The Nile

The Nile flows through the imagination of Dorian Gray as a river of ancient, exotic beauty, a setting for the fantasies that shape his artistic and sensual life. It first appears in Basil Hallward's description of the many roles Dorian has posed for: crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms, he has sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, looking into the green, turbid Nile. This image places Dorian within a dream of classical antiquity, a figure of timeless grace against a backdrop of legendary waters.

The Nile in Dorian's Reading and Fantasy

Years later, as Dorian reads Gautier's "Emaux et Camees," the Nile returns as part of a longing for a lost, exotic world. He reads of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, which weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud. This passage, encountered while he is waiting for Alan Campbell to arrive and dispose of Basil Hallward's body, reveals the Nile as a symbol of a sensuous, prelapsarian world from which Dorian feels himself increasingly cut off by his own crimes. The river represents a beauty and vitality that his corrupted life can no longer touch.

The Nile as a Symbol of Lost Beauty

The Nile's association with lotus-blossoms, Sphinxes, and crocodiles links it to the exotic and the eternal, a realm of art and nature that Dorian once believed he could inhabit through his own beauty. His wish to remain forever young, like the painted image on the canvas, was a desire to escape the decay that time brings to all living things—a decay that the Nile, with its annual floods and cycles of renewal, paradoxically both embodies and transcends. The river's green, turbid waters, into which the imagined Dorian once gazed, become a mirror of the soul's corruption, a murky depth that reflects the loss of innocence and the approach of death. In the end, the Nile remains a distant, unattainable dream, a reminder of the beauty that Dorian has sacrificed for the sake of an eternal youth that proves to be a curse.