Category: Uncategorized

As I’ve been taking this course on Victorian literature, I’ve been studying Medieval texts through the idea of Medieval angels and demons. We’ve followed the development of the representations of these dichotomies through the morality plays, and then through to some early modern plays. In the morality plays, a playwright could actually show on stage the entities of God, Christ, and Satan, just not the actual sacraments. This stemmed out of the idea that, because the actors were all monks for the morality plays, if the sacraments were performed on stage, it wasn’t so much an act or show anymore, it could be considered the real deal. Past the Reformation, though, as drama evolved, and societal ideals changed, plays couldn’t have God, Angels, Demons, or Christ on stage. Charles Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was one of the last of these plays that could do this, and the shift can be seen with Shakespeare’s plays. Because these entities couldn’t show up on stage any more, playwrights had to get a little more creative, and had to start representing these same ideas, just through the characters on stage. So no longer were there characters like Mephistopheles, but you could start to see angelic characters, like Desdemona, and demonic characters, like Iago.

Because of these readings, I have had a bit of a difficult time looking at the Victorian text, The Picture of Dorian Gray, without a sort of bias. In the beginning of the book, it starts with a beautiful garden, and a painter creating a work of art. This immediately harkened to the imagery of the garden of eden, and the creation of man. Basil, the painter, begins to talk about how he has “put too much of [himself] into it,” for him to be able to part with the painting, which just made me think of the idea of how in the Bible, God created man in his image. For the two men, Basil Hallward, the painter, and Lord Henry Wotton, the onlooker, to then go and argue in the beautiful garden, about this creation of an image of a man, really just solidified that imagery. In addition to this, Lord Henry continues to put down the church, and talk about vanity, and pride in one’s own image, not in any virtues. Lord Henry continues to make these seemingly outrageous claims, such as that he “like[s] persons better than principles, and [he] like[s] persons with no principles better than anything else in the world,” (Wilde, 12). Basil continues speaking the praises of Dorian, and continues to insist that he “[doesn’t] agree with a single word that you have said, and what is more, Harry, I feel sure you don’t either,” (Wilde, 12).

In his role of creation of an image of man, and insistence in the good of both this man, and in Lord Henry, I can’t help but see Basil Hallward take on a god like role in this text. He continues to try and stand by Dorian’s side, even as Dorian seems to fall from Basil’s grace, and listen more to Lord Henry. Lord Henry Wotton, on the other hand, keeps on tempting Dorian, and talking him into his shallow and materialistic way of thinking. Lord Henry seems to corrupt Dorian, just as the devil would have tempted and corrupted mankind, in the tradition of the morality plays from Medieval literature.

Something that really stood out to me while reading The Picture of Dorian Gray was the curious figure of Sibyl Vane, who appears only shortly as Dorian’s “great love,” but who just as quickly disappears when she commits suicide. After Sibyl performs badly in the play, Dorian immediately loses all love for her: “He flung himself down on the sofa, and turned away his face. ‘You have killed my love,’ he muttered.” (84) What is it that triggers such an immediate response of disgust in Dorian?

In the introduction found in the Penguin Classics edition of the novel, Robert Mighall addresses this curious relationship between Dorian and Sibyl, analyzing the significance of Sibyl as an actress. According to Mighall, Sibyl is an artificial character in the novel – in a sense, she is an actress not only in the story, but also in the novel itself. She is “living in a fairy-tale world,” in which Dorian becomes her real-life “Prince Charming,” and her sole existence occurs on the stage (xxvi):

“‘To-night she is Imogen,’ [Dorian] answered, ‘and to-morrow night she will be Juliet.’

‘When is she Sibyl Vane?’

