Author: Oscar Wilde
Genre: Literary Classic
Synopsis: A corrupt young man somehow keeps his youthful beauty, but a special painting gradually reveals his inner ugliness to all.
hOLY Smokes. What a ride! Going into this book, I was afraid that I will not like it, but it hath just increased my love for classics ten times more than before.
Dorian Gray is a young and beautiful man who gets a portrait of himself drawn from his artist friend Basil. He gets acquainted with Basil's friend Lord Henry, who obnoxiously attacks Dorian by telling him how one day all his beauty will fade as he grows older, and he'll become an old, wrinkled, ugly man. To this, our wonderfully naive little Dorian replies,
How sad it is! I shall grow old and horrible and dreadful. But this picture will always remain young. It will never be older than this particular day of June... If it were only the other way. If it was I who always got to be young, and the picture that was to grow old. For that - for that - I would give everything. Yes! there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! i would give my soul for that!
One day, as he breaks up his engagement with Sybil Vane in a ruthless manner, he notices a change in the portrait.
It was perfectly true. The portrait had altered.
The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame.
So of course, the portrait becomes wrinkled and ugly, while Dorian remains youthful and charming. To anyone, this would seem perfect, but on the inside it was eating up Dorian. Every time he looked at the portrait, he was reminded of the sins he had committed. The portrait was the true image of his soul.
The end he meets is tragic.
He loathed his own beauty... it was his beauty that has ruined him, his beauty and the youth he had prayed for. His youth had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery.
In this beautiful, heartbreaking tale of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde talks about vanity, youth, old age, love and gender roles in a magnificent way.
Dorian in the beginning, was just a dumb twenty year old getting a portrait made of himself from Basil (who deserved so much better) but Lord Henry and his bad influence ruins him.
The conversations between Dorian and Lord Henry were so fascinating, but Dorian acting upon the weird philosophies of Lord Henry was equally frustrating.
There are so many gorgeous lines from the book which I would like you all to experience:
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dream
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They would defile it and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive.
Oscar Wilde also gives us a sad insight on the reality of the place of women in the society during the nineteenth century.
My dear Dorian, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
Of course, these lines are said by Lord Henry, the real antagonist of the book.
It was a terrible tragedy. And no, I don't care one bit about Dorian stabbing himself in the heart, he deserved it of all people (although i was in shock for the next few hours) It was the character of Basil which really broke my heart. He deserved so much better. I wish we got to see more of him, and I wish it was Lord Henry who had met such a terrible end, but then would this book be as impactful as it was now? Probably not.
That's all for today!!! Do give this gorgeous book a read, you will not be disappointed.
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