En cours de chargement...
Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author's most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel's corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, "a terrible moral in Dorian Gray."
Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment.
Of Dorian Gray's relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be - in other ages, perhaps."
Everlasting beauty has its price...
The story happens during the Victorian era, around the figure of the young and very handsome lad Dorian Gray. After becoming the model and muse of Basil Hallward, a sensitive painter, Gray is so enthralled by his portrait that he implicitly makes a deal with the devil ; he wished for the picture to grow old in his place so he can remain untouched by the marks of time. But every pact has a catch... Influenced by his mentor Lord Henry and his hedonistic world view, Dorian basks in a decadent lifestyle for years while his picture takes all the blames and gets uglier... to a point of no-return.
By portraying a cruel, narcissistic and amoral character, Wilde offers his readers a still contemporary critique of hedonistic behaviors and the superficiality and blindness of those who adopt this way of living.