This is the first time I've read this classic book....but I've loved Oscar Wilde for as long as I can remember.

There is much to take away from this book. Themes exploring shallowness, selfishness, superficiality, hedonism, morality, and flaws of life and being human.

The dialogue is witty and humorous.
Oscar Wilde had great insights on beauty....
I love this quote:
"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. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learn professions. How perfectly hideous they are!
Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of 80 what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful".

Very reflective read....a little like looking into a mirror!

Once again, I find myself not liking a classic. Is it me? Have I been spoiled by a hundred years of advancement in every area of life so that I am now unable to enjoy or even appreciate the "genius" of a time-tested author like Oscar Wilde? Apparently so, because, for the most part...



Dorian Gray is the impossibly beautiful young man who becomes the subject of a portrait by the painter, Basil Hallward. When the artist, who has become infatuated with his model, introduces him to Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian is immediately seduced by Lord Henry's witty and corrupting devotion to hedonism. The center of the story is, quite literally, the picture of Dorian Gray, which Dorian soon discovers reflects the hideous corruption of his soul while his outward appearance (his youth and beauty) remains untarnished.

While I love the premise of the story, it read like a psycotherapist's musings on society in general and a couple of the characters specifically, namely Dorian and Henry. And the musings went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, ad infinitum.



And the worst thing, imho, was that there were several interesting things that happened — suicide, murder, debauchery, broken friendships, etc; however, we were never made privy to any of the details. These things were basically mentioned in passing. Again, maybe it's because of the period of time in which this book was written and those details would have prevented the book from even being published. I don't know. All I know is that my imagination is used for picturing people, places and things that are described. I don't want to have to imagine what happened as well.



This rating is totally a reflection of my enjoyment of the book, not of the writing. I think it goes without saying that it is well-written. Maybe if I read it in 1890, I would have loved it. Probably. But it's 2017 and, for me, it was just too much philosophy and not enough content.

ما هو أبشع كابوس تخيلته في حياتك؟
ما الذي تراه أصعب شيء يمكن أن تتعرض له

ماذا لو استطعت تجميع كل خطاياك و تخبئتها في مكان سري لا يعلمه ‏سواك

ماذا لو استطعت أن تنفض يدك عن أي جريمة ارتكبت‏
وأي شر اقترفت

ماذا لو استطعت تحقيق المستحيل
وضمنت الخلود..؟؟

وماذا لو كان ذلك المكان السري هو وجهك الذي نحته فيلسوف فنان ‏على الورق..‏

وماذا لو كان بإمكانك رؤية جميع مفاسدك تتجلى يوما بعد يوم على ‏وجهك الكامل الجمال في عيون الكل

سواك..‏

:::::::::::

ما رأيك يا دوريان في قول المسيح
ماذا يستفيد الإنسان لو خسر روحه وربح العالم أجمع؟
---------
‎ ‎
هذا هو ملخص الرواية في نظري

الرواية المعتقة بالفلسفة
والسخرية
والفانتازيا
‏
‏ الرواية المدهشة والمخيفة وكاشفة خبايا النفس البشرية‏‎ ‎

يعري فيها وايلد -لا النفس البشرية فقط بل المجتمع الإنكليزي بأكمله
وزيف من كان يطلق عليهم الطبقات النبيلة

إنها كاشفة لكلل ما هو خاوٍ بريقه خادع
فور ما تقترب منه يتكشف لك الخواء والسطحية ‏والأنانية

....
والرواية تترك منبهرا
فمك مفتوح على أخره في شهقة لا صوت لها
‎
‎

:::::::::::

ربما من أسباب عشقي لأوسكار وايلد هي قدرته الفذة على الخيال
وقدرته على الإتيان بأفضل العبارات إدهاشا
في عمقها وفلسفتها وسخريتها
أكثر بكثير في رأيي من شو أو مارك توين

دوريان جراي كان العمل الأول الذي أقرؤه لهذا العقل اللامع
ومن يومها أدمنته

Fascinante estudio sobre la hipocresía, el mal mayor de toda sociedad. Asimismo, es una oda hedonista a la belleza física y a su enorme importancia, mal que les pese a algunos.
Somos lo que parecemos.

n  Before you die, experience the love of a writer, poet or painter. If you're lucky enough to be an artist's muse, they will immortalize you.n

Find The picture of Dorian Gray on Amazon/Kindle/Audible

2021 - I re-read this for university and loved it even more the second time round... Lord Henry is a paradigmatic sophist and his epigrams are delightful (partly because it's easy to forget that he is more rhetoric than truth). The connection between youthful appearance and character is also so fascinating, especially since Wilde is writing at the end of the century where physiognomy is an outdated science. What does it mean to be young? And can innocence ever be restored?

