The sky over Covent Garden is turning the colour of a pearl. Carts piled with nodding lilies rumble down an empty street, boys thread past with crates of striped tulips, and a carter in a white smock hands a young man some cherries and will not take his money. They were picked at midnight, and they taste of the cold. The young man has spent the night walking through the worst streets of London after breaking a girl’s heart backstage at a theatre, and the flowers make him feel better. Then he goes home, glances at a portrait in his hall, and stops. Behind the cream silk blinds, in the half light, the painted mouth has acquired a touch of cruelty that his own mouth does not have. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde has been read for over a century as a fable about vanity. It works best as a slow study of what a person does once he learns that nothing will show.
The Girl Who Could Only Play Juliet
The novel’s first crisis happens in a shabby playhouse, and Wilde gives it unusual care. Sibyl Vane is seventeen and acts Shakespeare every night to a pit full of oranges and ginger beer. Dorian falls for her as Rosalind and Imogen and Juliet, which is to say he falls for the parts. When at last he brings his two friends to see her, she has fallen in love herself, and the love has emptied out her art. She speaks the balcony scene like a schoolgirl reciting. The audience whistles. Afterwards, radiant, she tells him that he has freed her from a world of painted scenery, and he tells her she has killed his love.
It is the cruellest scene in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and the best judged, because Dorian’s disgust is aesthetic rather than moral. He loved a genius; she has become a girl. Only a day earlier he was describing her Rosalind to his friends over dinner, down to the moss-coloured velvet jerkin, the cinnamon sleeves and the hawk’s feather in her cap, and it is plain that he was in love with the costume as much as the actress. The novel never lets him off, but it understands him, and the reader is left to notice how much of Lord Henry’s talk has gone into that speech.
Sibyl’s household gives the book its other register. Her mother is a faded actress who treats every family crisis as a tableau and is faintly disappointed when her son refuses to join the scene. That son, a sailor bound for Australia, swears in the Park that he will kill any gentleman who wrongs his sister. These chapters bring money, class and a London beyond Mayfair into a story that might otherwise have stayed in drawing rooms.
The Picture of Dorian Gray Goes Upstairs
The horror proper begins with furniture removal. Dorian sends for the housekeeper, asks for the key to the old schoolroom where his grandfather kept him out of the way as a boy, and wraps the canvas in a heavy purple-and-gold Venetian coverlet that may once have covered a coffin. A frame-maker from South Audley Street puffs his way up the stairs with it and asks, politely, whether he might look. He may not. It is a comic scene that ends on a turned key, and it sets the method of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: terrible things happen just out of sight, while someone discusses the weather.
What the painting does in that room is never sensational. Its changes are small and precise, a coarsening here, a stain there. Long stretches are told through rumour and dinner gossip rather than shown, and that restraint makes the rare scenes in the attic land very hard. The book’s version of the Faust bargain has no devil and no contract, only a careless wish, and the price is collected in silence.
When the book does leave the house, it goes east. A late cab ride through rain, under a moon like a yellow skull, past brickfields and kilns shaped like bottles and the masts of ships above the rooftops, is as fine a piece of night-time London as anything in Dickens, and it delivers Dorian somewhere he would never admit to visiting.
The comedy never stops either. Lady Narborough’s dinner, all ugliness and French novels, is pure drawing-room farce, and the epigrams keep coming from the same man who once complained, with perfect seriousness, that “Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde the laughter does not relieve the dread. It sharpens it, because every joke is made in a room where somebody is hiding something.
Where the Craft Runs Thin
Admirers of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde have to concede that its final act runs on luck. A vengeful figure from the early chapters turns up through a series of overheard nicknames and chance encounters, and the resolution owes more to chance than to anything a character decides. It reads like a sensation-novel device bolted onto a novel of ideas. The narrator, too, sometimes stops to philosophise in prose that turns purple, and the women beyond Sibyl are sketches: a witty duchess flirts, sparkles and is dropped. Lord Henry’s remarks about women are framed as his cynicism, but they are relentless. Suicide, addiction, murder, blackmail and the casual prejudice of the period all pass through the book, though nothing is explicit.
How Dorian Gray Came to Oscar Wilde
Wilde, born in Dublin in 1854, was already famous as a talker and a lecturer when he started the book. He later told the story that it began in 1887, when the Canadian painter Frances Richards painted his portrait and he remarked, half joking, how sad it was that the picture would stay young while he aged. The magazine editor who printed the first version cut about five hundred words before publication without asking him, many of them touching on desire between men.
Reviewers were still outraged, and in 1895 passages from the novel were read aloud in court during the trials that sent Wilde to prison. The poisonous yellow book that Lord Henry lends Dorian is generally identified with Huysmans’ Against Nature, which Wilde himself all but admitted. He also once wrote that Basil was who he thought he was, Lord Henry who the world thought him, and Dorian who he would like to be. After prison came De Profundis and exile in France, where he died in 1900. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde was the only novel he ever wrote, and it is hard to read now without seeing the shadow of what happened to its author.
After the Last Page
The book’s afterlife suggests its hold. Readers who want its decaying grandeur in a modern setting should try Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, where an old family rots behind beautiful manners, and Of Earthly Delights by Goldy Moldavsky takes up its knot of beauty and horror for a younger audience. Huysmans’ Against Nature is the strange, airless source.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde survives its coincidences because its central image is perfect and its cruelty is so well mannered. The lilies are still going into Covent Garden at dawn. Upstairs, behind a locked door, something is paying for them.