The Picture of Dorian Gray: "What did it mean?"

In chapter VII of The Picture of Dorian Gray, soon after Dorian has returned at dawn from the theater where Sibyl Vane has just bombed as Juliet, and where Dorian has broken off all relations with her in a particularly harsh and cruel manner ("You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity" [85]), he suddenly notices that the portrait has changed: "his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise. The he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he had taken the buttonhole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate. Finally he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange" (87). He opens the blinds, and in the early-morning light, "the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing" (87-88). He then compares the portrait to his actual reflection in a mirror: "No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?" (88).

Indeed, this supernatural morphing of Basil's "masterpiece" seems to "mean something" to the reader of this novel, and Dorian immediately makes the connection to the "mad wish" he had spoken when the painting was first finished, "that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins" (88). Wilde is clearly using the painting--and its mysterious transformation--as a means of symbolizing or signifying something about Dorian Gray's character. So, What does it mean? At this point in your reading of the novel, how do you interpret its central symbol? What does the painting seem to represent? What analogies in the "real world" does its transformation suggest to you? How do you see Dorian as affected by the transformation of the portrait in subsequent chapters?

Please take five minutes now and reflect on the possible meanings of this central symbol in your notebook, and be prepared to share your ideas with the class.