2017 - If you haven't already, you HAVE TO read this! Wilde delves into the cartesian dualist debate, asking us to question where the self truly does reside (and contradicting the popular Victorian idea of physiognomy). In his personal Fall and descent into sinfulness I saw similarities with H.G. Wells's 'The Invisible Man' where sin thrives simply because the individual cannot be held accountable. Similarly, the debate about the value of art is intriguing and, after reading this, I recommend reading Poe's 'The Oval Mirror' because, again, there are definite similarities.

n  There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.n

--------------------------------------

n   “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!”n

Be careful what you wish for.


Oscar Wilde - image from Wikipedia

Man sells soul to the devil in return for…something, in this case a body encased in eternal youth, while a portrait takes on the outward manifestation of his aging and his sins. It ends badly, as deals with the devil usually do. This is hardly a unique tale. In fact, it is a bit of a trope, a Faustian bargain. There is a lovely listing here of examples new and old. Absent, of course, is the most famous, and least successful example of a soul-selling, really more of a soul-buying, from Matthew 4:1-11, when the devil made Jesus an offer he actually could refuse. Don Corleone would have been very disappointed.

But it is a bit more complicated than that, as these things often are. It is always a challenge and an adventure to read a classic. Books become regarded as a base part of our culture for reasons. They can establish motifs, or ways of seeing the world that resonate with their contemporary audiences (well, not always) and future generations. They can offer us a portrait of a time and place, a culture, a class, a social or political issue. They can illuminate moral questions, deal in universal themes, offer insight into human motivation, whether individually or en masse. And we come to see them in particular ways. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the prior re-pub in this Gravelight series, what one finds in the original is not quite what one might expect, given how popular culture has transformed the story by bleaching out important nuance. That is less the case with Dorian Gray, at least in part because there appears to have been fewer iterations of the tale in popular entertainments. But, nonetheless, our understanding of the story is generally of the bare bones sort. There is plenty of flesh to give those bones some added heft.


Jeffrey Keeten - they came to take his furniture, but the only way they will take his books is from his cold dead hands - image from his site

The history of a book matters. Keeten’s introduction offers an excellent take on how Dorian was received at publication. It generated quite a bit of attention on its release. There were many who were not amused. That may have contributed to the fact that The Picture of Dorian Gray is singular in being the sole novel published by Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. The subject matter was considered a big no-no in 1890. The Dorian of the title is a man of many tastes, and apparently insatiable appetites. He manages to bring ruin to both men and women. It was not, in particular, the ruination of women that caused a storm. The periodical in which it was first published was withdrawn from bookshops due to the outrage.

Wilde was a very popular writer of the time, wearing his sexuality like a badge. A tough stance to assume in a culture that preferred to sate it appetites and interests discretely. His novel was a shocker for the time in portraying homosexuality in interest, if hardly in action. The painter of Dorian’s portrait is clearly smitten with him, dazzled by his physical beauty, which he sees also as representative of an underlying perfection.

For all the shock of its homosexual content, there is no physical contact of that sort in the pages. (an earlier version may have been more direct) All is insinuation, suggestion, hinting. It is the same technique that has worked quite well for ages in the horror genre. Shadows, rattling chains, creaky doors, unsourced moans. Sometimes we are offered the shocker scene in which the monster is revealed. The Opera Phantom’s mask is pulled off to reveal the horror of his face. Hyde’s deformity is revealed as the window into Jekyll’s soul. And so it is here. Dorian’s true nature is revealed. The “I’m shocked, shocked” reaction of contemporary critics suggests more about what they were projecting onto the novel than what was actually there.


The portrait, used in the 1945 film by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright - image from Wikipedia

So, what is the horror that is on display? It is the hedonism of the late 19th century English upper class, sashaying about in the interesting, entertaining, appealing drag of philosophy. Henry argues for the unashamedly sybaritic life. Art need have no meaning, no being other than itself. Apply to humans. Is art, is beauty the highest value? When beauty is left to dangle free, disconnected from any higher value, what is its impact on the world? Actions have no moral content. It is in fact a positive good to live a life dedicated to the primitive accumulation of sensation, through the arts, through physical pleasures, not just of sex, but of sight, smell, sound and touch, to experience beauty in all its forms. Try everything. Art for art’s sake in the guise of human experience. Some people have an amazing ability to come up with excuses for their excesses, explanations, some reason for why they shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. Like the poor and taxes, we will always have the morally challenged, the malignant narcissists, the sociopaths with us.

n  beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won’t smile.... People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....n

But if this was on the up and up, there would have been no need to keep one’s behavior secret. It is clearly a place where freedom crosses the line into license. The practitioners of such a “philosophy” knew they were up to no good. They merely wanted to hide from the responsibility. Dr Jekyll was quite happy to have an alter-ego he could let loose on the world, to have the sorts of fun he could not have as himself in public view. They knew, not just that their behavior was wrong, not just that it ran afoul of extant mores, but that their reasoned explanation was taffeta thick.


