Episode 84: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Closing out this year’s Halloween episodes, we have the much-requested Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) by Oscar Wilde. You probably know the story. Magic picture gets old while dude the picture is of stays young, dumb, and, uh, dtf? And smoking lots of opium, for it is late Victorian London, and what else does one do? We talk queerness and sexuality, how aesthetics might actually be liberatory, as well as Wilde’s (very good!) politics and tragic bio. We also dive into Wilde’s literary innovation of the f*ck flower.

We read the Penguin edition with notes and introduction by Robert Mighall, which we highly recommend as it gives you both a sampling of the hilarious freakout by reactionary late-C19th chud reviewers AND the (exceptionally light) edits and expansions Wilde made between the 1890 and 1891 versions in part to “appease” them (read: screw with them even more). For a great recent article on how Dorian Gray subverts Victorian epistemological claims, check out Chiara Ferrari’s “Subversive Aims: Science and Contamination in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.”

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