The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Each year, my second year A level English Literature students are required to undertake a Period and Genre Study as part of their coursework requirement, and have a great deal of free reign in selecting texts to focus on. Once they've chosen their focus texts, they have a summer to read and prepare notes, with the essay writing starting in earnest in September. The wonderful thing about this is that it forces me to re-read a great many classics so that I can properly advise my students as they write their responses. This year, two of my students have chosen to write about one of my favourite books, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', so without further ado, here are some interesting points raised by my recent re-read.

Fin de Siècle literature is full of seedy locations, corrupt aristocrats, heady excesses and supernatural events, and in many ways, Oscar Wilde's only novel has come to be seen as the archetype of this paradigm. At the beginning of the narrative, a talented portrait artist, Basil Hallward, is showing his new masterpiece to his friend, Lord Henry Wooton. The art work in question is a portrait of an extraordinarily beautiful young man named Dorian Gray. Lord Henry, a dandy and aesthete, is fascinated by the picture, and despite Basil's protests, proceeds to befriend him and corrupt him. Lord Henry makes two key interventions in Dorian's life which prove to be extremely fateful. Firstly, he makes the seemingly offhand remark that the painting will always be young and beautiful, while Dorian will age. This drives Dorian to make a wish almost reminiscent of a fairy tale: that all of the ravages and corruptions of time will be visited on the picture, not upon him. Soon after Dorian mistreats his innocent theatre actress fiancée, he notices the painting has changed. There is now, around the mouth, a cruel twist. Extraordinarily, Dorian's petulant wish has come true, but he should have been more careful, especially given Lord Henry's second intervention, which is the gift of the "yellow book", a French novel full of salacious questing after new sensations. Dorian embraces the philosophies of this book (which, although never named, is Huysman's notorious 'A'Rebours', which also fascinated Pete Doherty of The Libertines and Babyshambles, with similarly corrupting effects, some might say) and becomes more and more embroiled in secrets and scandals, which are darkly hinted at, but never seen "on screen" until fairly late in the piece (in this, Wilde's book follows closely the methodology of the novel it most closely resembles, 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson' which involves a similar identity displacement). Despite all of his crimes, Dorian remains the same physical specimen he was when Basil first committed his likeness to canvas. His soul, however, is a different matter.


The enduring appeal of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is not hard to understand. It is at once a social satire of Victorian polite society (though a rather darker one than any of his comedic plays), a Gothic tale of human corruption and an analysis of the dangers of obsessing too much over beauty and youth. The truth that Wilde hints at is that beauty and youth are powerful because they are fleeting. Extended into middle age, they become parodic and unpleasant qualities, and of course the activities Dorian chooses in pursuing his journey through eternal youth make him a great many enemies as well as causing the eponymous picture to corrupt in the privacy of the locked room it resides in. The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew the danger and indignity of an obsession with one's own beauty, as evidenced by the myths of Adonis (who was loved by several quarrelling goddesses and then killed by a wild boar sent by the jealous Artemis) and Narcissus (who fell in love with his own reflection and died of starvation) and Wilde reminds the modern world of late Ninteenth Century London that this remains true.


Stylistically, the book is very far removed indeed from the stuffy tomes that held sway over the mid-point of the century. The prose is direct, striking and full of seductive irony, and the dialogue, particularly in any scene involving Lord Henry, is often laugh out loud funny, being of course full of Wilde's trademark epigrams. The characterisation is rather two-dimensional, with Basil being the sensitive and emotional artist, Lord Henry the ultimate Wildean aesthete and Dorian the corruptible innocent, but as the book is essentially a moral fable, this isn't too much of a problem, especially when one considers how radically and refreshingly different this approach must have been after nigh on seventy years of novels which essentially trace a single character's entire life journey from birth to marriage or death.


In concluding this little look at a well loved classic, I can only say that this is one of those books which is a joy to re-read, one that has had an enormous cultural impact on the past 130 years, and one which never forgets that examining morality and examining the essential absurdity of life are not mutually exclusive. I'm looking forward to seeing what my students make of it...