Hurd Hatfield as Dorian in the 1945 film - image from Wikipedia

It is not the barely latent bisexuality of the novel that marks Dorian as fallen, it is that he had ruined peoples’ lives, men and women, not by having sex with them, (which is suggested, but never acted out on the pages) but by corrupting them in various ways, by causing them to become as self-centered, as pleasure-seeking as he was. A person can get away with this if he or she is wealthy enough. Paying off porn stars to keep quiet about an extramarital fling certainly fits into such a scenario. Dorian manages to keep his scandals at bay with the use of his wealth.

It is as true today as it was when Wilde was writing this book, the selfishness, the hedonism, the amorality of the wealthy feeds on the blood and life forces of those they exploit, few of whom can afford to fight back directly. (You go, E. Jean!) I imagine this is a core of what Wilde was getting at, and the real reason his critics were so angry at him.

Dorian does not come to his corruption unaided. He arrives as a beautiful young man, who is seen as being as pristine inside as he is on the surface. The Victorians were very concerned with exteriors, believing that they served as personal screens displaying to the world a person’s character. But then he is introduced to Lord Henry Wotton. Henry proceeds to emit a torrent of nonsense, albeit amusing nonsense, mocking the morals of the time. Wilde, speaking through Henry, is cattier than my living room when I shake a container of treats. Henry offers a torrent of false, cynical aphorisms, suitable material to be printed on small pieces of paper and tucked inside poisoned fortune cookies. Were he opining today, Henry would be posting outrageous clickbait opinions on Twitter. Here are a few examples. They are legion, and will sound familiar in tone to characters from Wilde’s 1895 theatrical triumph, The Importance of Being Earnest

n  …beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.

…the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet-we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together or go down to the Duke’s—we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.

…as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.n

It is the cynical Henry who finds in the gullible Dorian the raw material with which to cast the young man into a representative of his very hedonistic view of life. Dorian offers the plasticity of the young to the dubious molding of the amoral. The young man is all ears. He even takes time away from the painter, Basil Hallward, to learn at Wotton’s feet. .

n  To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. n

We are offered a bit of background on Dorian, to help explain his vulnerability to Lord Henry’s dark influence. And are even given a bit of theatrical brimstone to explain how the deal with the devil is achieved. Neither really matters much.


Angela Lansbury as Sibyl Vane in the 1945 film - image from Wikipedia

Early on, Dorian is smitten with a beautiful young actress, Sibyl Vane, who considers him her Prince Charming. It is Sibyl’s appearance, her elevated acting performances, in addition to her beauty, that attracts Dorian. But when her dazzling talent on stage suddenly vanishes, she can no longer offer Dorian the thing he most admired, and he dumps her, cruelly. It is the first crime to which we are witness, the first time his painting changes. The pursuit of beauty and sensation above all else has claimed its first victim. There will be many more, but most of those bad behaviors take place off screen.

Wilde put all of himself into this novel

n  “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be.”n

Unlike Lord Henry, and Basil Hallward, though, Wilde acted on his urges. Unlike Dorian, Wilde was imprisoned for his actions. Unlike Henry’s and Dorian’s depraved indifference to the harm they caused others, it is not clear that Wilde was a cruel person.

Dorian is clearly a corrupt individual. Whether he arrived there unaided or had a push is of secondary importance. Lord Henry is clearly corrupt as well, even though we do not see him engage in any physical acts of treachery. Perhaps the corruption of youth, pulling Luke Dorian to the dark side is enough. Henry and Dorian both represent the worst of the amorality of the Victorian age, the hypocrisy of the upper class. This seems the true target of Wilde’s effort. He is not celebrating amorality, but pointing an accusing finger at it, and letting us know who are its most damaging practitioners. At one point Dorian even shows enough residual humanity to want to turn over a new leaf, not appreciating that to succeed he would need to upend an entire forest. (don’t write. I know that the leaf in question was supposed to mean a book page.)

Keeten goes into some detail on the derivation of the name Dorian Gray. Why not Loki? There are reasons. In fact, there is a lot you will enjoy learning when you check out his introduction. It is rich with detail about the author, the book, and the controversy that surrounded its publication. It also looks at the lasting impact Wilde has had on modern culture. It will definitely increase your appreciation of this wonderful novel.

I suppose there might be a modern version in which Gray and his portrait are linked by quantum entanglement, or one should be made if it does not already exist. The battle between inner self and outer manifestation is certainly an eternal literary theme.

