#from Goodreads: '[Self] reimagines the novel in the milieu of London's early-80s art scene'

[soloharryenthusiast]

oh my god ana i finished the picture of dorian gray the unscensored version and please don't disown me but i was so...disappointed? with it. i don't know, from what people were talking about this hedonistic life he lived i was expecting like masquerade parties and orgies and a ton of drugs but all i read was how he had these obsessions with jewels and like embroidered tapestry???? maybe i was relying to heavily on what i had envision in my head !!! idk ??

I’ve been staring at the screen for a good 20 minutes writing and deleting typing and backspacing and yet here I am writing the opening sentence to what I think will be an Unnecessarily Long Reply for the umpteenth time. I apologise. It’s just that I know & love this book so intimately and effortlessly that the thought of someone being disappointed by it leaves me gobsmacked. Let’s see, let’s see.

The fact that you approached The Picture expecting explicitly illustrated instances of raw hedonism is hardly your fault. Every blurb and every ~critic’s~ insistence on classifying it as Gothic Horror would lead you to believe that this is a novel about a beautifully wicked man whose portrait grows old in his place. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The ageing portrait, the beautiful man who never changes in appearance… that’s merely the excuse, the metaphor Oscar chose to convey a greater ideal, to serve Art, to express what Victorian society insisted on repressing. Because that’s one thing you ought to keep in mind: As brave, as beyond-his-years as Oscar was, 1880’s Victorian England was still 1880’s Victorian England. Oscar couldn’t have expanded on Dorian’s hedonism more graphically even if he wanted to, or else no one would’ve printed it in the first place. But back to basics: Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul (TPODG Chapter 2). This book is an ode to the senses, a celebration of art for art’s sake. It’s not about the orgies Dorian partakes in or the drugs he experiments with or even the atrocities he commits post-Henry, it’s about everything in between. You speak of his obsession with jewels and embroidered tapestry, but this is not an obsession born from a materialistic streak in him, but from his fascination, or rather his reverential attitude towards beauty in all its forms. Dorian doesn’t love these things because they are expensive or exclusive, but because in his eyes they exist with the sole purpose of being admired. Because that’s what lies at the centre of the Aesthetic Movement - Oscar being the face of it -, the worship of beauty & pleasure above all else. That’s what lies at the centre of this book. But underneath all that the fact remains that Dorian was influenced into becoming who he eventually became, because he was forced to confront a reality that was much too great for him to bear. It’s easy to forget that once upon a time Dorian used to be good, that he wasn’t always vain and selfish and cruel. I think he often tried to forget that, too. Tried to drown out whatever remnants of his old self came knocking at his door by indulging in everything & anything worth indulging in. It was, perhaps, some of Henry’s cowardice that rubbed off on him. From Dorian Gray as a Symbolic Representation of Wilde’s Personality: “[Dorian’s] subsequent passion for objets d'art, so lengthily described in chapter XI, is simply a way ‘by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne’ (140). He is afraid of that side of his own personality for which he is not prepared to accept responsibility’. Take, for instance, what Dorian said to Henry about Sibyl’s suicide: “I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded”; Dorian, unable &/or unwilling to accept that his actions have moral consequences, has chosen to seek refuge in art, by choosing to see life from a purely aesthetic perspective. His sorrows are Romeo’s, his madness he borrowed from Hamlet, his joys belong to Bacchus. The Picture is, I’d say, a philosophical novel with Gothic elements to it, not the other way around. It’s a menagerie of sins disguising themselves as a thousand shades of grey (ha!). Reading this book, becoming involved in Dorian’s descent into wickedness, it’s supposed to be a subtle, almost imperceptible transition; we are, as we read The Picture, experiencing things vicariously through Dorian. The devil’s in the details. We, too, are kept away from the ever-changing portrait, charmed by Dorian’s faux naivete and bewitched by his looks. Distracted - or fooled - by ephemeral but true displays of humanity - his initial interest in Sibyl Vane, a moment of pity after Basil’s confession, ‘you must always call me Master Dorian, Leaf […] I assure you I am quite as fond of jam now as I used to be’ (chapter 8), his treatment of Alan Campbell in chapter 12, how you can feel Dorian’s pity for him, the by now out-of-character yet ultimately touching gentleness with which he treats him, even while asking him to do the unthinkable - all of these things make it so easy for us to forget about the skeletons in the closet, the picture in the attic. The chapters about the tapestry and the china and the perfumes are Oscar’s way of showing you what Dorian’s life was all about. What he gave his soul up for: Freedom of sensation. ‘TO drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play’. The Picture is not a graphic novel. It’s not a Horror novel. It’s not a cautionary tale. It doesn’t hand you vices & morbid obsessions & forbidden desires on a silver plate, it alludes to them, it whispers them in your ear, it offers you glimpses but never the full picture. And therein lies its charm, methinks. 

The full text of Oscar’s Helas, because I think it’s relevant to Dorian’s, shall we say, predicament, and very reminiscent of the whole “Lord Henry is what the world thinks me” bit: 

TO drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?— Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll         Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay Which do but mar the secret of the whole. Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance  Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God: Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance— And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?