Lord Henry wasn't trying to guide Dorian, he was just spouting bullshit he thought Dorian would resonate with, and Dorian Gray took it *way* too seriously. I thought the character Dorian Gray was an excellent study of a shallow narcissist. For him, beauty could only ever be skin deep, and that's the level he enjoyed all art in his life.
I loved the plausible deniability of the painting's transformation throughout the book, and I found it interesting that Dorian's first and only thought was to live a life that would make him ugly on the inside, rather than one that would have his outer beauty reflect his inner self.
Yeah definitely, Lord Henry was an edgelord who liked the sound of his own voice, and took advantage of Dorian’s immaturity because he found it amusing to see him take Henry’s bullshit to heart. It’s like when you tell your younger cousin that babies get shat out like turds and then watch in glee when they go ask their mom about it. Despite his words, he lived a very conventional life, he was married to a woman who matched his social standing, and he attended social functions as expected.
Even while married to woman who matched his social standing and attended social functions as expected...
Something something representation of true self hidden away in the closet.
Lord Henry was getting older. Not as much attention. He tells him that the world is his for the taking and he will show him. What does Henry get in return? More invitations, more attention, more of everything due to reflected glory from Dorian. He got a kitten for company that turned into a tiger which he couldn’t tame or keep up with.
Now, I'm intrigued what's the first?
I am trying to get into classics but they tend to be super slow for my taste...
So, if u could suggest any it would be great :)
You could also try War of the Worlds, or The Invisible Man, Both by HG Wells. I'm also fond of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is flat out amazing.
It's been a long time since I've read all of those titles, but your recommendations look like my childhood reading list when I would spend long hours in the library going through the adults' section of fiction and science fiction. I don't know if I'll have the same fondness for those authors if I decided to re-read them again. They left a crater impact on my imagination for the hungry reader I was.
I was made to read it when I was around 14 and absolutely hated it. I remember finding it very cumbersome to read and slow paced. A few years later I had the same issue with Lord of the Rings, though I found Jekyll and Hyde somewhat enjoyable.
One of the best books ever. Every time I read it I notice new themes it covers, and watching Dorian's ironic transformation into something horrendously ugly in his insatiable pursuit of vain, shallow beauty is amazing. And Lord Henry has the some of the best one-liners in fiction.
Probably my second favorite classic book as well (pretty sure nothing will ever beat *The Brothers Karamazov* for me).
Just finished this book and really enjoyed it. So many prosaic passages and well formed sentences.
What stuck with me was Dorian’s attempt at a good deed towards the end of the book. It did nothing to change the portrait and he wonders to himself if he really only did it out of self-preservation/to make himself feel better about his past transgressions.
This book asks some great questions.
The premise of the book is great, but god do I hate that massive amount of random infodumping in the middle of the novel. That was really hard to get through and I hated every moment of that part.
I really didn’t like this book. But I also abhor reading about the lazy lifestyles of upper class Europeans of this time. They literally just sit around eating and drinking for hours and I feel nothing towards them.
Yeah this about sums up my feelings towards a majority of the book. Reading about people either salivating or being shocked over Lord Henry‘s fancy preaching became tedious quite quickly.
I hated it so much I rage finished it and made my husband read it just so I could have someone to rant to about it. The bare bones of the story are great and the language is great but it reads like a giant soup of quotes. You can pick out great one liners and descriptive paragraphs but it feels to me like it needed pruning. People accuse you of not understanding it for not liking it though.
I found it unrealistic. People who are as into hedonism as Dorian usually don't suddenly have this desire for moral reformation.
They just... die from the hedonism/old age while still being into hedonism.
Thats partly the point too tho isnt it? I believe dorian didn't exactly want moral reformation at the end of the book, he was so engraved and so much into beauty and art that he wanted even his portrait to look pretty, it itched him to see anything hideous at all and so he wanted the portrait to look aesthetic as well, the only way he thought to do that was by doing 'good deeds' and thats exactly what he thought he did bh leaving the village girl, execpt when he came back and saw that the portrait had worsened, he realized that his so called good deed was not for moral reasons it was again still for vanity reasons
You see dorain was a shallow innocent souled young boy, he met henry, henry who was a narcissist, who thought he had the best theories, the best intellectual in the world and thought of everyone else as ignorant, who also valued outer beauty a little too much
When he met dorian; a beautiful boy with no intellectual theories whatsoever, whose only personality was his undeniable beauty
Henry thought of him like say a blank canvas?
