NovelVictorian · 1890Study guide · no full textSteady

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde's only novel is an argument with itself: beauty as the highest value, and the cost of holding that belief. Every brilliant line of dialogue is doing damage somewhere in the plot.

Art & Imagination Identity Mortality Class

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“All art is quite useless.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

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Identity — how other works handle it →Class — how other works handle it →Mortality — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

Dorian Gray

Heir, beauty, and a sitter

The Picture of Dorian Gray · Oscar Wilde

Wants: To keep his face and his freedom at the same time.
Undone by: He treats consequences as something that happens to somebody else — the portrait, for instance.

Lord Henry Wotton

Epigrammatist and social theorist

The Picture of Dorian Gray · Oscar Wilde

Wants: To watch his ideas take shape in somebody else's life.
Undone by: He never tests his theories on his own life.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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