For our discussion on Tuesday, October 20, 2015, the Banned Book Club selected The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. One of the club had wanted to read a book by an Irish author. Two months earlier I had given the choice between Dracula by Bram Stoker, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Dorian Gray. The one we chose was actually the shortest of the three, though it reads a bit slower than I expected. I still enjoyed it very much especially the witty banter from the character Lord Henry who seems like Wilde's alter ego. Still, it is not an easy book with several scary and disturbing parts. It does have supernatural elements but they are so well integrated to be considered magic realism. It was first published in Lippincott's Magazine in 1890, the same magazine that published the Sherlock Holmes novella The Sign of Four in the same year.
The first relatable reference that I noticed had to do with music. Dorian first appears "seated at the piano, turning over pages of Schumann's 'Forest Scenes.'" (p. 11) Later, "The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred in him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's beautiful sorrows, and the might harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear." (p. 98) An artistic reference is that Dorian's "mode of dressing . . . had their marked influence on the young . . . who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of the graceful, though to him only half-serious, foppishness." (p. 94) I just like all mention of fop. Two consecutive sentences contain relatable references that are both Italian words: "The mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris throated birds that flutter round the tall honey-combed Campanile . . ." (p. 120)
Other relatable references have to do with London and another place. Soon after Lord Henry first meets Dorian, Lady Agatha asks him, "Why did you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to give up (doing charity work) in the East End." (p. 29) That part of London used to be where many chavs lived. When Lord Henry, Dorian, and Basil go to the Theatre, Lord Henry says, "I'm so sorry, Basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. You must follow us in a hansom." (p. 58) We know hansoms from Sherlock Holmes. I wonder if cab drivers back then such as Jefferson Hope had "the Knowledge." Dorian tells Lord Henry that he had told Sybil Vane "only my Christian name." (p. 81) As narrator, Wilde compares Dorian to "Grifonetto Baglioni . . . whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who hated him could not help but weep." (p. 107) Is this an early reference to the Perugia of Michael Dibdin and Amanda Knox?
The book contained a few new words and a new expression of a familiar word. Wilde writes, "Then Wisdom altered its method and spoke of espial and discovery." (p. 45) According to thefreedictionary.com, espial can be the act of watching or the fact of being seen or noticed. After a character apparently commits suicide, "A verdict of death by misadventure was returned." (p. 91) In another painting "from the fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher, and pinked slashed sleeves." (p. 105) A stomacher is an ornamental garment covering the stomach and chest, formerly worn by women.
Wilde often gets philosophical through his characters. I think it is Lord Henry who says, "Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes." (p. 43) On Dorian's inner feelings, Wilde writes, "There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution." (p. 70) About what's happening around him, Dorian remarks, "If I had read this in a book Harry, I think I would have wept over it." (p. 72) That's interesting because what he's talking about happens in the book The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lord Henry says, "We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." (p. 145) Another of Dorian's reflections is "Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in imagination . . . in the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded." (p. 147)
Wilde channels much of his wit through the character Lord Henry. He has much to say on beauty. Early on he tells Basil, "there is only one thing in the world worse than been talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set up you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are capable of any emotion." (p. 2) He tells Dorian, "Beauty is a form a genius—is higher than genius as it needs no explanation . . . It makes princes of those who have it. Beauty is the wonder of wonders. Only shallow people do not judge by appearances." (p. 16) He tells Basil how "beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then, in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when a boy of eighteen, and as a consequence, he always looks absolutely delightful." (p. 2)
Lord Henry makes witty remarks about other topics such as "Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity" (p. 26) and "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." (p. 34) He declares, "I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do." (p. 54) He explains that "Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives." (p. 53) Much later he says, "one can survived everything nowadays except (death)." (p. 156) Lord Henry's uncle, Lord Fermor "had set himself to serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing nothing." (p. 23)
In addition to reading the book my wife and I read the graphic novel of Dorian Gray adapted by artists I.N.J. Culbard and writer Ian Edginton. They are from England and also adapted the graphic novel version of A Study in Scarlet that we read three years before. The graphic novel of Dorian Gray is in grayscale rather than color. Just like the book, Dorian first appears playing the piano, though Schumann is not mentioned. There is a statue of Siddhartha in Basil's home/ studio. I wonder if he got it with a "clay pot discount" similar to the one at Tacoma Boys. In one panel characters drink ginger beer and in another they eat strawberries. At the end there's a commentary on the story that quotes Wilde as saying "Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks me; Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps." (p. 122)
The Picture of Dorian Gray was challenged right from the beginning. After it first appeared in Lippincott's, "the novel's decadent aura, and particularly its tinges of homoeroticism proved an almost unprecedentedly hostile reaction in the British press . . . Although Wilde defended himself and his work eloquently, he took pains to moderate the language of several passages when the work was revised and expanded by six chapters." (p. v, notes) The book was later used as evidence against Wilde during his trial for gross indecency. He said, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that is all." (p. vii) Lord Henry also says, "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own image." (p. 161)
We had a good discussion on Tuesday, October 20. We talked about how Dorian had affluenza, was corrupted by Lord Henry, the "love triangle" between Basil, Dorian, and Lord Henry, and whether Dorian was inherently bad or made worse over time. I brought up the extravagant things that Dorian collects. Early on he receives "a rather heavy bill, for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set, that he had not yet the courage to send to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities." (p. 68) Later several pages describe what Dorian collects. One page is about ecclesiastical garments such as one where "orpheys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs among whom was St. Sebastian." (p. 102) This sounded rather extravagant for what we know to be a diaper. A club member later did some research and found that an ecclesiastical diaper is actually either 1) a cover for a chalice similar to a tea cozy; 2) the cloth used to wipe the chalice when it is in use; or 3) a religious weave pattern. Well, those definitions take to fun out of it.
A participant passed around some playbills for the play "Bloomsday," that was inspired by the book Ulysses by James Joyce. That book has inspired so many things such as a set of glass cylinders by Dale Chihuly and a chapter of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home. The participant also told us about "Jazz in the Castle" that was to be held at Stadium High School and that we attended (see later review). For the next month we planned to discuss Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers. For the "next next" discussion in December, we chose Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Louis Carroll over A Wrinkle in Time by Madelyn L'engle, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.
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