Dorian Gray #7

            As Dorian attempts to reconcile his feelings about murdering Basil with his desire to continue life without thinking about his actions, he finds his perfect façade slipping. Dorian recalls Lord Henry’s words from the first day they met: “To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul” (135). As he knows, Dorian has a very sick soul. He has been confronted with it in Basil’s words and as well as in his portrait. However, rather than try to fix his soul, Dorian chooses to overload his senses in hopes of forgetting his sins and stifling his conscience. He decides to visit an opium den to escape the reality of his actions. The disgusting and disturbing conditions are described in detail. Wilde explains how “[u]gliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason” (136). The intensity of the ugliness of his surroundings will, he hopes, ground him in reality and help him forget his thoughts. He wants an experience that is starkly real and unlike the art he has surrounded himself with in life so that it might create an alternate reality for him, one in which Basil’s murder cannot penetrate his thoughts. Wilde identifies the state of mind Dorian finds himself in: “There are moments, psychologists tell us, when a passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses” (139). Dorian does not know what to do with himself; he is essentially trying to sin in order to overshadow, or at least slightly cover up, his feelings about the greater sin he committed. He is not thinking through decisions; he is acting on impulse as he did when murdering Basil. Dorian is not unique in his desire to forget his sins. Humans do not want to think of their mistakes, and some turn to drugs, as Dorian does, in order to escape them. At this point, there seems to be little hope of something triggering remorse and a change in behavior from Dorian.