Oscar Wilde, 1890
Here’s a canonical novel that quite a few of my AP Literature students had read but I hadn’t, so when I found it in a Little Free Library box, I thought I’d snag it. I was vaguely familiar with the premise, of course, but not the plot, or even the length—somewhere I’d picked up the impression that it was a novella, not a book clocking in at over 250 pages. And when I happened across these lines in the preface, I was optimistic: “The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his face in a glass. The nineteeth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in a glass.” Wow, I thought, that’s both insightful and clever! It’s almost like Oscar Wilde had a reputation for saying clever things!
Unfortunately, the first few chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray consist of little more than a bunch of Oscar Wildes Oscar Wilding at each other, and that gets old fast. It’s not just that the characters’ dialogue is overly clever—it’s that it’s nearly all clever in the exact same way. They speak in paradoxical epigrams, Lord Henry in particular. “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” “The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.” “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” “The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” “I love acting. It is so much more real than life.” Etc., etc. Wilde tries to lampshade this by having characters accuse each other of speaking in epigrams and spinning out paradoxes ad nauseam, but all that does is turn this into a Pattern 28 book. Pointing out your novel’s shortcomings does not make those shortcomings okay.
The only chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray worse than the ones built out of paradoxical epigrams are the ones not built out of paradoxical epigrams. When I’d learned the premise of this book as a kid, my understanding had been that it was just about someone who is secretly much older than he appears, as his portrait ages but he doesn’t. In fact, it is about someone who is secretly much more dissolute than he appears, as the portrait absorbs the physical ravages of vice posited by our Victorian-era author. But the novel runs afoul of Pattern 7 and doesn’t actually show us the vice: we hear about it through rumors, and by the fact that Dorian is recognized when he visits an opium den. The nadir of the book is a chapter that details on the hobbies that Dorian takes up and lays aside—it’s a horrible slog. The ending is a bit livelier as a plot belatedly kicks in, but all in all, I’d thought this was a novella and now I wish it had been.
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