The Picture of Dorian Gray - Week 3 - thru Ch 14

[Robin P, Moderator]

Things get a lot darker in this section. Dorian throws himself into a hedonistic lifestyle, including some scandalous behavior. He is fascinated by music, art, and jewels (pages about jewels!) and has no concern for other people. But people keep looking at his beautiful young face and assuming he can't really be a bad guy.

Dorian is still haunted by the painting. We find out that besides getting older, the painting changes expression to show all the evil that doesn't show in Dorian's face. Finally, when Basil visits him, urges him to mend his ways, and talks about seeing Dorian's soul, Dorian blames Basil for the painting and shows it to him. Basil is horrified. Then suddenly Dorian turns on him, stabs him repeatedly and leaves him shut up in the room. Then he coolly creates an alibi for himself and gets a good night's sleep. The next day he forces an acquaintance with medical knowledge to somehow dissolve (?) the body.

Gone are the aphorisms and light-hearted banter. Dorian is somehow no longer really human. Did this turn of events surprise you?

Is there something to the idea that we judge people on looks? Studies have shown that people who are more conventionally attractive get more job offers. Certainly romantic partners make their first impressions based on looks.

Where do you think things can go from here?

[Abigail]

I’m behind on my reading but hope to get to these chapters by the end of the week.

[Brian E]

Robin P wrote: "Where do you think things can go from here?"

While I'd like to say "there's no place to go but up" that would be wrong as I have to believe the story will progress downwards, though to what I don't know - hard to get worse than the brutal killing of Basil (maybe eating him?) The murder is described in detail yet Dorian's other "scandalous behavior" over the years is only hinted at, none is described, so we are left to imagine it.

Robin P wrote: ".Gone are the aphorisms and light-hearted banter. Dorian is somehow no longer really human. Did this turn of events surprise you?."

I do agree that Dorian is non-human now though, like beauty, whether its super or sub human is in the eye of the beholder. Speaking of beholders, Lord Henry is not around to offer his perspective. Nothing has surprised me yet except that Lord Henry makes only a brief appearance in chapter 10 and is otherwise absent. I thought Dorian might turn to Lord Henry after murdering Basil.
Lord H's absence also explains the loss of the light-hearted banter. I presume Wilde purposely keeps Lord H and his banter at bay to better attain, as Robin identifies, the "darker" tone of this section. But then there's still one quarter of the book left, so there's plenty of time for Lord H to chime in.

[Trev]

All the earlier light hearted quips from Lord Henry just encouraged Dorian towards moral disintegration. The book Harry gave him probably had a witty title but in reality it just showed him 1000 ways to be bad. Basils’s murder seemed to be the culmination of Dorian’s evil. It had echoes of Frankenstein, but I don’t believe it was Basil who created the monster that was Dorian. It was Lord Henry. Basil may have worshipped Dorian’s beauty and contributed to his vanity, but for Dorian, Henry’s attraction was far stronger.

In murdering Basil, the creator of the picture, Dorian has lost any chance of redemption.

[Robin P, Moderator]

Trev wrote: "All the earlier light hearted quips from Lord Henry just encouraged Dorian towards moral disintegration. The book Harry gave him probably had a witty title but in reality it just showed him 1000 wa..."

I forgot about the book. This seems to contradict Wilde's own preface about how no books are immoral or cause certain behavior.

I really like your point about how murdering the creator of the picture dooms Dorian in a different way than if he had murdered a random person.

[Detlef]

I think that Dorian was never the innocent one that was corrupted by Henry. There are hints to that effect in previous chapters. Henry just gave Dorian „permission“ to give his evil tendencies free range. His life becomes a string of evil doings, which (as Brian stated) are never really described in detail. Wilde goes a bit overboard though in describing the luxuries he indulges in, no real depth in his life. His deeper thoughts don’t really ring true. The description of jewels etc sound more like an excerpt of an auction catalogue from Christie‘s.
Finally, a thought about the brutal murder of Basil. Maybe Dorian tries to free himself from the painting in killing the painter?

[Frances, Moderator]

I am struggling with this one! The section with the endless descriptions of jewels and tapestries and art seemed superfluous. The corrupting novel and all of Dorian's evil behaviour is one of those situations where I feel the need to see an example of his cruelty or betrayal, rather than just being told that he keeps doing these horrible things. Even the murder of Basil, which is shocking, seems unexplained. I went back a reviewed Dorian's parentage-certainly his grandfather was a cruel man. I simply don't see how Dorian, who had genuinely been a rather soft-hearted and decent young man, could be so absolutely corrupted-or is it the idea that he feels he can get away with anything that gives him licence to unleash all of his worst instincts.

I agree with Brian-I was surprised by the disappearance of Lord Henry, and that Dorian's worsening reputation hasn't had apparently worse consequences for him.

[Abigail]

Not sure I have anything new to add, I’m much in agreement with everyone here. Save for chapter 14, most of it read like dry navel-gazing or an elaborately described list of things and people. Dorian’s unstable sense of self and unpredictable and wild changes in mood are somewhat fascinating, but they’re so poorly painted by Wilde that I can’t tell if it’s intentional characterisation or just lazy writing. The scene with Alan did, to me, feel genuinely chilling, at last I got a sense of who Dorian has become. But why did we skip over so many years of his life and pass nearly an entire chapter going over his material possessions and historical obsessions? Without Wilde’s signature wit from the dialogue, it was all very average, and I think he could have pulled off combining flippant banter with a grotesque descent into amorality (and indeed immorality) in a way that would have more aptly displayed Dorian’s ‘fall’.

[Rosemarie, Moderator]

I agree that the chapter about the jewels and his hobbies was superfluous and boring.
In the notes of the version I'm reading, it was suggested that the book referred to could have been À rebours/Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I read the book years ago and really don't recall much of it-it was an extended version of chapter 11!
This was the Age of Decadence after all.

[Abigail]

I started out enjoying chapter 11, but then it went on. And on. And on. And on. It really became an encyclopedia of worthless knowledge. What did I find interesting at the start of it? It was such a perfect, though maybe unconscious, portrait of internalized homophobia. Made me dig out my Hozier CD and listen to it again, with all the talk about the “spirituality of the senses.”

It was also interesting to read, even in elliptical terms, about the seamy underside of London society in those days, so similar to the seamy underside of Georgian and Regency London with which I am more familiar. It seemed as if many of the same neighborhoods were still haunts of vice nearly a hundred years later.

Once we got out of the encyclopedia and back into action, I found the whole Basil incident unsatisfactory. For such a brilliant writer of plays, Wilde is just very clumsy when it comes to plotting a novel. Basil says something that annoys Dorian (why was that one thing so much more annoying than everything else he said?), and suddenly there’s a previously unmentioned knife ready to hand and the deed is done! We were better off with the endless aphorisms.

Oh well, plowing on into the last section.

[Frances, Moderator]

Yes Abigail this is not at all what I had expected-I somehow still thought that Wilde would maintain a lighter tone throughout, even though we would be reading about the corruption of a man.

[Abigail]

No worries, I’ll always have An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Ernest!