Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

When reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, I was constantly annotating the cynical witticisms running rampant through the novel. They were absolutely delightful, and some made me chuckle out loud. 

The majority of the quotes I highlighted were the sayings of Lord Henry, because even though he could be a bit sexist and a bit wicked, he said everything in a charming way that made him seem harmless. He appealed to my own cynical nature, and I only realized after I read it that Wilde masterfully manipulated me just like Lord Henry manipulated Dorian Gray. Lord Henry is so charmingly deceitful, no wonder Dorian Gray fell under his spell.

Although I loved the cynical witticisms, that was originally all I could say about the book. If you follow my bookstagram, you might remember I said that I was struggling to wrap my head around my main takeaway. Besides the obvious themes of selling one’s soul, the sin of vanity, and art as a mirror, etc., there seemed to be an underlying layer that I couldn’t quite grasp, and it nagged at me. 

So, me being me, I researched. And when Joyce Carol Oates said, 

What the strangely moved reader is likely to carry away from Dorian Gray is precisely this sense of something riddling and incomplete. One feels about it as one feels about the most profoundly haunting works of art-that it has not been fully understood.

and when Houston A. Baker Jr said,

The Picture of Dorian Gray has been seen as everything from an attack on late-Victorian hypocrisy to a story of the domination of an older man by a beautiful youth; this broad range of interpretation seems ample proof that the novel is not so indisputably clear and simple as some would make it out to be.

I felt a lot better about my own ability to analyze literature. 

But while researching, I realized that the only aspect of the novel I wasn’t sure I liked might be the key to understanding my main takeaway. Wilde implied that a single person or object can have an almost overwhelming influence on another person. Dorian Gray was overcome by Lord Henry and the book Henry gave Gray, although Lord Henry himself says that, “’art has no influence upon action.” But I also think it was intentional, because Lord Henry likens “influence” to “project[ing] one’s soul” and one of the main themes is the selling of the soul. 

I’m going to keep pulling on this thread in a personally assigned research paper, which I’ll definitely post for your studious perusal. 😉