CHAPTER IX

Dorian becomes obsessed with the yellow book, collecting multiple editions and taking its Parisian hero as a mirror for himself. Unlike that hero, Dorian keeps his youthful beauty, which silences skeptics despite rumors. In private, he compares his unaging face to the portrait’s corruption, finding perverse delight.

Maintaining social caution, Dorian hosts exquisite salons curated with Lord Henry’s help, influencing fashionable youth. He seeks a “new hedonism” that spiritualizes the senses, rejecting asceticism and systems that limit experience, and treats life itself as the highest art.

Dorian experiments with creeds and ideas without committing: he is drawn to Catholic ritual, then to mysticism and materialism, valuing experience over theory. He studies perfumes for their psychological effects, immerses himself in exotic and barbaric music before returning to grand opera, and amasses strange instruments.

He next devotes himself to jewels and their legends, then to sumptuous textiles and embroideries, and finally to ecclesiastical vestments, filling his house with rare objects as temporary escapes from fear. He hangs a pall over the portrait and cycles between forgetting it and descending into sordid districts, returning to gloat or loathe.

Over time he refuses to travel far, fearing for the portrait’s safety, and occasionally rushes back to check the locked room. Rumors grow; some men snub him, and former intimates avoid him, though society at large indulges his charm and riches. Only Lord Henry remains steadfast.

Contemplating identity, Dorian imagines inheriting vices from ancestors and kinship with historic sinners, as if history reenacts his inner life. He repeatedly rereads the novel’s lurid chapters and finally regards himself as “poisoned by a book,” embracing evil at times as a path to beauty.