Initial thoughts on "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
A couple weeks ago I signed up for yet another Victorian-literature email newsletter, Dorian Gray Weekly, which sends out a chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde once a week. I read the book when I was a teenager (16, maybe?) and I remember finding it disturbing and interesting, even though I didn't necessarily enjoy it. I was on a big Victorian lit kick at the time, and I was more interested in stories with heroes I could really get behind, like Jane Eyre or Journey to the Center of the Earth. Wilde's book was, to me at the time, just a story about bad people doing bad things and it all ending badly.
So far, I'm one chapter in, and I can already tell that this book is going to emotionally wreck me in ways it never could have when I read it as a teen.
Dorian Gray himself isn't in chapter one: it's a scene set between an artist, Basil Hallward, and his friend Lord Henry Wotton, who are both admiring the portrait of Dorian that Hallward has recently completed. Wotton says that Hallward should enter the painting into a gallery, but Hallward refuses, saying that it shows far more of himself than he cares to reveal to the public. Wotton scoffs at him for it. In fact, every sentence out of the young lord's mouth is some incredibly sardonic, cutting witticism or observation, and Hallward is nervous that if Wotton meets Dorian Gray, he'll corrupt the innocent youth with his cynicism.
Of course, in chapter two that's exactly what happens: Dorian shows up, Wotton dazzles him with his contemptuous view of life and virtue and human nature, and by the end of the chapter Dorian and Wotton are off to the theatre together while Hallward flings "himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face." Dorian's corruption arc has begun.
I hate Lord Henry Wotton because he reminds me so much of what I easily could be.
In my 20s, I was one of the most intensely sincere people you could imagine. Reading my diaries and travel journals from that time makes me blush because they are just achingly effusive about life, about places, about God. Not a hint of irony to be found. Even after I went through a really bad breakup, that sincerity was still there.
Somehow, self-consciousness wormed its way in. There wasn't any one grand moment that changed everything, just the slow creep of depression and the realities of getting older and finding that sincerity is vulnerability, and vulnerability is emotionally difficult to handle.
Cynicism and irony and sarcasm are so easy. Scorn is a lovely shield against vulnerability. Sitting back and seeing the wrongs of the world, scoffing at anyone sincere (if they really knew how life was, they wouldn't be so happy), softening reactions until emotion feels like a blank wasteland smoothed by a sort of smug knowingness: these are all easy, tricks to make life bearable, coping mechanisms to avoid the astonishing vulnerability of existing honestly in the world. I find myself slipping toward them constantly, like a magnet always pulling me in that direction.
In the first two chapters of Dorian Gray we see three different ways that people react to vulnerability. Basil Hallworth is sincere but will not show his sincerity (his art) to the world because it shows too much of himself ("every portrait painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter," he says). Dorian Gray is innocent to the point of being completely unguarded against influence: his emotional vulnerability is tragic, starting him down a path that will end in ruin. And Wotton, young though he is, has utterly lost himself in witticism and irony— not a word out of his mouth is sincere— another protection against vulnerability.
In essence, I feel like this book is asking from the beginning, what does it mean to be sincere— or not? (Not shocking, considering that Wilde wrote an entire play called The Importance of Being Earnest.) And I certainly did not expect to identify so strongly with Lord Henry Wotton, the antagonist of the story whose sardonic cynicism drives Dorian down the arc of tragedy in his refusal to face anything in life honestly.
To be sincere is to be vulnerable, and that can feel too devastating.
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