The Lido

The Lido, a slender barrier island off the coast of Venice, appears in Dorian Gray's consciousness not as a physical destination but as a luminous fragment of memory, a place where the romance of his past was staged. In the aftermath of Basil Hallward's murder, as Dorian sits in his library trying to distract himself with Gautier's "Emaux et Camees," the lines of a poem about Venice transport him back to an autumn he had spent there. The mere cadence of the verse makes him feel as if he is "floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, lying in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains," and the "sudden flashes of color" remind him of the "gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honey-combed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the dim arcades." From this reverie, the Lido emerges as a specific point of reference: the lines of the poem look to him "like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido." It is a place of departure and arrival, a threshold between the city's intricate canals and the open sea, and in Dorian's mind it becomes inseparable from the "wonderful love that had stirred him to delightful fantastic follies." The Lido, like Venice itself, had "kept the background for romance, and background was everything, or almost everything." It was also a place he had shared with Basil Hallward, who had been with him part of that time and "had gone wild over Tintoret." The memory of the Lido thus carries a double weight: it is a repository of the passionate, aestheticized life Dorian once lived, and it is now haunted by the presence of the man he has just murdered. The Lido's function in the narrative is therefore entirely retrospective and atmospheric. It is not a scene of action but a node of association, a place where the novel's themes of beauty, romance, and the corruption of memory converge. Dorian's recollection of it is a brief, poignant escape from the horror of his present, a moment of aesthetic pleasure that is immediately undercut by the thought of "Poor Basil! what a horrible way for a man to die!" The Lido, in its serene, sunlit distance, stands in stark contrast to the locked room and the chemical smell of the murder, representing a world of beauty that Dorian can no longer inhabit without the shadow of his crime falling across it.