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| The Picture of Dorian Gray |
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October
1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet.
After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of
London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his
epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian
Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early
death.
The first
version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published as the lead story in the
July 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, along with five others. The
story begins with a man painting a picture of Gray. When Gray, who has a face like ivory and rose leaves, sees his finished portrait, he
breaks down. Distraught that his beauty will fade while the portrait stays
beautiful, he inadvertently makes a Faustian bargain in which only the painted
image grows old while he stays beautiful and young. For Wilde, the purpose of
art would be to guide life as if beauty alone were its object. As Gray's
portrait allows him to escape the corporeal ravages of his hedonism, Wilde
sought to juxtapose the beauty he saw in art with daily life.
Reviewers immediately
criticised the novel's decadence and homosexual allusions; The Daily Chronicle
for example, called it unclean, poisonous, and heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.
Wilde vigorously responded, writing to the editor of the Scots Observer, in
which he clarified his stance on ethics and aesthetics in art – If a work
of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will
see its beauty and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly will see its moral
lesson.
He nevertheless revised it extensively for book publication in 1891: six new chapters were added, some overtly decadent passages and homo-eroticism excised, and a preface was included consisting of twenty two epigrams, such as Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Contemporary reviewers and modern critics have postulated numerous possible sources of the story, a search Jershua McCormack argues is futile because Wilde has tapped a root of Western folklore so deep and ubiquitous that the story has escaped its origins and returned to the oral tradition.
Wilde claimed the plot was an idea that is as old as the history of literature but to which I have given a new form. Modern critic Robin McKie considered the novel to be technically mediocre, saying that the conceit of the plot had guaranteed its fame, but the device is never pushed to its full.
He nevertheless revised it extensively for book publication in 1891: six new chapters were added, some overtly decadent passages and homo-eroticism excised, and a preface was included consisting of twenty two epigrams, such as Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Contemporary reviewers and modern critics have postulated numerous possible sources of the story, a search Jershua McCormack argues is futile because Wilde has tapped a root of Western folklore so deep and ubiquitous that the story has escaped its origins and returned to the oral tradition.
Wilde claimed the plot was an idea that is as old as the history of literature but to which I have given a new form. Modern critic Robin McKie considered the novel to be technically mediocre, saying that the conceit of the plot had guaranteed its fame, but the device is never pushed to its full.
Nowadays
people know the price of everything
and the value of nothing.
and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
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