The Picture of Dorian Gray | classics & cocktails

[00:00:00]A large oil painting of my face does exist. And I wish that I could pose in front of it for this video, but that is just not possible right now for reasons.

[00:00:14]Welcome back to Classics and Cocktails, the show where I sip on a classic cocktail while talking about a piece of classic literature. Today we are talking about the late 19th century Gothic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gay, which dates to the year 1890, kind of. I feel like to do this novel justice, I should be like draped in velvet and surrounded by fresh cut roses with incense burning.

[00:00:37]But it's like 100° outside, so we're going to have to settle for just a couple candles going in the background and some flowers on my shirt and a bottle of champagne. [clears throat] The title character of Dorian Gay is very fond of drinking Hawk and soda, which is basically a white wine spritzer. So, I felt like a sparkling wine-based drink would be an appropriate pairing for this novel. And specifically, this champagne-based cocktail is going to be the champagne cocktail, which comes from the contemporary classics section of the International Bartenders Association official list of classic cocktails. As I mentioned last time in my inaugural episode of this series, I have no professional experience with bartending.

[00:01:14]I just enjoy a cocktail, so please don't expect anything fancy in terms of form or whatever. For my champagne cocktail, I begin with saturating a sugar cube in some bitters, and then adding in 10 milliliters of cognac, which is two teaspoons of cognac. I'm a baker, not a mixologist. Okay, I've never actually had this cocktail before, so I have no idea if I'm going to like it, but I like the components of it. I feel like I should smush this sugar cube, but the recipe didn't say to, so I guess I'll just leave it like that. The recipe then said to top this with 90 milliliters of champagne, but I'm just I'm not going to measure out my champagne. I shall measure with my heart. In addition to thinking that this would be an appropriate cocktail for the Hawin soda reasons, I thought it would be appropriate because Oscar Wild may have once remarked that only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking champagne. So, I used my imagination and I found a reason to drink some champagne.

[00:02:14]Oh, that's very nice. That's very nice.

[00:02:17]Because it's about 100° outside. And because this cocktail is so very nice and refreshing, I am in serious danger of just like downing this glass of champagne. [laughter] Oh no. Oh no. Don't do that, Carson. But I will be moderate in my sipping because Oscar Wild may also have once remarked that alcohol taken in sufficient quantities produces all the effects of intoxication.

[00:02:39]Observant fellow that Oscar Wild. I say he only may have said these things because Oscar Wild was famously witty, but both of those quotes come from things he supposedly said in conversation. They're not based on like written records, so who knows if he actually said that. But we are not here to talk about the wicked wit of Oscar Wild. We are here to talk about the picture of Dorian Gray. To talk about this piece of classic literature in a kind of chatty and personal way rather than getting bound up in all the formality surrounding classic literature. In my first video in this series, I talked about Italo Calvino's short essay, Why Read the Classics? So, let's start off our discussion of this book with a quick consideration of why read this classic. This is a piece of classic literature that I frequently will recommend to somebody if they are curious about getting started with reading more classic literature, but feel kind of intimidated by that prospect. This is a very short novel.

[00:03:32]It's even shorter than it looks here as I'm holding it because this edition has a lot of preparatory materials. And not only is it short, but it feels very accessible. Partly, I think, because it is kind of suffused with that signature wittiness from Oscar Wild. So maybe you want to read this because it is just a clever little accessible piece of classic literature. Or maybe you would be interested in reading it because it poised with a lot of questions of morality and vanity and social expectation and performance and the idea of the Fouian bargain. Or maybe a reason to read this classic could be that you are interested in an introduction to the works of Oscar Wild. This was his only novel that he wrote. He wrote several really good, really funny plays, but this is his one piece of long pros fiction. Of course, the answer to the question of why read this classic could also be part of Italo Calvino's conclusion, which is it is better to have read the classics than not to have read them. But I don't know yet as you're watching this whether you have read this classic or whether you just clicked into this video because you were curious about Dorian Gay. So I'm going to keep this video spoilerfree. I'll talk about the premise of this book a little bit about the plot of it. I'll get into some themes and vibes and and give some recommendations for other books that you could pair this novel with. But I will leave plenty unsaid so that if you want to read the book after you watch this video, there will be plenty left for you to be surprised by.