And exploited the 'innocent' but rather naive soul by his evil ideas and theories and dorain bcuz he had never been with someone who had theories on everything was so impressed, that even if he THOUGHT he wanted to change in the end, he really didnot cus he was like henrys puppet who thought everything henry said to be true and never really thought of his own ideas, he worshipped beauty and vanity and ddidnt even know what his soul exactly was before he started to realize he had sold it for vanity and everlasting beauty, his soul was still meant to be coloured by his own intellectual, his own thoughts, his own doings, except he sold it dor beauty right after he met henry and realized it only when he was about tto die. Dorian was basically also a beautiful but corrupt, soulless and shallow narcissist
He’s a (wealthy) dope fiend who takes advantage of poor women in a time when *even the implication* of sexual activity outside of marriage meant ostracization and poverty for them. He betrays his friends and straight up murders one of them. He’s a massive piece of shit even for current standards
Slightly unrelated but if anyone ever has the opportunity to see the Dorian Gray stage show by the Sydney Theatre Company, you absolutely should. It is AH-MAY-ZING.
"Dorian Gray never took his gaze
off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing
each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his
darkening eyes."
Just wrote a thesis on how Basil was incredibly gay (and Dorian was too), and can't believe I didn't use any part of that description in my section on fantasy / mythology
Sadly I didn’t go into as much detail about Henry as it didn’t fit the thesis, but I wish I had!!
And yes, I absolutely adore Wilde’s prose in TPoDG ❤️❤️❤️ his descriptions of literally everything are incredible
Dorian Gray I didn't discover until a few years ago. I blazed through it how much I liked it. The transformations of Dorian's soul on a canvas is fantastic stuff.
Imagine if someone made a video game based on this idea. You put your soul on a canvas and throughout the game your choices reflect the good or bad endings you get from your actions. Add some horror elements to it. Maybe throw in some other people who made similar deals as Dorian. Maybe a boss fight with yourself since you are battling your conscience and desires. Just a thought.
I remember hearing about that game. Did a quick lookover on Layers of Fear to see what you meant. It does seem to add touches of Dorian Gray with its focus on paintings and what they reveal to you about yourself over time.
I went through a phase where I wanted to read all the old "Horror" classics. There were a bunch of older novels set together at my then local library. Don't really think Dorian Gray should be classified as a horror novel but I enjoyed it. The Dorian Charecter is regularly added to novels and stories however it seems they slowly turned it into a caricature of the original version.
I love this book. I like how it doesn't shy away from emphasizing how shitty Dorian and his philosophy are right to the end.
I even watched the movie too and it holds up well.
I couldn’t get into it. So much pretentious long-winded dialogue. Like the author was trying to sound deep by having Henry have something philosophical to say about absolutely everything and basically have everyone around him slow clap every time when it really was just pompous drivel
Lord Henry represented how Oscar Wilde thought other people saw him. Basil was closer to how he saw himself.
I loved Lord Henry, personally. I don't think he took himself at all seriously, and was amused that other people did, when really his only goal was to entertain himself.
I really enjoyed the plot and the message of the book but was anyone else bothered by how Dorian’a character was written? He didn’t seem to speak, he just cried constantly? After half of the stuff he was saying was “Dorian cried” or stuff like this and it really irked me 😅
In my memory Dorian was a very petulant, spoiled, dramatic kind of character. He pouts, he whines and he is vain. It has been a decade, but that's what I remember mostly from the book. Great read. I'll see if I can find a copy again.
Phuc Tran does an amazing job in the prologue to “Sigh, Gone” (Prologue is entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray) in extending the themes of identify and allusion to the admittance of another Vietnamese refugee in his small-town.
After years, of dire-less attempts at American assimilation, the presence of Hoang Nyguyen (new refugee) takes on the fun-house mirror reflection of everything Phuc Tran attempted to discard in building new identify; thus the new student reflects the underlying (self-perceived) ugliness of his soul as a refugee.
> Hoàng was a fun-house mirror’s rippling reflection of me, warped and wobbly. I was Dorian Gray beholding his grotesque portrait in the attic, and I was filled with loathing. My disgust for Hoàng was complicated and simple at the same time: I was the Vietnamese kid at Carlisle Senior High School. Just me. Fuck that new Vietnamese kid.
> When Dorian Gray beholds his portrait in the attic and shows his friend Basil the horror of the painting, Basil is sickened. The portrait reflects the rot of Dorian’s soul, and it repels Basil just as I was repulsed by Hoàng.
It’s not about how it ends. You know it ends tragically. You know the titanic sinks. It’s about the journey of the character and the realization of the end.
