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Dorian feels that his painting is essentially immortal. It’s bound to display the ravages of time and of his now-absent conscience in perpetuity, while Dorian’s physical body remains unsullied and beautiful. He plans for a reputable art framer named Mr. Hubbard to move the painting to an underused room in the residence. Dorian finds an extravagant, purple-and-gold piece of cloth obtained by his grandfather, in whom he has no fondness, to cover the painting. Mr. Hubbard arrives and treats Dorian with the same reverence that everyone treats him with.
Mr. Hubbard and his assistants move the painting successfully into the room, to which Dorian has the only key. Dorian becomes horrified when he thinks about how his painted likeness will bear the visual signs of age and decay. Mr. Hubbard asks to see the painting, but Dorian refuses. Dorian anticipates that his servant Victor will become aware that the painting has been moved and try to sneak into the room to see it. Dorian feels the weight of secrecy and suspicion weigh on him.
A few things from Lord Henry have been delivered to Dorian: a note, a book, and a copy of the third edition of the St. James Gazette. In the St. James Gazette, Lord Henry has marked a passage in red. There, Dorian reads that an inquest on Sybil’s death has ruled “death by misadventure” (120) as the cause. Dorian tears the page in half and flings it away from himself. He becomes irritated that Lord Henry carelessly marked the passage in red, which could be seen as incriminating. He then becomes enraptured in the book that Lord Henry left him. It appeals to his senses and transports him in a way no other book ever has, and he is consequently late to dinner with Lord Henry.
Dorian grows more obsessed with the book that Lord Henry gave him:
The hero [of the book], the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. (123)
The obsession lasts for years. However, Dorian differs from the hero of the book in one key way: The hero develops a fear of mirrors and then comes to a tragic end with the loss of his beauty. Dorian’s beauty has never left him. His coming of age, however, produces rumors. Dorian has also taken to leaving town for many weeks at a time, which also stirs gossip. Many men and women who have fleeting involvement with him have soured on him. However, he is insulated by his wealth, as such scandals only increase the allure of rich people.
Dorian also keeps company with mostly young, fashionable men, who also imitate Dorian’s style of dress. Dorian is flippant and fickle with his moral and philosophic tendencies, and believes that intellectual exploration in the absence of action is bankrupt. He thus devotes himself to the study of perfumes, music, jewels, embroideries, and other arts, amassing a collection of artistic objects from all over the world, and developing a keen interest in ecclesiastical garments especially.
Throughout all of this, Dorian keeps the painting locked away. He looks at it privately, sometimes filled with self-loathing, and other times filled with a secret triumph. After a few years, Dorian cannot bear to leave London for any extended amount of time because he has become so jealous and suspicious in his guardianship of the painting and its terrible secret. The intricate system of bars and locks that he has installed at the door of the room are not enough to ensure him of the painting’s safety. He does, however, take nighttime outings while in disguise to places of ill repute. Throughout all of this, he remains obsessed with the book given him by Lord Henry.
It is November 9, the day before Dorian’s 38th birthday. At about eleven o’ clock, he walks back home through the cold streets. He passes Hallward and pretends not to recognize him. Basil, however, calls upon Dorian immediately, and succeeds in gaining admittance to Dorian’s home.
Basil tells Dorian that he is leaving England that very evening for Paris, where he is going to cloister himself in a studio for six months to finish a painting. He also admits that he is very concerned—both about Dorian’s moral well-being and his reputation. Vicious rumors have been floating throughout London. Although, upon seeing Dorian’s pristine appearance, Basil can’t believe them: “If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even” (143), Basil admits. However, it is still true that the Duke of Berwick leaves any room that Dorian enters, and that Dorian’s friendship has proven socially or literally fatal to several young men, including someone named Adrian Singleton, who has since left England. Even Lady Gwendolen, Lord Henry’s sister who had a completely unsullied name prior to her acquaintance with Dorian, has fallen into great disrepute.
Basil laments that only God can see Dorian’s true soul. At this point, Dorian becomes possessed by a mad pride and a petulant insolence. “I shall show you my soul. You shall see the thing that you fancy only God can see” (146), he tells Basil. It feels right to Dorian that the man whose painting cursed him should be the only other soul to become aware of Dorian’s terrible secret. He invites Basil upstairs, to the forbidden room.
