Lord Henry’s Grecian Mentoring Influence on Dorian

Lord Henry serves as a mentor to Dorian in the ways of life, so far, in The Picture of Dorian Gray” that is very similar to the Greeks, with older men serving as mentors to the confused youth. When Dorian believes Sibyl is the love of his life, he attempts to reject Lord Henry, his new found love fulfilling his need to be taught about life by actually living it until her love for Dorian destroys her acting and then he rejects her as easily as he had rejected Lord Henry and Basil. I chose a passage from chapter 6 after Dorian finds out that Sibyl has killed herself and Lord Henry is consoling the young Dorian, once again attempting to allure the beautiful young man. I argue that Lord Henry advises Dorian in a similar fashion as what John Addington Symonds talks about in “A Problem in Greek Ethics”. In this he is discussing the ways of the Greek and their teachings from one man to another as “the lover taught, (and) the hearer learned”; a dynamic Lord Henry practically forces onto Dorian the moment life throws him an unexpected turn with Sibyl’s suicide. In his attempt to help Dorian, he blatantly tells him the truth of what his life would have been like had they actually ended up together, that in marrying “this girl you would have been wretched” (65). He then continues on to tell Dorian an even more intrusively honest fact that “she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her”, addressing Dorian’s sexual disinterest he himself hasn’t discovered yet (66). In this moment you can see Lord Henry’s influence on Dorian return, the obstacle of Sibyl no longer pulling Dorian interest away from him. In the next chapter, when Basil attends to Dorian expecting to find him in grief, it becomes clear how much Lord Henry has truly impacted him with his blasé dismal of Sibyl’s death, telling Basil “what is done is done” though the incident was only the day before (74). It becomes clear the true impact Lord Henry has on Dorian in his Grecian-like mentoring, stemming from this passage in chapter 6 in which Lord Henry pushes aside Dorian’s grief and makes him react entirely different to Sibyl’s death, reclaiming his influence on Dorian he had lost partially when Sibyl had his attention.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *