Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Earlier this year, while strolling through Chelsea, I found myself in front of 34 Tite Street, the red-brick home where Oscar Wilde lived from 1854 to 1900 with his wife Constance and two sons. It was in this period building where Oscar, the-then celebrated and respected playwright, wrote his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, first published in 1890.   

I vaguely knew the story, having seen a film-adaptation several years prior and I began to read the tale of Dorian Gray, as Wilde wrote it.  I have just finished reading the novel, and I found it fascinating. It is not a long story. One could easily read the novel in a week or two.

To fully appreciate the story, one must dispense with contemporary cultural norms and allow oneself to be transported full-throttle into late 1800s Victorian-era London.  I say that for a few reasons.  The characters often speak in witticisms which today seem musty and irrelevant.  There are depictions of gender, ethnicity and class which would easily rile modern sensibilities.  The fact is, however, that the society in which Wilde lived and describes in the novel was characterized by a distinct class structure and strict roles of gender.  It was also a time when the largest immigration into impoverished East London (Whitechapel, in particular) were Jews from Poland, Germany and Russia; this was at the very time of the Whitechapel Murders when no Englishman would dare suggest that Jack the Ripper could be English.  If the Picture of Dorian Gray were first introduced in 2020, political correctness would likely undermine its prestige as a classic or pivotal novel… however, context is everything.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a strange and wondrous tale of a young man who never ages, but whose portrait depicts the tell-tale signs of his sins and deteriorating body.  The story borrows much from the German legend of Faust who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge and pleasure.  Wilde, however, makes the story very British.

What is wonderful about the book is how the words string together seamlessly, transporting the reader to Queen Victoria’s London, with illustrative visits to the grand theater, patrician dinners, and a dramatic journey into a squalid East London opium den.  If the book demonstrates nothing else, it demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s mastery at words, as evidenced in the following paragraph:

“The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was waiting for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him stone."

Wilde sprinkles numerous provocative and intriguing axioms and observations about character traits throughout the story.  In one scene, for example, Dorian Gray, proclaiming that his portrait reflects his own soul, cries out, “Each of us has heaven and hell in him.”  In another scene, Dorian is confronted for his lack of grief or remorse over the death of someone with whom he was intimately involved.  He responds, “What is done is done.  What is past is past... It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.  A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I do not want to be at the mercy of my emotions.  I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."  In the same scene, he declares, "If one does not talk about a thing, it has never happened.  It's simply expression… that gives realty to things."   What the novel has to say about the subject of beauty and age is interesting, suggesting that once one loses their youth and beauty, one becomes essentially irrelevant in society, that youth and beauty are what we all worship, covertly or overtly.  In another important scene, the painter of Dorian’s portrait states that the work reveals less about Dorian and more about himself.   He then muses about what art reveals and conceals about its subject and artist.  The story of Dorian Gray, then, seems to be less about Dorian Gray and more about Oscar Wilde who injected his own pathos into the tale.   

Many critics of Wilde’s era condemned the book as indecent and lambasted Wilde for promulgating a profligate and debauched lifestyle.  The novel was used as evidence against him in his trial.  Eddie, however, after reading the novel, suggests Wilde is decrying immorality and serving up a strong deterrent:  ultimate ruin awaits those who taint humanity with their personal corruption.  I suggest that the novel represents Wilde’s longing to free himself from the constraints of Victorian morals and manners, to be able to enjoy the beauty and wonder of this world before he grew old and died.   Sadly, he was not able to do that.  In 1895, only a few years after writing the controversial novel, Wilde was ostracized, put on trial, and sentenced to prison for “two years with hard labor” for “gross indecency."  In 1900, Oscar Wilde died penniless in a Paris bedsit.