In the forbidden room, which is filthy and decaying, he cruelly dares Basil to look behind the curtain and glimpse Dorian’s soul. Basil draws the curtain away, and is astonished and horrified by what has happened to his painting of Dorian. Dorian’s likeness is there, grinning evilly out from the canvas. And, although the face is marked by sin and age, it is still recognizable as Dorian. Dorian then tells Basil about his wish to remain as beautiful as the painting, which is seemingly why the painting is now enchanted. Although Basil recognizes his own brush strokes within the painting, he adamantly denies that it’s the same one. He begs Dorian to recite the Lord’s Prayer in order to stop the enchantment. When Dorian tells him that that prayer no longer holds any meaning for him, Basil uses the painting as evidence of Dorian’s great evils, and still asks him to repent.
Then, Dorian murders Basil by stabbing him in the neck. Dorian leaves the corpse sitting in a chair in the forbidden room, and then collects Basil’s belongings. Re-dressed in his furs, Dorian goes back outside and rings the bell, pretending to be coming in for the evening. He asks his manservant, Francis, what time it is (two o’ clock). Dorian then asks if anyone has come to call on him, and Francis informs him that Basil Hallward waited in Dorian’s study until eleven o’ clock. Francis says that Basil left no message, “except that he should write to [Dorian] from Paris, if he did not find [him] at the club” (154). Dorian reasons that—with Basil’s travels to Paris being expected, and the man’s peculiarly solitary ways—it will be a long time before his death is discovered. However, he resolves to go see an Alan Campbell, of 152 Hertford Street in Mayfair, because Alan is someone who can help him.
As he has been instructed to do, Francis awakens Dorian at nine o’ clock the next morning. Dorian sleeps peacefully, like “a boy who had been tired out with play, or study” (155). As Dorian sips the chocolate that Francis has brought to him, the ghastly events of the preceding night come back to him. He tells Francis to take care of two letters, one of which is bound for Mr. Alan Campbell in Mayfair, then reads to distract himself.
Dorian is wild with impatience and suspense by the time Francis returns with Mr. Campbell in tow. Once the two men are alone, Dorian tells Alan that there is a dead man in the house. At first Dorian claims that Basil killed himself, and then Dorian admits that he killed him. He says that it will be months before the death is discovered. He then asks Alan to use his expertise with chemistry and make the body disappear. Alan is horrified, and he refuses Dorian. Although Dorian begs him, telling him that he will be ruined, and that he is not asking Alan to do anything that he doesn’t already do in the course of his work, Alan refuses, saying that he will not allow Dorian to drag him down with him. It is clear that the two men have had a falling out, and that Alan despises Dorian. Dorian then writes something on a piece of paper and slips it to Alan. Alan’s face drops once he reads it. Dorian tells him that he will have no choice but to send a letter to the address shown if Alan does not perform the deed, so Alan finally agrees to dispose of Basil’s body.
Dorian has Francis fetch all of the needed materials, and tells Francis to take the rest of the day off. Although Dorian wishes to make Alan enter the room containing Basil’s body alone so that Dorian does not have to be near the horrible dead body, Dorian sees that the painting is unhidden when he opens the door. He also sees that one of his hands in the painting has now become soiled by a streak of blood. He throws the curtain over the painting and leaves Alan to his work. In about 5 hours, Alan emerges from the room and Basil’s body is gone. Alan requests that they never see each other again.
Evening finds an exquisitely dressed Dorian at dinner at Lady Narborough’s. Dorian finds a brief delight in the fact that his finery and good looks betray nothing about the ghastly recent happenings. His spirits also lift when Lord Henry arrives to dinner. Lord Henry notices that Dorian seems out of sorts. When he asks where Dorian went after leaving the club the previous night, Dorian becomes flustered. He informs Lord Henry that he can inquire with Francis, who let Dorian in at 2:30am. Lord Henry brushes the entire affair off, assuring Dorian that he does not really care one way or the other, though he does continue to press Dorian about his peculiar mood.
Lady Narborough teases Dorian throughout dinner, and ultimately tells him that she must find him a wife. She resolves to draw up a list of eligible women for him, complete with their ages. She also chides Lord Henry for his widespread reputation of being very wicked.