‘Never.'” (54)

Dorian is “in love with Sibyl’s acting rather than the women herself.” (xxv) For Dorian, Sibyl is an archetype of art – therefore, Dorian’s love of Sibyl is not an emotional love, but an aesthetic love, which can be connected to the theme of Aestheticism that runs throughout the entire novel. According to Aestheticism, ethics and aesthetics are distinct from each other and can’t coexist. This can be seen when Sibyl acts in “Romeo and Juliet” just before she commits suicide – she weaves her love for Dorian into her role of Juliet, intermingling reality with art:

“(…) Dorian, before I met you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. (…) The painted scenes were my world. (…) You came – oh, my beautiful love! – and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is.” (84)

Sibyl’s failure to act well when introduced to reality, as well as her suicide immediately after, are a testament to the Aesthetic notion that art and ethics are opposites, and that “art is destroyed by life and morality, and that ethics and aesthetics belong to separate spheres of thought and judgment.” (xxvii) One could extend this theory of the separation between ethics and aesthetics to the portrait of Dorian Gray – in “real life,” Dorian is an aesthetic version of himself, a handsome man whose beauty remains intact forever, while the portrait is a moral version of himself, a face that becomes more and more corrupted with every sinful act he does. In an interesting reversal, Dorian becomes the “art,” while the portrait becomes the ethical and moral judgment.

Many critics have interpreted Dorian Gray as an autobiographical novel about artistry and homosexuality during the Victorian Era; however, the evidence that supports their claims exists mostly in “subtle” forms such as coded botanical language and expository dialogue. During the 19^th century, an explicit story about romantic same-sex lovers would have too scandalous for the general population to grip because sodomy was illegal and homosexuality was seen as a crime. Yet, Wilde was sent to prison because lawyers were able to analyze and exploit the revealing dialogue between characters and the thinly veiled Victorian “language of flowers.” Henceforth, Wilde’s art was wielded as a weapon against him and I will be conducting a dialogue analysis in order to emulate the techniques that lawyers may have taken advantage of during the trials.

During the Victorian Era, various types of flowers held specific meanings and could convey emotional sentiments. Interestingly enough, basil is an herb that signified hatred and offence in the 19^th century (138, Engelhardt). Wilde’s choice to name the creator of Dorian Gray’s picture Basil is extremely curious. If the novel of Dorian Gray is meant to mirror the artwork in a metafictional manner through self-exploration and indulgent allusions to itself, then it is safe to presume that Basil, as the main artist, is Wilde’s interpretation of himself. So, why would Wilde name himself after an herb that symbolizes hatred? Perhaps Wilde despised the artwork that Basil created because it revealed far too much information about him.

When prompted to display his artwork, Basil refuses while stating, “I know you will laugh at me, but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it” (6, Wilde).   After hearing this, Lord Henry calls Basil ”vain” and tells him to get over himself by saying, “Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him” (7, Wilde). Basil’s confession reaffirms Wilde’s fear that he has placed too much of himself within the novel, but Lord Henry, as a representation of the general audience, fails to understand his friend’s coded language because he assumes that appearance is the main indicator of likeness. Since Lord Henry dismisses Basil’s statement, the reader is inclined to do the same. However, Basil’s anxieties are so strong that he is determined to convince Henry that he must look beyond the surface of the painting in order to find meaning.

Basil delights in his use of coded language and secrecy as he claims that, “The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it” (8, Wilde). The painting of Dorian Gray is the same as the novel in the sense that the artist who created it has infused the work with some essence of himself. Similarly, Wilde disperses advice through Lord Henry’s dialogue in which he states, “People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self” (23, Wilde).

Since Wilde incorporated so much of what appears to have been his own personal beliefs and anxieties into his novel, I wonder if he was surprised to have been sent to prison or whether he had written Dorian Gray in order to taunt authorities. The idea of Wilde as a supreme troublemaker is extremely alluring and far greater than the notion that Wilde was an accidental criminal who didn’t conceal his identity well enough through covert language.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Engelhardt, Molly. “The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age.” Victoriographies 3.2 (2013): 136-60. Web.

 

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1985. Print.

