Spare of Hetty Merton

Dorian Gray's decision to spare Hetty Merton is the central event of his purported moral reformation, a single act of renunciation that he presents to Lord Henry Wotton as the beginning of a new life. Occurring after years of debauchery, the murder of Basil Hallward, and the blackmail-driven disposal of the body, this event represents Dorian's first and only attempt to break from his pattern of destruction. Yet the event is defined by its profound ambiguity: it is simultaneously a genuine, if fragile, impulse toward goodness and a final, catastrophic act of self-deception that seals his doom.

The Renunciation in the Orchard

During the month of May, Dorian had been regularly visiting a village girl named Hetty Merton, whom he met two or three times a week. He describes her as "quite beautiful, and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane," a resemblance that first attracted him. Hetty was not of his social class—"simply a girl in a village"—and Dorian claims to have genuinely loved her. They had planned to run away together at dawn. However, on the day before his conversation with Lord Henry, Dorian met Hetty in a little orchard where apple-blossoms fell on her hair as she laughed. At that moment, he says, he "suddenly determined to leave her as flower-like as I had found her." He broke off the relationship, sparing her from the disgrace and ruin that would have followed an elopement with him.

Lord Henry's Cynical Interpretation

When Dorian tells Lord Henry about this act of self-sacrifice, his friend immediately subjects it to a corrosive, psychological analysis. Lord Henry suggests that the "novelty of the emotion" gave Dorian a "thrill of real pleasure," and that his reformation began by giving the girl good advice and breaking her heart. He predicts that Hetty, having loved Dorian, will now despise any husband from her own rank and live a life of quiet wretchedness. Lord Henry even darkly speculates that Hetty might be floating in a mill-pond with water-lilies around her, like Ophelia. Dorian protests, insisting that Hetty's heart is not broken and that she can "live, like Perdita, in her garden," but Lord Henry's mockery has already planted a seed of doubt about the purity of his motives.

The Portrait's Verdict: Hypocrisy, Not Redemption

The true test of Dorian's reformation comes when he returns home and, driven by a hope that the portrait might have changed for the better, creeps upstairs to the locked room. He drags the purple hanging from the canvas, expecting to see the signs of evil expunged. Instead, he sees "no change, unless that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite." The portrait is "still loathsome,—more loathsome, if possible, than before," and the scarlet dew on the hand is brighter, "more like blood newly spilt." The face now bears the specific mark of the hypocrite, revealing that his good deed was not a true moral transformation but a performance, a role he played for his own gratification. The portrait's unchanged, even worsened, state forces Dorian to confront the possibility that his renunciation was motivated by "vanity," "the desire of a new sensation," or "that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves."

The Desperate Destruction and Final Irony

Confronted with the portrait's damning evidence of his hypocrisy, Dorian experiences a moment of clarity. He realizes that the portrait is "like conscience to him" and that it is the only piece of evidence left against him for the murder of Basil Hallward. In a desperate act to kill the past and free himself, he seizes the knife that killed Basil Hallward and stabs the canvas, ripping it "right up from top to bottom." The result is the opposite of what he intended. The servants hear a horrible cry and a crash; when they break into the room, they find hanging on the wall a splendid portrait of their master in all his youthful beauty, while lying on the floor is a dead man, "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage," identifiable only by his rings as Dorian Gray. The attempt to destroy the evidence of his hypocrisy and crime instead destroys him, fulfilling the original wish in a final, ironic twist: the portrait regains its perfection, and the man who tried to be good but could not escapes judgment only through death.