9780099511144

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THE PICTURE OF DORI AN GRAY

THE PICTURE OF DORI AN GRAY

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. He later lived in London and married Constance Lloyd there in 1884. Wilde was a leader of the Aesthetic Movement. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. He published a revised and expanded edition in 1891 in response to negative reviews which criticised the book’s immorality. Wilde became famous through the immense success of his plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. He later lived in London and married Constance Lloyd there in 1884. Wilde was a leader of the Aesthetic Movement. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. He published a revised and expanded edition in 1891 in response to negative reviews which criticised the book’s immorality. Wilde became famous through the immense success of his plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

In 1895, after a public scandal involving Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol for ‘gross indecency’. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was based on his experiences in prison and was published in 1898. After his release, Wilde neverlived in England again and died in Paris on 30 November 1900. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.

In 1895, after a public scandal involving Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol for ‘gross indecency’. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was based on his experiences in prison and was published in 1898. After his release, Wilde neverlived in England again and died in Paris on 30 November 1900. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.

OTHER WORKS BY OSCAR WILDE

OTHER WORKS BY OSCAR WILDE

Vera: or, the Nihilists Poems

Vera: or, the Nihilists Poems

The Duchess of Padua

The Duchess of Padua

The Canterville Ghost

The Canterville Ghost

The Happy Prince and Other Stories

The Happy Prince and Other Stories

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories

A House of Pomegranates

A House of Pomegranates

Lady Windermere’s Fan

Lady Windermere’s Fan

A Woman of No Importance

A Woman of No Importance

Salomé

Salomé

The Sphinx

The Sphinx

An Ideal Husband

An Ideal Husband

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Ballad of Reading Gaol De Profundis

The Ballad of Reading Gaol De Profundis

OSCAR WI LD E

OSCAR WI LD E

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Irvine Welsh

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Irvine Welsh

17 19 20 18 Vintage

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Introduction copyright © Irvine Welsh 2007 This edition reissued in Vintage in 2016 First published in Vintage in 2007

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in 1890 This revised edition was first published in 1891 www.vintage-books.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099511144

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

INTRODUCTION

Both a cautionary tale of a life of depravity and sham, and a tender portrait of the aesthetic urge unbridled and spinning out of control, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is his only novel, but it has arguably enjoyed almost as wide an impact as his drama. In fact, only The Importance of Being Earnest can rival its claim to be Wilde’s bestknown work.

A dark, supernatural affair, its sparkling wit never completely conceals a Gothic layer that would have done justice to Edgar Allan Poe at his best. It’s probably this winning combination which continues to excite the many contemporary novelists who still draw inspiration from this book. It very directly impacted on my own novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, while Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, is an updated version of Wilde’s tale, set in early eighties Britain where the AIDS epidemic was quietly incubating. And it’s not only novelists who have fallen under his spell; it’s hard to imagine a range of British artists from Joe Orton to Morrissey and the Smiths without Wilde’s precedent. The book has also made it onto the big screen, most famously in 1945 when, despite the Technicolor available to him, it was shot in black and white by director Albert Lewin. It proved a good judgement call: the film ironically won a cinematography ‘Oscar’. With the current vogue for remaking old movies, an updated version surely seems inevitable.

As a writer Oscar Wilde has never gone out of fashion and, indeed, is probably now as popular as ever. His devastating wit, his sense of the artist as an aesthete and his personal life as an unlikely martyr for sexual liberation; they all serve to keep him at the front of our collective consciousness in a way that very few authors have matched. Like fellow Irishman Jonathan Swift before him, Oscar Wilde was often paradoxically regarded as an archetypally English writer. But then, the

best satirical writers in England have generally possessed a quality that marked them as outsiders to the WASPish paradigm; even Evelyn Waugh had his devout Catholicism.

It may have been his only novel, but Dorian Gray’s excellence is hard to dispute, with the playful and the sinister shadow-boxing throughout its pages. Instructively, Wilde was an admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The compelling literary device of duality, realised in extremis in Stevenson’s book, is handled more deftly here in order to highlight one of Wilde’s key concerns: the theme of aestheticism and corruption, with the aesthete and criminal combining in one person.

The narrative is relatively straightforward. Artist Basil Hallward paints the portrait of a ‘beautiful’ young man. (Rather than a merely ‘handsome’ one. Wilde also makes Dorian roughly the same age as the author himself when he was reputed to have commenced engaging in homosexual activity.) The artist becomes enchanted with his subject, who in turn entertains the narcissistic wish that it would be this lovingly produced painting that would grow old, while he himself retained his youth. This aspiration is realised as the figure in the portrait sinisterly ages; growing more debased in concert with the protagonist’s moral decline, even as Gray himself continues to appear unsullied and innocent.

