The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

The storyline of this book is not very complex. Dorian Gray is a beautiful young man just in his first bloom of life, his beauty captures the attention of a painter, Basil Hallward, who invites him to sit for a portrait. He perfectly captures Dorian's beauty on the canvas. Dorian, after speaking to Basil's enigmatic and thoroughly hedonistic friend, Lord Henry, suddenly realises just how fleeting and transient youth and beauty really is, while simultaneously becoming jealous of the painting's immortality that he cannot enjoy. He fervently wishes that it was the painting that grew older and more sinful instead of him - and his wish is fulfilled.

It's been a long time since I last read this book, and I think I had a fairly neutral impression of it. After growing older and also having had the advantage of taking a module on Victorian literature since, revisiting this book was an absolute delight. There's so much to unpack and discuss about this book.

A huge theme of this book is the idea of art and beauty - obviously. What exactly does justice to beauty? Is it in an immortal preservation in a frozen “original” state, or is it in molding something already beautiful into an image that further fits one's standards and ideals of beauty? At the very beginning chapters of the book, I kinda felt sorry for Dorian because, due to his beauty, no one seems to treat him like a human individual but as a subject on which to project their own ideals.

Basil, though he is extremely fond of Dorian, nevertheless wants to preserve him as much as possible in an “unspoiled” state, as if he could freeze the human being in a snapshot in time just as he had done on the canvas when painting him. It's simultaneously exalting but also dehumanising at the same time, when you refuse to let a person be the person they are, and just want them to be this ideal muse in your mind.

Lord Henry is both self-centered and also more callously apathetic in his treatment of Dorian. It feels like he wants to create a sculpture out of him, almost in his own image. In Chapter 4, when Lord Henry is musing about Dorian and says “to a large extent, the lad was his own creation”. He preaches a lot of his own hedonistic principles to Dorian, swaying him around like a rag doll but also just apathetically watching how things unfurl (“It was no matter how it all ended”).

Even Sybil Vane, Dorian's first love interest, is satisfied not even knowing his name. She simply calls him Prince Charming, and projects onto him all the ideals of the heroic male lead in the plays that she acts in. There is certainly something tragic in the way that, because he incited passion for the first time in her, it drew its source from her talent for acting, and that in turn caused his love for her to wither away.

Though this book is short, at less than 300 pages, it feels so much longer - but not in a bad way. Every sentence is so thought-provoking, and Wilde doesn't waste a single word. This is one of those rare books that I actually wanted to read on an ebook/physical copy because I wanted to slowly digest each line. Whether Dorian Gray can simply be written off as a “villain” by the end of the book is really so, so up for debate which I don't really want to go into here in a review. Nevertheless, this book was such an excellent introspective read about youth, immortality, art for art's sake, hedonism, morality, and conscience.