Readers' Review: "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-02-23/readers-review-picture-dorian-gray-oscar-wilde
In the preface of his 1891 novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” Oscar Wilde writes "diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital". He would no doubt be pleased to know that his book with its themes of beauty, art, pleasure, and hedonism has been generating a diversity of opinion for more than one hundred years. But Oscar Wilde’s book fared far better than he. A few years after its publication, he faced charges of “gross indecencies”, and went from being a British celebrity to a broken, penniless man living in exile. Join us for this month's Readers Review, a discussion of “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, by Oscar Wilde.
Guests
Nicholas Frankel
associate professor of English. Virginia Commonwealth University
editor, "The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition by Oscar Wilde"
Thomas Mallon
director of creative writing at George Washington University, author of seven novels, including "Bandbox," "Henry and Clara," and "Dewey Defeats Truman." Among his nonfiction books are "A Book of One's Own," "Stolen Words," and "Mrs. Paine's Garage." He's a frequent contributor to "The New Yorker," "The Atlantic Monthly," and other magazines.
Leslie Maitland
former reporter for "The New York Times"
Comments
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I read it as an eighth-grader in Lynchburg, VA. I was the daughter of a computer programmer, going to school with the children of doctors and lawyers, wearing only the best in a "preppy" age. I read it twice more in high school, simply to affirm my belief that, perhaps, not having "all the best" was actually a blessing. I still love the book, despite all the reasons my conservative connections have told me to eschew it.
We spend the majority of our thought and energy in the commercial sector, designing, producing, and selling sophisticated products and services that are intended to satisfy the most demanding tastes. Yet we neglect to devote anywhere near the same energy and support to nurturing people. Oscar Wilde could have been describing us when he wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “Nowadays people know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
Comments?
Thank you for noting the homosexual undertones in this novel. I went to a very 'Victorian' style High School and repressed my own homosexuality throughout my High School years. I read and wrote and entire paper about Dorian Gray using his notions of beauty and entrapment as metaphors for his own homosexual tendencies. I got an F for paper for having missed the point of the novel.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054403/
The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960)
The movie is wonderful and stars Peter Finch as Oscar Wilde.
My reading of Dorian Gray never forgets that Wilde was a Greek. It's the speech he hoped to make at his second trial. Beauty, the Platonic Forms, the place of the mortal. Dorian's "evil" is his impiousness, his lack of reverence.
The 'foolishness' of Wilde & Queensbury doesn't seem a random act, a quirk, but a consistent part of Wilde's living the Romantic tradition. The Orphic descent to Hell, the dismemberment, and (potential) Re-collection through the Forms, is the very meat and drink of life to a classical scholar initiated in the Neo-Platonic /Rosicrucian/ Alchemical variety of Masonry. (These are driving, fundamental influences that are mostly ignored in scholarship, but I think that is changing as we become more syncretic. Meanwhile, Art keeps the flame that compensates vision.) I think Wilde saw this as Fate and embraced it as it embraced him; that he felt he was marked to follow Beauty with the same fervor that enraptured Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti.
This is simply intuition, not an attempt to write to rewrite history. We're way beyond that with Wilde. He is now just what he knew he would become: Wilde is myth.
The bigger question is: Does Orpheus know the price he will pay for his infatuation and longing for Apollo? Does he persist anyway? It's the very same knowledge of the Virgin holding her son on her lap. A metaphor for our understanding that we are mortal and all it will take to be immortal... I believe most sincerely that this was (and is) the sort of thinking that would have been in Wilde's head. In his marrow and flesh.
Wilde is left to us in his work. In that he succeeded brilliantly.
We read it in junior high school, too. Also, my grandmother, an English teacher herself, gave it to me to read, along with other Wilde works.
In school, I remember discussing the moral concepts and cultural obsessions with physical appearance. I think my grandmother encouraged me to read Wilde because of his brilliance and wit.
I remember, too, when I was younger that many adults used "Dorian Gray" as a cultural reference for a number of relevant issues. Everyone seemed to understand, maybe because they'd all read it, but also because they remembered the popular film.