This book reminded me why I hate classics.

Like Frankenstein, it starts out with a great premise: what if a portrait bore the brunt of age and sin, while the person remained in the flush of youth? How would that person feel as they watched a constant reminder of their true nature develop? And like Frankenstein, it gets completely bogged down in uninteresting details and takes forever to get to the interesting bits. Seriously, in a 230-page novel, the portrait doesn't even start to change until 100 pages in.

And it's so damn flowery. Every time Lord Harry starts talking (and believe me, he likes to talk) he's so witty. Witty witty witty. Ahahaha, you're soooooooo worldly wise and charming. And entirely cynical! You just have a quip for everything, don't you? Look, reader, look. See Harry. See Harry corrupt Dorian. Corrupt, Harry, corrupt!

I actually ended up skimming most of the book. I really thought about stopping, but I hoped it would redeem itself by the end. It didn't. I should have just skipped to the last page. So to save you, dear reader, the same pain I went through, is the summary of Dorian Gray (spoilers, of course):

Dorian semi-consciously makes Faustian bargain to transfer all his sins and signs of age to his portrait. He sins and feels guilty about it, but keeps doing it anyway. He finally decides to get ride of the portrait/evidence and stabs the painting. Surprise, it breaks the spell, and he is left ugly, old and dead while his portrait returns to its original form. The end. You can thank me later.

UPDATE 9/3/12: Since this review is still around and kicking four years later, I thought I might point like-minded individuals to a new parody of classic literature to the tune of Call Me Maybe: Call Me Ishmael!

Nothing like a nice homoerotic 19th-century classic to start the spring season off with.

What would you do to live forever? Would you sacrifice your morals? Would you sacrifice your friends? Would it all be worth it?

Dorian Gray was an asshole! He abandoned all goodness in his life for worldly pursuits. He wanted nothing more than to be young and beautiful for the rest of his life and he was willing to do whatever it took to remain that way.

Dorian Gray is a study of morality and the effects of what giving into our shallow, vain, and carnal desires have on our physical and spiritual bodies. What other possible outcome could there have been for a young and handsome Dorian Gray? Take away all consequences and what's left for a person to do but be an asshole.

It's an old book that reads like an old book. It was hard to feel bad for Dorian. He made his choices. He knew what he was doing, and he had the opportunity to remedy the situation but always chose to delve deeper into his own depravity. He gets no sympathy from me. A spoiled man-child obsessed with his looks. Not the most relatable character.

Un excellent classique que je ne connaissais pas. J’ai été envoûtée par la plume de l auteur. Ce roman est tellement d’actualité dans nos sociétés actuelles il y a tellement une course à la jeunesse éternelle. Est-ce qu’un joli minois cache une noirceur d’âme? Pourquoi pas 5 étoiles j’aurais aimé voir la descente aux enfers de Dorian j’aurais aimé que le livre soit plus long. Un petit bijou
Si vous cherchez un bon classique foncez

4.25

ﾟ.*ꕤ( 4.5 stars )⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

"each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil."

this was not just a book,
this was an experience.

‍I really really enjoyed this book, it was refreshing, different from my usual reads (in my classics era??) but I have to say that there are some parts that are slow and personally I had to stay concentrated to understand fully what was going on

Funny how books are moulded by the circumstances in which they have been read.

In Dorian Gray, some of its aspects are very easy to grasp and do not need great explanations.

For example, Wilde’s epigrammatic style is so very distinct. I have had a lot of fun selecting quotes and peppered with them my reading progress.

His sentences are like small diamonds. They can be held and set against the light and moved around so that their different facets will shine and reflect the world around them. They are also so tightly self-contained with an inner perfect structure that cannot be easily modified. They are perfectly balanced. I am thinking of sentences such as:


Nothing can cure the soul, but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

These nicely constructed phrases seem to form part of the collection of precious objects that are presented in this novel as in a gallery or Kammerschatz. There is an abundant series of orchids, amethysts, velvety tapestries, emeralds, ivory caskets, jonquils, skull-caps parsemés with pearls, Japanase Foukousas, hyacinths, ear-rings of emeralds, Arabian aspilates, carbuncles of cinnamon-stones....

Yes, Wilde's precious epigrams could dangle nicely from a bracelet.

Wilde got clearly infected with préciosité during his extended visits to France. This novel has such an obvious debt to the French aesthetic tradition, with its explicit references to the Symbolistes and personalities such as Gautier (with his consolation des arts) and Huysmans, that I almost felt embarrassed. Wilde liked to shock but he himself was bewildered by Huysmans À rebours, published about six years before his own work, in 1884. This “book without a plot” and with that curious jewelled style,.. that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes is the culprit of Wilde’s novel. As he diagnoses: Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.

