A labbra aperte: l'Immagine-Ferita di Dorian Gray

This essay is a re-reading of Wilde’s masterpiece The Picture of Dorian Gray through the lens of (Barthesian) semiological analysis and visual studies. By theorising the fundamental difference and opposition between the two concepts of “portrait” and “picture/image”, I bring forward the idea that the character of Dorian Gray is split into two different entities which correspond the one to a wounded narcissistic or ideal Ego (the Dorian of the portrait), and the other to an unknown, formless, appaling “Thing” (the Dorian of the picture), hardly conceivable outside the perspective of Freudian Beyond the Pleasure Principle taken in its most drastic hypothesis and paradoxical implications. What is the role played by art within this daunting scenario?