[00:04:54]I will also put up my hair because it's really hot in here.

[00:05:00]Let's see if this dagger will do.

[00:05:08][sighs] Okay, now I'm ready. The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses. And when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac or the more delicate perfume of the pink flowering thorn. You see why I say I should be surrounded by fresh cut flowers as I'm talking about this book. That was the very first sentence of this novel. We open in the home of a painter named Basil who is in his studio talking with a friend of his, Lord Henry. Basil has been working on a portrait of a beautiful young man. And not only is the subject of this portrait just stunningly beautiful, but Basil also says that through painting him, through adopting this young man as his muse, he has been able to create the best work of his career. Basil describes how this young man Dorian has become his inspiration. how even if Dorian is just in the room while Basil is painting something else, Basil feels that he is suddenly able to create better and better works of art. And Basil is not only artistically inspired by this man's beauty and his energy, but he is very fond of Dorian. He's very, very fond of Dorian. And Basil says that he does not want Lord Henry to meet Dorian because Dorian is fairly young and kind of sheltered and inexperienced. He has this incredible beauty, but he's not vain.

[00:06:37]Meanwhile, Lord Henry is very jaded. He champions superficial pleasures and he looks at the world through this kind of detached ironic perspective. And Basil is worried that Lord Henry would serve as a corrupting influence to Dorian. And he's right to be worried about that because Lord Henry and Dorian do meet and all it takes is one conversation in the garden for Dorian to start adopting some of Lord Henry's perspectives to start internalizing some of his worldview. Dorian looks at the portrait that Basil has painted of him and he suddenly becomes bitterly jealous of the painting. Jealous of the fact that this painting will remain young and beautiful and perfect. But Dorian himself will age, will move through the world and take the signs of life upon his face.

[00:07:31]And so he makes a wish out loud that rather than the painting staying the same while he ages, that the reverse could be true. That Dorian could remain perfect and that all the signs of aging and all the wear and tear of life could be abstracted onto that piece of art.

[00:07:47]And I don't think that this is a spoiler to reveal because this is part of the premise and it is a very famous plotline. Dorian's wish comes true.

[00:07:55]Years go by and it becomes clear that Dorian is staying the same while the painting is taking on not only the signs of aging and the signs of a life lived pleasurably, but also it's taking on some external signs of internal corruption. what those signs of corruption are and what the corrupting acts and perspectives are. I will not say that is for you to read and discover on your own. But this is the basic story that this novel is presenting. A beautiful, innocent young man wishes that a piece of art could take on all of the signs of life and aging that he himself will not, that he will remain perfect and the art will be blemished. I called this a Gothic novel, and it definitely is Gothic, but it has a much different feeling than a couple of the other significant late 1800s works of Gothic fiction. Dorian Gay comes out 1890ish. We have Jackal and Hyde being published in the late 1880s and Dracula published in 1897.

[00:09:00]But Jacqueline Hyde and Dracula, while they both deal with some similar ideas of corruption and immorality and monstrosity, have a much more kind of like straightforward supernatural horror vibe to them. Whereas Dorian Gay is almost more like a fairy tale. And to again make a case for why to read this classic beyond just it's better to have read it than to have not. I think it's really interesting to read Dorian Gray in conversation with some of the other Gothic novels. So that by putting these novels in conversation with each other, you can see how they are workshopping similar ideas but with each author really using some of these overarching themes of corruption and monstrosity and public appearance versus private reality. and they are using these same ideas to tell very different stories.

[00:09:54]Now, I think that works of classic literature can stand on their own. That you could pick up Dorian Gay and read it with absolutely no prior context about genre, about authorship, about what literature in the 1890s was like. I think that when a work of classic literature works, that means that anybody can connect to it regardless of prior context, prior reading experience, anything like that, if you just pick up Dorian Gray and read it, you can enjoy it on its own. And to get back to that Italo Calino essay, one of the things that Calino says is that scholarship and interpretation of classic literature can sometimes obscure more than they reveal.