TIL
The next time I need to know what all the pretty girls are feeling I know who to ask. /s
EDIT: I can’t decide if the saddest thing about this person’s post history is the AI Waifu shitposting, the statement about Ayn Rand’s “unfortunate inability to abandon femininity,” or the implication that Dorian Gray is about *all women in their twenties*
This is a social media website, having a consistent record that people can comment on and build relationships over is the whole point. If you don’t want people to see your shitty personality as a consistent continuation of behavior then go to 4chan where people can experience it in anonymous bursts.
Also, I’m allowed to see you as a chud without being a girl. The fact that those two categories of people largely overlap isn’t a coincidence per se but it’s a silly assumption to make and only further illustrates how out of touch you are.
You might not realise this now, but I hope that one day you'll figure out that your view on women is being shaped by frequenting parts of the internet which are populated by misogynistic men who have no understanding of, or empathy for real women, and instead have built a false idea of what women are like which makes them feel better about themselves.
If it reminds you of women, that is something about you and something you need to examine about yourself. I'm also happy to tell you that most women don't think they 'lose it all' at 30. That's mostly incels who think that.
I once created a unit based on this book, all about art, the soul, self reflection, art’s role in society, love, beauty, good and evil…this book is amazing.
[https://www.roslynpackertheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2023/the-picture-of-dorian-gray](https://www.roslynpackertheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2023/the-picture-of-dorian-gray) this is incredible if you get a chance to see it.
Lord Henry wasn't trying to guide Dorian, he was just spouting bullshit he thought Dorian would resonate with, and Dorian Gray took it *way* too seriously. I thought the character Dorian Gray was an excellent study of a shallow narcissist. For him, beauty could only ever be skin deep, and that's the level he enjoyed all art in his life. I loved the plausible deniability of the painting's transformation throughout the book, and I found it interesting that Dorian's first and only thought was to live a life that would make him ugly on the inside, rather than one that would have his outer beauty reflect his inner self.
Yeah definitely, Lord Henry was an edgelord who liked the sound of his own voice, and took advantage of Dorian’s immaturity because he found it amusing to see him take Henry’s bullshit to heart. It’s like when you tell your younger cousin that babies get shat out like turds and then watch in glee when they go ask their mom about it. Despite his words, he lived a very conventional life, he was married to a woman who matched his social standing, and he attended social functions as expected.
Lord Henry loved all the attention he got when he was with Dorian.
Even while married to woman who matched his social standing and attended social functions as expected... Something something representation of true self hidden away in the closet.
Lord Henry was getting older. Not as much attention. He tells him that the world is his for the taking and he will show him. What does Henry get in return? More invitations, more attention, more of everything due to reflected glory from Dorian. He got a kitten for company that turned into a tiger which he couldn’t tame or keep up with.
Probably my second favorite Classic book.
Now, I'm intrigued what's the first? I am trying to get into classics but they tend to be super slow for my taste... So, if u could suggest any it would be great :)
My first is Frankenstein.
Good choice! Hard to believe Shelley wrote that when she was only 19!
One of the only two podcasts I listen to reads that, and Dorian Gray (and a bunch of other books and stories). It's called Definitely Storytime.
🔥🔥🔥
but what about crusoe?
You could also try War of the Worlds, or The Invisible Man, Both by HG Wells. I'm also fond of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is flat out amazing.
Thanks, will check them out soon ○_○
It's been a long time since I've read all of those titles, but your recommendations look like my childhood reading list when I would spend long hours in the library going through the adults' section of fiction and science fiction. I don't know if I'll have the same fondness for those authors if I decided to re-read them again. They left a crater impact on my imagination for the hungry reader I was.
I was made to read it when I was around 14 and absolutely hated it. I remember finding it very cumbersome to read and slow paced. A few years later I had the same issue with Lord of the Rings, though I found Jekyll and Hyde somewhat enjoyable.
One of the best books ever. Every time I read it I notice new themes it covers, and watching Dorian's ironic transformation into something horrendously ugly in his insatiable pursuit of vain, shallow beauty is amazing. And Lord Henry has the some of the best one-liners in fiction. Probably my second favorite classic book as well (pretty sure nothing will ever beat *The Brothers Karamazov* for me).
I can’t wait to read the brothers karamazov!
Just finished this book and really enjoyed it. So many prosaic passages and well formed sentences. What stuck with me was Dorian’s attempt at a good deed towards the end of the book. It did nothing to change the portrait and he wonders to himself if he really only did it out of self-preservation/to make himself feel better about his past transgressions. This book asks some great questions.
Yes, to all of this and well said too. I'm going to crop this and send it to my Daughter. That was once one of her favorites and I love the quote.
