I recently listened to an audiobook of The Picture of Dorian Gray and was pleased to find that it remains great. I'm sometimes struck, when going to literary fiction after months in the sff mines, by the fact that authors like Wilde are canonical for a reason.
My prose expectations are tempered when I'm reading for the Hugos. There's often great stuff, but I just don't expect the same level of craft from T. Kingfisher as I do from Virginia Woolf. And that's actually part of the reason I spend more time with genre work than "literature," especially lately; the latter demands from me an attentiveness to the language that, while usually rewarding, is often exhausting, and when I don't have that kind of attention I don't read those books.1
With that said, Gray did grab me and propel me, despite having prose that rewards closer reading. Part of it, I think, has to do with Wilde's theatrical background; much of the best stuff in Gray is witticism and paradox, which plays very well in audiobook form. Part of it is just that it's a great, short book. And part of it, I think, is that it does, really, straddle the literary and the generic2 ; the gothic and the fantastic have a lot of overlap. The action is dramatic, the pacing is propulsive, and the writing is lovely.
The thing I found myself thinking about most on this read-through was how Wilde stages seeming and being against one another. This is one of my favorite themes in literature in general3, so it's no surprise that I find it here, in a book about a man and a painting. The artistry that struck me this time, though, was the unity of the exploration of the theme. We see it in Dorian, of course, but we see it in Basil, too, who Lord Henry says is boring because everything interesting in him is in his art. We see it in sort of quixotically in Lord Henry, who only seems to have a personality behind his perversity in his final scene, where he demands the secret of Dorian's youth.
But we see it echoed most strongly in the sad character of Sibyl, the actress who loses her ability to act like she's in love when she falls in love, truly, with Dorian - and whose suicide is executed by means of swallowed cosmetics.
She had swallowed something by mistake, some dreadful thing they use at theatres. I don’t know what it was, but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it. I should fancy it was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously.
There's a fascinating rabbit hole here!
I did a bit of digging about prussic acid and white lead as used in cosmetics and came across the story of Madame Rachel, an infamous London beautician whose slogan was "Beautiful For Ever" and whose specialty was enameling women's faces:
Madame Rachel’s most sought after stock in trade, for which she claimed unique talents, was the ‘enamelling of ladies’ faces’, a method for lightening the skin to a then fashionable whiteness. Although by no means original to her, ‘enamelling’ became for ever after associated with Rachel’s notoriety. The objective was the age-old one of producing a smooth and transparently white porcelain quality to the face and bosom for that special ball or dinner or presentation at court and one whose effects could last – so Rachel claimed – for up to a year. In her seductive advertising campaign enamelling was elevated to an almost occult art, which she claimed was conducive to health and beauty, grace and youth, and one that was exclusively hers.4
There's a longer discussion here, but Madame Rachel was known for using exactly the kinds of caustic cosmetics that Sibyl takes, and she was prosecuted by Sir George Lewis, who knew Wilde and defended him in some of his court cases. Madame Rachel even had a young daughter, an operatic soprano, who killed herself two years before Gray was released! If this was more than a blog post, I'd chase that down, since there's an interesting historical link here.
But the thematic link is really what I brought it up for. Dorian's youth and that youth's link with his painting, and Sibyl's death by a facepaint that was associated with a cosmetician with that slogan, has a pleasing coherence that I love, and that works.
In closing, I'll paste what Lord Henry had to say on the topic of Sibyl's death. It's lovely and monstrous.
No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare’s plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.