[00:10:36]I have those words ringing my head a little bit right now. You know, I don't want to obscure the fundamental truths of Dorian Gay with my academic chattering. But I am going to get into some historical context now because I think that with this novel in particular, there is a real benefit in holding the novel up next to an understanding of its publication history and its author's life and seeing where the bridges between these things are.

[00:11:03]that surrounding context that this book emerged out of and the way that the book has moved through the world kind of cling on to the story and have become part of the way that many readers understand and connect with the story.

[00:11:20]So I'm going to talk about some historicizing contextualizing background now and I'm going to start with publication history. There's been one or two times already in this video when I have referenced the publication date of Dorian Gay and I've been a little bit fuzzy on the details. You know, I've said 1890ish.

[00:11:35]And the reason for that is that there are a couple different versions of this novel from a couple different stages of its publication. The Picture of Dorian Gay was first published not as a standalone novel, but as a novella published in a magazine in 1890. And Oscar Wild then expanded that 1890 magazine version into a slightly longer short novel that was published as a standalone book in 1891. So, there are a couple of passages and even a couple of entire plot points and at least one character in that 1891 version that don't exist in the 1890 version. Those passages and plot points and characters are not included in the version that I am holding here, which is the uncensored picture of Dorian Gray. Now, obviously uncensored has different implications than just original. Censorship implies not just edited but edited for moral reasons. And that's exactly the case with this novel. And the censoring edits were made even before the publication of the 1890 magazine novella. The censoring edits were made to the original manuscript. This copy, the uncensored version, is based on that original manuscript. The evolution of the story is this. Oscar Wild writes the picture of Dorian Gray. He sends that manuscript to a magazine. That manuscript, this book. Then the editor of the magazine reads that manuscript version and he thinks that there are some things in it that would not go over well with the general readership. So without asking Oscar Wild, he makes censoring edits. He then publishes the version in the magazine in 1890. Oscar Wild, when he is expanding out that 1890 magazine version into a novel, decides to keep the censoring edits that the editor made in place. He also makes a couple censoring edits of his own in addition to adding that expanding material that turns it from a novella into a novel. And what was the material that those censoring edits were trying to make? Well, it is what the back cover of this uncensored version calls graphic homosexual content. Now, personally, I think that graphic homosexual content is an overstatement. I think that that makes it sound like there's some kind of sexual erotic material in this manuscript version. There is not. The difference is that in this original manuscript version, it is extremely clear that Basil the painter is in love with Dorian. That Dorian is not just his muse, not just his artistic inspiration, but is the object of his romantic and likely sexual affections. And the edits that are made from this manuscript version to the magazine version and then again to the novel version are edits that try to shift it to make it seem less like Basil is in love with Dorian and more that Basil is artistically inspired by Dorian. So a passage in the original manuscript where Basil talks about how Dorian makes life lovely to him and how he worships Dorian. that becomes a passage about how Dorian inspires Basil to create better art because he's such a good model. Here is a passage from the first couple pages of the original manuscript version in which Basil is describing the moment he first saw Dorian. I suddenly became conscious that someone was looking at me. I turned halfway round and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious instinct of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

[00:15:44]Whoever loved that loved not at first sight, you know. I knew that if I spoke to Dorian, I would become absolutely devoted to him. Even with those censoring edits in place, the magazine version and the novel version were recognizably queer to audiences at the time. And that created some pretty serious trouble for our author. So, let's talk about the author, Oscar Fingle O, Flarity Wills Wild, Irish fellow if you can believe it. Like I said, this is his only work of pros fiction, but he wrote these fantastically witty social commentary plays. He wrote essays about art and literature. He wrote some poetry, but we're not going to talk about his other writing right now. We are going to talk about his personal life. When he was in his early 20s, Oscar Wild had a brief flirtation with a woman who ended up instead marrying Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, which is not relevant really. It's just literary gossip, and I like literary gossip. Oscar Wild got married when he was, I think, 30. I should know that for sure, but I don't.