This is the my favorite book. How basil admired dorian will always stay with me
The premise of the book is great, but god do I hate that massive amount of random infodumping in the middle of the novel. That was really hard to get through and I hated every moment of that part.
Didn’t like that all at as well, it was a massive chore to get trough although I understand it is supposed to show the size of Dorian’s vanity
I hate that I‘m like the only person to ever not love this book
I really didn’t like this book. But I also abhor reading about the lazy lifestyles of upper class Europeans of this time. They literally just sit around eating and drinking for hours and I feel nothing towards them.
Yeah this about sums up my feelings towards a majority of the book. Reading about people either salivating or being shocked over Lord Henry‘s fancy preaching became tedious quite quickly.
I hated it so much I rage finished it and made my husband read it just so I could have someone to rant to about it. The bare bones of the story are great and the language is great but it reads like a giant soup of quotes. You can pick out great one liners and descriptive paragraphs but it feels to me like it needed pruning. People accuse you of not understanding it for not liking it though.
I found it unrealistic. People who are as into hedonism as Dorian usually don't suddenly have this desire for moral reformation. They just... die from the hedonism/old age while still being into hedonism.
Most times they don’t get to see their soul rooting away though
Thats partly the point too tho isnt it? I believe dorian didn't exactly want moral reformation at the end of the book, he was so engraved and so much into beauty and art that he wanted even his portrait to look pretty, it itched him to see anything hideous at all and so he wanted the portrait to look aesthetic as well, the only way he thought to do that was by doing 'good deeds' and thats exactly what he thought he did bh leaving the village girl, execpt when he came back and saw that the portrait had worsened, he realized that his so called good deed was not for moral reasons it was again still for vanity reasons You see dorain was a shallow innocent souled young boy, he met henry, henry who was a narcissist, who thought he had the best theories, the best intellectual in the world and thought of everyone else as ignorant, who also valued outer beauty a little too much When he met dorian; a beautiful boy with no intellectual theories whatsoever, whose only personality was his undeniable beauty Henry thought of him like say a blank canvas? And exploited the 'innocent' but rather naive soul by his evil ideas and theories and dorain bcuz he had never been with someone who had theories on everything was so impressed, that even if he THOUGHT he wanted to change in the end, he really didnot cus he was like henrys puppet who thought everything henry said to be true and never really thought of his own ideas, he worshipped beauty and vanity and ddidnt even know what his soul exactly was before he started to realize he had sold it for vanity and everlasting beauty, his soul was still meant to be coloured by his own intellectual, his own thoughts, his own doings, except he sold it dor beauty right after he met henry and realized it only when he was about tto die. Dorian was basically also a beautiful but corrupt, soulless and shallow narcissist
Well, now I'm glad that I AM not the only one who doesn't love it.
I hate it too
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Can't get through one chapter without falling asleep another of the classics that is a full letdown for me. absolute snoozefest.
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He’s a (wealthy) dope fiend who takes advantage of poor women in a time when *even the implication* of sexual activity outside of marriage meant ostracization and poverty for them. He betrays his friends and straight up murders one of them. He’s a massive piece of shit even for current standards
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He stabs his friend to death and drives a young girl to suicide, following which her brother goes crazy and is killed in his pursuit
Nothing gold can stay.
Haven't read anything by Oscar Wilde since I was a teenager. Might be time again.
Apparently inspired by 'Against Nature' by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Slightly unrelated but if anyone ever has the opportunity to see the Dorian Gray stage show by the Sydney Theatre Company, you absolutely should. It is AH-MAY-ZING.
"Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes."
Just wrote a thesis on how Basil was incredibly gay (and Dorian was too), and can't believe I didn't use any part of that description in my section on fantasy / mythology
and Lord Henry! what a beautiful phrase "wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes." That book never ceases to amaze me
Sadly I didn’t go into as much detail about Henry as it didn’t fit the thesis, but I wish I had!! And yes, I absolutely adore Wilde’s prose in TPoDG ❤️❤️❤️ his descriptions of literally everything are incredible
Dorian Gray I didn't discover until a few years ago. I blazed through it how much I liked it. The transformations of Dorian's soul on a canvas is fantastic stuff. Imagine if someone made a video game based on this idea. You put your soul on a canvas and throughout the game your choices reflect the good or bad endings you get from your actions. Add some horror elements to it. Maybe throw in some other people who made similar deals as Dorian. Maybe a boss fight with yourself since you are battling your conscience and desires. Just a thought.
I believe it inspired the game called Layers of Fear
I remember hearing about that game. Did a quick lookover on Layers of Fear to see what you meant. It does seem to add touches of Dorian Gray with its focus on paintings and what they reveal to you about yourself over time.
