![]() Wilde is also often remembered for his witty quips and paradoxes and his conversational one-liners, which are legion.Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes) is a young naive man arriving in Victorian London to live in his newly inherited mansion. But in a career spanning some twenty years, Wilde created a body of work which continues to be read an enjoyed by people around the world: a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray short stories and fairy tales such as ‘ The Happy Prince’ and ‘ The Selfish Giant’ poems including The Ballad of Reading Gaol and essay-dialogues which were witty revivals of the Platonic philosophical dialogue.īut above all, it is Wilde’s plays that he continues to be known for, and these include witty drawing-room comedies such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as a Biblical drama, Salome (which was banned from performance in the UK and had to be staged abroad). The life of the Irish novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is as famous as – perhaps even more famous than – his work. In the last analysis, as he and his portrait do not exist separately from each other, he must live with himself – and with his conscience – or must die in his vain attempt to close his eyes to who he has really become. It will, in the end, destroy him: in lashing out and trying to destroy the truth that stares back at him from his portrait, much as he had destroyed the artist who held up a mirror to his corrupt self, Dorian Gray destroys himself. Dorian’s own eternal youth comes at a horrible cost: without a soul, all he can do is go in pursuit of new sensations, forever chasing desire yet never attaining true fulfilment. She had eternal life, but not eternal youth. Her name, Sibyl Vane, points up the vanity of acting and the pursuit of skin-deep appearance at the cost if something more substantial, but her first name also acts as a warning: in Greek mythology, the Sibyls made cryptic statements about future events.īut there’s probably a particular Sibyl that Wilde had in mind: the Sibyl at Cumae, who, in Petronius’ scurrilous Roman novel Satyricon (which Wilde would surely have known) and in other stories, was destined to live forever but to age and wither away. ![]() When she loses her ability to act, he abandons her. Then, when Dorian falls in love, it’s with an actress, not because he loves her but because he loves her performance. Lord Henry is so taken by the beauty of Dorian Gray that he sets about being a bad influence on him.ĭorian is so taken by the painting of him – a two-dimensional representation of his outward appearance – that he makes his deal with the devil, trading his soul, that thing which represents inner meaning and inner depth, in exchange for remaining youthful on the outside. We say ‘at bottom’, but that is precisely the point: the novel is, as many critics have commented, all surface. The Picture of Dorian Gray is, at bottom, a novel of surfaces and appearance. Dorian’s life is destroyed by his commitment to a life of pleasure, even though it entails the destruction of other lives – most notably, Sibyl Vane’s.įar from being a book that would be denounced from the pulpits by Anglican clergymen for being ‘immoral’, The Picture of Dorian Gray could make for a pretty good moral sermon in itself, albeit one that’s more witty and entertaining than most Christian sermons. Despite his statement that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a highly moral work, as the tale of Faust was. The overly sentimental style favoured by mid-century novelists like Dickens had given way to a more casual, poised, nonchalant, and detached mode of storytelling.Īt the same time, we can overstate the extent to which Wilde’s novel turns its back on earlier Victorian attitudes and values. It was Wilde who, famously, said of the sad ending of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, which Dickens’s original readers in the 1840s wept buckets over, ‘one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without’ – what, crying? ![]() Wilde’s novel is a good example of how later Victorian fiction often turned against the values and approaches favourited by earlier Victorian writers. Both Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Gaskell, the author of Mary Barton and North and South, were ‘Victorian’ in that they were both writing and publishing their work in Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901).īut whereas Gaskell, writing in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, wrote ‘realist’ novels about the plight of factory workers in northern England, Wilde wrote a fantastical horror story about upper-class men who are able to stay forever young and spotless while their portraits decay in their attic. We tend to speak conveniently of ‘periods’ or ‘movements’ or ‘eras’ in literary history, but these labels aren’t always useful. ![]()
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