Author: Oscar Wilde
Published: 1890
Publisher: Random House USA
254 pages (hardcover)
I made a list of classic books I want to read before I die, which ended up being pretty long because I realized that I don’t read a whole lot of classics. Anyway, one of the books on my list is The Picture of Dorian Gray. A friend of mine had to read the book for a literature course a few semesters ago, and although she didn’t really end up liking it that much, the premise of it sounded so interesting to me that I wanted to give it a try myself.
Dorian Gray is a handsome young man (twenty years old, or even a little younger, at the start of the story) who is sitting for a painting that his friend Basil Hallward is doing of him. Basil’s other friend, Lord Henry, visits Basil that day and meets Dorian Gray. Lord Henry marvels at what a handsome, gorgeous person Dorian is, and plants an idea in Dorian’s head that youth and beauty is everything. When Dorian sees Basil’s completed portrait of himself, Dorian comes to the conclusion that Lord Henry is right — his portrait self has attained immortality, but Dorian himself will eventually grow old, ugly and die. He tells his friends how he wishes he and the portrait can exchange places; he shall retain his youth and beauty while his portrait should be the one to grow old and ugly.
Dorian and Lord Henry become best of friends, which worries Basil. Lord Henry fills Dorian’s head with ideas of living life recklessly, and Basil is sure Lord Henry (despite being a good friend of his) is being a bad influence on Dorian. After doing something not quite nice one night, Dorian returns home to find his portrait has changed slightly — there is now a cruel smile where there wasn’t before. His soul is now in the portrait instead. Horrified, Dorian realizes that his wish somehow came true, but after further reflection, decides this is the best thing to happen to him, for every sin he does now, his portrait will bear it instead of his own appearance.
It wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be like, but I ended up really liking it. There is a sense of horror in this novel, and I don’t normally read horror stories of any kind, but the scary factor is very, very subtle. Much of it comes from Dorian looking at his painting. He keeps it covered most of the time with a piece of cloth because he’d prefer not to watch his soul degrade, so as the reader, you don’t see it that often either; but every time he does uncover it, it’s terrible. As the novel goes on, Dorian becomes even more reckless and daring and the portrait of himself becomes even more twisted and ugly. I think the scariest part is that Dorian himself still continues to look like a young, handsome twenty year old even when he’s in his late thirties, and nobody suspects a thing because surely a person that looks so beautiful can’t be harboring an ugly soul riddled with his sins. And isn’t that what real life people think too?
Another theme is influence. Dorian is a pretty normal guy at the beginning of the novel and doesn’t even realize he’s a handsome fellow until he meets Lord Henry; later on, Basil admits he was artistically drawn to Dorian, initially because of his great beauty. Then, not only is Dorian obsessed with maintaining his youth, Lord Henry becomes his BFF and tells him about his views on life and how one should live it, interact with people, and so on. This plants all sorts of ideas into Dorian’s head, and it makes me wonder if the evil things he did later on in the story … was he doing them because of what his friends said about him, thus influencing his nature? Or was he always like this from the beginning and his friends have only tipped him over the edge?
As you can probably tell, I was really fascinated by this novel. However, I can also kind of see why my own friend did not like it that much. Oscar Wilde is really, really good at run-on sentences, haha. In fact, by the time I finish reading a sentence, I often have forgotten what the sentence was supposed to be about. Chapter eleven was brutal to read, for me, because it seemed to be one giant tangent of a chapter. The entire chapter is dedicated to describing what Dorian’s reading in this corrupting book that Lord Henry lent to him, and it just goes into excruciating detail. I wasn’t even wholly sure what the chapter was about until I reached the end.
As the novel is not really action-orientated, coupled with the long-winded writing and dialogue, it can seem a bit slow, or over embellished, I suppose. I personally thought, plot-wise, it was pretty good although I suppose it could have been better in some way. Though the ending was really obvious and predictable (to me), it was also fitting, so I liked it. I think I would have been shocked if the ending wasn’t what I thought.
Overall, this is a great book and I definitely would recommend it. It does require some concentration to read; it’s not the kind that you can just zip through. However, I think it would be worth it.
My Rating: 4/5
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