The Picture of Dorian Gray

On mornings like this, where the Walla Walla sky looks like it’s been smudged with the world’s most complete palate of gray, I like to curl up with a book that reminds me I’m not nearly as messed up as fictional people can be. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s poisonous love letter to vanity, moral decay, and the dangerous idea that mirrors should mind their own business.

Dorian is that guy who starts out looking like he’s just stepped out of a cologne ad, all cheekbones and promise, and ends up proving that eternal youth is best left to dermatologists and plastic surgeons. Meanwhile, his portrait does all the heavy lifting, aging harder than a rock star on a 50th anniversary farewell tour.

Wilde knew secrets of show more humanity's vanity like a serious therapist and knew exactly when to stick the blade in. Every line is like a straight razor, every aphorism full of truth and venom. The man didn’t waste words.

What I love most is how Dorian Gray asks a question we’re too afraid to say out loud: If we could hide all our sins somewhere out of sight, behind a locked door, under a coat of varnish, would we behave any better? Spoiler: humanity doesn’t fare well in that hypothetical. We can barely be trusted with smartphones.

This isn’t just a novel. It’s a moral Rorschach test dipped in decadence. You don’t read it. You inhale it, choke a bit, and feel weirdly grateful for the experience. Like drinking absinthe in a room where the wallpaper is judging you. And it sticks with you like a mouth full of peanut butter - thick, persistent, and impossible to swallow without making strange faces.

If your mood or soul currently leans toward gray-scale introspection, pour yourself something warming (I recommend a highland Scotch), settle in, and let Wilde remind you that the real monsters aren’t in the portrait—they’re the parts of ourselves we hope no one sees. I only gave this 4 stars because the damned story won't leave me alone, even years later. show less

Oscar Wilde at his best, full of wit and wisdom and quotability.
Are we all Dorian Gray...in danger of having our better natures devoured by our darker sides? Perhaps. But doesn't Gray choose to be who he is? In fact, isn't he given every advantage and every virtue. Is he redeemed in the end? I think not, but you may differ.

When we first see Dorian Gray, we are told he is shy and innocent, a blank space on which Lord Henry hastens to write. Perhaps this is too simple and Dorian is already carrying the seeds of his demise in the beauty of his face. What I love the most about this story is that it is timeless. It is set in Victorian England and in a world that we chose to think had a much different set of moral laws and thus different show more problems. To the contrary, I think you need look no further than modern day Hollywood to find prime examples of Dorian Grays. People who decide outer beauty is not only sufficient to exceed character, but also that their charms and talents entitle them to live as hedonistically as they wish. Like Dorian they believe that they can live life in any fashion they choose without paying any consequence, and too late find that the life they have lived brings them no satisfaction and requires payment of a kind they had never anticipated.

When Dorian begins to realize how terrible he has become, he attempts to blame anyone but himself. It is Harry’s fault for his influence, it is Basil’s fault for painting the portrait in the first place, it is Sibyl’s fault for acting badly and disappointing him, or it is “the book”. It is the fault of society. It is anyone but Dorian. “When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.” Dorian playing psychological games with himself?

Despite his protests, Dorian finds he can hide his true self from his peers, but he cannot hide from his conscience, which is what the portrait has become in the end. Even in his attempt at reform, which comes too little and too late, Dorian must admit that he is insincere. He is acting, phoning it in, trying it on for size. “Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that?...No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.”

Dorian is so obviously shallow and a mockery of innocence, and he is contrasted almost immediately with Sibyl, who is a true innocent. For Sibyl, who loves deeply and completely, her true love makes the acting of love impossible. For Dorian, who cannot feel the depth of any emotion, the play's the thing without which his love dies.

Wilde, himself, is buried in and exposed by this novel. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter, who, on the coloured canvas reveals himself.” Wilde is well aware that he cannot write such a tale without putting too much of himself into its heart. He can be found in each of the major players: Dorian, Henry and Basil. Who is better than Wilde at giving us quips that resonate and wisdoms veiled in witticisms? Can one doubt that personal experience brings Wilde to “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.” Is this not the personal struggle of every soul? Things we do not desire are easy to eschew, it is those temptations that we truly wish for that test our morals and fortitude.

Basil is constantly saying that Lord Henry does not believe what he says. “You never say a moral thing and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.” I imagine to a large extent that is so, but Dorian believes what Lord Henry says, which makes it poison. In the end, Dorian becomes to other young men what Lord Henry has been to him--a bad influence. Yet, Dorian knows the danger of Henry’s influence and realizes that Basil is the better man. He also sees the truth, that he is himself the source of his most dangerous poisons. “Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry’s influence, and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament.”

Basil says, “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.” But, Basil has given Dorian the method to conceal his sins from his face and this lack of visual evidence has heightened his recklessness and hedonism. Anyone who knows Dorian well, however, knows that his face belies his character. People shun him, they leave rooms when he enters, they are only duped if they do not know him or if they persist, like Basil, to disbelieve what they know. After all, Basil chronicles Dorian’s sins. “Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name…You have not been fine. One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. Yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity.”

