"The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

This is one of several books I’ve slowly been making my way through this year. This one in particular was a slog for the first few chapters, but after the first quarter was finished, things picked up and I read until the end that same day. As a story, I thought it was alright. There are certainly interestingly explored ideas and elements, but it’s so painfully slow to start that I doubt I would ever make it through a book like this if it weren’t for its legacy. I want to emphasise that I mostly enjoyed the latter three-fourths of the novel, but my overall opinion is heavily colored by how little enjoyment I found at the start of the story. The opening’s inanity could be spun into a deconstruction of the mundanity of life that leaves Dorian so obsessed with Lord Henry — I can think of several ways to justify such a reading — but at the end of the day the fact is that it was unpleasant to read for uninteresting reasons. On the thought of deeper meaning in incredibly boring passages: chapter eleven is simultaneously incredibly important to the book and the most mind-numbing collection of text I’ve read outside of a textbook. I understand what Wilde is doing but I feel as if there has to be a less headache-inducing way of emphasising Dorian’s obsession with beauty and descent into materialism.

Despite being a cautionary tale about Hedonism and excess, Wilde doesn’t propose any form of middle ground. It does not read as if Wilde is advocating Puritanism; despite being a condemnation of excess the setting does not decry pleasure itself. The Picture of Dorian Gray is probably the most famous example of excess taken to an extreme; the reductio ad absurdum of a life without true consequence or limit. The book’s thesis is clear: seeking pleasure over all else rots the soul and is ultimately unfulfilling. But in its focus on condemning both extremes, it felt as if the novel had little to say about the ocean in between. What makes things unclear to me is the surrounding nuance: Lord Henry is the proponent of pleasure, the one who (intentionally or otherwise) set Dorian down his path of extreme self-indulgence and destruction — but we spend so little time with Henry’s actions that I am not sure if Wilde intended to paint his behaviors as problematic or not. Henry is undeniably a bad influence on Dorian, but Henry also goes more or less unpunished for his actions — or, more accurately, his words. Henry is ultimately divorced by his wife but it’s not something he’s horribly upset by. Dorian’s comeuppance comes from a lifetime of decay culminating in anxiety and self-loathing that leads to suicide. Henry receives none. I’m left to come to my own conclusions, and it’s perhaps a poor reflection of me that I struggle to find any. I’m sure it’s intentional that Henry goes unpunished, his evils were too benign to attract external retribution, but it, like Dorian’s death, makes it deeply unsatisfying.

Dorian’s fate is anticlimactic. His end did not play out how I expected. One could easily assume, as I did, that there would be some form of karmic justice at the end of the novel. James Vane, returned from his travels, hunting down and killing the man who drove his sister to despair. Perhaps the painting being destroyed — Basil, horrified by the man his friend had become, burning the portrait to ashes and destroying Dorian’s soul in the process. It’s intentional and meaningful that none of this happens. The “comeuppance” that Dorian receives, if one could call it that, is from his own anxiety, fear, and ultimately self-inflicted death. In a world where he is all but immune to external consequence, he still destroys himself from the inside. It’s poetic that, while attacking with the intention to destroy the reflection of his dirtied soul, Dorian only succeeds in killing himself.

I’m loath to critique a book like this, with myself nearly a century and a half removed from its target audience and context. More specifically, I feel strange about leaving a review calling the novel “mediocre.” It’s not really my place to do so, but if this is to be an honest reflection of how I felt about it, this is where we’re left. I don’t expect The Picture of Dorian Gray to stick with me in the way that other stories have — Nothing, by Janne Teller, or “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, or Harlan Ellison’s “Paladin of the Lost Hour” and “The Deathbird” — but I am glad to have read it and I hope that it’s left me equipped to recognize the later works it had an influence on.