Dorian returns home after dinner, and spends three hours burning up Basil’s belongings in the fireplace. Then, he goes to a large, ebony Florentine cabinet in the forbidden room because “A mad craving” possesses him (174). He touches a hidden spring in the cabinet, which releases a drawer containing a small lacquer Chinese box. Inside the box is “a green paste waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and persistent” (175). Dorian hesitates for a few minutes, with a smile on his face, before replacing the box and retiring to his bedroom.
When midnight arrives, Dorian steals out of the house and entices a driver with two sovereigns in order to secure a ride to a faraway address.
The driver takes Dorian to a bad part of town. During the ride, Dorian is reminded of an old saying that Lord Henry recited when they first met: “To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul” (176). He arrives at an opium den, passing by many grotesque and shadowy figures in the meantime. He sees people disfigured and insensate due to their addiction, and relates to their escapism.
Dorian finds Adrian Singleton, who has become an opium addict. Adrian tells Dorian that none of his old friends will speak to him now, but that he doesn’t care about that, nor even about women, because opium is better than human relationships. Dorian, craving anonymity, tells Adrian that he is going to a different place. A woman sidles up to Dorian. He tosses her money to be rid of her, and tells her never to speak to him again. She pockets the money, and then chides him as he flees by saying, “There goes the devil’s bargain! […] Prince Charming is what you like to be called, ain’t it?” (180). A sailor, who had been snoozing among the drugged, startles awake and hurries out into the night after Dorian.
Outside, James Vane holds Dorian at gunpoint. James tells Dorian that he has been pursuing him for 18 years, having nothing to go on but the nickname that Sybil insisted on using—“Prince Charming.” When he heard the woman calling Dorian by that name, he knew he had found his man. He then tells Dorian that he has one more moment left to live, and to make his peace with God. Dorian, desperate for his life, begs James to allow him to put his face in the streetlight, after reminding James that he has been searching for 18 years. James begrudgingly follows Dorian’s request, and becomes penitent once the light reveals Dorian’s face, which looks to be not a day over 20 years old. He convinces James that he has the wrong man, and James lets Dorian go, horrified that he was about to murder an innocent man.
The woman who called Dorian Prince Charming then comes out and asks why James let Dorian go. James tells her that Dorian could not possibly be the man he hunts, as that man must be nearing 40, while Dorian appears to be half that age. The woman tells James that that man is, indeed, Dorian Gray, and that many believe he sold his soul for eternal youth.
Chapters 10-16 highlight the beginning of Dorian’s decline. The cost of his decadent, indulgent life begins to announce itself in both the growing scandals that arise in the lives of those who choose to associate themselves with him, and in Dorian’s turn to opium in order to both quell the cries of his deadened conscience and to access the primal, intoxicating pleasures that his early days indulging in his beauty granted him. Although his good looks and riches still keep him mostly insulated and safe, there is a growing number of people who disapprove of him and see that suffering, social banishment, scandal, and even death follow in his wake. Dorian’s turn to drugs also shows the weakening of his own constitution, and signal that his formerly breathless and reckless moral grounding to pursue only formal beauty is beginning to fray and exhaust itself. Through this conceit, Wilde forwards the idea that the beauty and frivolity of youth is not meant to last or be indulged forever: For Wilde, the unnatural lengthening of youth and its beauty leads to moral decay, and the arrested development of compassion and nuanced thought that sustains more than instant gratification.
Interestingly, Dorian’s increasingly paranoid guardianship of the painting is not animated by a desire to preserve the painting’s beauty, which would be in natural and coherent keeping with the moral system that he now follows. Indeed, there is now no more beauty in the painting to be guarded. Instead, and ironically, it is the ugliness of his moral depravity, given physical form through the enchanted painting, that Dorian now jealously guards. He desperately hides the truth of his wretched soul from the eyes of others, in order to continue taking advantage of a physical beauty that is growing less and less satisfying.
Dorian’s past also begins catching up with him, as James Vane reveals that he has spent almost two decades attempting to hunt Dorian down and exact revenge for his sister’s death. Dorian’s misdeeds with Sybil can therefore be seen as his original sin and key to his eventual downfall, and his close encounter this time foreshadows future instances of his past misdeeds coming back to haunt him.
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