Reading the classics: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The book

The book first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, and the year after it was released as a book in a revised edition. As I am working on this post, I discover that the book is not necessarily considered a classic….great choice for the kick-off post for the series then! However, in my experience, it does usually appear on “classics” lists, so I am going to count it! At the time of the first publication in 1890 it was considered immoral, by a lot of people, but Wilde took offense to that and defended his story. When it was published in book form though, he had changed some things and added a preface, that stated that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well written or badly written. 

The author

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was Wilde’s full name, but he later changed it to Oscar Wilde because, as he said, the name was too long for someone who was going to be famous. He was born on October 16th 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He went to Trinity College in Dublin and later Magdalen College in Oxford. In 1884 he married Constance Mary Lloyd and they had two sons together. I have for some reason always thought of Wilde as a novelist, but he mostly wrote plays. He also wrote two volumes of fairy tales, and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is actually his only novel. 

Review

I will go pretty in depth with this review, so beware of spoilers below!

I wasn’t really sure what this book was about other than the fact that a young man, Dorian Gray, is gifted a portrait of himself and somehow this portrait grows older, while he himself stays young. What happens after he discovers this fact was new to me. 

This all happens quite early in the book, and I was wondering where Wilde would take the story with the premise set up. 

All the summaries I have seen of this book says that the portrait grows old instead of Dorian, but that is not the whole truth. The portrait also degenerates every time Dorian commits an act of depravity or cruelty. As soon as he discovers that the portrait will bear the (visible) weight of his sins, he seems to go crazy. Because he keeps his youthful innocent aspect, nobody quite believes all the rumors and stories they hear about his bad behavior. 

I found the descriptive language beautiful, but Wilde does have a tendency to wax poetic on subjects such as beauty, love and the philosophy of living, and these passages seemed wordy in a pretentious kind of way to me.

The characters of the story all seem quite base and selfish, perhaps with the exception of Basil Hallward, but even he wanted to keep Dorian to himself in the beginning. But Dorian especially is a selfish person. When he meets Sybil, he doesn’t see her as an actual person, he only sees her as an illusion, and when she ruins the illusion by showing him something of her true nature, he blames her for ruining his life and he leaves her. Later on he decides to go back to her, but ultimately this is only to save himself from the influence of being cruel. But Sybil is dead and Dorian must live with the consequences. But there seem to be none, as her death does not really affect him in any way. His friend Lord Henry is equally callous. They call it a marvelous and beautiful experience, because they don't consider her as a real person. They consider her as an actress in the play of their lives, and her death is an interesting plot point, but of no real consequence to them. This is where Dorian’s downward spiral starts. He apparently corrupts quite a few young men, but we don’t get the details of this, as the first half of the book is about Dorian’s younger years and the last half is about his later life, and his decent. He doesn’t care about his influence on people and only uses them for his own good, before he flings them off and leaves them. All these cruel actions show themselves in the portrait of him that he has hidden away, so that no one else can see what he really is. After a final act of cruelty and selfishness, that seems not to bother him, except to the extent that it changes the portrait, he finally decides to get rid of the picture. But by destroying it, he kills himself. 

As you can perhaps tell, the character of Dorian Gray really bothered me. I cannot stand people who don’t think about the consequences of their actions and, even worse, take no responsibility for themselves and what they have done. That being said, his character was believable, and his actions made a sick sort of sense. 

Is it still a classic to me?

I quite enjoyed the book, although it did have some longwinded, boring passages, especially in the middle, when there is a chapter describing how Dorian Gray lived his life in-between the two halves of the book. That is mainly the reason I only gave it 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. Without theses rambling bits, it would have been a much better book in my opinion. 

But as mentioned above that language was often beautiful and I think the moral of the story is a good one. In my opinion this moral is the fact that you can try and hide, but in the end you cannot escape the consequences of your actions. 

I would consider this book worthy of a place on the classic book lists.  

(All the facts are from www.cliffsnotes.com )