Oscar Wilde

I'm not sure why, but my high school syllabus didn't include The Picture of Dorian Gray. Instead of Wilde, we were reading Emerson, I guess. You know, New England...

In any event, I've now righted that wrong, and let me say to begin just how gifted Wilde was as a stylist. The plot of the book aside (because parts of it aren't entirely convincing), Wilde's writing alone is the worth the price of admission, and Dorian Gray is the work of a master, of a man firmly in control of his craft. Wilde is at turns humorous and grave, pointed and prescient.

My only other exposure to Wilde's work was The Importance of Being Earnest, which I saw in a theater. And so I was not prepared exactly for Dorian Gray, which is book that's far darker than Earnest, even if it pretends at times to be something else (like a pulp Gothic novella for starters). 

For me, Dorian Gray was a book about aging and about the frailty of the human condition. Dorian sees his portrait as a double for his conscience, which fills - slowly, and then rapidly - with "sin." But that part of the book I found least compelling: I mean, who hasn't been to an opium den? 

Instead, the bit of this book that worked best for me, and that was most compelling as a sort of moral tale, had to do with that inevitable doubling: that sense in which adventure and sin are associated with youth, while adulthood is reserved for its opposite: all that is drab and...gray. 

Dorian Gray struggles as a character to reconcile his dive into the muck with his longing for youth, with his anxiety, really, about aging, and his loss of that youthful purity (of form, of persona, of emotion). Ultimately, of course, by ridding himself of sin, by practicing a form of self-sacrifice against his portrait, Gray comes to terms with his years, and experiences a sort of liberation. But by then of course, it may have all been too late...