[00:16:50]He was, I think, 30 and he and his wife had two children together. And I said that what we're going to talk about is Oscar Wild's personal life. More specifically, we're going to talk about his sexuality. And it's impossible to know the details of Oscar Wild's sexuality for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's private. We have no business knowing the details. For another thing, it was 150 odd years ago.

[00:17:16]The passage of time obscures a lot of the facts of someone's private life. And for yet another reason, those intervening 150 odd years saw a lot of substantial changes in the way that people talk about sexuality, the way that people understand themselves and categorize their behaviors or their identities. So, however Oscar Wild might have seen himself, we don't know. And even if we did know exactly how he would describe his sexuality and his identity, that description wouldn't fully align with how people today talk about sexuality and identity. And this is all just to say that I will be using just the word queer to describe Oscar Wild because that's kind of a widely encompassing term that can hold a lot of identities and orientations within it and makes room for that ambiguity, the obscuring elements of privacy, time, and change that are at play here. So, what's relevant here is that whatever the details of Oscar Wild's personal life, he was undeniably, unambiguously queer.

[00:18:29]By the time he was in his early 30s, he for sure had had romantic and sexual relationships with men. Again, Dorian Gray comes out 9091. By 1893, Oscar Wild was in a relationship, a seemingly kind of intense and possibly dysfunctional relationship with a man named Lord Alfred Douglas, who went by the name of Boosezie. In addition to this ongoing serious relationship with Boosezie, Oscar Wild was also patronizing young male sex workers. And Boose's father, a man named the Marquis of Queensbury, boo knew about all of this and really did not approve. To put it lightly, in 1895, Queensbury left a note for Oscar Wild at his social club accusing him of being a sodomite, a man who has sex with men, although Queensbury misspelled sodomite as somite.

[00:19:30]And because this was a note left for him at a club. This was a semi-public accusation of homosexuality, Oscar Wilds, seemingly encouraged by Boosezie, decided that the thing for him to do would be to sue Queensbury for liel. Do you ever want to just like reach back in time and physically shake someone and say, "Make a different decision, please.

[00:19:56]if you just made a different decision, everything would be different.

[00:20:02]He didn't make a different decision. He sued Queensbury for liel. In order to win this case, Oscar Wild would have had to prove that Queensbury's accusation was baseless, that there was no justification for Queensbury to say that he, Oscar Wild, was a man who had sex with other men. And that meant that during the trial, the defense had to prove that Queens Bur's accusation was not baseless. They didn't have to prove for sure that Oscar Wild was having sex with other men. They just had to prove that there was enough reason for Queensbury to say so, that it wasn't crazy for him to leave that note. And in order to prove that there was justification to this labeling of Oscar Wild as a somdemite, the defense read out excerpts from some of Oscar Wild's writings. And one of the texts that they read out passages from in the trial was Dorian Gray. And as with those censoring edits made to different versions of the text that tried to replace romantic love with artistic admiration, Oscar Wild tried to characterize his writing as being about artistic inspiration, of the beauty of men and the beauty of male friendships. And he tried to characterize his relationships with those younger lowerassed men as just friendships. his friendships with 16-year-old sex workers that he happened to just give gifts to because he admired their boyish spirits.

[00:21:37]It wasn't a very good It wasn't It didn't work. He lost. And worse, Oscar Wild not only lost his lawsuit against Queensbury, but he was then immediately sued for public indecency and sodomy.

[00:21:53]And he lost that case, too. and he was sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison. The hard labor consisted of things like hours at a time spent unraveling the individual fibers from rope and up to 6 hours at a time being forced to walk on a treadmill while also being fed a very limited and very poor diet. He spent months upon months in solitary confinement in a small windowless room. His mother died while he was in prison. His wife terminated his parental rights. the, you know, the the sentence of 2 years hard labor in prison might not sound catastrophic if you don't fully expand out the details of what that meant, but this was 2 years in prison that were just physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically ruinous. and Oscar Wild's friends intervened at one point to get him moved to a different prison because they were afraid for good cause that he was going to die. And at his new prison, he had a warden who allowed him the luxuries of a couple of books and writing materials.