For the second time, a sojourn down the Gravelight illuminated alley of classic horror has proved stimulating and enlightening. From Keeten’s smart, incisive intro to the chance to see what the original of a household-name classic was really on about, The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a richly rewarding reading experience, clever, funny, dark, shocking, intelligent, satirical, and satisfying.

n  There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.n

Review posted - 02/23/24

Publication date – 11/6/23

I received copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray from Gravelight Press in return for a fair review.

n  nn  nn  nn  nn  nn  n

This review has been cross-posted on Coot’s Reviews

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Keeten’s personal, FB, and Instagram pages

Prior reviews for books intro’d by J. Keeten
----- Exhumed: 13 Tales Too Terrifying to Stay Dead – edited by David Yurkovich
----- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – edited by David Yurkovich

Items of Interest
-----Les Cent Nouvelles - a book of coarse French stories referenced in Chapter 4
-----Margaret of Valois
-----Manon Lescaut - an 18th C. novel in which young lovers live a life of sexual and social freedom, while giving morality little thought – referenced in chapter 4
-----The St. James’s Gazette - referenced in chapter 10
-----Elephantis - author of a sex manual in Classical Greece – noted in Chapter 11
-----Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans – cited in the introduction – Dorian’s reading of this 1884 celebration of sensory gluttony contributes to his corruption
-----Wiki Deals with the devil in popular culture

I was sure i'll like this book but it was so boring, long and uninteresting. The long descriptive pasages were the death of me! I read a paragraph and immediately forgot what it was about, which was pretty frustrating.

Not for me.

just might fuck around and start channeling my inner dorian gray by flinging myself dramatically on the nearest sofa and bursting into tears

So I read all of Wilde's plays a couple of years ago but for some reason I never read this at the time. This is probably the number one most requested book for me to read. So I read it. Are ya happy now!? ARE YA!?

I really rather enjoyed this. Well, obviously. I mean, did you honestly think I wasn't going to like The Picture of Dorian Gray? It's by Oscar Wilde for fuck's sake. His prose is like spilled honey flowing across a wooden table and waterfalling onto the floor beneath. The viscous liquid flowing slowly over the edge. His plot, perfectly paced, moves slowly as we wade deeper and deeper into Dorian Gray's maniacal life. Over the edge we go as everything goes wrong, there's death, there's pain, there's long conversations about art. We hit the floor as we finish and we see nothing but sweetness amassing around us as we escape from Wilde's prose. Putting the book down you see the light has hit the stream and it glows and it shines and it sparkles and you stand there mesmorised by what you're witnessing and you put the book back on your shelf and feel sorry for the book you read next.

So, yeah, it's good.

Forever young. I want to be forever young

Warning, contains spoilers and bad anti aging tips that might ruin one's complexion

Do you really want to live forever?
Well, together with all the others, why not? Besides faith, similar weird pro death ideologies, and stuff, nobody wouldn´t like to live until whatever comes after this edition of the universe with the big freeze, rip, bang, or rebirth by a black hole. But it can also be quite

Lonesome on the immortality front
For instance, if all the others would still age while one stays young. From a sociopathic or dark empath perspective, this wouldn´t seem that bad. One should probably camouflage oneself with makeup to seemingly age, to not let others get too suspicious regarding bathing in the blood of virgins that wasn´t extracted by harmless and consensual blood donations, selling one's soul to the devil, and sacrificing humans to the flying spaghetti monster or whatever one is into fetishizing to get kinky style aroused. Without proper aging style, this could lead to

Envious people ruining a show that could go on for a very long time
If this would be the only front, it could be easy to handle. But of course, poor, weak ephemeral flesh embedded, human minds, souls, and other questionable and theoretical constructs, just can´t handle the pressure of seeing the manifestations of one's true age in a not so flattering painting. Then paranoia and other mental issues kick in and the whole thing tends to go

Towards psychological gothic horror
That combines the fear of death, evil forces, psychiatric disorders, and some historical fun facts about the society of the Victorian era. The snobby elites with all the decadence and superficiality are contrasted with Dorian slowly drifting towards insanity. While the aging Dandys (seemingly every age has to have a hilarious hipster equivalence for people addicted to manifesting their narcissistic personality disorders with second hand embarrassment creating styles) keep pimping hard, poor Dorian gets more and more problems with

Handling his OCD tendency to take a short glimpse
That might be a breach of contract. And if already human lawyers are a pain in some body regions, imagine what a literally hellish contract may include. All in all, together it´s one of the best classic novels of all time, combining social satire with dark elements and the big questions of life and death and thereby immortalizing the ingenuity of Oscar Wilde.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

(3.5) This reminded me of why I like classics. Some parts dragged on too long but I enjoyed it overall!