The Picture of Dorian Gray recap

In fashionable London, the painter Basil Hallward finishes a portrait of the beautiful young Dorian Gray, whom his cynical friend Lord Henry Wotton teaches to prize youth and pleasure above all else. Terrified of aging, Dorian wishes that the portrait would grow old in his place. The wish is granted: Dorian stays young and lovely while the painted image records every sin and cruelty. He drives a young actress, Sibyl Vane, to suicide, sinks into years of secret vice, and hides the changing portrait in a locked room. When Basil sees the corrupted painting, Dorian murders him and forces a former friend to destroy the body. Hunted for a time by Sibyl's vengeful brother, who dies by accident, Dorian at last tires of his own corruption. Hoping to be free of his conscience, he attacks the portrait with the knife that killed Basil. He is found dead, aged and disfigured, while the picture is restored to its youthful beauty.

In the London studio of the painter Basil Hallward, his friend Lord Henry Wotton admires a nearly finished portrait of a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray. Basil, who has become devoted to Dorian and finds new inspiration in him, is reluctant to exhibit the picture because it reveals too much of his own feeling. Against Basil's wishes, Lord Henry meets Dorian and quickly captivates him with witty, cynical talk, arguing that youth and beauty are the only treasures worth having and that both fade quickly and cruelly. Shaken by this new idea and by the sight of his own perfect image, Dorian is overcome by envy of the portrait and cries out a wish that he could stay young forever while the picture aged in his place, even offering his soul for it. Falling more and more under Lord Henry's spell, Dorian begins to change. Before long he tells Lord Henry that he has fallen in love with Sibyl Vane, a poor young actress he has watched perform Shakespeare at a run-down theatre, praising her as a genius and calling her the woman he means to marry.

Sibyl Vane, glowing with happiness, tells her worn mother and her rough sailor brother James about the wealthy gentleman she calls Prince Charming. James, about to leave for Australia, distrusts the stranger and swears he will kill him if he ever wrongs his sister. Dorian announces his engagement to Basil and Lord Henry and brings them to see Sibyl act. That night, however, she performs badly, for her real love has made the pretended passion of the stage feel hollow to her. Humiliated before his friends, Dorian turns on her with contempt and rejects her. Returning home, he notices a faint change in his portrait, a touch of cruelty about the mouth, and realizes with a shock that his wish may have come true. He resolves to go back and make amends, but the next day Lord Henry brings word that Sibyl has taken her own life by poison. Lord Henry persuades Dorian to see the tragedy as a strange and beautiful experience rather than a horror, and Dorian chooses to feel wonder instead of guilt.

Basil comes to comfort Dorian and is disturbed by how little grief he shows. Fearing what the portrait now reveals, Dorian has it moved and locked away in the old schoolroom upstairs, hidden even from himself under a covering. Lord Henry sends him a strange yellow French novel about a life devoted to sensation, and Dorian is deeply influenced by it. Years pass. Outwardly Dorian keeps his flawless youth and beauty and moves through fashionable society, collecting jewels, perfumes, embroideries, and other rare and beautiful things, while dark rumors spread about his private life and the ruin of people connected to him. All the while the hidden portrait ages and grows more monstrous, absorbing the marks of every sin, and Dorian visits it in secret to measure the corruption of his soul against the perfection of his face. On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, walking home on a foggy night, Dorian encounters Basil Hallward, who is leaving for Paris and wants to speak with him seriously before he goes.

Basil confronts Dorian about the terrible rumors surrounding him and pleads with him to deny them and to pray. In answer Dorian takes him upstairs and shows him the hidden portrait, now a hideous record of his soul. Horrified, Basil begs him to repent, and in a surge of hatred Dorian seizes a knife and stabs him to death. To dispose of the body, Dorian blackmails Alan Campbell, a former friend and skilled chemist, forcing him with a private threat to destroy the corpse with chemicals. Outwardly composed, Dorian attends a dinner party, but he is tormented by fear and craving and slips away to a squalid opium den. There Sibyl Vane's brother James, who has never stopped seeking revenge, overhears Dorian being called Prince Charming and follows him with a pistol. Dorian saves himself by pointing to his youthful face, arguing that he is far too young to be the man who wronged Sibyl many years before, and the confused James lets him go, only to learn afterward that he has been deceived.

Haunted by the knowledge that James Vane is hunting him, Dorian is terrified when he glimpses the man's face at a window of his country house. During a shooting party in the grounds, one of the hunters accidentally kills a beater, and the dead man proves to be James Vane, freeing Dorian from that threat. Newly frightened by his own conscience, Dorian tries to reform, and boasts to Lord Henry that he has spared an innocent village girl he might have ruined. He also learns that Alan Campbell has killed himself. Hoping that a single good deed has begun to redeem him, Dorian looks at the portrait for any sign of improvement, but finds it only worse, now marked by hypocrisy. Enraged and desperate to be rid of the evidence of his life and the burden of his conscience, he attacks the painting with the knife that killed Basil. His servants hear a cry and break in to find the portrait restored to its original youthful beauty, and on the floor a withered, hideous old man, dead with a knife in his heart, whom they recognize as Dorian Gray only by his rings.

Weary of his ruined life and wanting to escape the evidence of it, Dorian resolves to destroy the portrait that has recorded every one of his sins, believing that killing it will free him from conscience and the past. He takes up the same knife with which he murdered Basil Hallward and stabs the canvas. His servants hear a terrible cry and, forcing the locked door, find the portrait hanging untouched and restored to the radiant youth and beauty it had when Basil first painted it. On the floor lies a withered, wrinkled, hideous dead man in evening dress, a knife in his heart. Only by the rings on his fingers do they recognize him as Dorian Gray. His bargain has come due: the magic that spared his body its punishment collapses at the moment he tries to erase the record of his soul, and the disfigurement the picture had carried for years passes back to the man himself in death.