The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde | Review | Bookish Favourites

hello and welcome to Spencer's library I'm Claudia and this is the 24th and last episode in my bookish favorites advent calendar series and before we dive into the book that I want to discuss today I just have to say that I've really enjoyed doing these daily videos it's been a lot of work it's actually been a lot more work than I had expected but we really enjoyed looking back at some of my absolute favorite books some of which I bang on about every single video and some of which I don't really talk about so thank you so much for being there with me on these on this journey through my reading life and I want to finish it today with what I routinely consider my favorite classic and which might even might even make it to be my favorite book of all times and that is the Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde this book is so so special to me weirdly I don't remember when I first read it I don't even remember if I first read this in German or if I went straight to English but I do remember reading Oscar Wilde as a teenager with a dictionary by my side looking up pretty much every second word because his language is so complex for someone who speaks that as a second language and his style is so beautiful and you have to read every sentence three times before you understand it but something about that gave me a real sense of satisfaction as a teenager when I read his books the Picture of Dorian Gray just keeps on giving whether you read it for the first time or the tenth then there's always something more to discover that is largely due to the beautiful beautiful prose you could read this book and not take any of the plot in and not understand any of the characters or know what's going on at all and you would still get something out of the beautiful language of this book but I am getting ahead of myself let me start by giving you a bit of background about the Picture of Dorian Gray if you haven't heard of it this was published in 1890 and it is Oscar Wilde's only novel and in a way that's kind of a good thing because of actively oh I'm gonna get so much hate on this objectively it's not that good especially when you compare it with some of his more brilliant works like his plays and his short stories and his fairy tales which I think are really the heart of his opus the novel didn't really suit his style I think because as a form it is just a bit too long and doesn't lend itself to punchy beautifully crafted sentences but you don't need to try and it is still an amazing novel I mean look I've just said it's my favorite novel so of course I'm going to defend this novel but the point still stands if you need to Oscar Wilde I probably wouldn't recommend starting with this one so published in 1890 this caused a little bit of a scandal the scandals around the perceived immorality and depravity of the Picture of Dorian Gray and in fact in subsequent editions and the book has always been printed with a preface you can see it right here I have taken plenty of notes in this and the preface in a way is a defense of the book not a defense of its quality but a defense of its validity as a novel in the literary world I think my favorite sentence of this preface is the line books are well written or badly written that is all and that's my favorite line because I don't a hundred percent agree with it I think there is more to books than pure quality especially since quality is an entirely subjective measure and I do realize that I'm contradicting myself here because just a few minutes ago I said that objectively this is not a very good book but what I mean by quality being a subjective measure is that the collective decision of whether a book is good or not is heavily influenced by the lived experience of the people who make that decision so if a literary critic of Oscar Wilde's time said this is a bad novel because of its immorality and depravity then that is very heavily influenced by this art critics lived experience as likely a Victorian man with a certain sense of morality and of what is good and what is bad honestly I don't know where I'm going with this do I agree with Oscar Wilde or do I not agree with Oscar Wilde I don't know hello I'm not a professional literature person this book makes you think that is evident from the preface but it's even more evident from the rest of the story but the preface is just a beautiful kind of microcosm of what the book is actually about oh wow I'm eight minutes into the recording of this video and I still haven't talked about the plot right the Picture of Dorian Gray is about a beautiful young man named yesterda in gray who lives a life of leisure he's admired by his two friends one is the painter basil Hallward and then the aristocrats Lord Henry and the three of them sit together at the beginning of the book Dorian is being a model for basil who's painting his portrait and Lord Henry is sitting there and watching them and during that first scene in the book they strike up a conversation about what really is the purpose of life and Lord Henry convinces Dorian that the purpose of life is to be beautiful and to enjoy beautiful things and Dorrie grey looks at his portrait and is dismayed because he knows that while he is young and gorgeous and rich now he will not always be young and gorgeous and rich so he curses the painting and he expresses the wish that the painting would age in his place and that the painting would show the signs of his sins and of his aging in the Dorian Gray himself