Dorian Gray is certainly no Raskolnikov figure. Unburdened by conscience, his killing of a young woman, ‘as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife,’ only surprises him in that there is no sea-change in his viewpoint or in how he perceives his broader environment. ‘The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden.’ Like Dr Frankenstein, the cerebral Hallward tries to make sense of what he comes to perceive as his creation, while his friend Lord Henry Wotton is more content with spouting axioms and encouraging Dorian in his sensual adventures. Despite theabsence of overt homosexual acts within its pages (although Dorian’s ruination of young men is alluded to), the book is highly homoerotic, both in itsalmost fetishised descriptions of Gray as an Adonis figure, and in the competition between Basil and Lord Henry, whovie for his attention. ‘Why,mydear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you – well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of

exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.’ This mirrored Wilde’s own homoerotic idealisation of youth, and his valuation of beauty above intellect. This would prove to be acostly vice, setting him on a journey that would, via his attraction for Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, take him to the courtroom, then a charge of homosexual misconduct and a sentence of two years of hard labour in prison. Originally charged as a sodomite by Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, on 2 March 1895 (a charge which was obviously almost impossible to substantiate), the victorious Wilde then made what was to prove a disastrous error of judgement in initiating a suit of criminal libel against Queensberry. When his suit failed in April, countercharges by the Marquess followed. After a spectacular court action, Wilde was convicted and sentenced. He would follow his prison ordeal, broken in spirits and health and all but spent as a creative force, in a self-imposed Parisian exile until his death three years later.

What became known as ‘the love that dares not speak its name’ is very much in evidence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as both older men make repeated comments in praise of Dorian’s good looks and youthful demeanour. Basil Hallward goes as far as to to state: ‘As long as I live, the personality of Dorian Gray will dominate me.’ In a sense this is a somewhat curious claim, as Dorian is himself a shallow creation and his depraved quest for new experiences far less entertaining than the drawing-room debates and speculations of Hallward and Lord Henry. This fact of the voyeurs being more interesting than the actor also helps explain some of the novel’s uniqueness as a work of fiction.

For Wilde, who emphatically asserted the basic amorality of art and the artist, The Picture of Dorian Gray paradoxically has a very conventional moral message. The inevitability of the handsome but empty Dorian’s eventual come-uppance seems to contradict Wilde’s statement that ‘No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.’ Wilde’s espoused valuation of style before traditional morality made him many enemies in Victorian England. Yet The Picture of Dorian Gray contains that same ‘unpardonable mannerism’ suggesting that this advocacy was itself an affectation, a stylish tick if you will. In more recent times the novel has inspired different moral objections. The least sympathetic character (apart, perhaps, from Dorian Gray himself) is Mr Isaacs, the manager at the theatre where Sybil Vane

performs. Dorian refers to Isaacs as a ‘hideous Jew’ and a ‘monster’. Some critics have suggested that Wilde might have been guilty of playing to the populist gallery of the Victorian age’s anti-Semitism, but I believe that this flies in the face of his natural subversive tendencies. In his art and his life, he took great delight in swimming against the tide and revelled in disdaining and ridiculing popular prejudices. As there is no real trace of anti-Semitism in his other works I am inclined to see the scorn of Isaacs instead as a device to highlight Dorian’s crassness and superficiality.

Oscar Wilde was far more than the nihilistic dandy and persecuted homosexual of enduring popular imagination. For writers, and aspiring writers in particular, his wit raised the bar, to the extent that many feel it almost obligatory to adopt some of his poses: as essential to the trade as a pen and paper. It’s also difficult to imagine gay culture without Wilde – where would our homosexuals be without at least a pretension towards that trademark caustic humour?

The quintessential Wilde experience is probably sitting in a traditional gold-leaf and red-velvet theatre, enjoying a quality production of The Importance of Being Earnest. It was this play that gave English drama its now defining tradition of satire, irony and wordplay – arguably in the process casting a stylistic shadow it has since struggled to emerge from. However the nature of this truly great and essential novel means that The Picture of Dorian Gray is, and will continue to be, Oscar Wilde’s most accessible work, and the perfect introduction to this marvellous writer.

Irvine Welsh, 2007

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