The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray is young and beautiful and has his portrait painted. He wishes that the portrait would age instead of him — and it does. He spends the next twenty years living without consequence while the painting accumulates every moral cost of his choices in his place. Wilde published this in 1890 and it was immediately attacked as immoral, decadent, and corrupting — which was accurate, in the sense that it was a direct attack on Victorian morality's central fiction: that virtue shows on the face and vice marks the body. Dorian's beauty is a lie the world insists on believing because beauty is the only currency Victorian society actually values. The preface — added after the attacks — contains the most important aesthetic statement Wilde ever made: there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only well-written or badly-written ones. This book sits at the hinge between Laugh & Resist and Feel the Fissure. It begins as Camp and ends as horror, because Wilde understood that the performance of beauty as transcendence eventually consumes everything. The companion to The Importance of Being Earnest: that play shows the comedy of the performance, this novel shows what the performance costs.