The famous London painter Basil Hallward shows to his friend Lord Henry his last work: the portrait of a very young nobleman.
Lord Henry is captured by the beauty of the portrait and the person that’s in it and he asks Basil to introduce him to the youth. First Basil is against this idea but then he accepts and is forced to introduce the handsome and young Dorian Gray.
Innocent Dorian immediately makes friends with the old and experienced Lord Henry, lost in the fascinating conversation with Dorian. Lord Henry invites the young man not to use badly his beauty and youth and to use all this to start a life full of experiences. This makes Dorian express, just as a foolish game, a wish: he wishes that the signs of life and time would appear on the portrait Basil made and not on his face and for this to happen he would give away his soul.
But what has been said as a joke, turns real. While the young Dorian loses his innocence, his portrait gets a wrinkle and a malignant expression. When Dorian Gray notices it, he is scared by it and hides the portrait in the attic: no-one will have to know about how dirty his soul is, that soul that reveals itself in the portrait.
After many awful happenings, including the killing of his friend Basil, his corruption is terrible but he still keeps an innocent face that produces sympathy from the other people, who are sure that evil shows on people’s faces.
Tired of his sad secret and wanting to forget all his bad actions and to start all over again by being truly good, he decides to destroy the hated painting. But the portrait has his soul so the knife that Dorian wants to use to destroy the work, ends by killing himself.
Fallen to the floor, his face will assume its truthful looks while the portrait, freed of the diabolic soul, will shine again with the youth and beauty painted 20 years before.
I don’t know why – year in, year out – all my students love this story… Maybe because it has to do with secret dreams? What’s YOUR answer??