Picture of Dorian Gray: Elementary Level (Macmillan Readers)

Oscar Wilde

ISBN 10: 0230029221 / ISBN 13: 9780230029224

Published by Ediciones Infinito, 2007

About this Item

Befriedigend/Good: Durchschnittlich erhaltenes Buch bzw. Schutzumschlag mit Gebrauchsspuren, aber vollständigen Seiten. / Describes the average WORN book or dust jacket that has all the pages present.

Seller Inventory # M00230029221-G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Picture of Dorian Gray: Elementary Level (Macmillan Readers)
• Publisher: Ediciones Infinito
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0230029221
• ISBN 13: 9780230029224
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

Basil Hallward painted a picture of a young Dorian Gray, he admires. Dorian is angry because he will grow old and the picture will stay the same. He wishes that the picture would age instead of him. He buys the picture and he hides it. The years pass and Dorian never seems to age. But his wish has tragic consequences for many people.

Review

A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."