Oscar Wilde, The Eternal Dandy

OSCAR WILDE — THE UNCENSORED PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY — 2012

The main character is not so much Dorian Gray as Lord Henry Wotton. He is the one who manipulated the seventeen-year-old Dorian Gray as if he were a puppet-master playing with his puppet on its strings and rod, unseen and yet the one who provided society, meaning here the top elite of this society, with the daily gossip that can only entertain their idleness. Both Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton were part of this idle society and Lord Wotton occupied his time with making Dorian Gray do what he, Lord Wotton, would like to do but couldn’t since it was a lot funnier to have someone else do it.

We all know the trick of the painting that ages in the place and stead of Dorian Gray and takes on itself all the perverted crimes of this Dorian Gray it is supposed to represent. What is important here is the fact that Dorian Gray is going to remain innocent-looking and as if he were forever 16 or 17 years old in his body, while his soul — if he has a soul, or if the concept of soul was relevant here — is getting more and more wicked and lost. I will not use the words “sin” or “sinful” here because that’s an easy…