Biblio Beau

Thursday, May 13, 2010

39.

Author: Oscar Wilde
Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Publication: Paperback, Norton
Pages: 184 pages
Genre: Gothic
Acquisition: Work Text
Date Completed: May 13, 2010
Rating: 7 stars out of 5

It is difficult for me to review The Picture of Dorian Gray because of my shifting, yet everlasting, love for the novel. I first fell into infatuation with Lord Henry's wit, grew irrevocably attached to the horror that is Dorian Gray himself, wept over Basil and sympathized with his greatest needs, and shifted through a series of fascinations as I read the novel year after year.

This year I have chosen to focus on the parallel narratives of Dorian Gray, introducing both the primary Gothic tale and the secondary satire of Victorian London society. Alas, I will be abandoning Mr. Wilde next semester, as I feel that we just don't have as much time as I would like to devote to the novel.

Starting next semester I will be "auditioning" replacements, starting with We Have Always Lived in the Castle. But my devotion to Wilde remains: my children are Brooks DORIAN and Maxwell HENRY, and my right foot will be forever tagged by Wilde's penmanship. And that's just the way I like it.

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Favorite Quotes

"To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching [...]. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission..." - Oscar Wilde, "Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Subject of 'The Best Hundred Books'" (qtd. Wright, Built of Books, 317).

"I wish you joy o'th' worm" - Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.270.

"The world must be peopled!" - Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table ... whereas daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men." - Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (77).

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

And then there is more Oscar Wilde:

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit." - The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal." - Personal Impressions of America

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint." - "The Children of the Poets", The Pall Mall Gazette

"There is no sin except stupidity." - The Critic as Artist

"One should always be a little improbable." - "Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young"

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - The Importance of Being Earnest

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
--- A.E. Newton