Throughout reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, I have been trying to figure out how the gaze functions. I am usually drawn to how men and women view each other, and seeing who becomes the object of someone else’s gaze. The relationship between Dorian and Sybil is a typical one. The male gains extreme pleasure in viewing a female body, especially knowing that he cannot be viewed in return. In Dorian, this pleasure manifests itself in his infatuated proposal of marriage to Sybil so that he will always be able to possess this amazing creature. And we see where this plan fails – Sybil reminds him that she is human, not just a character on a stage, when she is no longer able to act out the love of others because her feelings for Dorian are so strong. He immediately rejects her because she is no longer a perfectly pleasing object, and his spiral into debauchery begins.

That is a normal exemplification of the effects of the male gaze on a female subject-made-object. But I am having trouble understanding the implications of the picture of Dorian and the effects it has on him. The picture is an object from which others could originally gain great pleasure – it belies Basil’s obsession with the beautiful young man, and in the normal expression of the male gaze would then feminize Dorian. In that moment, Dorian demands that no one else is allowed to have the paining, no one else is allowed to feminize him in that way, and he choosing to follow Lord Henry’s advice of constantly seeking beauty.

But Dorian becomes obsessed with looking at this picture as it comes to reflect his soul rather than his beauty, which he gets to keep as long as he doesn’t destroy the painting. I am not sure how to obsession with self within the conversation about the gaze – a male is taking pleasure in seeing his own beauty as an object, and continues to gain a sort of sick pleasure in seeing how his soul is being destroyed through his sinful life. He is, in a way, feminizing himself, the action which when it came from Basil caused him to start down the path of an aesthetic. Is this constant viewing of his true self, and of the destruction on his own purity, the motivation behind Dorian’s scandalously sinful life?

It would seem odd in a book that is basically teeming with homoerotic connections between the male characters and Dorian, that Dorian would react so negatively to his constant self-feminization. He wants to always be with Lord Henry around, a man who explicitly wants to dominate Dorian in the way that Dorian dominated Basil, which puts Dorian in the stereotypically female submissive role. Dorian is seeking that kind of relationship from Lord Henry, but he seems to hate when he is put into that female position.

I’m still struggling with how to understand how the male gaze works on Dorian, and how self-gaze affects his actions, but I think that these different gazes are somehow connected to Dorian’s sexuality that he does not seem to be able to come to terms with.

“‘We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.’

‘Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?’ asked the duchess after a pause.

‘Especially when one has been wounded by it,’ answered Lord Henry.”

 

The characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray in the scene quoted above are talking about romantic experience, but their dialogue is ambiguous enough that it set me thinking about experience in general. How would their endorsement of experience – any experience, and at any cost – apply to the characters in the other novels we’ve read, particularly The Island of Doctor Moreau and Dracula? The characters of the other novels are entirely focused on trying to end or escape their awful experiences, not savor them or milk them for future memories, and they have certainly been wounded by what has happened to them. Much of what renders their experiences so horrible is that they themselves are ordinary people, totally unprepared and unwilling to be thrust into the grotesque worlds of their stories. That is how the horror genre works: it emphasizes its outlandish events by setting against them people you could meet any day. The type of character has become an essential element of the genre.

The characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, on the other hand, pride themselves on not being ordinary; at being superior to the vast masses of common, boring, good people. Thus they are able to enthuse about the value of experience without needing to qualify that it must be good or worthwhile. Is it possible to imagine them in the worlds of Dracula or Doctor Moreau, or would that genre fall apart if the characters placed in them are scarcely less appalling than the horrors that befall them? I think it would. I think that the ordinary people who populate horror stories are vital to the structure of the genre, since it achieves its effect by allowing the reader to inhabit the minds and fears of the characters – a difficult job if the characters are as bizarre and artificial as those in Dorian Gray.

