My first encounter with Oscar Wilde’s THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY was a dreadful audiobook that made Wilde’s refined aesthetes sound like horsey country squires. Reading it in print didn’t make me like it better.
For those who don’t know, Dorian is a shallow but beautiful young man; Basil, a talented painter with some decidedly homoerotic feelings for Dorian, has painted an exquisite portrait.of his friend. Basil’s cynical friend, Lord Henry Wotton, tells Dorian that while nothing is better than being pretty — it’s certainly worth more than thoughts or opinions — it will inevitably fade away and make Dorian dull and repellent. Dorian wishes that didn’t have to be so. Later, after he turns on a woman he thought he loved, she kills herself; he discovers his painted face now has cruel lines around the mouth. Dorian has the face of perpetual youth and innocence, no matter how badly he sins.
There’s an obvious similarity between Dorian and Henry Jekyll: both have found a way to hide their sins from the rest of the world, and thereby sin more. Though Dorian’s approach is obviously less effective: rumors and scandal swirl around him but nobody can really believe someone so charming is as black as he’s painted. My main interest in the book was the idea that Sir George in the 1920 John Barrymore Jekyll and Hyde is modeled on Lord Henry. I’ve run across this several times but I don’t think I buy it. They’re both encouraging the protagonist to sin but while Sir George is a libertine, I think he’d be appalled at Wotton’s constant cynicism; Wotton, unlike Sir George, talks a good game but never seems to do anything. Plus there’s a 1910 stage version that has both an adulterous Danvers Carew (the equivalent character to Sir George) so possibly that’s the real influence (it’s not as well known as the Wilde book, which may explain why nobody notices)
As to the book itself? Still insufferable. Wilde has great bon mots but Wotton tossing them off in a steady stream gets tedious, and there’s a huge chunk of the book devoted to exploring Dorian’s aesthetic interests, which I skimmed over (at least that’s easier to do than in an audiobook).
Like Victorian Demons, FICTIONS OF LOSS IN THE VICTORIAN FIN-DE-SIECLE: Identity and Empire by Stephen Arata deals with Victorian fears that men were becoming less manly (something we’re still obsessing over today, sigh), though focusing on fiction. H. Rider Haggard shows men conquering their weakness by heading out into the Empire. Dracula presents as the vanguard of a vampire master race ready to take over England. Sherlock Holmes shows the middle class is much less stable and sensible than they appear, from the dysfunctional family of A Case of Identity to the banker-turned-beggar in Man With the Twisted Lip (though Arata erroneously claims the murderous father of Adventure of the Speckled Band gets away with his crimes). Hyde and Dorian Gray are examples of the decadent aristocrat, both combining elegance and superb good taste with cruelty and sexual deviance. Like the other book hardly essential research reading, but still valuable.
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