Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

It was a good book. Oscar Wilde seemed to be ahead of his time when it come to depicting morality and reality. I hated his character Lord Harry Wotton, though, but Wotton was essential to the novel. He was the driving force (no sexual innuendoes intended) behind Dorian's actions. He was smart and he was vain about it, and he brushed off all his theories and epigrams about morality and reason with an air of "Oh, don't mind my jibbering." There was a hypocrisy about Wotton, but even I can't describe it. Someone gave him the pet name "Prince Paradox," which I think suited him perfectly. He was serious about all his thoughts, but not once, have I read any of his own immoral crimes. Aside from possible homosexual acts, such as the house in Algiers that he shared with Dorian, nothing was outright explicit--affairs with other women, gambling, opium, or having bad friends--to mar Wotton's reputation. Nothing was in the air except for a divorce-case, and even then, it was his wife who committed the scandal. Wotton was a paradox. It was like he wanted to be embroiled in some scandal to prove that he was living proof of all his hedonistic views and philosophies, but compared to Dorian, he had a clean record.

Dorian, the more I read about him, the more I thought about Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a book that Wilde was familiar with and a work that he admired. I can't help but think that Stevenson's novel may have influenced Wilde a bit: the idea that one can lead a double life.

There are plenty of good quotes in this book, and I've circled the ones I especially like. My favorite is by Dorian, who thought, "It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution." How true is that? We don't need a priest to tell us how we can be absolved. The act of confession--especially to the individual who was wronged--is the very act of removing a burden. We apologize to those we hurt to make amends, and from them do we seek forgiveness.

If this book is a semi-autobiographical to Wilde's own life, I wondered, at several times in the novel, if Wilde was ever dedicated to his own country. Through Wotton, he seems to declare his own dislike of English society and its conventions. But Wilde was already an outcast and through his book, he held up a mirror against society: "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."-- Lord Harry Wotton

Definitely a good read.