What about the reverse – if the ordinary men and women of Dracula were placed in the setting of Dorian Gray? There the story’s structure would fall apart as well, because someone like Mina Harker could not work within its artificiality – either she would be treated as a laughingstock by someone like Lord Henry, or she would simply leave Wilde’s world of exquisite drawing rooms. Both in Dorian Gray and in Dracula and Doctor Moreau, genre is dependent on character, and each genre has evolved its own kind of staple character to carry the novel’s story and atmosphere. The ordinary person who stumbles into something awful is undeniably well known in horror, and a quick look at Oscar Wilde’s other works – or at mannered comedy in general – bears out the similarity, and artificiality, of the typical characters. I suspect Oscar Wilde would hate to be told that he had anything in common with Dracula, but the otherwise different genres share reliance on a particular type of character.

During the Fin de Siecle, as discussed by Ledger and Luckhurst in the reading under the same name, the topic of contemporary identity, “whether concerning gender politics, sexual identity, or conceptions of subjectivity itself,” was not a clear-cut issue (xvii). According to the reading, “Such problematic complicities and ambivalences at the beginnings of modern feminist thought have proved productive sites for thinking through the articulation of gender with other significant markers of identity” (xvii). With this quotation we see room for differentiation between gender and identity, opening a whole new realm of discussion for what it means to be male or female, homosexual or heterosexual.

Within The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde takes these ideas of relatively fluid lines between the two sexes and alters them, changing them in the way that mentalities were changing during this time of “complicities and ambivalences.” One of the ways in which he does this, at least in this particular scene from the book, is by clearly defining gender lines while the readers already know that the characters cannot be defined so simply.

When Dorian and Harry are visiting with the Duchess of Monmouth, exchanging rhetorical and witty banter amongst other conversations, the Duchess says, “We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all” (88). This seems like a straightforward statement, placing men and women into their own gendered categories, not allowing room for overlap between the two.

However, Basil and Dorian, two of the novel’s primary characters, complicate this almost immediately. Basil is clearly a male character, meaning he should align with the latter part of the Duchess’s statement. The fact that he is an artist should also, and does, align him with the latter because he loves Dorian with his eyes and he loves his artwork through his eyes. But throughout the novel, it is made clear that Basil lusts after Dorian, aligning his sexual preferences with that of a female, indicating that he could very easily fit into the first category of “loving with his ears.” Yet Basil cannot hear his paintings and prefers to see Dorian rather than hear him, since he does not always agree with the words Dorian speaks. Regardless of the words that exit Dorian’s mouth, his face and image do not change and Basil continues to lust for him due to that. These factors of his profession and the way in which it is clear he loves with his eyes makes his masculinity appear a clear-cut issue, but the fact that the one he loves with his eyes is male makes the issue not as simple.

In the case of Dorian, these ideas are reversed. Although Dorian is a male, never portrayed as showing serious lust for any of his male friends and instead giving voice to the fact that he wished Basil would not complicate their friendship with talk of love, he does not align with the latter part of the quotation. Dorian appreciates women, rejects the notion of feelings for Basil, and holds his male friends in general at a distance. Despite this, when Sibyl is introduced, Dorian arguably loves her with his ears more than he does his eyes. Surely he does, to a degree, love her with his eyes as a man is “supposed” to do, but more than that he falls in love with her through his ears. It is through her acting, in particular the audible delivery of text and her verbal conveyance that she has fully transformed into the characters she plays, that he falls in love with her. The night she falls fully in love with Dorian is the night he falls out of love with her, the change coming about through the fact that she delivers a dry and awful portrayal of Juliet, an assault on Dorian’s ears. Through his ears he falls both in and out of love with Sibyl, so although his sexual desires match with what is considered ordinary for those of his sex, the way in which he loves is the opposite of what the Duchess declares it should be.

In this manner, the characters of Basil and Dorian have almost swapped traits because the two men love opposite the way that they supposedly should. This returns to the question of the artist permeating his work because Wilde’s choice to blur these lines speaks to his own issues of blurred lines in terms of sexuality, potentially saying more about his beliefs than those of his characters.

