The Picture of Dorian Gray is all about youth and retaining youthful beauty–but underneath, it is about wanting to be able to freeze time: to exist as you are, unchanged, forever. The novel has a dream-like quality and a strange sense of being both hyper-aware of time passing and also a-temporal, or out of the linear fashion of time itself, as we know it. As Dorian begins to become more and more aware of his own soul’s corruption—and his everlasting beauty—he loses his empathy altogether. Killing his one-time friend and creator of the painting that allows him to retain his visual youth and beauty did not weigh terribly on his conscience, nor was it some sort of cathartic release. Dorian is simply apathetic about the whole thing. He systematically removes of the body and all traces of Basil’s existence from his life. His overall impression of the ordeal was that it was pretty bad that there was “a dead thing” in his room upstairs next to his portrait. The actual murder itself does not resonate much with his conscience—until he sees the portrait and realizes the effect the murder had on his own soul. Still, after the fact, Dorian is not much bothered by the fact that he is now a killer, and seeks out other things to busy himself with. One thing that struck me particularly was the chapter about the opium dens.
“To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.’ Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion—dens of horror, where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new” (189). Dorian is determined to forget, to pause time, to escape, at least for a little while, what he has done, what has happened to him and what he has caused. This reminded me of the poem by Arthur Symons, “The Absinthe Drinker”. In this poem, the speaker also feels the need to lose himself for a little while, although he knows that grim reality will inevitably come back just like the tides come back to the shores. He uses absinthe, a mind-altering, hallucinogen drink, to erase whatever troubles he has, and rocks away on a “dreamy and indifferent tide”, similar to Dorian’s use of opium to dull his pain and the marring of his own soul.
Putting both of these literary works into a greater theme, we can read into the need to stop time as part of the anxiety of modernity at the fin de siècle. Inevitably, the new age is coming, and there is no stopping it. It must be faced, just as Dorian must eventually face his sins and the Absinthe Drinker must face problems as well. But for the time being, we can pretend, or fool ourselves, into enjoying this time of false peace.