The Picture Of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde

The portrait which Basil Hallward painted of Dorian Gray revealed the face of an Adonis, and when he saw the finished picture of himself, the beautiful young aesthete exclaimed: 'Why should it keep what I must love. Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could always be what I am now!' His perverse aspiration was strangely fulfilled. Abandoning himself to every sin his profligate mind could devise, the wealthy and exquisite young man brought misery and disgrace upon all who accepted his companionship, but Dorian Gray still wore the outward appearance of serene beauty. It was upon the portrait, locked away in his attic, that the marks of degeneration mysteriously appeared, for the painting of Adonis slowly transformed into the likeness of a satyr. This was Wilde's only novel; slightly edited when it first appeared in print in 1891 but due to public outrage at the remaining hints of homosexuality and deviancy, was further edited. This edition is the version in which only 500 words had been cut from Wilde's original manuscript. Wilde himself said, of Dorian Gray: 'All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.' Many believe that Wilde not only intend to point a moral but to highlight the fact that Dorian. himself and many others in the Victorian age were forced to live a double life of hypocrisy, but that to lead such a double life is, in the end, destructive to oneself and to those about one. Cover art from an engraving by Ceil Keeling.