One of the overarching themes of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is beauty, not only as an aesthetic sense but also as a social position still present in today’s society. Dorian Gray transforms into an embodiment of debauchery and corruption throughout the years, casting his guilt and crimes upon the portrait that contains his soul. However, I feel that one of the reasons the portrait takes on the appearance of the sins committed is not only because it contains part of Dorian, but of the artist Basil Hallward himself. He even claimed that he put too much of himself into the painting, and in with his death marked the turning of the tides. However, Dorian gets away with all of these horrific acts, including the death of Sybil Vane, because of his beauty.

Dorian Gray’s story, and by that I mean his actual life and not the timeline of the book, even begins with beauty. His mother was remembered as a beautiful young aristocrat who became the victim of unsavory attitudes and manipulation after marrying a man of a lower class, a “Belgian brute” (Wilde 35). Lord Henry talks with Lord Fermor of Dorian’s life, and when the latter asks what kind of boy he is Lord Henry simply replied “He is very good-looking” (Wilde 35). This implies that one should not have to question his character and morals, for beautiful people must be inherently good (an unfortunate assumption that has dominated our culture for millennia). There is also a divide in beauty, for while his mother, Margaret Devereux, was an exceptionally beautiful woman, she is met with pity and disdain for her choice to marry below her class. Dorian’s actions are excused because he is a man belonging to an upper class, and the deeds are even forgotten quickly because of his beauty and charm.

The culmination and exoneration of Dorian Gray primarily happens at the end of the novel. With the death of Sybil Vane and her misfortunes it is unfortunately cast aside as a sort of foolish act due to the influence of Lord Henry. However it is resurrected in chapter XVI when Dorian encounters her brother James Vane. Determined to kill Dorian and take his revenge (Which is an interesting mix of rightful vengeance and the incredibly masculine stereotype of the over protective brother driven to violence in order to preserve the virtue of his sister) James recounts the wrongs of his sister’s doomed love. In this Dorian finds his means of escape, which is the third time he seeks to be absolved of crime (the first two being the news of Sybil’s suicide and his murdering of Basil Hallward), explaining that he couldn’t possibly be the culprit because her death was eighteen years ago and he is but a young man in his early twenties. James sees him in a brighter light and realizes this (for how could a beautiful young man have been responsible?). However he soon learns that Dorian has tricked him and sets out for revenge.

Dorian is not completely free of Sybill’s death until James is accidentally shot and killed during a shooting party with Sir Geoffrey. However, he later confronts Lord Henry about his crimes, asking what would happen if he were to have committed them. Henry tells him that he would be trying to pose as a character that does not suit him. “All crime is vulgar…crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders” (Wilde 203). Thus Dorian is trapped. He is absolved of the actions of the crimes but left with the guilt (which some would argue is a much more terrible fate). His beauty is the curse through which our society still operates. We even have an obsession with “sexy” criminals and fell better for them, painting an image of wrong doers as people as grotesque as the portrait of Dorian Gray. However we are starting to recognize this and can hopefully move towards a time where character and class are not tied to our physical appear

Here is a link to the latest “sexy criminal” taking the internet by storm:

Sexy Criminal Mugshot

In the class “Angels and Demons” with Prof. Skalak we’re reading Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlow. Doctor Faustus follows the life of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in return for a devil to do whatever he wishes. As I was looking over passages I’d marked I began to realize some interesting similarities between Dorian Gray and Faustus. I don’t mean to argue that they are the same or mirrors of each other. In the blog post I want to explore the similarities to see if there are any interesting connections to pull out of Dorian Gray.

The first connection I made was between the figure of Mephastophilis and Lord Henry. Both are introduced to the protagonist (Dorian and Faustus respectively) early in the text. Faustus summons Mephastophilis while Dorian is introduced to Harry but both are the catalyst for corruption. Another connection was the loss of the protagonists soul. For Dorian the portrait, as he states, “was to bear the burden of his shame” (Wilde 102) and for Faustus Mephastophilis/Lucifer has taken his soul. While these are not necessarily the same thing I feel like they echo each other. Both characters get something in return for their soul (and potentially their salvation depending on the religious reading of the text).

