Dorian’s Inner Id in The Picture of Dorian Gray

“He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanor, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.” (pg 174) And thus is Dorian Gray – a man behind a beautiful mask – a man behind a lie. Readers follow Dorian over an eighteen year span of his life learning about the sins that he indulges in. Yet does the reader have the power to judge Dorian and Dorian alone? Or is Dorian merely a prisoner – trapped in his own mind? Possibly suffering from a bout of Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder, Dorian Gray commits acts of unspeakable means (after all Oscar Wilde never defined them) over the course of his short life. So when it comes down to it… what is the cause of Dorian’s actions? Although many literary analyses take a modern psychoanalytical approach, by examining Dorian through the lens of Freudian theory, the reader is able to get a deeper sense of what it really means to have an inner demon and the root causes for Dorian’s indulgence in his depravity.

Dorian Gray is naïve and in many cases weak. Basil Hallward, enamored by Dorian’s beauty, introduces his obsession to Lord Henry: a man critics site as the sole cause of Dorian’s downfall. Henry ‘corrupts’ Gray by introducing mental fodder for the young lad to savor. Henry tempted Dorian with small lines such as: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” (pg 21) He continues to shower Dorian with opinion and flattery – leading him down a dangerous Narcissistic path. In the eighteen years the reader knows Dorian, he falls in and out of love, a woman commits suicide for him, he becomes addicted to opium, he ruins a plethora of lives, and yet he continues to stay beautiful until his suicidal-homicide at the novel’s conclusion. It is not...

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...plagued with. Dorian steadily declines into a period of deep depression and in another fit of rage plunges the murderous knife into his portrait, killing himself.

Would Dorian’s life have ended differently if he would have been mentally stable? Had Oscar Wilde chosen to give Dorian different characteristic the prevailing plot would be void. Wilde, for all intents and purposes, set up a grand social experiment in the spirit of aestheticism. A Freudian reading illustrates how an ignored conscious and a non-existent unconscious allow for the dark wishes of the id to come to the fore front. Dorian allows the painting to dominate his life and warp his psyche. Though most likely suffering from Schizophrenia, his inner demon, or his id, is allowed to roam free is his ultimate downfall. His vanity, impressionability, and cursed painting turn out to be a lethal combination.