The Picture of Dorian Gray

"The Picture of Dorian Gray is now a part of the canon that no one would admit to not having read. Most of us have read it and delighted in its witticisms. It’s hard to imagine, but when Dorian Gray was first published, the book was not well received at all. It was totally panned. It was held against him as being an example of an effete character. It was being serialised by Lippincott’s Magazine , and the serialisation of the novel stopped when it became too inflammatory. One of the reasons why I wanted to recommend this book is that it is an example of literature being used as evidence itself. Most of us know the bones of the situation of Oscar Wilde being put on trial in 1895 – the father of his [homosexual] lover became inflamed and found all kinds of characters to use against him [in court]. During his trial, Oscar Wilde had to answer for the attitudes expressed by the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray . We need to stop and think about that. There was a brilliant cross-examination rendered against him. In court, the lawyer who took him on was remarkably talented. He essentially said to Oscar Wilde: “Do you hold these views? Is this your belief?” Oscar Wilde was quite brilliant, but not brilliant enough to see what was being done to him. He very aggressively adopted the views, thereby admitting his proclivities and then having to answer for the fact that in England, at that time, private sexual activity between men was punishable by two years of hard labour. “During his trial, Oscar Wilde had to answer for the attitudes expressed by the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray .” The key point about Dorian Gray is whether a writer must answer for the thoughts and ideas of the characters that he writes. And in this case, he did. It worked very much against him. I wonder whether writers today – who write about murder, perversion and all of the terrible things that populate books and television – should ever be called to task for the thoughts and ideas expressed in their work. Most of us would say that should never happen. There’s a very large difference between the composer and that which is composed."

"The million-dollar question is ‘what is an aestheticist novel?’. Certainly, it’s impossible to read The Picture of Dorian Gray as making any straightforward statement about aesthetics. “The novel throughout takes joy in the surface and look of things” People have tried to offer such interpretations. For example, they have read the novel as about the dangers of treating life purely as art , as Dorian does. He treats fundamental life experiences—such as a woman committing suicide because he has rejected her and broken her heart—as though it’s a play, or merely an aesthetic spectacle. The novel can then be read as a warning against seeing beauty as the only valuable quality in life. The trouble with such interpretations is that it is impossible to read the novel without taking aesthetic pleasure in it. The novel throughout takes joy in the surface and look of things. There is one point when Dorian plans to take some drugs; just as he is doing this wicked thing, the narrative stops and gives a wonderfully detailed description of the Florentine cabinet that contains the drugs. It pauses to appreciate the cabinet before the story continues. The novel itself demands a similar aesthetic appreciation from the reader. If you wish to participate in the novel, you have to appreciate it in the way that Dorian appreciates cabinets, carpets, tapestries and jewels. Is beauty deceptive or can beauty be a moral guide? Does the novel suggest that if you judge by appearances you’ll be led astray, like the people who think that Dorian can’t be guilty of the crimes that he has committed because he is beautiful? Or does the ending of the novel, in which Dorian magically becomes ugly as he is ‘punished’ for his sins, affirm the link between morality and beauty? You can offer equally convincing readings either way round, but only by discarding half the evidence in the novel. So, it’s a novel that engages with beauty, aesthetics and the idea of what an aesthetic life would be, but it offers no answers. The most immediate reference for the yellow book is J K Huysmans’s novel À rebours ( Against Nature). This is a French novel about an aristocrat who indulges in a purely amoral life of the senses. There is a way in which Dorian models his life on that. But you could also interpret the book as Walter Pater’s The Renaissance . The conclusion to Pater’s book is about living your life with this ‘hard, gemlike flame’; life is not about the fruit of experience, but experience itself. Pater removed this conclusion in the second edition of the book, because he was worried that it might corrupt some of young men into whose hands it fell. You can read Dorian Gray as a ‘what-if’ book. What would it look like if you were corrupted? And is that a realistic fear or not? It’s also worth bearing in mind that although Dorian blames the book on his corruption, the preface to the novel challenges the idea that a book can corrupt. It holds that there is ‘no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all’."