Christa Giles

But, oh horror! on certain evenings, in your
cruel pool,
I have recognized the barrenness of my
disordered dream. 177
Dualism, symbolized by the mirror image in The
Picture of Dorian Gray, is also a means of articulating a sense
of estrangement. Thus Dorian, while he ˝felt keenly the
pleasure of a double life,˝ 178 is aware of the difficulties of
inner divisiveness. He claims at several points throughout
the novel that his personality has become a burden to
him. 179 In effect, he watches himself even as he watches the
figure in the painting decay, rejecting:
the shallow psychology of those who
conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple,
permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To
him, man was a being with myriad lives and
myriad sensations, a complex multiform
creature that bore within itself strange
legacies of thought and passion…. 180
While the diversification of the self can be experienced as
alienating, it is also a means of growth. Wilde usually
defines this growth in terms of art: ˝Culture has intensified
the personality of man. Art has made us myriad-
minded.˝ 181 Ironically, therefore, a world of fluid roles
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