism. Wilde designated hedonism in The Picture of Dorian Gray, by injecting the idea of seeking pleasure into the protagonist’s mind and life. Dorian Gray follows hedonism and gives freedom to all his desires, and seeks any kind of pleasure.
What does the ending of The Picture of Dorian Gray mean?
Is the picture of Dorian Gray a true story?
Dorian Gray was clearly based on a living person, a member of Wilde’s literary homosexual circle in the early 1890s when the story was first published. If Wilde’s fiction is strange, the real life story of John Gray, Dorian’s original, is even more bizarre.
Who does Dorian Gray fall in love with?
Sibyl
Men do have relationships with women in the novel—Dorian falls in love with Sibyl and Lord Henry himself is married—but the novel’s heterosexual relationships prove to be rather superficial and short-lived. If the novel is homoerotic, it is also misogynistic.
How do they identify Dorian’s body?
On the floor is the body of an old man, horribly wrinkled and disfigured, with a knife plunged into his heart. It is not until the servants examine the rings on the old man’s hands that they identify him as Dorian Gray.
How does Dorian live hedonistic life?
Wilde designated hedonism in The Picture of Dorian Gray, by injecting the idea of seeking pleasure into the protagonist’s mind and life. Dorian Gray follows hedonism and gives freedom to all his desires, and seeks any kind of pleasure.
What is the meaning of Dorian Gray?
A nickname applied to someone who doesn’t seem to age. The phrase refers to the titular character in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, who makes a deal with an artist so that a painting of him ages, but he does not.
