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THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
(OSCAR WILDE)
,.
“Taboo in The Picture of Dorian Gray”
by Arundhati Sanyal, Seton Hall University
Oscar Wilde’s novella The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) explores the
relationship between an artist, Basil Hallward, and the subject he
paints: a beautiful young man named Dorian Gray who is obsessed
with preserving his youth. Under the influence of Lord Henry
Wotton, who sees life’s purpose as the pursuit of beauty and sensual
fulfillment, Dorian wishes that the portrait painted by Hallward will
age while Dorian does not. Ultimately, as Dorian engages in hedonistic
acts, the image in the portrait ages, gradually becoming more
and more disfigured, allowing Dorian to retain his unaffected youth
and beauty. As the novel’s characters interact and as Dorian changes,
a profound discussion of art and its relationship to our moral, ethical,
and psychological selves ensues. From this discussion, Dorian Gray
emerges as both an innocent upon whom Hallward and Wotton
impose meaning and also a Faustian figure championing the taboo.
In his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
quotes James Frazer’s words connecting the sacred and the taboo
within the heroic figure:
Apparently holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may
call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred
or tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher
as a physical substance or fluid, . . . it is necessary in the interest
of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest
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