The Picture of Dorian Gray/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The novel

  • Angst? What Angst?: Dorian after Sybil's death.
  • Closet Key: From Basil's confusion about his feelings for Dorian, it didn't seem like he had loved men before.
  • Courtly Love: Basil's for Dorian.
  • Creepy Awesome: Dorian Gray.
  • Creepy Souvenir: The picture for Dorian.
  • Ho Yay: Basil is clearly pining for Dorian.
    • The warm gestures of friendship between the men.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Pick from Dorian either driving his sort-of girlfriend Sybil Vane to suicide with a cruel Breaking Speech, and only feeling bad due to his own Pride or stabbing Basil Hallward to death and then blackmailing his other former lover Alan into disposing of the corpse, which later drives Alan to kill himself too.
  • Older Than Feudalism: If we take Dorian as Adam and Eve being tempted out of the Edenic innocence. And maybe Basil as Christ.
  • Older Than They Think:
    • Uniquely, occurring within the author's own writings -- a lot of the famous quotes from Wilde's comedies come from the novel, and one of the major characters in Lady Windermere's Fan is an Ascended Extra mentioned in passing in the novel.
    • Also, Wilde's great uncle, Charles Maturin, wrote the novel Melmot the Wanderer with the title character as a Flying Dutchman type who similarly keeps a portrait well-hidden, although not for Dorian's reason, only because it is dressed in antiquated clothing.
    • A meta-example is that the novel is somewhat inspired by the French book A Rebours, which is the "Yellow Book" Dorian is always reading.
    • The Penguin Classics edition's annotations note that the basis of the story, magical pictures that capture the soul or life essence of its subject's, are very old indeed. The Picture of Dorian Gray was a grim twist and deconstruction of the magical portrait trope, which would have been well known to Wilde's audience at the time of its writing.
  • The Svengali: Henry for Dorian.
  • Unusual Euphemism: "under the effect of his personality".
  • Values Dissonance: Homosexuality.
  • What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic: Besides the eponymous painting that Hallward made of Dorian, he also painted several others of the lad in classical attitude -- such as Narcissus, the Grecian who was heartbreakingly beautiful, and cursed to fall in love with his own reflection and starve to death, while nymphs died for his love out of his sight.
  • The Woobie: Basil, who has to watch Dorian Gray, the love of his life and his greatest inspiration, descend deeper and deeper into corruption against his wishes and ultimately gets murdered by him. Even The Soulless Dorian felt sorry for him.

Adaptations

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