Focus on Drama: Dorian Gray

Author’s information
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin. His mother was also a writer, but a very nationalistic one. His father wrote also books, but was in the first place a surgeon. Oscar Wilde studied classical languages at a college in Dublin. In 1875 he travelled to Italy with a former teacher of him and to years later also to Greece. In that time, it was a weird thing to travel to the places where the languages origin from. He was very interested in art and thought that the only function of art was that it should be nice to look at, so with no deeper meaning. After his study, he started to write plays. He got married in 1884 with Constance Lloyd and they brought two sons into the world. In 1892 he wrote “The Picture Of Dorian Gray”, of which I will tell you about later on. He met a man, Lord Alfred Douglas, and fell in love with him. His wife left him and took the children with her. He got arrested because he was gay, and he had to be in prison for two years. He died in Paris, in 1900, very poor and lonely, just after he converted himself to Catholicism on his death-bed.

Information about the story
Oscar Wilde wrote this novel in 1892. The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a work of classic gothic horror fiction. On September 9 2009 a movie adaptation of the story was released.


'Dorian Gray' Movie trailer 2009

Short summary
Dorian Gray is a handsome young man. His best friend, Basil, made a portrait of Dorian, but Basil found it too perfect, he’s afraid that it shows too much of himself. So he gives the portrait to Dorian. Dorian found the portrait very beautiful and he hopes and wishes that he could always stay that handsome as he is at that very moment.
Then he fell in love with a girl, Sibyl Vane, an actress. He went to some of her plays. But when she saw that Dorian was in the audience, she got very nervous and she ruined her whole part in the play. She committed suicide. Dorian went home after the play and saw that his portrait had gotten an evil face. In the following 18 years, the picture got even more evil, older and uglier, due to all the bad things he did. On the other hand, Dorian didn’t got older at all. At the end of the story, Dorian couldn’t take eternal youth and he killed Basil, the man who made the painting, because he blamed him for all his misery. After that, he put his knife in the painting. When the housekeeper came to his room, she found Dorian on the floor with a knife in his chest. He died. The painting went back to his old version, on which he was still young and handsome.

References to The Victorian Age
The Victorian Age has a couple of characteristics (see above) which can be found in Dorian Grey. The story is written in a very brilliant way. You can notice that the writer, Oscar Wilde, really thought his story true. He wrote it with as mission to let the reader find a hidden a hidden, deeper meaning in the story. In this story, there’s the lesson hidden that you must not love yourself too much because then things get out of hand.