gilda_elise

Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.

Though the book is advertised as a cautionary tale when pleasure and beauty are pursued without moral accountability, Dorian Gray is pretty much an asshole to begin with. The picture is more of an excuse, rather than something that drew Gray to his doom. It doesn’t take much from Lord Wotton, another total jerk, for Gray to start on his road to ruin. Actually, Gray starts down that road all on his own, before even knowing that the picture will show his cruelty.

The book tends to drag in places, especially when the reader is given an account of the different hobbies Gray takes up over the years. I’m not sure how that would be considered decadent, but there you go. I would have preferred that more time was given to how exactly he destroyed the people mentioned. Were they weak to begin with? Would they have fallen from grace even if they had never met Gray? Since none of the characters are filled out, it’s something the reader is never to know.

I was somewhat surprised that the book only covers twenty years of Gray’s life, as most of the movies based on the book show the picture with a wizened and corrupt visage. Far more damage than could have been done in only twenty years.