The Picture of Dorian Gray: Difference between revisions

 

[[Oscar Wilde]]'s only novel, naturally rife with witty banter and [[Ho Yay]]. Blond [[Pretty Boy]] Dorian is the [[The Muse|muse]] for the talented artist Basil Hallward. Dorian, gifted with incredible beauty, is a thoughtless and happy young man until the day that he comes to Hallward's house to see the unveiling of the artist's latest masterpiece -- the eponymous portrait. There, he meets Lord Henry, who with a few casual words, instils the fear of aging and decrepitude into Dorian's young, impressionable heart. Dorian is greatly troubled, and when Basil brings the portrait out and unveils it, its beauty hurts Dorian so much that [[Fairest of Them All|he exclaims he would sell his soul for his painting to age in his place]].

 

 

 

* [[All Gays Are Promiscuous]]: Averted with Basil, the most moral character of the story.

* [[All Love Is Unrequited]]: Dorian finds Henry fascinating.

** Interesting to note that during this time period, the practice was to paint the portrait of a supposedly insane person and diagnose their illness from how they looked in the painting. A famous example is Géricault's ''Insane Woman.''

** Though the rugged Basil's and Henry's (with his beautiful voice and elegant body talk) looks and charms don't match their characters either.

* [[Blond Guys Are Evil]]: Dorian Gray. Despite the fact that he's sometimes presented as having black hair. In fact, the only characters in the book stated to have black hair are Basil Hallward and Alan Campbell, both of which [[The Woobie|come across as much more sympathetic]].

* [[Blackmail]]: Dorian blackmails Alan Campbell to {{spoiler|get rid of Basil's corpse. He does so, crosses the [[Despair Event Horizon]], and kills himself.}}

* [[Blank Slate]]: Dorian starts out the book apparently without any convictions or personal beliefs, leading him to be shaped very powerfully from a few casual words from Lord Henry.

* [[Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick]]: Lord Henry uses this.

* [[Bury Your Gays]]: {{spoiler|Poor Basil.}}

** And poor {{spoiler|Alan}}, if you take the blackmailing as {{spoiler|Dorian threatening to reveal a possible affair between the two of them}}.

* [[The Charmer]]: Henry for Dorian.

* [[The Confidant]]: Henry for Basil.

* [[Covers Always Lie]]: Look on Amazon.com. Ninety percent of the covers of this book give Dorian hair that is black as night, while he is explicitly described, several times, as being blond.

* [[Death Equals Redemption]]: {{spoiler|When Dorian died, the painting representing his soul reverted to its original form, although that may have been because the signs of sin and age came out of the picture and went into Dorian himself.}}

* [[Depraved Bisexual]]: Dorian, arguably. Part of [[Anything That Moves]].

* [[Devoted to You]]: Sybil, Basil, the unnamed ladies ruined by Dorian, and Dorian himself, for Dorian.

* [[Dogged Nice Guy]]: Not about relationship, but rather friendship and mentorship, Basil seems to be the type. Good person, nice friend, but boring, his advices are only annoying.

* [[Dramatic Irony]]: At least twice: The ever innocent Basil cannot see, or refuses to acknowledge, that the boy he fell in love with is slipping further and further into corruption. {{spoiler|This proves to be fatal. Then, after Basil's murder, Lord Henry tells Dorian that he wishes he knew somebody who had committed a real murder. [[Dramatic Irony]] indeed.}}

* [[Driven to Suicide]]: {{spoiler|Both Sybil Vane and Alan Campbell}}

* [[Everyone Is Bi]]: Probably James Vane is the only one who would refuse a night with Dorian.

* [[Evil Makes You Ugly]]: Or makes your picture ugly.

* [[Fainting]]: Dorian at a dinner party he is hosting shortly after James Vane has threatened to kill him and might possibly come after him again.

* [[Gayngst]]: Poor, poor Basil.

* [[Getting Crap Past the Radar]]: That's how the Ho Yay gets into a Victorian novel. The novel supposedly has ''less'' [[Ho Yay]] than the original magazine version. According to the Wordsworth edition, the novel [[Executive Meddling|editor]] removed a few lines of dialogue from Basil's confession about how he "somehow never loved a woman" and how he explicitly felt for Dorian.

* [[Grande Dame]]: Pretty much every woman in the book besides Sybil and her mother fall into this category.

* [[Grey and Gray Morality]]: [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Yes.]]

* [[Hair of Gold]]: Played straight with Dorian to begin with, then gradually [[Subverted Trope|subverted]].

* [[Heel Face Turn]]: Subverted -- Dorian thinks he's having one when he decides not to seduce an innocent country girl; when he triumphantly looks at his picture expecting it to be better, it actually looks ''even more evil'', now tainted by a smile of smug hypocrisy.

* [[Homoerotic Subtext]]: So much that a scene between Dorian and Basil was used as evidence against Wilde during his criminal trial for homosexuality.

* [["I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight]]: Basil attempts this when he finds out [[The Soulless|what his beloved Dorian has become]] [[Soul Jar|and what has happened to his painting of Dorian himself]], {{spoiler|unfortunately resulting in his death}}

'''Dorian''': ''{{spoiler|*Picks up a knife and stabs Basil*}}'' }}

* [[Immortality Inducer]]: The portrait.

* [[Incorruptible Pure Pureness]]: Henry corrupts every acquaintance of his, except Basil. If we don't count the sinful gay love Dorian tempts him to. But even that is a chaste, redeeming platonic one, so...

* [[The Ingenue]]: Poor, poor Sybil Vane.