[00:23:12]And so he was finally able to have some form of mental escape through reading again. and he was able to write while in prison. And one of the significant things that he wrote was a letter, a long letter to Boosezie that is just this outpouring of grief and anger and bitterness and fear. At at the end of this video, I'm going to recommend pairings of things to read in connection with Oscar Wild. And I honestly don't even know whether I recommend this piece of writing, this letter to Boosezie, which is titled De Profundis because it's just so crushingly sad. This is directed to Boosezie. Do you really think that you were worthy of the love I was showing you then? Or that for a single moment I thought you were?

[00:24:10]Do you really think that at any point in our friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you? Or that for a single moment I thought you were? I knew you were not. But love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a hu scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of love is to love, no more and no less. You were my enemy, such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you my life and to gratify the lowest and most contemptable of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than 3 years, you had entirely ruined me from every point of view. For my own sake, there was nothing for me to do but to love you. I knew if I allowed myself to hate you that in the dry desert of existence over which I had to travel and I'm traveling still. Every rock would lose its shadow, every palm tree be withered, every well of water proof poisoned at its source. Are you beginning now to understand a little? Is your imagination wakening from the long lethargy in which it has lain. You already know what hate is. Is it beginning to dawn on you what love is and what is the nature of love? Is it not too late for you to learn? Though to teach it to you, I may have had to go to a convict cell. It's just seething with emotion, with just this trapped emotion that had nowhere to go. It feels almost invasive, honestly, to be reading that.

[00:25:42]And it just is these layers of compounding tragedy. Oscar Wild was released from prison at the end of his sentence in 1897 and he was dead within three years as a result of the health complications he incurred during his forced labor. He was 46 when he died and the law he was sentenced under was not repealed until 2003. Now, it feels kind of inappropriate to be drinking champagne because champagne is a celebratory beverage.

[00:26:16]Although, I do think it's what Oscar Wild would want. Non-zero chance that this reading the classics while drinking cocktails series ends up becoming a series of Carson gets sad about books and authors from hundreds of years ago.

[00:26:33]And then she drinks a little champagne while crying off camera. I didn't cry off camera. Who would say that?

[00:26:42]This is a brief overview. Obviously, you know, in the same way that I am giving just a basic big picture view of the plot of Dorian Gay, I'm giving a basic simplified version of the life of Oscar Wild and the details of the trial and the criminal state of England in the 1890s and and all those things. You know, this is a brief overview in order to give some context for Dorian Gray.

[00:27:11]And so to bring things back around to Dorian Gay, the reason that I wanted to give the details of Oscar Wild's life and death in this way is to illustrate that part of the legacy of Dorian Gray is that for Oscar Wild ultimately, even if somewhat indirectly, the act of writing about queer male relationships was essentially a death sentence. This has become, as I said, an integral part of the way that readers engage with Dorian Gay and connect with the text.

[00:27:52]This is part of the parextual material surrounding the text. This is part of the legacy. This tragedy, it feels like, not only hangs over and and shadows over the text, but is attached to the text, is intertwined with the story. And again, I'm trying to ease a little bit out of the deeply depressing Oscar Wild life and death stuff and and back into the text a little bit into some of the themes of the text. That thematic element of homoeroticism, I guess, although again, I feel like erotic isn't the right word. I I don't love the word homoerotic for literature in general.

[00:28:37]homo romantic, I guess, just the presence of queer love within the text, the presence of queer identity and the thematic inclusion of queer characters.

[00:28:50]This is one of the uh the big themes of the text, the the big areas of analysis that a lot of readers and a lot of scholars latch on to. And sometimes the way that those readers and scholars latch on to that dimension of the book is through trying to track those bridges between Oscar Wild's personal life and the content of Dorian Gay. You know, Dorian Gay was published prior to Oscar Wild's relationship with Boosezie. that there are people who point out the parallels between the Basil Dorian dynamic and the Oscar Wild Boosey Douglas dynamic as if the piece of fiction that Oscar Wild wrote in 1890 kind of anticipated the relationship he would be in in 1893. You know, to read again from the beginning of the text, no spoilers. He likes me, Basil answered. I know he likes me. Of course, I flatter him dreadfully. I find strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said. I give myself away. As a rule, he is charming to me and we walk home together from the club arm in arm or sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. Now and then, however, he is terribly thoughtless and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel that I have given my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.

