Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The picture of Dorian Gray, “the most magical of mirrors,”
shows Dorian the physical burdens of age and sin from which he has
been spared. For a time, Dorian sets his conscience aside and lives
his life according to a single goal: achieving pleasure. His painted
image, however, asserts itself as his conscience and hounds him
with the knowledge of his crimes: there he sees the cruelty he showed
to Sibyl Vane and the blood he spilled killing Basil Hallward.
Homoerotic Male Relationships
The homoerotic bonds between men play a large role in
structuring the novel. Basil’s painting depends upon his adoration
of Dorian’s beauty; similarly, Lord Henry is overcome with the desire
to seduce Dorian and mold him into the realization of a type. This
camaraderie between men fits into Wilde’s larger aesthetic values,
for it returns him to antiquity, where an appreciation of youth
and beauty was not only fundamental to culture but was also expressed
as a physical relationship between men. As a homosexual living in
an intolerant society, Wilde asserted this philosophy partially
in an attempt to justify his own lifestyle. For Wilde, homosexuality
was not a sordid vice but rather a sign of refined culture. As he
claimed rather romantically during his trial for “gross indecency”
between men, the affection between an older and younger man places
one in the tradition of Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.
The Color White
Interestingly, Dorian’s trajectory from figure of innocence
to figure of degradation can be charted by Wilde’s use of the color
white. White usually connotes innocence and blankness, as it does
when Dorian is first introduced. It is, in fact, “the white purity”
of Dorian’s boyhood that Lord Henry finds so captivating. Basil invokes
whiteness when he learns that Dorian has sacrificed his innocence,
and, as the artist stares in horror at the ruined portrait, he quotes
a biblical verse from the Book of Isaiah: “Though your sins be as
scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow.” But the days of
Dorian’s innocence are over. It is a quality he now eschews, and,
tellingly, when he orders flowers, he demands “as few white ones
as possible.” When the color appears again, in the form
of James Vane’s face—“like a white handkerchief”—peering in through
a window, it has been transformed from the color of innocence to
the color of death. It is this threatening pall that makes Dorian
long, at the novel’s end, for his “rose-white boyhood,” but the
hope is in vain, and he proves unable to wash away the stains of
his sins.