If Wilde’s book echoes the luscious elements of the French A Rebours, it, however, does have a plot. It is burdened with a very Gothic intrigue which I associate so strongly with Britain and the Victorian puritanical culture. Even if at the time of publication the book run into trouble with the authorities and was partly censored, the moralist background is there.

Another clearly discernible aspect is its Faustian theme. And this has fitted very well in my recent book choices. I have lately read the original anonymous Doktor Faustus, plus three of its later variations (Marlowe, Mann, Banville). Dorian Gray presents an interesting adaptation in which Art is the Devil and one of the characters, Lord Henry Wotton, who, like Wilde, loves to pronounce epigrams, plays a sort Mephistophelian role as the messenger or instigator. Wotton spells out the Faustian theme: By the way, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose – how does the quotation run?—his own soul. P. 209.

Another echo to my parallel reading is the Dantean contrapasso that unfolds in some sections of the story, for each crime bears its misshapen brood.

But the aspect that has intrigued me the most is less obvious and has to do, again, with the circumstances surrounding the moment I have chosen to read this book. Unavoidably these shape my interpretation.

I have recently read Balzac’s Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu and visited a couple of art exhibitions for which this novel is relevant. Both Cézanne and Picasso were fascinated by Balzac’s work because they identified with one of the characters, Frenhofer, the artist who seeks to represent the ideal in art, with tragic repercussions. In several of his paintings Picasso developed Balzac’s theme: the painter in front of his canvas trying to extract from the model its inner qualities and the ability to represent them through beauty. Cézanne’s practice of working and reworking a given motif confirms a similar obsession in this quest for the ideal.

So, it is to this particularity in Dorian Gray that I have devoted most thinking. For Wilde has also developed this theme: the relationship between the artist, the sitter and the painting. But in his pen, it becomes a devilish dance, and, as in Balzac, it also proves to be fatal.

Art and life and the act of representation. A trio. Which one is to have the upper hand?

In his Dorian Gray, Wilde does away with the creator once he has achieved the ideal. The artist has become redundant when it is recognized that his painting had gone quite off. It seemed to me to have lost something. It had lost an ideal (p.208).

Without the artist, the process of representation is corrupted and the nature of the sitter is not captured but instead comes apart. Beauty and eternity are split in the pact and the canvas grabs the soul.

The trio becomes a duel and just one survives.

Art withstands.




-------

Picasso had felt the threat and he rabidly fought and counterclaimed the role of the painter in face of the negation of the artist that PopArt implied. His painters, his paintings, would not be annihilated.

His art is with us.

It was his doing.

Oh Dorian. Oh Dorian.

When I first read this book in the fruitless years of my youth I was excited, overwhelmed and a blank slate (as Dorian is, upon his first encounter with Lord Henry) easily molded, persuaded, influenced, etc.

Certain Wildisms (Wildeisms?) would take my breath away. Would become my mottos to believe in. To follow. To live.

Lines like:

"It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."

"If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat."

"Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place."

"You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

Re-reading this masterpiece and coming upon these highlighted lines was possibly more interesting than the book this time. Why had I highlighted these lines? Do they still mean the same thing to me, as they did when I first took note of them, enough to highlight them? I still love all of those lines. But no longer feel so strongly for them.

Now these are lines that stick out still to me. Or were newly underlined on the second pass through. New Wildisms to mold me.

"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?"

"Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty."

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one."

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects."

"Ah! this Morning! You have lived since then."

"what brings you out so early? I thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till five." --A new personal favorite. That I follow very seriously.

"She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm."

'He thought for a moment. "Can you remember any great error that you committed in your early days, Duchess?" he asked, looking at her across the table.
"A great many, I fear," she cried.
"Then commit them over again," he said, gravely. "To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies."
"A delightful theory!" she exclaimed. " I must put it into practice."

"Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion."

It turns out that all of these quotes occur in the first 45 pages, except that last one which is right near the end. And it seems most of my reviews end up being mostly quotes from the book itself, but I figure this is what shaped and informed my reading, so I want to share it with all of you. What do you think of it all?

That said, poor Sybil Vane! Poor James Vane! Poor Basil Hallward! Shit, even poor old Lord Henry Wotton! And Dorian! Oh Dorian! Lead the life you did and for what?

That's all I am going to say about the book. I don't think I shall read Against Nature, for fear of being seduced like Dorian.

If you're tired of this review or just tired in general, stop now and come back later. I am going to include two more quotes from the book that truly fucked me up. So much I had to read them at least 3 times in a row. And then transcribe them here for you. The last section, thats the one that did it. Beautiful.

