Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde had often spoken of his belief that, in artistic matters, style outweighed sincerity or substance. As such, in his novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, his attention was therefore paid to form and the nuances of wording. If the novel was an “essay on decorative art”, it was also a piece of decorative art composed of carefully selected phrases. In fact, Wilde was so determined to have perfection in his works, when he was asked to write a story of a hundred thousand beautiful words, he complained that “there are not one hundred thousand beautiful words in the English language.”

Oscar Wilde had a phenomenal ability to put aspects of both fantasy and realism into his works. Through thoughtful imagery and realistic dialect, he successfully merged two contradicting genres into a fascinatingly morbid tale. He vividly described people and situations with many types of literary devices though his favorite and therefore most frequented, is morbid imagery. He commanded an astonishing mastery of the art of morbidity, describing in unusual detail images of corpses and blood and a murder that would rival anything in modern cinema. “He [Dorian] rushed at him [Basil], and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man’s head down on the table, and stabbing again and again. There was a stifled groan, and the horrible sound on someone choking with blood. Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively, waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air. He stabbed him twice more, but the man did not move”. This passage describes in haunting detail a gruesome murder and paints a terrifying picture in even the most unimaginative mind.

However, most readers are divided in their response to a style and atmosphere which early reviewers found deeply distasteful. Richard Ellman wrote of ‘a certain gaminess’ about Wilde’s favorite poem ‘Charmides’, and the phrase could also pertain to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

Another style that is prevalent in Oscar Wilde’s novel, is the presence of dialogue rather than action. He prefers his characters to engage in casual conversation in a sitting room much more often than actual action. Through his writing, Wilde seems to be striving to stimulate the visual and musical arts through language primarily.

Whether descriptive or dialogic, Wilde’s writing in the novel is characterized by the use of paradox (a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth). It is his favorite stylistic device. In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Basil, Dorian, and Lord Henry - the latter being called “Prince Paradox” by his friends - trade paradoxes constantly. Contemporary reviewers were quick to identify the technique and belittle it. However his style was soon accepted by the vast majority of British reviewers. Literary critic, Ernest Newman hailed Wilde’s style said, “To hear one of Mr. Wilde’s paradoxes by itself is to be startled; to read them in their proper context is to recognize the great fact on which I have already insisted, that a paradox is a truth seen round a corner.”

Another style familiar to Oscar Wilde is his incredible talent for morbidity and evil. He had an astonishing grasp on the reality of human nature and the darkness that resides in everyone’s soul. Unlike most writers of his time, Wilde was particularly

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