Picture of Dorian Gray (miękka)

Picture of Dorian Gray - opis produktu:

A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man`s portrait, his subject`s frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray`s picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, `as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife`, Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. `The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden.`

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful `When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.` But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel`s drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde`s supposed aims, not least `no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.` Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: `All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.`