In English - Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

   I am currently revising my baccalauréat, that I take on June 19th. But writing articles about litterature could be regarded as revising, don't you think ?

Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde

Genre: fantastic novel

Publication date: 1890

Country: United Kingdom

Summary

   In the Victorian London, Dorian Gray is an extremely handsome and wealthy young man. He has a painter, named Basil Hallward, as a friend. Basil paints Dorian's portrait, a magnificient painting, in which he put all of his talent and love for Dorian. Lord Henry Wotton, one of Basil's friends, makes Dorian's acquaitance and wants to admire his portrait. Seeing the picture of the beautiful and young Dorian, he can't help tell him its beauty won't last long. Piqued, Dorian makes the wish for his picture to age instead of him. Dorian gets more and more fascinated by Lord Henry's personnality, his cynic sense of humour, his scepticism and his hedonism, so that he merely sees Basil anymore. Dorian soon falls in love with a lovely actress, an innocent young girl he admires for her beauty. But the love affair will end tragically and Dorian will throw himself into the seediest parts of London still looking young and innocent, while the evil portrait shows the signs of his age and abuses.

My opinion

    The thing that stroke me the most about this book was its being an aesthete's novel. The descriptions are polished, and the fascinating originality of Lord Henry's character and his propensity to throw disillusioned maxims at any time are perfect illustrations of the Portrait's aesthetics. I loved this aspect of the novel very much, I don't usually read much of this kind of novels so I was pleased to discover one.

   But the novel is also philosophical: this book raises several issues such as time passing, self-representation and the moral principle according which you don't get away with the consequences of what you do, and it is very interesting to see how this theme is being renewed (for example, I am thinking of La Peau de Chagrin by Balzac). The Victorian London reminded me of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson and Conan Doyle's novels too.

   Nevertheless, I didn't enjoy the novel that much. To my mind, the amount of maxims about everything make the novel quite difficult to read and pauses the plot a bit too much. The thing is, there are so many flashes of wit one after the other that it is quite hard to focus on each one and that, to my mind, they are not as powerful as they could have been.

To conclude

   3,5/5, a aesthate's novel