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L ord Henry Wotton’s lightning-fast seduction of the rather vacuous but extraordinarily beautiful ingenue, Dorian Gray, revolves around that most attractive and fleeting of qualities: youth. Up to this point in his life, Dorian has been unconscious of both J M Barrie, even adolescence is to be avoided if possible. ‘All children, except one, grow up' explains the narrator of Peter and Wendy (1911), and it soon becomes clear that Peter Pan is not just a case of arrested development but a child who died rather than endure the indignities of how good-looking he actually is, and how quickly those maturity. ‘I don’t ever want to be a man’, Peter insists. looks will fade and wither. ‘You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed’, Lord Henry warns him, ‘Don’t squander the gold of your days…’ In stressing the transience of youth, in many ways, Lord Henry is simply regurgitating age-old platitudes about how (as George Bernard Shaw probably didn’t say), ‘youth is wasted on the young’. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’, admonished Robert Herrick in the mid-17th century, for ‘Old age is still a-flying:/And this same flower You have the most that smiles to day,/To morrow will be dying’. Those rose-blushed cheeks that marvellous you, Dorian so winningly displays at the start of Oscar Wilde’s novel will become and youth is the one ‘withered, wrinkled, and loathsome’ by thing worth having. the final paragraph, and the entire plot depends on a Faustian bargain to stave off those apparently repellent signs of age from literally defacing him. Dorian feels the same as Peter – but instead of death, he chooses to sell his soul. Indeed, it is probably best to think of Dorian as voluntarily trapped in Tír na nÓg , a land of perpetual youth and childhood for most of the plot. Despite actually being over 20 years old, no one in the novel acknowledges his adulthood, and multiple characters refer to him as a ‘good boy’ or a ‘dear boy’ throughout. Lord Henry Wotton has 17 pictures of Dorian in his house, suggesting he is a kind of male celebrity pin-up for him, but Dorian is also the must- have guest at every society dinner party. Youth itself is a fetish in the novel, much like it is in our own time. At the centre of Lord Henry’s philosophy is a hymn of praise to youth. Youth, we are told, is the ‘one thing worth having’ ‘Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world While anxiety about the impact of aging is indeed but youth!’ At times, indeed, Lord Henry sounds like he perennial, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) was written is working for the plastic surgery industry – which had at the start of what came to be understood as an almost already emerged by the late nineteenth century. hysterical period fixated on youth, on its preservation, its perpetuation, and its power. Newspapers and periodicals were chock-full of advertisements for creams and potions all promising the prolongation of buyers’ girlish skin. ‘I am 50 today’, declares Mrs Georgina Weldon, in one such advertisement from 1887, ‘but, thanks to Pear’s Soap, my complexion is only 17’. Lucky New Yorkers could purchase Professor Mack’s ‘Chin Reducer and Beautifier’, with the guarantee that it would give ‘the flesh the resiliency and freshness of youth’. While most of these promotions were aimed at female readers, Victorian men suffering from an early version of body dysmorphia were not ignored, and the cult of exercise and the development of gym culture had already begun to provide ways in which to hold off the horrors of middle age. While the term ‘Dorian Gray syndrome’ for someone crippled by anxiety about Although Oscar Wilde is usually considered to have been a worshipper of youthful attraction, and a proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, where surface beauty trumps deep meaning, The Picture of Dorian Gray is probably best read as an indictment of the cult of the young rather than a celebration of it. Like a latter-day celebrity, Dorian wishes to remain young forever, or, more accurately, to remain forever an adolescent, a liminal figure trapped between full manhood and childhood, and he is surrounded by men who also want him to achieve this dream. Dorian’s perpetual adolescence is certainly one kind of masculinity, one which still has a powerful resonance for us today, as it continues in the fan worship of actors like Timothée Chalamet and Tom Holland – men who look like boys who will never grow up. aging was first used in the year 2000, its symptoms were in evidence over a century before that particular fin de siècle . Once his youthful good looks have been revealed to him, Dorian becomes so fascinated and emotionally invested in them that he declares (sounding like a 1960s teenager), ‘When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself’. Suicide is a rather extreme solution to wrinkles and a paunch, but in the work of Wilde’s contemporary However, age catches up with all of us, and rather than reward his antihero for his aesthetic endeavours, Wilde punishes Dorian with the most appropriate sentence: ugliness. At the end of the novel, following a vain attempt to destroy the portrait, Dorian ages in the blink of an eye, his beautiful body suddenly transformed into something decrepit and hideous, his glowing, unlined skin now wizened, wrinkled and grotesque.
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Trinity Alumni Book Club Looking to dive deeper into the themes of The Picture of Dorian Gray ? Join the Trinity Alumni Book Club as we explore Oscar Wilde’s chilling masterpiece in our next reading period from 12 October to 14 December. Engage in lively discussions about the allure of eternal youth, the dangers of vanity, and the timeless relevance of Wilde’s critique of societal obsessions. Whether you're revisiting this classic or reading it for the first time, the Trinity Alumni Book Club offers a perfect opportunity to connect with fellow readers and explore the dark, thought-provoking layers of Wilde’s iconic novel. ‘I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Click here to join our next reading period