would forever remain beautiful well because this is a gothic horror story he gets his wish so Dorian Gray goes through his life in the body of a gorgeous 18 year old innocent boy while doing some really rather nasty things I'm not going to spoil it exactly what he gets up to but it's not good and his beautiful face carries him through life and he's admired from all sides and the people who dare question him conveniently pushed aside they leave or they die and no one ever really catches on to what Dorian is up to in his sinful life I find it difficult to explain what I love about this book so much I think it's partly the fact that this is very much a philosophical essay disguised as a novel the plot of the novel is definitely not what drives it there isn't really a mystery to it because we know what happens with Dorian in this portrait there isn't really a sense of character development which is what I normally really enjoy about fiction but what this book has is loads and loads of really beautiful sentences of really intriguing thoughts about the philosophy of asceticism of questions of morality and those questions don't always get answered in the way that you expect them to from a Victorian novel this book takes ideas and tropes of the gothic horror genre and uses them to express kind of the horror within humanity it shows us what exactly we are capable of it shows us the really ugly side of being a person and especially the really ugly side of being a beautiful person the opening scene itself is an absolute masterpiece and if you get your hands on this novel then and you're not sure whether it's for you then I would definitely recommend reading at least the first chapter reading that conversation between the three friends and figuring out from there if the Picture of Dorian Gray is a book for you let's talk a little bit about the characters the book is set around this triangle of Dorian basil the painter and Lord Henry the friend and these three people function very much as archetypes as personified ideas as personified philosophies Dorian at the beginning of the book very impressionable really a blank page ready to be filled with ideas with dangerous and immoral ideas from Lord Henry Basel kind of acts as the conscience but at the same time he's down for is his love of beautiful young men like Dorian Gray and he is too weak to place his moral boundaries above that admiration of Dorian unfortunately one of the really big things that are lacking from me in this book a female characters there are two characters that kind of play a role in the story one of them is a young woman called Sibyl vane whom Dorian falls in love with when he sees her on stage because she's a stage actress and again she is very much a personified idea she's not really a person as such she is this creature of pure innocence and purity and love and that is juxtaposed with her profession as an actress which in Victorian times had a lot of connotations of prostitution of sex work of disreputable women so she kind of embodies that paradox and she is someone who Dorian Gray can pour his love into and then later his hates and she's very much an object that show up that shows us the first wrongdoings of drinks of Dorian's character the other woman that I'm thinking of his lady Henry so there's Lord Henry Wotton wife but she's again more of a punchline and really a person so I do wish that Oscar Wilde had spare the second thoughts especially to fleshing out Sibyl vanes character because I think it would have given the book just an extra layer of emotionality if we as the reader had been able to feel more connected - Sybil and to her own personal tragedies of which there are many on a much more surface level this book is a wonderful collection of one-liners of punchlines of aphorisms of things you can engrave on tea or I don't know what you actually engrave and basically I can open this book on any page and there will be a punchy line for me to read out to you likely written in dialogue because that's where Oscar Wilde really truly shines that's where you can see that his true talent is as a playwright not a novelist let's test this theory okay I've opened the I've open the novel on page 42 fake 43 let's have a look I am too fond of reading books to care to write them mr. Erskine I should like to write a novel certainly a novel there would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal but there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers primers and encyclopedias of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature says of course Lord Henry Wotton the book has a very Oscar Wilde type humor about it so if you enjoy Wilde comedies then you will find the same kind of humor in the Picture of Dorian Gray accepts mixed in with really dark and dreary a dreadful story I find that a combination quite attractive personally right I think I have gushed about this book a lot my video is now running to 21 minutes funny that I manage to talk about all of the other novels in this in this series in around five or six minutes at the most but it's a truly beautiful book I love it so much despite its shortcomings and there are many I just can't help loving this a little bit more every time I read it let me know if you feel the same there won't be a video tomorrow because this is the last in this series but I will see you again in a few days thank you so much for watching bye

Channel: Spinster's Library

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Id: OwbkzN2z9qI

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 24 2019