Dorian Gray and Hetty Merton's romance

Dorian Gray and Hetty Merton's romance represents the final, ambiguous attempt at moral reformation in a life otherwise defined by corruption and crime. During a May of extraordinary beauty, Dorian, now in his thirties but still retaining the flawless appearance of his youth, began a secret liaison with Hetty Merton, a village girl of no social standing. He would travel from London two or three times a week to see her, and he came to believe that he genuinely loved her. The affair culminated in a planned elopement at dawn, from which Dorian abruptly recoiled, deciding to leave Hetty "as flower-like as I had found her." This renunciation, which he presented to Lord Henry as his first good action in years and his first genuine act of self-sacrifice, became the subject of a bitter philosophical debate between the two men, and ultimately led Dorian to test the magical portrait that had borne the burden of his sins.

The Affair and the Renunciation

Hetty Merton was, by Dorian's own account, "quite beautiful, and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane." This resemblance to the actress he had loved and destroyed in his youth was, he believed, the initial attraction. Unlike the women of his own class, Hetty was a simple country girl, and Dorian found a peculiar charm in the anonymity of their relationship; half the pleasure of the village where he courted her was that no one knew who he was. He told her he was poor, and she believed him; when he confessed he was wicked, she laughed, telling him that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. Her laugh, he remembered, was "just like a thrush singing." The affair reached its crisis in a little orchard, where apple-blossoms fell on Hetty's hair as she laughed. They were to have gone away together at dawn. But Dorian, at the last moment, determined to leave her. He spared her, he told Lord Henry, from the fate that had befallen Sibyl Vane, and he felt a profound, if fragile, sense of moral renewal.

Lord Henry's Cynical Interpretation

Lord Henry Wotton, to whom Dorian confided the story, immediately subjected the act to a corrosive analysis. He dismissed the renunciation as a mere "novelty of the emotion" that must have given Dorian a "thrill of real pleasure." He predicted that Hetty's heart was broken, that she would now despise any husband of her own rank, and that she might even be floating in a mill-pond with water-lilies around her, like Ophelia. Lord Henry framed the entire episode not as a moral victory but as a piece of vanity, a desire for a new sensation, or the "passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves." He concluded that the "great renunciation" was, from a moral point of view, poor, and that Dorian was merely beginning to moralize about sins of which he had grown tired. Dorian, stung by this mockery, insisted that he knew he was right, but the seed of doubt had been planted.

The Test of the Portrait

Haunted by Lord Henry's words and by his own desire for a new life, Dorian returned home and went to the locked room where the portrait of himself was hidden. He had hoped that his good deed might have begun to expel the signs of evil from the painted face. He dragged the purple hanging from the canvas and saw, to his horror, that there was no change—unless it was that the eyes now held a look of cunning and the mouth the curved wrinkle of a hypocrite. The portrait was "still loathsome,—more loathsome, if possible, than before,—and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt." The red stain on the hand that had killed Basil Hallward had grown larger, and there was blood on the painted feet. The portrait had not registered his mercy toward Hetty; it had only recorded his murder of Basil. In a fury of despair, Dorian seized the knife that had killed the painter and stabbed the canvas, ripping it from top to bottom. The act triggered a terrible cry and a crash, and when the servants broke into the room, they found hanging on the wall a splendid portrait of their master in all his youthful beauty, while on the floor lay a dead man, withered, wrinkled, and loathsome, identifiable only by his rings. Dorian Gray's attempt at redemption had failed, and his destruction of the portrait had destroyed himself.