In Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, how might Dorian's relation to his portrait be interpreted as an allegory for the relationship...

Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian
Gray has been seen as an allegory of English/Irish relations in several
different ways, including the following:

• In his
  book Terror and Irish Modernism, Jim Hansen notes that the book was
  written in the midst of a political crisis involving home rule for Ireland. Hansen
  relates the novel to the desire during this era for Irish political autonomy. According
  to Hansen,

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Dorian is destroyed by his fear of social
conventions, while the novel uses [Irish] Gothic conventions in order to push, and
finally to extend, the limits of the form itself.  Whereas the Unionist Gothic writers
allegorize sociopolitical anxieties, Wilde undercuts them by accepting, understanding,
and, finally, reworking social discourse from within.
(91)

According to Hansen,
Gray embodies two earlier conventional ways of depicting Irish masculinity: as
effeminate and as aggressive and terrifying
(92).

• Meanwhile, Maureen O’Connor, in an essay
  on Wilde’s novel as an Irish national tale, also argues (like Hansen) that the novel is
  indebted to the genre of Irish Gothic writing. According to O’Connor,
  

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In The Picture of Dorian
Gray, Wilde emphasizes the necessarily fantastic nature of the allegorization
of a nation traumatized by its relationship to the past . . . . (p.
195)

• One of the
  most suggestive comments about the novel, however, comes from Terry Eagleton, who in his
  book Heathcliff and the Great Hunger suggests that an overly clever
  analyst might try to perceive Wilde’s novel as a work which threatened to “unmask” the
  contradictions in Britain’s presentation of itself as a civilized empire (p.
  9).