Dorian Gray, Critics

Dorian Gray, Critics

1. Mike Haldenby

   • "proclamation of Wilde's sexuality"
   • "Wilde wants Dorian's death to represent a glorious sacrifice, and the ultimate triumph of aestheticism"
   • "explores Wilde's own views on art"
   • "Wilde lays himself bare in his fiction"
   • "allowing his characters to articulate his own sentiments"
   • "His voice speaks loudly on every page"
   • "shamelessly promoting his corrupt lifestyle through his work"
   • "Basil Hallward represents Wilde's pure commitment to Aestheticism"
   • "Wilde's voice was most clearly heard through Wotton"
   • "Sibyl Vane evokes some striking parallels with his marriage"

2. Simon Callow

   • "morality was the preserve of lesser spirits"
   • "Wilde stands nakedly revealed"
   • "Hallward helped to create the monster of his own destruction"
   • "novel grips hard, sustaining a disturbing atmosphere of gothic suspense"
   • "seems to speak dangerously frankly of his own situation"
   • "dialogue walks on stilts"
   • "Wilde was a slave of beauty"
   • "depiction of Wotton is a self portrait"
   • "Dorian is the eternal boy with whom Wilde is eternally in love"

3. Anne Varty

   • "Epigram is not exclusively the symptom of Wotton's moral vision, but also of the corrupt aristocratic society"
   • "culture... leads a double life: it can see beauty and innocence, but knows they are irrevocably lost"
   • "Mephistophelean voice of Lord Henry"
   • "homosexuality is also represented as a possible force of redemption"
   • Vane's: "whole episode is written in a style that parodies the conventional melodrama of the period"
   • "extraordinary anthology of styles"
   • "Wilde is exclusively concerned with the effects of action, rather than action itself"
   • "mother is portrayed as a victim of the style"
     • "she has no other medium with which to represent life to herself"
   • "experienced cynicism of Henry's voice always makes him seem significantly older than Dorian"
   • "Throughout the novel, vice and virtue are described by the rhetoric of aesthetics"