on
3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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English 45C
Rating: 4.5/5
Pages: 213
Started: 23 January 2024
Finished: 29 January 2024
Summary:
Dorian Gray is young, pretty, and pure--the perfect muse for painter Basil Hallward. But when Dorian meets the rakish and immoral Lord Henry, who takes pleasure in corrupting the boy, he is convinced to make a deal with the devil: for all of his imperfections--signs of age and sin--to be projected onto Basil's portrait, while he stays young and beautiful. Yet as Dorian continues to be influenced by Lord Henry's irreverent arrogance and wickedness, he starts to suffer from the incongruousness of his flawless face hiding a stained soul.
Thoughts:
My GSI Matthew Manno was right--the more times you read a book, the better you understand it and the more you like it. Reading Dorian Gray for the second (and a half) time was a far better experience than the previous. I was less caught up on Lord Henry's epithets and philosophizing, and was better able to understand the subtler themes at play in the novel.
Aestheticism was, of course, very present, especially in its tie to physiognomy and in Wilde's prolific use of flowers and flowery descriptions throughout the novel. The themes of portraits and mirrors, what they reveal and what they hide, was very interesting as well, especially considering all the ways in which a person can be a portrait or a mirror of another person (i.e. Dorian himself as a canvas onto which Lord Henry's philosophy was projected).
The idea of vice and secret double lives was also fascinating to look at. Even the novel itself seemed to be bisected, half a relatively sunny, philosophical, and irreverent portrait of high society, while the second half fell more into the Gothic genre. I know I was vehemently opposed to that idea when I read the novel last, but I'm not sure if I agree with myself. The first half of the novel is certainly not gothic, but between the empty house haunted by the eerie portrait, the moral darkness and stain physically projected onto an object, themes of romance and the descent into madness, and the presence of the supernatural which can only be defeated through a sacrifice and a full eradication of sin, it does seem that the novel's second half is distinctly Gothic. However, I do stand by my previous assertion that there is not enough of a sense of vulnerability in the novel as a whole to solidly classify it as a Gothic text.
Either way, this is a lovely book with absolutely stunning writing and a very fun, if at points torturous, set of moral debates presented primarily through very witty epigrams. Reading it again reinforced how clever and beautiful a book it is.