Love In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray

“Then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger, This is thy sheath. There rust and let me die.” In this scene, Juliet is filled with such a sadness that she is willing to stab herself for her love. Could you blame her? However, many people would rather kill love instead of dying for it. Near the end of his life, Oscar Wilde was thrown in jail for being gay. While in jail, he witnessed a man getting executed for killing his own wife. Wilde went on to write a poem called “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, which is a poem expressing Wilde’s ideas and opinion of people who kill their own love. Even though The Picture of Dorian Gray is an older work, it gives an example of how someone can kill the things they love, Dorian with both Sibyl and Basil.

In witnessing

The Picture of Dorian Gray provided a narrative in which Oscar Wilde was at his moral crossroad, but would not realize it until his unfortunate time in jail. Although Wilde had not yet realized he was morally confused, The Picture of Dorian Gray is still about how its characters kill the their own love. When Dorian watches Sibyl’s horrible performance, Sibyl causes the connection that Dorian felt between them to die. “You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don 't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid” (Dorian Gray, 63). This disconnect between the two underscores how Sibyl killed Dorians love. This is more of a metaphorical killing of love, but Oscar Wilde shows a more literal meaning behind killing their love. When Henry says “My letter----don’t be frightened----was to tell you that Sibyl Vane is dead” (Dorian Gray, 71) Dorian is shaken about how his drastic actions caused Sybil to kill herself. Doiran quite literally causes the death of the one he loves. Wilde used a direct, sharp statements to emphasise the scale of what happened. It was the very magnitude of this even that had actually cause the painting to have changed, and start a long descent into depravity. It is only after years and years of horrible acts does the painting warp into a horrid creature, yet Dorian still loves the portrait. “The sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.” (Dorian Gray,93) Dorian loves the duality of the portrait, the elegant use of repetitions in the sentence strongly enforces this point. The connection between Doiran and the painting is heightened because Basil painted