Life Imitating Art: The Duality of Beauty and Morality in The Picture of Dorian Gray

There’s a relationship between life and art in the story, especially because we witness how life becomes art, and art becomes life. There’s an exchange between art and life.

The novel starts off with a theory of the purpose of art, and it presents art in many forms, also shows us that it can be dangerous when someone takes it way too literally, in a sense.

For example, we see Dorian’s romance with Sybil and we find out that it’s not actually genuine. He just thinks he has fallen in love with her because of the characters she plays as an actress. Seeing her die on the stage and then find her backstage, alive and beautiful feels supernatural and amazing to him, but it cannot last. He doesn’t actually love her, and doesn’t care who she actually is. When she cannot perform well on the stage, he behaves in such a cruel way to the poor girl that she commits suicide.

Dorian sees life only through the lens of art and it’s not a great thing to do.

Another example is that, in the story, Lord Henry sees Dorian as a thing of beauty. He's not bothered about his character or intelligence, Dorian is just a symbol of youth and beauty for him. Dorian is not creative, he doesn't produce anything, but under the influence of Henry, he makes his life kind of an art form, but not in a good way, and the consequences of that are terrible.

Dorian gets a reputation as a person who lives their life like a work of art and does what he wants in search of beauty— while doing that, he’s set aside from the world. He uses people as instruments of his pleasure. There’s a connection between his moral behaviour and the painting, whenever he acts in an immoral way and commits a sin, his portrait reflects that while his own body and face don’t reflect it. He looks young, innocent, and beautiful but the way his portrait looks gets worse and worse with each sin he commits.

In the end, he stabs the painting and it costs him his life. We see that he looks hideous because of all the crimes he had committed in search of beauty. This change between life and art goes back naturally and the painting is now the original painting. Art has returned to its place.