The Picture of Dorian Gray (Uncensored 1890)
I read the censored version of this book (published 1891) some time ago now, but in retrospect it should be confined to the trash heap when compared with this bad boy. Lots of little differences make this a more interesting, less abstract story. Oddly enough, this uncensored version is probably more moralistic than the censored one, in my honest opinion. So I would recommend for anyone hoping to read Dorian Gray that they pick up a copy of the original.
The novel is intensely philosophical, but in a very pragmatic way. Lord Henry, the playful cynic, puts forth a philosophy of “new hedonism” that he himself does not practice. Truth is, he’s simply a bored member of the upper class, and he delights in the “experiment” of watching Dorian try to live it.
Dorian himself begins as something of a blank slate, although not without any immediate flaws. He is very boyish and innocent, in a sort of pout-y and unassuming way. You can tell he has some vanity about him, though not fully fleshed out as it will be later in the novel. But he is almost immediately a superficial character that is easily impressionable. Not that (in this version) Lord Henry is Dorian’s Mephistopheles, but it’s clear that he’s not much of a deep thinker.
Basil is likely partly to blame for this. He’s undoubtedly the most moral and sane of the trio, but he becomes infatuated with Dorian—and I mean this literally since it’s Oscar Wilde’s book we’re talking about, and the homosexual subtext is simply rendered here as text. Hence it was considered an “indecent” work in its time.
Nevertheless, I think there’s an irony in this since the work on its surface is a testament to everything wrong with the passions: how they can be corrupted, how they can hurt others as well as ourselves, how they leave one ultimately unfulfilled and longing for something more. I actually took quite a Christian message from this. But with further thought, I began to wonder if the work was actually about quite a bit more.
Materialism
There were points, particularly in the ninth (I think?) chapter, where it felt like I was reading American Psycho. The descriptions of the quality of the books Dorian had, the focus on possessions, and surface-level “beauty” are trademark Patrick Bateman. Although in Dorian’s case, I would suggest that this stems from vanity rather than Bateman’s insecurity.
Dorian initially resents Basil for painting him because the portrait will always remain the same while Dorian himself will age. But this resentment grows deeper when he eventually kills Basil, blaming his work for all that has transpired. His depiction—before and after the “curse”—offends his pride.
Youth
This is an easy theme to pick out since so much of what is said about youth glorifies the experience. However, Wilde’s commentary is naturally more thought-out than that. The interesting thing about Dorian’s character development is that he is quite literally developmentally stunted, both physically and psychologically. Like Peter Pan, he can’t grow up, and throughout the book he romanticizes his youth in nostalgic and self-pitying ways.
I found myself wondering if the book might be likened to Blake’s |Songs of Innocence and Experience in that Dorian begins quite inexperienced or uninitiated in life but becomes increasingly melancholy at the choices he’s made and the consequences of the philosophy by which he’d ruled his life.
Quotes
To a large extent, the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of Art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
“You don’t mean all that, Harry; you know you don’t. If Dorian Gray’s life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than yourself. You are much better than you pretend to be.”
Lord Henry laughed. “The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the Banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pock-ets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. And as for a spoilt life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.
“Dorian, Dorian,” she cried, “before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the other The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came, oh, my beautiful love! - and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness, of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scen-ery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, not what I wanted to say. You had brought me some-thing higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You have made me understand what love really is. My love! my love! I am sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be. What have I to do with the puppets of a play? When I came on to-night, I could not understand how it was that everything had gone from me. Sud-denly it dawned on my soul what it all meant. The knowledge was exquisite to me. I heard them hissing, and I smiled. What should they know of love? Take me away, Dorian. Take me away with you, where we can be quite alone. I hate the stage. I might mimic a pas-sion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. Oh, Dorian, Dorian, you understand now what it all means? Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. You have made me see that.”
He flung himself down on the sofa, and turned away his face. “You have killed my love,” he muttered.
…
Dorian Gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There is always something ridiculous about the passions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sybil Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him.
At this point it struck me just how much crueller Dorian was in this uncensored version than in the 1891 edition.
He had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realise that we live in an age when only unnecessary things are absolutely necessary to us…
How well he recalled it all! Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him, as he looked round. He remembered the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here that the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him!
Harry,” said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.
Lord Henry’s Philosophy
Any analysis of this work would be lacking if it did not feature some of Lord Henry’s philosophical declarations, which had a strong influence on Dorian. It’s important especially to understand how they may be perverse, or that Lord Henry himself did not often live by what he preached.
“What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.
“Not at all,” answered Lord Henry, laying his hand upon his shoulder; “not at all, my dear Basil. You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of de-ception necessary for both parties.”
…
“I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry,” said Basil Hallward, shaking his hand off, and strolling towards the door that led into the garden. “I believe that you are really a very good hus-band, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.”
“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose 1 know,” cried Lord Henry, laughing…
I can believe anything, provided that it is incredible — Henry
“Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one,” said Lord Henry.
I quite sympathise with the rage of the English Democracy against what they call the vices of the upper classes. They feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself we are poaching on their preserves.
“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.”
The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic.”
“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 some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for.12 People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. 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. And yet … I believe that if one man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal, to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purifica-tion. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it-and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its mon-strous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain.” It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 18 You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…”
“Because you have now the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having. … Someday, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.”
“Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to re-ally live. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.
“Realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar, which are the aims, the false ideals of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
“I don’t like simple pleasures,” said Lord Henry. “And I don’t like scenes, except on the stage. What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. I am glad he is not, after all: though I wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture. You had much better let me have it, Basil. This silly boy doesn’t really want it, and I do.”
Lord Henry had not come in yet. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.