Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray follows Dorian, a handsome and impressionable young man, as he is corrupted under the influence of the specious Lord Henry. In the 11th chapter, Wilde aptly writes that “Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book,” an often overlooked idea which is nonetheless essential to understanding the novel’s subtext. Throughout the text, Wilde intertwines scientific and chemical motifs with the symbol of both the yellow and green books to display how the influence of knowledge is inherently toxic to the development of natural selfhood. By presenting such knowledge as addictive, Wilde reveals its simultaneously all-consuming and degenerative nature.

In the novel’s early chapters, Wilde contrasts naturality with scientific motifs, showing how Lord Henry’s influence over Dorian as an “interesting study” inherently degrades his natural selfhood (60). He further establishes a chemical motif which is later repeated in the context of the symbolic yellow book. Upon their first meeting, Lord Henry tells Dorian that “to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions” (24). The repetition of the term “natural” draws attention to the passion and thought framed as the bipartite manifestations of the “soul.” It is further reasonable to assume that the terms ‘soul’ and ‘self’ can be read synonymously; Dorian’s thought and passion are indications of his selfhood. Wilde therefore creates a baseline understanding that influence steers one away from natural selfhood, superseding it with some other unnatural self. He then infuses Lord Henry’s ruminations on his influence with scientific, specifically chemical, terminology. After Dorian falls in love with Sybil, Lord Henry states that “few people had ever interested him so much as Dorian Gray [. . .]. He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others” (60). Vivisection evokes the image of bodily mutilation, and Lord Henry’s view of vivisection as a method of natural science through which to study Dorian’s natural self shows that that self is influenced to the same mutilative end. Lord Henry then goes on to note how “sulphurous fumes” and “poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them” warp and reshape “the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect” (60, 61). Wilde again echoes the passion and thought of the self, indicating Dorian’s progression away from natural selfhood as a result of chemical influence. Indeed, the fumes and poisons Lord Henry describes are chemical means of altering the body and echo the previous scientific vivisection. The term “sulphurous” carries a negative connotation for the chemical fumes’ dangerous nature. Poison is similarly negative and is then repeated throughout the novel, creating a chemical motif which follows Dorian’s self-degradation. Thus, through Lord Henry’s repeated use of scientific, specifically chemical, terms to describe his influence over Dorian, Wilde displays the toxic and degradative effects of Lord Henry’s influence on Dorian’s selfhood.

Wilde then uses this chemical motif, alongside a yellow book to symbolise knowledge, to show how such knowledge is similarly degradative to selfhood. Lord Henry sends this yellow book to Dorian in the aftermath of the first significant turning point in the novel, Sybil Vane’s death, and at the chronological centre, in the 10th chapter of 20. This is the crisis point of the narrative, the point in a classic tragic arc where a protagonist is given a choice which leads to their fall. The book’s positioning accentuates its symbolic role in the narrative arc and therefore emphasises its pivotal role in Dorian’s ensuing self-degradation. Books themselves are iconic symbols of knowledge; further, the yellow book builds on the previous chemical motifs as Dorian aptly terms it a “poisonous book” (126). By tying the established significance of poisonous chemicals to the symbolism of the book, Wilde demonstrates how the influence of Lord Henry’s “poisonous theories” and the influence of knowledge are analogous (80). Dorian goes on to describe the yellow book as “a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his entire life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own” (126), repeating the passion and thought that make up the self. He then goes on to live his life under the book’s philosophies, shifting between various obsessions just as the book’s protagonist does: “he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture” (134); “at another time he devoted himself entirely to music” (134); “on one occasion he took up the study of jewels” (135); and “then he turned his attention to embroideries” (137). The yellow book acts as an extension of Lord Henry’s influence as well as the symbolic influence of knowledge, and under this influence, Dorian’s selfhood degrades. He carries out these obsessions carelessly, switching from one to the other with the “changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control” (128), and his very understanding of selfhood warps: “to him, man was a [. . .] complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead” (142). Again, Wilde returns to the bipartite manifestations of the natural self, which Dorian now sees as “tainted” and “monstrous.” This distinct loss of natural selfhood at the hands of a poisonous book which symbolises knowledge shows how, in much the same way as chemicals disfigure and warp a physical self, the influence of knowledge degrades Dorian’s selfhood. 

The motif of chemical contamination then comes to a head through Dorian’s opium addiction. As Dorian finds his way into the opium dens, Wilde includes another notable book, a copy of Gautier’s Emaux et Camées. He includes a distinct description of the book: “the binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates. It had been given to him by Adrian Singelton” (162). Dorian selects this book at random after Basil’s death, as a means to “not think about what happened until it became absolutely necessary to do so” (162). Though the yellow poisonous book represents a knowledge that Dorian immerses himself in for pleasure, the green book serves as an attempt to avoid it. The nature and origin of the book echo Dorian’s chemical addiction, the green of the book echoing the “green paste waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and persistent” also stored in his library (181). Wilde furthers this colour symbolism, as Dorian recounts the “crocodiles, with small beryl eyes, that crawl over the green steaming mud” (164), while the “cold yellow hand” interpolates imagery reflective of the poisoned yellow book (164). The noted “haggard eyes” of the yellow book’s protagonist are also amplified in the context of Dorian’s opiate addiction, through the character of Adrian Singleton (144). In chapter 16, Dorian’s visit to an opiate den is prefaced by descriptions of a “squat misshapen figure” and “haggard women” (184), and “the twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes” of the addicts (185), a group of chemically sickened and degraded beings to which Adrian now belongs. These physical descriptions are evidence of the physical toxicity of opium, yet Dorian claims that they are “better off than he was. He was prisoned in though. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away” (185). Despite his desperate attempts to escape the thought of Basil’s death, by immersing himself in a book or in a drug-addled world, Dorian is poisoned by his addictions. Wilde’s twofold use of Adrian and colour mirroring irrevocably joins the impact of the chemical addiction and the books, displaying the sickened and degraded states of opium addicts and knowledge addicts as analogous. Thus he connects this inhuman, degraded, state to knowledge, that addictive and sickening escapism symbolised by books. By paralleling the physical effects of opium and the psychological effects of the influence of knowledge, Wilde shows how the nature of knowledge is analogous to addiction, creating an all-consuming desire for its degenerative effects.

Throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde embeds chemical motifs and the symbolic yellow and green books to portray the toxicity of knowledge. Drawing attention to its all-consuming and degenerative effects by paralleling them to that of chemical addiction, Wilde shows how a natural conception of selfhood is sacrificed when one becomes addicted to knowledge. Coming to the conclusion that “knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful” (202), Wilde cautions against the subtle yet fatal loss of that charming mist in a world where knowledge is paramount and ambiguity is trivial.

Although this carefully crafted string of knowledge is all-consuming, inescapable, and finally fatal, Dorian’s tragic arc goes further. In tracing his growing addiction through his aesthetic corruption, it follows that his perpetual hunger for the self-corruptionof his innocence fuels his passion. Pain is first pleasure, vice is at first virtue, and a knowledge addiction is no exception. In exposing the destruction of Dorian Gray at the hands of nothing more than a book, Wilde also exposes the initial joy, beauty and glory of that barely definable knowledge that we all strive for, that we gather greedily as we poison ourselves searching forever and ever for more of it.