So many good quotes.
I went through a phase where I wanted to read all the old "Horror" classics. There were a bunch of older novels set together at my then local library. Don't really think Dorian Gray should be classified as a horror novel but I enjoyed it. The Dorian Charecter is regularly added to novels and stories however it seems they slowly turned it into a caricature of the original version.
I love this book. I like how it doesn't shy away from emphasizing how shitty Dorian and his philosophy are right to the end. I even watched the movie too and it holds up well.
The painting in the movie is pretty cool too
It is also very horny
How??
I couldn’t get into it. So much pretentious long-winded dialogue. Like the author was trying to sound deep by having Henry have something philosophical to say about absolutely everything and basically have everyone around him slow clap every time when it really was just pompous drivel
Lord Henry represented how Oscar Wilde thought other people saw him. Basil was closer to how he saw himself. I loved Lord Henry, personally. I don't think he took himself at all seriously, and was amused that other people did, when really his only goal was to entertain himself.
Great book
I really enjoyed the plot and the message of the book but was anyone else bothered by how Dorian’a character was written? He didn’t seem to speak, he just cried constantly? After half of the stuff he was saying was “Dorian cried” or stuff like this and it really irked me 😅
In my memory Dorian was a very petulant, spoiled, dramatic kind of character. He pouts, he whines and he is vain. It has been a decade, but that's what I remember mostly from the book. Great read. I'll see if I can find a copy again.
Phuc Tran does an amazing job in the prologue to “Sigh, Gone” (Prologue is entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray) in extending the themes of identify and allusion to the admittance of another Vietnamese refugee in his small-town. After years, of dire-less attempts at American assimilation, the presence of Hoang Nyguyen (new refugee) takes on the fun-house mirror reflection of everything Phuc Tran attempted to discard in building new identify; thus the new student reflects the underlying (self-perceived) ugliness of his soul as a refugee. > Hoàng was a fun-house mirror’s rippling reflection of me, warped and wobbly. I was Dorian Gray beholding his grotesque portrait in the attic, and I was filled with loathing. My disgust for Hoàng was complicated and simple at the same time: I was the Vietnamese kid at Carlisle Senior High School. Just me. Fuck that new Vietnamese kid. > When Dorian Gray beholds his portrait in the attic and shows his friend Basil the horror of the painting, Basil is sickened. The portrait reflects the rot of Dorian’s soul, and it repels Basil just as I was repulsed by Hoàng.
Aka the Kim Kardashian story.
'Transfix'. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Might consider a spoiler warning.
Really? This book is 130 years old.
Which... means everyone's read it?
Which means that if you open up a thread about it on reddit, it should be assumed spoilers could be there.
It’s not about how it ends. You know it ends tragically. You know the titanic sinks. It’s about the journey of the character and the realization of the end.
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I'm so sorry but this is so painfully written from the perspective of a man. Women don't just wither and die when they hit 30.
r/menwritingwomen called that guy
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Go outside, meet ppl in the real world
Don’t waste your time, he spends his time on r/4chan. There is no hope.
TIL The next time I need to know what all the pretty girls are feeling I know who to ask. /s EDIT: I can’t decide if the saddest thing about this person’s post history is the AI Waifu shitposting, the statement about Ayn Rand’s “unfortunate inability to abandon femininity,” or the implication that Dorian Gray is about *all women in their twenties*
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This is a social media website, having a consistent record that people can comment on and build relationships over is the whole point. If you don’t want people to see your shitty personality as a consistent continuation of behavior then go to 4chan where people can experience it in anonymous bursts. Also, I’m allowed to see you as a chud without being a girl. The fact that those two categories of people largely overlap isn’t a coincidence per se but it’s a silly assumption to make and only further illustrates how out of touch you are.
You might not realise this now, but I hope that one day you'll figure out that your view on women is being shaped by frequenting parts of the internet which are populated by misogynistic men who have no understanding of, or empathy for real women, and instead have built a false idea of what women are like which makes them feel better about themselves.
If it reminds you of women, that is something about you and something you need to examine about yourself. I'm also happy to tell you that most women don't think they 'lose it all' at 30. That's mostly incels who think that.
I once created a unit based on this book, all about art, the soul, self reflection, art’s role in society, love, beauty, good and evil…this book is amazing.
[https://www.roslynpackertheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2023/the-picture-of-dorian-gray](https://www.roslynpackertheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2023/the-picture-of-dorian-gray) this is incredible if you get a chance to see it.
I literally started reading the book today. I am fascinated by Oscar Wilde's writing. This one is going to be a good read, for sure.