THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY was Oscar Wilde's first and only novel. It was first published as the lead story in "Lippincott's Monthly Magazine" on 20 June, 1890. The success of the short-story lead to its being made into a novel. Althogh Wilde wrote a couple of plays, a books of poems, and essays, it was this book that established him as the most successful society playwrite of that time.
Just recently there was an article in the Times Of India which said that Oscar Wilde was officially the greatest literary genius. What honor! Like all geniuses his personal life was a mess. He lived pursuing the pleasure of his senses and constantly mocked the standards of his society. There were whispered rumours of homosexual friends and telegram boys. However his love for mysteries and secrets made sure that noone could point a finger at him. He used this as a technique in The Picture of Dorian Gray where, (as he himself put it) “what Dorain Gray’s sins are no one knows”. This helps the reader identify with the character of Dorian Gray(if they want to). However, he was brought to trial and the opposing coulsels believing the book to have autobiographical parts used the book in the proceedings.
CRITICAL REVIEWS“Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring ( or some decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals”
- SCOTS OBSERVER, 5TH July 1890
“We need emphasize only once more, the skill, the real subtelety of art, the ease and fluidity withal of one telling a story by word of mouth, with which the consciousness of the supernatural is introduced into , and maintained amid, the elaborately conventional, sophisticated, disabused world. Mr. Wilde depicts so cleverly, so mercilessly. The special fascination of the piece is, ofcourse, just there – at the point of contrast.
- WALTER PATER in The Bookman
The novel would seem like something he worked all his life to put together - it had a part of himself in it. 'It aimed at blurring the distinction between high and low, respectable and outcast – suggesting duplicity is an essential part of existence.'
I have put down some lines from the book below -
“ He grew more and more enamored of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.”
“It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true object, or amongst the two objects, of life; and in his search for new sensations that would at once be new and delightful and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences and then having as it were, caught their color or satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament, and that indeed according to certain psychologists, is often a condition of.”
“..and I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I don’t know what to say. Why is it Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy at the Guards who committed suicide. You were his greatest friend. There was Sir. Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Lord Kent’s only son, and his career...”
“I should have to see your soul”
“Yes, I shall show you my soul. You shall see the thing that you fancy only God can see.”
“It is too late, Basil,” he faltered
“It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow’?
“The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each of us. I know it” – Dorian
“ Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood.”
“ He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?"
