3 characters = O. Wilde himself

[Rervus Baxelles]

Of course, but... are you sure he is NOT, at least A BIT, like Dorian Gray? Think about the way his life ended, the 'crimes' he was accused of three years before his death...

[Matthias Govaerts]

I believe that Oscar Wilde once said that people think of him as Lord Henry Wotton, he likes to think of him self he's Dorian, but he is really like Basil. <br><br>If you know what i mean?

[Scatterbrain]

^ That is really interesting, if that's what he has actually said.

[Herr Herr]

This is from my book.

"Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks of me; Dorian what I would like to be-in other ages, perhaps."

[Art_mirrors]

i always sae him more as l.h in the way he can influence others into immoral acts but he himself seemed kinder at heart. also Dorian appears not to have the unending amount of wit shared by himself and l.h. read his preface to dorian gray and ull realise that he belives alot of what he puts in his books.....and i do not belive he is basil purely becuase basil was boring.....he never wanted a risk and wanted to hold on to dorian purely for his own use.

[JCamilo]

Oscar Wilde is a creation of Oscar Wilde. He created such "characters" to face, mock, and survive in the society so it is only natural that other characters for the same purpose would be similar to him.

[Art_mirrors]

i agree but not just to mock society i think it also educated victorian society even if he did think that all art was uselss, and critics did not enjoy his writtin, however he showed society what life was like and that living a life of haednism if a wonderful way to live if you can pull it off of course.

[mazz]

quote; Wilde disliked the thought of being seen through his art, or at least he claimed that you should not be able to see the author through his work in Critic as an Artist.(from masterfulfruit)
I think that Wilde used his characters to express an opinion, his own? well he was the writer. That doesn't mean he is the character, that is just the way you as the reader might interpret it. I think Dorian himself is very passive and weak minded and Wilde strikes me as completely the opposite. Someone said about the crimes he commited.. well homosexuality was against the law then, today he would be treated differently. He probably provoked many by his opinions so caused upset, I don't think he suffered fools gladly.

[JCamilo]

i agree but not just to mock society i think it also educated victorian society even if he did think that all art was uselss, and critics did not enjoy his writtin, however he showed society what life was like and that living a life of haednism if a wonderful way to live if you can pull it off of course.

Not just mock, but it was his own way to deal with them. However I doubt Oscar had any pedagogical intention, he is not a revolutionary or a romantic kind of artist - he was rather confortable to live among the society he made critics.
Now, Oscar is witty, not wise (He is wise, but he did not said things to be wise, rather to be witty) - so he said a lot of things just for the impact. Someone as deeply linked as him with art certainly did not thought art to be useless, that was a form of critic; more to say "I am an artist, art is useless, watch out what I do besides the art" than anything else. In Dorian Gray then, he sprinkled several aphorism just to pinpoint his critics (Dorian would became a much more mature writer later), and it is now usual to just quote him as if every aphorism was good or usefull and not a construction for a certain text.

[Countess]

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." Oscar Wilde

If this is true, then we can extrapolate from his work an image of Willde himself. Dorian and Oscar are/were both malignant narcissists. Oscar cheated all over his wife with other men (this is his greatest vice in my mind).
But, there are significant differences between the two as well.

So long as you don't see Dorian and Oscar as a one-to-one correspondence, I think it's safe to draw parallels. You could probably write an English paper on it and get an "A" (even if your teacher disagrees with you - I have) so long as you beef it up with concrete data.

[mazz]

I think it's Lord Henry that makes an observation that when an artist is agreeable in society then his art is not that good or significant and when an artist is truly producing something of worth then they are not so agreeable or perhaps bother to pander to the social mores of the day. "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." Oscar Wilde. Interesting thought with this quote in mind, don't you think countess?

[Countess]

Yes, Mazz. Thanks for that reflection. It hadn't occured to me.

[dotk]

Of course, but... are you sure he is NOT, at least A BIT, like Dorian Gray? Think about the way his life ended, the 'crimes' he was accused of three years before his death...

he wrote tis book before he ended up in exile right.
wow, with that coincidence (the crimes), could he have
some sorta predicted his real own ending in e book?

[JCamilo]

Yeah, I can imagine this: Dorian was a murderer, Oscar a gay, therefore Being a Murderer was in Oscar's mind a way to say he was gay. ><

[timtimes]

It's been twenty odd years since I read the story for a lit class I took during a summer semester at a local community college. I was several years older than average having done military service prior to college and what surprised me was that perhaps only one other person in the class was aware of all the homosexual allusions made in the story.

I brought this up during discussion and the teacher held me after class and assigned me do a biography on Wilde. Perhaps the issue of his sexuality was not content appropriate at that point in Raymond Mississippi as part of the core curriculum and it was her way (very liberal teacher) of injecting it into the discussion since it was student initiated. I certainly wasn't shocked to find he was indeed homosexual but I was flabbergasted that he was JAILED for it.

Of course I've learned of many, more recent examples of institutional excess towards gays (Paragraph 175 comes to mind), but at that point in my life it was an enlightening insight into man's inhumanity to man.

Enjoy.

[s.santa]

I've just read De Profundis (kinda sad:( ) but what struck me is that Dorian Gray is soooo similar to Lord Alfred Douglas!!! It's like Wilde is Basil in his relatiuonship with Dorian and Lord Henry in society....Dorian has some strange power over Basil Hallward, as well as Wilde couldn't help himself when Bosie needed something(think how they met!); there's a simile also in the difference of age between Dorian and the painter....
At the same time Lord Henry is this charming witty cynical aristocratic man, just as Wilde appeared to society: an eccentric, yet fascinating man, a man who knows sin, but skilfully hides it. Like Dorian has power over Basil, Lord Henry is the one who inspires D. his life of pleasure, he even says, at the end, that Dorian's life had been a work of art. Maybe Wilde wanted to be Dorian Gray, everyone would say he was, but he poured his soul mostly in two opposite characters.
I don't know it's just I was reading De Profundis and I felt it was a sort of echo of The Picture of Dorian Gray (no need saying I read it again for the 100th time I think); it's cool cause everytime I read it I discover something new, or it hits me some strange ideas (like this one) or I recognize a name I didn't notice before...
Anyway what do you think about this?? Could it be or it's another odd oddity from my wiocked mind???