Both characters also have a doubleness. Dorian is literally doubled in the portrait. He looks at himself and uses this second self to separate himself from the actions he chooses. He does not need to see himself age or become ugly with his sin because the portrait does that for him. In Faustus the double self is more subtle but can be seen in the way that Faustus is constantly speaking to himself in the third person. When he expresses either his desire to work for the devil or his desire to repent he does so in the third person. This creates a separation from his actions because he treats them as though another person is doing them.

There is also a parallel in the way that books are discussed. Oscar Wilde explicitly states that “Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book” (Wilde 140). This connects some of Dorians downfall to his reading dangerous literature. He read a book that influenced him so much that he becomes more corrupted than ever. In Faustus literature has a similarly corrupting function. Faustus discovers how to conjure the devil from a book. His last line before being dragged to hell is “I’ll burn my books” as though that would save him from damnation (Marlow 1508). Both of these texts reference literature as a corrupting element.

Structurally both texts follow the white male protagonist through his decent into sin and corruption. We meet the protagonist before he is damned and very early in the text the reader is shown a moment of change where both are changed and begin their journey towards damnation. Both stories end with the death of this protagonist at their own hands and at the same time by accident. Dorian attempts to destroy the portrait and destroys himself instead. Faustus sells his soul and then is unwillingly taken years later.

Now that I’ve outlined all these similarities I’m not quite sure what this tells us about these texts. Perhaps Dorian Gray is more invested in religion than it first appears. Perhaps Wilde was influenced by Marlowes work. I think that both are invested in exploring white masculinity and what that means. They explore how these men navigate their desires and influences from the world. Despite the more than two hundred years’ time difference these texts have similarities that connect them. If anyone has any other ideas about this I’m curious what you think! I was interested in the ways these two texts participate in some of the same projects but I’m not sure if it’s entirely fruitful yet. Any light ya’ll can shed is much appreciated!

The Island of Doctor Moreau and Dracula are both overtly concerned with anxieties about colonization and reverse invasion. Prendick stumbles upon a colony of “civilized” animals created by Dr. Moreau. Van Helsing and his friends struggle to ward off a foreign enemy infecting good English people with an age-old curse. It is clear in both novels that the foreign, the other, and the damned are a threat to British security.

The Picture of Dorian Gray doesn’t really seem to fit into this theme of invasion and conquering. However, one passage in Chapter XIX stood out to me. Lord Henry says to Dorian, concerning country life, “There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt” (Wilde 215*).

Lord Henry’s theory of civilization could be applied to Dr. Moreau. If “out of town” can refer to anywhere outside of England (the Island), then the British must spread their “culture” to civilize their colonized people (Moreau’s animals). The way the colonists saw it, they were spreading the right religion, the right government, the right customs and ideas to the unfortunate people who were not born British. Moreau creates his civilization by introducing human aspects into animals. He’s civilizing the animals by introducing them to his culture. (I’m using “culture” here to mean a form of societal structure, not to mean the arts, music, etc. that Lord Henry probably meant. The Beast-People form their own governed society, following strict laws and practically worshipping their creator/ruler. It’s a mini-England.) Montgomery also has a hand in their civilization. He blurs the line between Lord Henry’s culture and corruption by introducing the creatures to alcohol. He says to the beast-people, “Drink and be men!…Moreau forgot this; this is the last touch. Drink, I tell you!” (Wells 84). The last step in making the animals men, civilizing them, is corrupting them, offering them temptation.

Count Dracula invades England to establish himself in a new society. He wants to create a new generation of vampires, starting with Lucy. He’s colonizing England and spreading his culture to the greatest city in the world, London. However, he does this exclusively by corrupting his victims, turning them into blood-sucking monsters. Dracula is also linked with various temptations. His appearance is androgynous and though he only ever preys on women, he is a constant threat to the men. Dracula’s threat is not only that he can corrupt people’s souls, but also that he breaks gender and sexual mores. He tempts the already civilized people of England to a new civilization with different rules.

