The picture of dorian gray gay
Published in:November-December 2014 issue.
THE AUTHOR of this piece passed away in 2011, having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a book with the somewhat salacious title, The Secret Experience of Oscar Wilde (2005), by Neil McKenna. While Hattersley doesn’t directly speak to the question of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s primacy as a male lover novel, he does venture that it was, “while prudent, implicitly homosexual”—at least for cognoscenti who knew what to look for.
This obfuscation is what makes Dorian Gray’s place in the gay canon so open to debate. The novel’s very coyness on the matter of queer desire, its not daring to identify “the love,” is what prevents it from being a shoo-in as the first gay novel in English. Wilde is not to blame, of course (and notwithstanding that a few of the most suggestive sentences were excised by his publisher): late Victorian world simply did not allow for a more explicit exploration of the devotion whose name could not be spoken, much less elevated to a primary role in a novel. Thus Dorian’s affairs are all with women, starting with the actress Sibyl Vane, for whom h "You appear to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a experience of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet -- we do encounter occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke's -- we explain each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it -- much superior, in fact, than I am. She never gets perplexed over her dates, and I always do. But when she does come across me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me." (1.10) We're not entirely sure to make of this comment from Lord Henry – we find out as the novel goes on that his relationship with his wife is certainly not one of mutual attraction. What is Lord Henry attracted to, then? "I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and co Over time, perceptions of Oscar Wilde’s works have changed significantly. Initially considered scandalous and used against him as evidence of gross indecency, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is now regularly introduced to readers as a canonically gay novel. However, attitudes towards homosexuality had started to shift by the time James Joyce’s Dubliners (1916) was published, as a direct result of Wilde’s sensationalised persecution. This article analyses Joyce and Wilde’s characters through the lens of necropolitics and examines how homosexual panic and gender inequality contributed to the tragic, preventable deaths of women and gay men. By depicting the effects of these societal influences, both Joyce and Wilde criticise the strict moral codes that governed the public and private lives of ‘sexual deviants’ oppressed within a heterosexist system, factors which can be deduced from the treatment of the era’s proscription of gay relationships, the colonial situation, and gender imbalances promoted by the strict moral codes of the time. Coined by Achille Mbembe, the term ‘necropolitics’ refers to how neoliberal systems exhaust those lives who execute not contri Zebra1 I’ve just finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and I have some questions. First, let me say that the book was far different than I expected. I didn’t know it was by Oscar Wilde, and yet it is very different than the works of his I have read, which are mostly his more popular plays. This was like a really witty Edgar Allen Poe story.
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Introduction
The Picture of Dorian Gray
OH and SPOILERS AHOY!
Any way, the first questions I have is about the guide that Lord Henry gives Dorian. This book changes Dorian completly. The book is described quite a bit but the call of the book and the author of the book are not given. Is there a real book that Wilde is talking about? Or is the book to be found in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Or is it really just a symbol for Lord Henry and Dorian having hot queer sex?
Much later in the book, after Dorian burns Basil’s clothes Dorian opens a covert drawer in a cabinet and pulls out a 'Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, and the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round crystals and the tasselled implaited metal threads. " Inside is 'green paste, waxy in lustre, t