** Dorian was also majorly guilty of this after embracing Lord Henry's hedonistic ideals when he starts corrupting people out of his own accord. Needless to say, Dorian's actions were more obviously for the evulz than his mentor's.

* [[It's All About Me]]: Basil's nicknaming Dorian "Narcissus" in Chapter 1 is more dead-on than he'd realized.

* [[I Want My Beloved to Be Happy]]: Basil after Dorian Gray gets engaged to Sybil.

* [[Karma Houdini]]: Lord Henry. Granted, he's grumpy about getting old, and his wife has left him, but nothing of any great consequence happens to him. Some have argued that Lord Henry doesn't merit any special punishment because he's simply amoral -- he talks a big game, but he hasn't the courage (as Dorian has) to cross the line into outright ''evil''.

* [[Lover and Beloved]]: Two mature, cultured men's rivalry for an innocent little boy's friendship. Of couuurse...

* [[Man Child]]: Dorian Gray at his first appearance.

* [[Meaningful Name]]: Dorian (the name of a tribe allowing homosexuality), Harry ('abuse, destroy').

* [[The Messiah]]: Basil

* [[Morality Pet]]: Sybil Vane, before {{spoiler|Dorian [[Driven to Suicide|drives her to suicide]].}}

* [[Murder Simulators]]: Subverted in that Dorian blames the [[Author Avatar]] Lord Henry for corrupting him with his cynical outlook as well as the "Yellow Book" he is always reading, but it is ultimately revealed that Lord Henry leads a fairly normal life and the idea of blaming a book comes across as similarly misguided.

* [[The Muse]]: Dorian for Basil, naturally.

* [[Noodle Incident]]: Dorian writes something on a card and shows it to Alan Campbell to blackmail him. We never learn what Dorian wrote.

** It's implied that the two had an affair, at a time when homosexuality was a capital offense. Campbell's reputation would be destroyed as well, as would Dorian's, but the reader can infer that Dorian is past caring what people think of him anyway. {{spoiler|Confirmed when Campbell commits suicide few after doing what Dorian asked from him - disposing of Basil's corpse.}}

* [[Oblivious to Love]]: Dorian to Basil's until the confession.

* [[Older Than They Look]]: Dorian keeps his youthful looks for several decades. Many readers assume that Dorian receives immortality, but this is never stated. He simply doesn't show the effects of age, and {{spoiler|doesn't live long enough for death by natural causes to factor into it}}.

* [[Opium Den]]: Dorian frequents them.

** It's also speculated that when his publisher told him that the book was too short, he padded it with those descriptions.

* [[Pygmalion Snapback]]: Oh men, you'd better have left that boy alone.

* [[Refuge in Audacity]]: Just about everything Lord Henry says.

* [[Shrine to Self]]: When Dorian isn't out getting debauched, he spends his time contemplating his portrait.

* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism]]: Each philosophy impersonated by the mentor characters.

* [[Spooky Painting]]: The decayed Dorian is mighty unpleasant to look at.

* [[Tears of Joy]]: Dorian after {{spoiler|he discovers that James Vane is dead}}

* [[This Was His True Form]]: At the end, {{spoiler|when Dorian stabs the picture, thus killing himself, the portrait become pretty again, but his body becomes mutated, reflecting his own inner corruption and age. His servants can't even tell it's his corpse until they recognize the rings on his fingers.}}

* [[Too Good for This Sinful Earth]]: {{spoiler|Sybil, Basil}}

* [[Weak-Willed]]: That's why Basil wasn't a good [[Mentor]] material.

* [[We Could Have Avoided All This]]: If Basil recognized what a hedonist and debaucherer Lord Henry was, why the heck did he introduce him to his impressionable [[Man Child]] friend so that he [[Corrupt the Cutie|slipped further and further into corruption]]? Basil himself realizes this, [[My God, What Have I Done?|and regrets it dearly.]]

* [[What the Hell, Hero?]]: Basil calls Dorian out for going to the Opera {{spoiler|barely a day after he got the news of Sybil Vane's death.}}

* [[Wrong Genre Savvy]]: Again poor, '''poor''' Sybil Vane.

* [[You Killed My Father]]: Although he doesn't say them in the same order as the [[Memetic Mutation|meme]], "[[My Name Is Inigo Montoya|My name is James Vane]]," "You killed my sister," and "[[Prepare to Die]]" all make an appearance when James Vane corners and almost shoots Dorian outside the opium den.

* [[You're Insane!]]: Alan Campbell to Dorian {{spoiler|after he killed Basil and is asking him to help dispose of the body.}}

 

 

* [[Even the Guys Want Him]]: Ben Chaplin almost enjoyed kissing Ben Barnes.

* [[Gender Flip]]: A 1983 TV movie called ''The Sins of Dorian Gray'' made the lead a woman (and yet, still not blonde).

* [[The Movie]]: There have been several film adaptations of the book. However, probably the most well known version is the 1945 movie directed by Albert Lewin.

* [[Scare Chord]]: The portrait reveal in the 1945 film.

* [[Setting Update]]: The 1970 film version updates the setting to then-contemporary times. The more open attitudes about homosexuality and premarital sex shift the plot around a little, but it still works.

* [[Shadow Discretion Shot]]: During Dorian's murder of {{spoiler|Basil Hallward}} in the 1945 film.

* [[Splash of Color]]: The portrait, and only the portrait, in the 1945 film.

* [[Take Our Word for It]]: Due to the [[Hays Code]], Dorian's [[Offstage Villainy]] couldn't even be ''named'', let alone shown or described, in the 1945 film adaptation. It therefore must suffice for the narrator to simply tell the viewer that he has committed such debauchery that his name is now mud in most decent circles.

 

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[[Category:Hugo Award]]