Book Review – The Picture of Dorian Gray by OscarWilde
August 15, 2024 by Vishy
I’ve wanted to read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray‘ by Oscar Wilde for a long time. Recently, one of my friends recommended it highly and so I thought I’ll pick it up and read it.
Dorian Gray is a handsome young man. Or rather he is a beautiful young man. One day, his friend, who is an artist, paints Dorian Gray’s portrait. It is very beautiful. Dorian Gray looks at it and feels that every year, he’ll get older and his looks will fade, while the portrait will be the same, and he’ll always be young in it. He wishes that he stays young and his portrait grows old. Miraculously it starts happening. How it comes about and what happens after that forms the rest of the story.
This is, of course, the simplified version of the story. The actual story is quite complex. It starts off well, there is lots of humour, Oscar Wilde shows off his genius as a dramatist and floods us with quotable quotes on every page – those cool, stylish one-liners that we love him for, they just keep on coming – but at some point, the story turns dark, and then it gets darker, and then becomes darkest. I loved the first part of the book more than the second part, but the second part was fascinating too. One of the fascinating characters in the story is Lord Henry Wotton, who has an unconventional and controversial view of life, and Oscar Wilde makes him speak most of the cool, stylish lines. Sometimes we agree with Lord Henry and sometimes we don’t, but what he says is always fun and pleasurable to read – as they say, you can love him or you can hate him, but you can’t ignore him. Another of my favourite characters in the story is Sibyl Vane, and her story was beautiful and heartbreaking to read. The ending of the story is scary like a horror novel, but I won’t tell you what it is.
There was an interesting mention of something called ‘Dacca gauzes’ in the story, which went like this –
“the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the East as ‘woven air’ and ‘running water’ and ‘evening dew’.”
I found this very fascinating because I read about this recently in Instagram, and it was so cool to read about it again in a 130-year old novel. You can read more about the Dacca gauze in this article here.
I loved ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, inspite of half of it being dark and sombre and heartbreaking. There were so many beautiful, thought-provoking passages throughout the book and my highlighting pen was working overtime. I want to share all my favourite passages here, but when I thought of doing that, I remembered what John Updike said once –
“My reviewing habit, hard to break, was to quote extensively; just as the impossibly ideal map would be the same size as the territory mapped, the ideal review would quote the book in its entirety, without comment.”
Well, can’t quote the whole book here and bore you 😄🙈 So, I’ll just offer a few vintage Oscar Wilde one-liners here, all spoken by the fascinating Lord Henry. Hope you like them.
“I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.”
“I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.”
“To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”
“Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view.”
“Why?”
“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion – these are the two things that govern us.”
Have you read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’? What do you think about it?
