3 thoughts on the significance of the eponymous portrait in Dorian Gray

About half-way through the novel we get to the "reveal" in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which everyone by now knows, but in any case: Gray comes home after crudely rejected the sentiments of his former beloved/fiancee Sybil (who later kills herself); when he looks at his portrait, which Basil has presented to him, he sees a maligned expression and the first sign of age lines and scowling - he's quite sure that the portrait had mutated, aged somehow, though he cannot fathom how this could be (nor can we). Extremely disturbed by this development, he drapes the portrait in cloth coverings and calls on some workmen stash the portrait away in an attic storeroom (he flatly refuses Basil's request to show the portrait in an exhibit). OK, so the motif of the novel is that while Gray retains the beauty of his youth the portrait ages - not just with the years, as I'd initially surmised, but in sync with the growing bitterness and cynicism that Gray experiences as he ages. Other than that this is a clever narrative trick, what do we make of this aging-portrait phenomenon? First, as OW's take on art, hes going against the idea that beauty is eternal and unchanging (Ode on a Grecian Urn, e.g.) art itself changes as we age - the experience for example of re-reading a work that had a certain meaning when first encountered and later in life seems different. Second, OW's sense art in some manner protects us or shields us from life: Yes, our bodies inevitably fail us as we age and we suffer the torments of life as we are battered and hardened by experience (the innocence of use, Wordsworth, Rousseau, q.v.) but art helps us endure, preserves us in a way. Third, covering up the portrait and hiding it away, in a "closet" no less, is an analogue for the enforced secrecy around the lives of homosexuals in the Edwardian age (note all of the emphasis on male beauty, the homoerotic flirting and competition and jealousies among the 3 protagonists, Lord Henry's loveless marriage of convenience, the sense that Gray's "engagement" is just a cover, a beard, not to be taken seriously), these 3 men and Gray in particularly seeming to live a socially conventional life but hiding the truth away in a closet - and perhaps this novel is the origin of that phrase?

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