Does Social Media Make Us Like Dorian Gray?
Are you reflecting your man-made image, or the image of Christ?
To give all readers a glimpse of my bi-weekly newsletter, this one is going out to everyone for free! If you wish to continue receiving these literary-based emails, subscribe below.
Imagine if you could impute your every physical flaw, sign of aging, and all the little tweaks to your appearance that give away the sins in your life to a painting of yourself. Sounds kind of wild? This is the story of the classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
Dorian Gray was a young, beautiful, well-off man who recently became friends with the painter Basil Hallward. Upon setting his eyes on Dorian, Basil became captivated by Dorian’s youthful beauty—Dorian appeared so beautiful that Basil knew that no young man could ever appear so lovely and yet have corrupted character. Basil grew enamored with Dorian’s beauty and asked him to pose regularly so he could paint portraits of him. Basil believed he’d never had such a muse as Dorian and it forever changed his life.
Basil had another friend: Lord Henry Wotton. A middle-aged, well-off man with eccentric, worldly ideas about the meaning and purpose of life. He had no use for religion or morals; simply do as you wish for tomorrow we’ll be old and grotesque with nothing good left for ourselves. This life, physical beauty, and fortune are all we have, so live it up now while you can.
Basil never wanted his unblemished Dorian to meet Henry Wotton. Unfortunately, their paths collided almost immediately.
One day as Basil awaited the arrival of Dorian, Henry arrived unexpectedly. Basil pleaded with Henry to leave and not defile his beautiful Dorian—but Henry, being the carefree person he was, laughed and waved off his friend’s silliness just long enough for Dorian to walk through the doorway.
As Basil painted, Henry began his influence upon Dorian. He shared his philosophies and encouraged Dorian that he had everything it took to live life to its fullest—for in years not far from now, he would bear the signs of aging and a life of lived in sin and extravagance.
As Dorian pondered these things, Basil called his friends back to behold his finished masterpiece. He believed it was the best portrait he had ever created. As Dorian looked upon it, he crumpled in sobs of despair; this image would forever reveal to him how much he had aged and his beauty had faded. Dorian cried out, If only this portrait could take on every wrinkle and blemish so that I never do!
That’s exactly what happened.
With each passing year, each murderous act, each cruel word spoken, each lie and betrayal, each use of illegal drugs, Dorian’s portrait grew more and more vile, while Dorian never aged or sneered.
What if this story isn’t so far-fetched as it seems—what if we each live this kind of life through our glowing screens? Consider for a moment how we can put forth a flawless, beautiful image of ourselves through our social media accounts, meanwhile our true lives look nothing like them.
I’m not just referring to people who create entirely new identities for themselves online through lies, altered images, and the like. I believe each of us feel the pull to display a different version of ourselves than the one local friends and family know. Social media offers us a fresh start, a different personality with no consequences. I’ve heard fellow writers talk about having an identity crisis about Instagram—who do I want to be on this platform? How do I want to present myself? I’ve said it myself too.
Social media gives us a chance to be the person we actually want to be, the person we don’t have the courage to be when face-to-face with another human being. We can be sassy, arrogant, rude, and sarcastic. We can be loud and extroverted when all our local friends know us as quiet and meek. The stories we don’t dare tell our local small group are no sweat to proclaim from an Instagram caption or blog post. Why? Because no consequences exist here; we can ignore emails, direct messages, comments, and reels stitched with another condemning our behaviour.
We can spice up stories because no one will correct us. We can make ourselves the victimized hero in every narrative. We can adapt to any theology that would benefit us best in the moment to acquire friendships, connections, and publishing contracts. We can tell one person we believe X while telling the next person we believe Y. We can agree with contradicting views. We can raise our fist with the rest of the internet for being our true selves and sharing honestly and vulnerably, all the while holding up an image carved of another likeness altogether.
We can take it another step further. We can pretend to be a theologically sound designer while formatting our logos on the designs from another small business owner. We can promote our beautiful words of wisdom that we copied and pasted from another website. We can pretend to love the latest trends but never actually embody them off the screen. All it requires of us are a few clicks.
Charlotte Mason, an educator from England at the turn of the twentieth century, believed that education was a life, a discipline, and an atmosphere. Part of forming children into godly adults began with how they acted in the home, so she instructed mothers to raise their children to be kind, honest, well-disciplined, and how to keep an orderly home.
With this calling, however, Mason didn’t want mothers desperately demanding their children to act a certain way simply for show. She wrote in Home Education, “a mother whose final question is, ‘What will people say? What will people think? How will it look?’ [will lead] the children [to] grow up with habits of seeming, and not of being; they are content to appear well-dressed, well-mannered, and well-intentioned to outsiders, with very little effort after beauty, order, and goodness at home, and in each other’s eyes.”
With our online presence, we likewise need to ask ourselves if we are cultivating habits of seeming rather than being. Are our online habits forming us towards godliness, or in another image entirely? Are we reflecting the image of Christ being restored within us, or are we reflecting an image of our own making to win people over to love us instead? Social media on its own may be neutral (you can decide that) but what we do with this tool is not.
The Picture of Dorian Gray ends with Dorian finally stabbing the portrait to rid himself of the last piece of evidence against himself—but when the household servants find him, he’s an unrecognizable dead man on the floor with a knife in his chest, laying before a flawless painting.
What will our new identities lead to? Will we be left in the same sorry state as Dorian Gray?
To Meditate On:
So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “ ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”
— Mark 7:5–8 NIV
Recommended Reading:
The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
The Wolf in their Pockets by Chris Martin