After he kills Basil, Dorian cannot escape the knowing. He says to Basil, “Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil.” He says it with “despair”. Dorian knows for certain that whatever heaven he had in him has been buried and consumed by the hell that is there. From that moment forward, the truth assaults him wherever he goes. Even in the opium den he comes upon Adrian Singleton and wonders “if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door…” Dorian has failed at his attempt to hide his decadence and vileness from the only person who truly matters, himself.

Perhaps the question at the heart of Dorian’s tale is contained here: “There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.” What is sin? Do we have choice and if we elect to follow impulse instead are we doomed? Can we lose the “freedom of our will” and if we do are we then responsible for our depravity? And, if we kill conscience, can we hope to escape the most horrible of reckonings? Wilde seems to me to be grappling with the same kinds of high questions that Dante and Milton and Goethe faced and that perhaps every man must face emotionally if not intellectually.

Why is Dorian never made to answer to man for his sin? He is able to cover the murder of Basil and in the process destroys Campbell; James Vane, who might have required an answering from him is killed in the fortuitous hunting accident. All of those who know of Dorian’s evil and corruption find themselves in no position to expose him, and Basil, who is the only character who breaches the subject to Dorian himself, dies for his efforts. It should be noted that Basil’s purpose in confronting Dorian is wholly to save Dorian from the evil that has overtaken him.

In the end, Dorian dies unrepentant. “Nor, indeed was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him.” Dorian’s thoughts are always and ever for Dorian. His decision to destroy the painting is just another step in the journey he has already undertaken. “It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.” He wants nothing but to rid himself of the portrait as a reminder of his conduct and the condition of his soul. But, we cannot separate ourselves from our souls, as it is the soul that is the true reflection of who we are, so if the portrait must die, Dorian must die, and in the end all is revealed in the corpse that he leaves for the world to see. show less

This is the ultimate novel of the Aesthetic Movement in England, written by the forerunner of said Movement, Oscar Wilde. Perhaps due to a natural affection for beauty--and perhaps due to the influence of certain English teachers (and their encouraging ISP flattery)--this book is one of my very favourites.

It tells the story of a beautiful young man who is willing to give up his soul so that he will never age himself. His portrait ages in his stead, displaying all the sin and cruelty of his life as it progresses while he looks never a day older than when it was painted.

It's a beautiful, Gothic piece, and is full of Wilde's typical witticisms, as well as his philosophies on the importance of beauty. Though at it's time it was scandalous show more and immoral, I believe that, if anything, Wilde displays that he fully understands the importance of a beautiful soul along with a beautiful face. Though we assume Lord Henry to be Wilde's voice throughout the novel, exalting Dorian's beauty and youth, it is important not to confuse the author with his characters or his work (a view Wilde always maintained throughout his life). After all, if Wilde truly did not care for the soul, would Dorian be punished in the end? Would he bother to make the portrait become ugly? The poetic justice in this book just doesn't match up with the brand of immorality. Wilde has displayed in this work, and in others, that though he may make charming, flippant, "immoral" statements all the time, below it he has a deep understanding of good and bad, and he employs them in his craft so cunningly that it frightened the Victorian audience. show less

This is not a plot-driven book. Most of Dorian’s story takes place “off-screen”, and the words of the book describe a few crucial incidents, but devote a lot more time to dialogue and description. This is also not a character-driven novel. Most of the characters are one-dimensional and betray no development: Lord Henry, the society fixture, is always witty, flippant and faux-profound; Basil, the relcusive painter, is always convention and earnest in his attitudes (surely there is irony that the recluse is so conventional and the society man is so unconventional). Other, minor characters, merely exist for the purposes of these three main characters. Only Dorian Grey himself develops: the famous plot device (another irony) of inward show more moral corruption betrayed in his portrait, while outwardly he appears always young and umblemished—morally as well as physically. Yet one might question the depth of Grey’s character development after his initial corruption/awakening, and what, if anything, he has learned by the end of the novel.

The real star of the book is Wilde’s sparkling prose. Lord Henry is Wilde’s mouthpiece, throwing out paradoxical bons mots faster than they can absorbed. I can never decide how to take Wilde: is his witty flippancy profound, or is this apparent profundity really a smokecreen for a wit in search of a good line? He was certainly clever and intelligent, so he was bound to say something profound every now and again.

It is fascinating to set the book in its social context. It is certainly daring for its time. Basil, who so represents the conventional morality and sentimentality of his time, is mocked and contradicted by Lord Henry/Wilde at every turn. The book seems to be a powerfu satire of the social conventions and hypocrisy of late Victorian Britain. However, as this is probably the main force of the novel, its appeal has perhaps aged and faded as society has changed. This is shown particuarly by Wilde’s silence regarding Dorian’s depraved ways. Presumably they involve various sexual dalliances with various adults—not always, perhaps, fully consenting— seducing or manipulating others into such a lifestyle, plus a fair amount of drugs ‘n’ booze. Nowadays, it sounds like the goings-on of various celebrities who are by no means disgraced. A more jaded age may wonder what all the fuss is about. Dorian’s picture now needs to be on the cover of Who Weekly, not hidden in some attic.