[00:30:24]I'm sad again.

[00:30:26]Again, classic literature stands on its own. This Basil Dorian relationship stands on its own. But when put in the context of Oscar Wild's own life and his own experiences, it adds to that kind of tragic allure of the book. The fact that this description of a frustrated, unequal love, of an artist who pours affection into another man and is met with indifference at best, that this is kind of prophetic almost to what Oscar Wild would be writing about from prison.

[00:31:02]This is absolutely a valuable and rich area for analysis, but it's not the only theme, the only element of this text worth talking about. For me, one of the points that I find most interesting in Dorian Gray is the element of aestheticism. Here I will get possibly a little bit meta and reveal to you that back in October I made a whole like 45 minute long video about Dorian Gray and aestheticism that I ended up scrapping because it was not just disorganized but honestly frankly weird. I had recently woken up to find that a hole in my ceiling from directly above my head was kind of uh trickling out a slight but steady stream of wasps. There was a wasps nest in my roof and it was just leaking wasps into my apartment. And I found that out like the day before recording this video. And so I was quarantined away from the Wasp room and kind of sitting in this studio area drinking white wine spritzers. One singular white wine spritzer, but it went straight to my head, which might have been part of the disorganization.

[00:32:22]And also, I was just kind of like spitballing a little bit, you know, kind of just like freestyling, going off the top of my head with what I was going to talk about in that video. And it turned out that what was on the top of my head in that video about Dorian Gray and aestheticism was also like the at that point recent Taylor Swift album release and how it was presenting imagery of opulence and privilege. And then that brought me to the frequency of references to gray pupan mustard in hiphop and rap music. And I was talking about, God, I don't even remember anymore. Weird, fractured, fragmented ideas. The way that people on Tik Tok use the word aesthetic in a particular way. That was part of it, too. And I really I just I talked a lot in that video about the wasps and how much I hate saying the plural of wasp.

[00:33:19]I'm doing it again. I'm going off track again. Anyway, aestheticism.

[00:33:25]Aestheticism is a late 19th century artistic movement and like art criticism movement that focuses on beauty as an end in itself with art. Aestheticism is where you will hear phrases like form over function and art for art's sake.

[00:33:46]One of the originators of the aestheticism movement was a man named Walter Pater and particularly an essay he published called studies in romanticism possibly not even slightly studies in the history of the Renaissance that's what the essay was called at a couple points in this essay per is talking about his philosophy surrounding criticism of art the study of art and how beauty factors into this.

[00:34:17]One of the things he said is what is important is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. At one point he's talking about the importance of the critic, the scholar, the observer being open to really fully internalizing and understanding the power of the beautiful. And he says, "A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. [snorts] How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame to maintain this ecstasy is success in life. Now, one of the things that is not included in this original manuscript uncensored version of Dorian Gay, to my regret, is a preface.

[00:35:29]Actually, it might be included at the end. Yeah, it is. Okay. [laughter] It's included in the wider materials of the text, but not in the actual manuscript at all. Anyway, one of the things that is not included as a preface to this version is the preface so good at at talking about books. So, in the original manuscript of Dorian Gay that Oscar Wild wrote, there was no preface. Likewise, of course, in the 1890 magazine novella version of the story, there was no preface. But in the 1891 expanded novel version, Oscar Wild did write a short preface to the reader, which is included in this edition at the end. And it feels honestly almost like a disclaimer uh to almost head off any moralistic criticism of the story of Dorian Gay.

[00:36:26]But it also reads as an avowel of some of Oscar Wild's belief in aestheticism which he was a fan of aestheticism and of Walter Pater's writing. This preface is written as almost just like a series of aferisms. One of the things he says is those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. I I think you can see what I mean that this is like simultaneously a disclaimer and an a vowel of an aestheticist philosophy. You know, he is saying beauty is the most important thing in art. And he's also saying and because beauty is the most important thing, don't look too closely. Don't analyze.

