Books : The Picture of Dorian Gray (Simply Stories)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Simply Stories)

Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780140814385
Edition: Abridged
Format: Abridged
ISBN: 0140814388
Label: Penguin Books Ltd
Languages: EnglishUnknownEnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishPublished
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: May 26, 1994
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Studio: Penguin Books Ltd

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
As years pass Dorian Gray always looks young and handsome. A picture of Dorian Gray is locked in a dark room. What has happened to the picture, and why does no one ever see it? Kieran McGovern has simplified the text.

Amazon.com Review:
A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."

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