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Oscar Wilde (1856-1900). Character sketch of Lord Henry ( The Picture of Dorian Grey ). Appearance. …the tall , graceful young man…(Ch.2) …romantic olive-coloured face and worn expression…(Ch.2) …low, languid voice…(Ch.2) …cool, white, flower-like hands…(Ch.2)
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Oscar Wilde(1856-1900) Character sketch of Lord Henry (The Picture of Dorian Grey)
Appearance • …the tall , graceful young man…(Ch.2) • …romantic olive-coloured face and worn expression…(Ch.2) • …low, languid voice…(Ch.2) • …cool, white, flower-like hands…(Ch.2) • …pointed brown beard…(Ch.1) • …dreamy, languorous eyes…(Ch.2) • …long nervous fingers…(Ch.1) Typical aristocratic appearance
Marriage and Family • …the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.(Ch.1) • The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless.(Ch.5) • Of coarse married life is a habit, a bad habit.(Ch.4) • I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.(Ch.1) Cynical attitude to marriage, family and relatives.
Love and Faithfulness • When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others.(Ch.4) • Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love…(Ch.1) • Faithfulness is simply a confession of failures…(Ch.1) Love means deception. Being unfaithful himself tries to blacken the idea of devoted love.
Conscience and Principles • Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the tradename of the firm. That is all.(Ch.1) • I like persons better than principles and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. (Ch.1) Perverts the idea of conscience and honour. Praises dark sides of human character.
Influence on Dorian Gray • There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was real joy in that…(Ch.3) • He would seek to dominate him – had already indeed half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.(Ch.3) • To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature.(Ch.4) Realizes his influence on Dorian, wants to change him, to make him his own creature.
Hedonism • Pleasure is the only thing worth having theory about.(Ch.6) • The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.(Ch.2) • Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing… A new Hedonism – that what our century wants.(Ch.2) • Nothing can cure the soul but the senses.(Ch.2) • Sin is the only coloured element left in our life.(Ch.2) • Moderation is a fatal thing.(Ch.15) Sin and pleasure are the only things worth living for. If moral prevents us from pleasure, it should be rejected.
Man vs. Woman • Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.(Ch.4) • …no woman is a genious.(Ch.1) • They [women] worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.(Ch.6) • Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.(Ch.6) • I have a theory that it is always the women who propose us, and not we who propose to the women.(Ch.6) Despises women. Treats them like beautiful stupid dolls, who only want to marry men.
Attitude to Death • You must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy…(Ch.8) • I wish he [Basil] had come to such a really romantic end [murder] as you suggest.(Ch.19) His cynicism is boundless. He treats to death (L) as if it were a romantic thing or a play.
Conclusion • Lord Henry is a cynic, perverting all the morals of the mankind and turning them into cowardice or failure. • He praises sin and pleasure, proclaiming them to be the meaning of human life. • He embodies devil, corrupting Dorian and making him his own “toy”.