Here goes:

"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral-immoral from the scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry and cloth the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals; the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us. And yet-"
"And yet," continues Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice,"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream-I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sins, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. 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. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame-"
"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me. I don't know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don't speak. Let me think, or, rather, let me try not to think."

Whew.
And:

"There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamored of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those who minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black, fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of the birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleeper, and yet must needs call forth Sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin, dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain."

Yep.

I finally get around to reading this and find out it’s really good! Figures

It's been close to 20 years since I read this and I enjoyed this more, maybe it's maturity, this time around. I upped the stars from 3 to 4 stars.

I felt like Oscar Wilde is lambasting the upper class of British society, the gentlemen. He makes them into such idiots and they have the most ridiculous logic. Such as, a gentleman shouldn't need money. His class should be enough. To me if felt like Oscar was roasting this society and making them as ridiculous as possible.

So much time is spent on beauty. Beauty is the centerpiece of the story. The whole book, beauty is lovely and it's own moral. When people are ugly and old, they are wicked. Oscar would fit right in with American culture of the 21st century. These old gentleman keep telling Dorian how wonderful he is as a person because he is so beautiful and he could never do evil. What I learned from watching TV, movies and real life celebrities, beauty can be genuine and good hearted, but most of the time beautiful people tend toward being cruel and heartless; okay amendment, at least the ones who long for fortune and fame. I have known plenty of beautiful people who were good hearted. I'm just trying to show the ridiculousness of this idea.

This is a great gothic book and it has it's own chills and thrills. There is love, murder and the mystery that is Dorian Gray. Maybe, I need to go back and read some other books from my past and see how my views of them have changed. This was interesting.

I do love read the wit of Oscar Wilde. I think he is talented and I will be finding more works of his to read.

Facts that I know for sure:

1. I got this edition because I'm a slave to the aesthetics and that's exactly the kind of motive the ghost of Oscar Wilde would approve of

2. It’s safe to assume that no matter what I’m doing, at any given moment in time, at least 20% of my brain capacity is perpetually dedicated to making sure I am clever enough, gay enough, and dramatic enough to earn the approval of the ghost of Oscar Wilde

Upping my rating to 5 stars. What a powerful novel about choices and consequences! Written in 1890 by the brilliant Oscar Wilde, this novel follows the life and times of Dorian Gray. Dorian is a gorgeous blond 20 year old when he meets up with the painter Basil Hallward, who paints the ill-fated portrait of Dorian.



Through Basil - who dotes on Dorian just a wee bit too much, though at least he has Dorian's best interests at heart - Dorian also meets the cynical Lord Henry Wotton ("rotten"?). Lord Henry, despite Basil's pleas, decides (just for the amusement of it, and apparently because Lord Henry loves to hear himself talk) to share his cynical epigrams - Wilde at his dark humorous best - and thoughts on the beauty of a hedonistic lifestyle with the innocent Dorian.

Dorian is sucked in by Lord Henry's ideas, especially those in a nameless (critics point to À rebours) yellow book that Lord Henry shares with Dorian. Dorian may be innocent, but he’s rather shallow and vain. And so this:

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

Dorian makes some fateful choices in his life — choices that lead him further and further down paths of evil, even though he keeps his youth and looks. And meanwhile Dorian's portrait (which he quickly hides away in a locked upstairs room) is showing all of the corruption and age that Dorian himself escapes ...

This is a much more complex story than I would have guessed before reading it. The fall of Dorian is a gradual process. It’s jump-started by Lord Henry, who is terribly witty and demoralizing (in the truest sense of the word).

“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.”

But Henry is more talk than action, while Dorian eventually has to try everything, no matter the cost to others ... or himself.

Dorian doesn’t just choose dissolution for himself; he pulls others along with him. A distressed friend tells him: “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. You have filled them with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You led them there.”

“I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art.”
-tThe Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Wow! This book can really mess with your head.

Let’s start off by my confession. Most people won’t describe this book in these terms, but it’s my review, and this is my take….

The Picture of Dorian Gray is about a young man named Dorian Gray. He is exquisitely good looking, and his friend, Basil Hallward, paints Dorian’s portrait. In walks, Lord Henry Wotton, Harry, who convinces Dorian that youth is everything, and Dorian wishes that his portrait would grow older while he could retain his youth.

Lord Henry is an extreme narcissist, and his conversations with Dorian are riveting. There are so many quotable quotes, and the discussion of his philosophy is highly intriguing. He essentially views anything honorable as horrible and boring.

Although the book is The Picture of Dorian Gray, the book really belongs to Lord Henry. He is far from a perfect character, but he is definitely not boring.

Tip: Audible has a version of this for free!

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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