Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

5 reviews

jessthanthree's review against another edition

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dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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elihrus's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

**Read for school compulsory reading**
Well. It's complicated.
I won't talk about the blantant antisemitism and horrible mysoginy, but damn that made it hard to read. I understood that Henry *is* a bad influence, but it was unhinged.
The first half of the book was pretty slow, nothing really happend. But the middle and second part? That was something, and it made the overall experience much much better.
I loved the psychology in this book, it reminded me little bit of The Cremator - how much you can influence one.
I also loved the flower symbolisms throughout the book.

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morebedsidebooks's review against another edition

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dark

Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.0

The Picture of Dorian Gray an Annotated, Uncensored Edition edited by Nicholas Frankel is a beautiful and indispensable edition of the story’s emended typescript submitted to Lippincotts Monthly Magazine. Frankel, who has also authored books on Oscar Wilde, takes on the added task of offering context around a controversial 19th century novel and author. Extensive notes and pictures add much dimension. However, at the same time essays of over 60 pages particularly the preface and general introduction fall short in more than one respect as well as some annotations. Judging from other writing by Frankel he cannot be ignorant of details or distinctions. So, this obliqueness in Frankel’s approach leaves me cold in recommending his books on Wilde. Outside this version of Dorian Gray that is, which I happen to like best as one of my favourite novels. Though some passages are more ambiguous in the story’s first public form (and vice-versa comparing versions), the best art perhaps that which offers range of interpretation, Dorian Gray continues to fascinate. Wilde too, as historian Mathew Sturgis put it ‘in his posthumous existence he has assumed quite as many masks as he did during his own life, and with the same élan.’ So, I also beg anyone if interested in Wilde to make the effort of sifting through the ever-evolving muddle mythos around him. Especially when Wilde is painted as a martyr, often done (including by Wilde himself). The reality is so much more complex.

Case in point, the biggest issue with Frankel’s writing I have is as it’s put by Michael M. Kaylor in Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde: ‘scholarship engages in absolute avoidance of this form of love, intimacy, and/or eroticism; claims its anachronism; heightens its 'homosocial' aspects; or disguises it as 'homosexual'.’ In a letter to Robert Ross (who Wilde also had an important relationship with and would become Wilde’s first literary executor after his death) in February of 1898 Wilde wrote ‘a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble— more than other forms.’ Uranian stemming from 1844 too is a word very often given the stand in of homosexual (the latter term newer at the time taking on use as an adjective in 1891 and noun by 1894). Yet the term represents a continuum that, not without irony, such approaches obfuscate. Particularly artistic output of this nature was of a boy-lover manner. Wilde was not just being cute when he used the word boy. The man went almost exclusively for teenagers. (I also have not been able to source Frankel’s annotation that older men referring to young men as ‘boy’ is some sort of gay code. I’d love to know.)

Too in describing The Cleveland Street Scandal in 1889, shortly before Dorian Gray was published, Frankel chooses to put the word boys in parenthesis. This case which notably led to an aristocrat fleeing the country involved teenage sex workers as young as fifteen all but one under eighteen, and the thirty-five-year-old brothel keeper. Though there were older sex workers, in a connected case in 1890, another sex worker in his thirties at the brothel served as a witness (but was not believed) when a journalist was successfully sued for libel.

Similarly, the included briefest summary of the trials involving WIlde does not do the proceedings justice (no pun intended). Nor was it only a “series of blackmailers, male prostitutes, and the procure Alfred Taylor, as well as the bookseller’s clerk Edward Shelley’ Wilde was interrogated about.

As to the text of Dorian Gray, Frankel like most ignores references to child abuse, at one point passing off a section as representing a common feeling yet coming close to the implications Dorian’s childhood can have on the story.

Also, worth mentioning if choosing to cite flower language, the annotation on laburnum associated with Lord Henry fails to mention it is a very poisonous plant and meaning something forsaken or pensive beauty.

Yes, Victorian society had sectors advocating a puritanism that threatened literature (plus those who produce it) and engaged in moral panics (and is still alive today). But the upset about a transgressive story of a young sexually fluid man whose youth is so empahsised (but for reasons beyond inflated pride, vanity— in what way one wants to be viewed) involved with two principal older men to ruin and crime is showing ‘the world its own shame’ in more ways. And if one wants to talk of other ages ‘Greek love’ was a very specific age stratified model that bears less and less resemblance to what was going on in later centuries. Further in the now 121 years since Wilde’s death, while homophobia has been beaten back in several respects, the criminalization and dehumanization around sex work(ers) also changing, society still would pass its judgements. (Perhaps even more harshly and a worse media circus, plus a whole variety of public opinions including accompanying hashtags no doubt.) Then as now the question raised of the corruption of youth remains. Along with the same underlying The Picture of Dorian Gray.

We can however more easily consider controversial works like The Picture of Dorian Gray, and by consequence the man behind it, as neither are hardly forgotten. Wilde even in 1897 wrote ‘Dorian Gray is a classic, and deservedly.’ That I do have to agree, while bearing in mind there was far less classical about Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde himself.

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borokaaa's review against another edition

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mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK IS SO GAY

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s_zoe_k05's review against another edition

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adventurous dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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