So what does this say about Dorian Gray? He is definitely “cultured,” being a wealthy white man in London society. But he’s also corrupt––his portrait is evidence of that. Wilde makes it clear that Dorian is not the only rich and corrupted man in London. Lord Henry leads Dorian down this path and then Dorian leads many more young men there. What does it say about the civilization that the wealthy, powerful people are all corrupt? And that they seek to spread their corruption to others? For once the anxiety is not about a foreign culture ruining British culture. What if British culture is inherently corrupt already?

*I have a different edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray so the page number may be off. This quote is right at the beginning of chapter 19.

When reading The picture of Dorian Gray, I couldn’t help but compare his character to the only other version of him which I had seen prior to reading the novel.  In the movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the character Dorian Gray makes an appearance as one of the main characters, although he is drastically different in this story.  Instead of being the pleasure seeking high society socialite Wilde writes him as, Dorian takes the role of a dangerous gentleman figure in the movie, being shown instead as a capable fighter and ever confident character.  The greatest similarities revolve, of course, around the painting of Dorian, which in both works serves as his both his greatest strength and weakness at the same time.

While the creators of the movie clearly wished to make use of the creative supernatural circumstances regarding Dorian Gray’s youthful secrets, they obviously chose to ignore other parts of his character as well.  Even his physical appearance was altered in the movie.  Instead of a youthful figure with short, well-kept blonde hair, the movie adaptation of Dorian Gray possesses a long mane of immaculately brushed and styled dark brown locks.  This decision seems rather innocuous, and forces me to wonder as to why he was so changed.  The physical appearance never really becomes a plot point of importance, and there are other characters with short hair throughout the movie who also show themselves as refined gentlemen in much the same way as Dorian.  The only real usage of his hair, it seems, is that it stays styled even during his fight scenes- another change from Wilde’s character.  While Dorian Gray certainly murders in Wilde’s story, it is not a result of a refined combat confrontation, but rather a passionate and spur of the moment stabbing, devoid of the emotionless grace the movie Dorian exhibits.  Really, the only character trait seemingly retained from Wilde’s character is Dorian’s inclination to seek out beauty.  In the movie, Dorian seems drawn to the fatally attractive vampire Mina Harker, making his inclination to beauty a sort of nod to the original Dorian’s pursuit of sensory bliss rather than a defining character trait.  Interestingly enough, there seems to be little to no themes of homo eroticism in the movie as well, which makes the dynamics of romance almost entirely between men and women.  After looking at this almost entirely reimagined character, it seems that the movie sought only to capitalize on the immortal painting aspect of Wilde’s work, not caring whether or not they stayed true to the character in the slightest- and even with the painting a few key details were altered.

Specifically, Dorian’s method of death is altered in the movie.  In the novel, Dorian becomes unhappy with what the painting shows him to be, and finally attempts to destroy it.  In Wilde’s depiction, Dorian’s death doesn’t appear to be intended- he attempts only to destroy the representation of himself, perhaps in the hope that no one will ever be able to see the degenerated picture again.  However, he doesn’t take into account the reverse of the link to the picture, and damage to it applies to him instead, leaving him dead and decrepit.  In the movie adaptation, there is no need to stab the painting.  The mechanics of how it shows his consequences functions quite differently, with Dorian being unable to even gaze upon the picture without his life ending.  This mechanic is the largest difference between Wilde’s painting and the movie’s reimagining, and makes no sense at all.  There is no rule established which implies sight of the degeneration leads to Dorian taking its effects upon himself, and it makes no sense narratively.  Even in respect to Wilde’s novel, there is no indication that the effects become reversed until the painting is destroyed.  The movie could quite easily have required some sort of damage be done to the picture, as its reveal occurs during a fight scene between Dorian and Mina.  Looked at in sum, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen seems to pay no heed to the character of Dorian Gray as envisioned by Oscar Wilde, and instead simply hijacks his creative supernatural element for their own usage.  Nearly none of the defining traits are carried over, many of which could have made the character more engaging and interesting throughout the movie.