[00:37:20]Don't make any arguments about the morality of my book. Either you like it or you don't. That's it. And the preface ends with a pretty bold statement. All art is quite useless. If you haven't read the preface before, you should absolutely read it. Even if you don't want to read Dorian Gay, though I don't know why you would be watching this video if you didn't, but let's say you've gotten this far and you've decided that this is not the book for you, I still really recommend reading the preface on its own. It's really interesting and there's a lot to be made of that ending statement. All art is quite useless. I will say when I first read Dorian Gay, there was a chapter of this book that I definitely thought was useless. And I didn't mean it in an elevated aestheticism form over function way. I just thought it was kind of stupid. If I remember right, it is chapter 10 of the uncensored version.

[00:38:19]And the entire chapter reads as basically a catalog of beautiful and luxurious things. And when I first read this novel, which I can't remember when it was, but I was surely in my teens, I remember getting to like the third paragraph in a row of just physical sensory descriptions of objects and thinking, how much longer is this going to go on? And then it went on for a lot longer and I thought, "Oh, no." And I didn't really like it. I mean, it really does go on. It's these descriptions of gemstones and fabrics and the bindings of books and the different scents of different perfumes and musical instruments.

[00:39:09]I when I first read it and I think probably even for the next one or two times that I read it treated that chapter of the book as something that I just had to get through in order to get to the rest of it. I would kind of just like skim over it. I'd read it. Yeah.

[00:39:26]But I wasn't really paying attention.

[00:39:28]And then when I read this last fall in late September or early October, I got to that chapter and I really just sank into it. You know, one of the points that Italo Calvino brings up in his essay, why read the classics? When he is defining what constitutes a classic, he talks about how classic literature rewards rereading. And that definitely bore out for me the last time I reread this book. I think with that chapter more substantially than anything else, that was most where I felt the benefit of rereading because even though I had an overall positive view of the story, rereading it allowed me to connect to that one little bit in a whole new way.

[00:40:16]And that is one of the reasons that this book goes in my personal library of classic literature. You know, if I had to gun to my head, make a list of my top 10 favorite books of all time, Dorian Gay would not be in it. But if I had to compile a personal library of classic literature that means something to me, Dorian Gay would absolutely be in that.

[00:40:43]I unfortunately am now going to bum myself out again because as I was writing up my notes for this video and I was reviewing Dorian Gay and I was thinking about how rereading this classic has shifted my exact views on on different parts of it and you know the joy of revisiting a familiar classic and and reacting in slightly different ways.

[00:41:05]And as I was holding Dorian Gay up next to Oscar Wild's life [snorts] in my mind, I again thought a lot about that chapter of the cataloging of beautiful things. And I thought about the man who wrote these joyful sensory descriptions of finery and art and beauty and pleasure.

[00:41:30]being then in a windowless cold, dark cell alone.

[00:41:39]Why read the classics? Because it will connect you with your emotions. Like the emotion of crushing sadness for people who died a long time ago.

[00:41:50]I do want to say for anybody who is watching this video without ever having read Dorian Gay, Dorian Gay, I don't think is a crushingly sad book.

[00:42:00]I wouldn't say it's like a happy book, but it's not like a a devastating book.

[00:42:07]This book doesn't make me cry. You know, thinking about this book in connection with Oscar Wild's life is a different story, but like, you know, it's not like a a huge emotional undertaking [laughter] to read that book. Okay, I started this video by talking about my cocktail pairing of what drink I've decided to pair with this classic. And I'm going to close out now by talking about book pairings for Dorian Gay. If you want to read Dorian Gay in connection with other texts, whether you have already read Dorian Gay, you're a fan, you want to bridge from Dorian Gay into some other books, or whether you are about to read Dorian Gay for the first time, and you want to kind of cluster together some thematically appropriate other books to read. These are some suggestions I have for books that pair well with Dorian Gay. And all of these are linked in the video description. I mentioned earlier in this video two Gothic novels that were published in close proximity to Dorian Gay that form this kind of brackets of late 19th century Gothic horror with Dorian Gay. Jacqueline Hyde in the late 80s and Dracula in the late 90s. You could absolutely read those books in connection with Dorian Gay. But if you wanted to read a Gothic novel in connection with Dorian Gay, my recommendation would be The Castle of Toronto, which was published in 1764.

