Dorian Gray Alternate Ending

WARNING POSSIBLE PLOT CLUES:

He looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the motivator, Lord Henry. Dorian bound the knife with his handkerchief and pocketed it. He ran downstairs and sent his servant on an errand to invite Lord Henry over with urgency.

The moon was full and high in the sky. The light shone through the upper windows casting shadows counter to those of the dimly candle lit room. Lord Henry entered the room Dorian was lingering in. “Welcome Henry. How do you do?”. But little opportunity was given for a reply, Dorian quickly interrupted himself, “My mind is so clouded at the moment. It is every thing the nights sky is not on this still night. Follow me, you must understand.”. He led him up to that dark secret room where he stored his most hated of treasures. “Look, look at what you have made me!”. Dorian yelled as he whipped away the curtain covering the painting and forced Henry in for a closer look.

Lord Henry gasped at what he saw. At first it seemed as if Dorian was showing him a painting of a crazed old man, but after a second glance he saw it was the one holding him so closely to this ugly face. Henry then noticed something not even Dorian had seen before, it was Henry's own face starting to show through the horrid man's features, like that of a possessed person. It was on noticing this that he felt a sudden cool feeling in his back, and saw blood starting to trickle on the floor. He had no breath left in him to exclaim anything more than deathly sigh.

Dorian released the knife dropping Lord Henry to the floor. As Henry's last breath was exhaled with a bubble of air boiling through his blood filled mouth, he looked up to see what Dorian was now starring at. As Henry transitioned into the next state of life the painting changed with his departure. Revealing itself over an awe inspiring minute the paint moulded itself to form a new image not seen on this canvas for decades, but a near perfect reflection of the man standing admiring it. A new feeling came over Dorian he had not felt since his child hood. One of innocence and purity. It was soon obvious that the murder of his long time mentor was the cleansing of the devil on his shoulder. He felt free of sin and his thoughts were rid of the murkiness that had filled it moments earlier. The moon light shone through the small window of the room. The light cast a shadow over the young looking man and a silhouette from the white cross of the window frame came over his body.

It's no Crime and Punishment

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a strange book. Perhaps due to the large amount of changes Wilde made to the text from the original short novel version, including adding six chapters and removing the parts that were seen as too explicitly homoerotic or hedonistic, the pacing is rather uneven. One tedious chapter is mostly copied from various historical guides to Dorian's series of obsessions with precious stones, tapestries and clothing. Passages like this:

When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light. Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and twenty-one diamonds. Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies....

continue on for quite some time, and don't have much relation to the story.

Wilde uses (and recycles) a lot of epigrams in Lord Henry's dialogue ("Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects."), which makes for entertaining dinner party banter. Later on, Henry's compulsion to pronounce witticisms sometimes gets a bit tiresome, but is perhaps meant to show that the ideas of his that Dorian falls for aren't particularly deeply thought out. "You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."

I don't think it is just the style of the book that makes it somewhat unsatisfying though. Dorian falls for the hedonistic lifestyle without much of a moral struggle. Any sympathy he elicits as a young, naive youth is disposed of pretty quickly by his lack of remorse for any of his actions. Past a certain point there is no chance of redemption and the rest of the novel is just marking time until Dorian receives his just deserts. Even at the very end Dorian's feeling of remorse is quickly overcome by the desire to simply destroy all the evidence of his past.

But for the most part I found The Picture of Dorian Gray entertaining, and the episode with the young actress was quite effective in its desperate humour. Just don't expect deep and meaningful, capital-L Literature. Like an epigram, it is a bit of fun, but its charm is liable to evaporate if placed under too much scrutiny.