Reading the novel, I also could not escape the parallels with Wilde’s own life. As said above, Lord Henry represents Wilde’s wit. Basil’s love for Dorian also seems to parallel Wilde’s infatuation with younger men such as Lord Alfred Douglas. I am not surprised that the homosexual overtones raised many Victorian eyebrows. Basil’s bad end is, then, ironic, given the way that Wilde was undone by his involvement with Bosie (and Bosie’s abandonment of Wilde). Dorian also represents, perhaps, Wilde’s own persona: outwardly the successful auter and society wit, while secretly indulging other urges.

The portrait itself is an enigma. On one level it appears to be a rather conventional device, representing the judgement of traditional morality on Dorian’s inner corruption. Perhaps Wilde was, ultimately, a man of his time? Or perhaps the portrait is turning the moral mirror of accepted morality back upon the corruption of the late Victorian upper classes? If Dorian Grey represents the wrongs of Wilde’s society—outwardly respectable, while inwardly corrupt—then perhaps the portrait is the inner corruption of which his society was so terrified? Or, maybe more consistently with what Wilde says, it is not the sins that warp the inner soul, but social attitudes towards them?

Despite, perhaps, Wilde’s intentions, it is clear that Dorian’s corruption cannot be swept away by a change of social attitudes towards them. He is unable to maintain Lord Henry’s distance while heeding Lord Henry’s advice. This is the paradoxical crux of the novel. Society needs gadlfys like Wilde to mock at its absurdities, but needs more substance to correct them. show less

A wonderfully sensational and unique work. Though obviously Victorian with regards to characters and setting, but the influence of French Symbolism is very easy to see. Huysmans' novel A rebours features as a prominent motif in the book. It is no stretch to claim to claim that Dorian Gray is a Faustian character, whilst the hedonistic Lord Henry represents a model of Huysmans' own Des Esseintes as a sort of Mephistopheles who coaxes Dorian towards his doom. Looking at the premise of the work alone, it could have just as well been a cheap thriller devoid of complexity, but Wilde imbues the work with no small amount of literary references and witty dialogue. There is also no shortage of criticism against the English upper class, and the show more homoerotic symbolism oozes from every other page. A spectacular and rich novel that excites the mind just as much as any Hitchcock film, and at the same time causes the reader to think deeply about its many themes. show less

Another one I hadn't read since the '70s, and I wondered whether it might have aged badly, but no, like the picture itself, this is one book that has stayed as fresh and young as when it was created.

Wilde's way with an aphorism is brilliant, and not just Dorian, but Sir Henry Wooton in particular are fully rounded characters, and perfect foils for Wilde's wit and almost casual brilliance.

I wondered whether the movie representations would change the book for me, but all they have done is remind me how little of Wilde's inimitable style has ever transferred to the big screen.

Beautifully written, sharp and incisive and strangely grotesque in places, I was immersed for the duration. A true classic.

5 / 5

i RARELY give a book five stars. five stars is what a book gets when i genuinely don’t think it could be improved upon. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is absolutely hAUNTING dude. heavy handed and moralizing, sure, but also a really in depth examination of the human psyche.

dorian gray starts as innocent, young, untouched by the world, and he devolves thoroughly as the story progresses. he traded his soul, his goodness, for eternal beauty, only to discover that beauty alone cannot save a man from destruction.

what is most interesting to me is Lord Henry. he introduces dorian to the damaging idea that experience, hedonism, and beauty are all that matter in the world - opulence, wealth, delaying pain. Lord Henry literally encourages show more dorian to not engage with his feelings of grief and guilt - he’s the ever-philosophizing devil on dorian’s shoulder, always with an agenda and always exercising his influence. so how is it that dorian is the one that turns monstrous?

when i started this book, i thought i would be reading something gay - and sure; this book is gay as hell. but it’s way more of a horror novel than i expected. when you look at who is punished, it becomes clear that the only one who escapes tragedy is Lord Henry. how can that be? why does he debauch and defile himself without consequence? food for thought.

i can think of many aesthetes that would disagree with OSCAR WILDE on this one. beauty, the pursuit of perfect aesthetic achievement, has always been the aim of art - or at least, some people would argue that. i personally think art is created to mirror humanity in truer ways than we can see with the naked eye. the truth that THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY reveals is that beauty is a hollow virtue. you can have everything that the world desires and still have nothing. wealth, power, youth, beauty - and yet be rotten to the core.

basil is the only character that means well and does well, and he meets a less than desirable ending. his fault, his failing, is his worship of dorian. he idolizes gray, and immortalizes him - this is his biggest mistake. we see sin play out in really interesting ways in THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY - vanity, hubris, idolatry. we see how narcissus would have cracked under the pressure of perfection, how obsessive love for oneself can lead a man to commit violence in the world.

altogether i loved THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. the prose is bitingly smart and wildly memorable, as are WILDE’S characters. i never pitied dorian gray - rather, i blamed him for making that prayer in the first place. with eternal youth and beauty comes an inability to evolve - the only thing dorian can do is devolve.

loved it! it is absolutely a modern horror story, and one that everyone should read. (if only to see what a poison beauty and opulence can be). FIVE STARS show less