[00:43:32]It's considered to be the first Gothic novel. And I'm recommending it in connection with Dorian Gay, not just because it is a Gothic novel, the first Gothic novel, but because there are a couple of through lines from a Toronto to Dorian Gay. There is arguably a throughine of queer male desire between the two texts.

[00:43:58]There is also a throughine of spooky portraits. You could also, of course, cluster Dorian Gay together with some of Oscar Wild's other writings. In terms of what those other writings would be, I you could do day profundis, the prison letter.

[00:44:17]It's really [ __ ] depressing, but you could do it. You could also do any one of his plays really, but the play of his that I recommend, and take this with a grain of salt because it's been a really long time since I read any of his drama, but the play I would recommend would be his play, An Ideal Husband, because it has some overlap in terms of the interest in uh public appearance versus private reality. Because the premise of Dorian Gray rests upon Dorian making that wish that he could exchange something for another, but that realization of the wish having an unexpected bite. You could also pair Dorian Gray with some Foustian stories.

[00:45:03]There are the two very famous plays that fit the bill for this. Christopher Marlo's Dr. Foustus and Ga's Foust.

[00:45:12]There is also the Thomas Man novel, Dr. Fastus, which I think is from the 1940s, which I have not read, but which people keep on recommending to me. Actually, a couple people have brought this up to me to tell me not to read it. I've gotten mixed reviews. I need to find out for myself, but people keep on bringing it up to me in connection with my little Satan Summer Reading project that I'm doing. One pairing that I personally have been wanting to do for a long time with Dorian Gray that is both Gothic and Foustian is a novel from the early 1800s called Melmouth the Wanderer. And that novel was written by Charles Matin who is a distant relative of Oscar Wilds. I think maybe his greatuncle, possibly like stepg greatuncle, but Oscar Wild actually used the name Matcherin as a pseudonym after he left prison. When he left prison, he left England, never to return.

[00:46:15]Possibly just because he felt unwelcome, but also possibly because he died before he could return. Anyway, he used this distant relative Gothic novelist's name as a pseudonym for himself while living in France. And in addition to those parallels, there is I've seen a spooky portrait overlap between Dorian Gay and Melmouth the Wanderer, though I don't know in what capacity because I've tried not to read too many plot details because I really want to read Melmouth the Wanderer and I don't want to be spoiled going into it. You could also, if you wanted to pair Dorian Gay with another novel that is considered to be a queer literary classic, go with the EM Forester novel, which when I read the title, I want to say Maurice, but which my English viewers have informed me is pronounced Morris. This book was written in 1913, just 13 years after Oscar Wild's death. He should have been alive [laughter] to have been able to read it.

[00:47:19]Although even if he was alive, it would be questionable whether he would have had any opportunity to read it because it was not published in the 1910s. And the reason it was not published is that Forester was determined not to punish his characters for their homosexuality.

[00:47:40]He was writing a novel that was about this title character, Maurice or Morris, wanting to find a man to share his life with. And Forester wrote about this plot that he knew that if he punished his title character, if he had bad things happen to him as a result of his queer identity, that maybe then the book could get published. but that giving a queer man a happy ending in literature would never be permissible. And so rather than compromise his story, Forester reserved the publication of this novel until actually the year after he died, 1971, and he dedicated this novel to a happier year. I guess this is the note that we can end on, that we can raise a glass to. To Oscar Wild, who I would like to think would be happy to know that people are sitting around drinking champagne and talking about his work in a happier year. Although, actually, you know what?

[00:48:55][laughter] I should end it with Oscar Wild's own words in his preface to Dorian Gay. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Sorry for trying to go beneath the surface, Oscar. I'll try to be more superficial from now on.

[00:49:18]Champagne cocktail is a good cocktail.