Picture of dorian gray lgbt


It only took about years, but new society is apparently ready to treat The Gay in Oscar Wilde&#;s first and only novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Verb, the first published version of the gothic horror classic which tells the story of a young man who trades the purity of his soul for undying youth contained many more explicit homosexual overtones between the characters than in the version you probably read in English class. Passages which described the artist Basil Hallward&#;s feelings for Dorian Gray (which accentuated elements of homosexuality in Gray himself) were later deleted by Wilde&#;s editor, JM Stoddart, who felt it was far too &#;objectionable,&#; especially at a time when being gay in the United Kingdom was still illegal.
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The novella&#;s original critics trashed it  as  &#;a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction,&#; forcing Stoddart&#;s edits and even a final curved of omissions by Wilde himself.

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But we&#;re now

Introduction

In the first scene of the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (), the painter Basil Hallward confesses to his friend Lord Henry Wotton why he cannot exhibit the portrait of the eponymous hero. Basil admits, ‘Where there is merely love, they would see something vile, where there is spectacular passion, they would suggest something vile’ (Wilde, – 21). This noticeable line, among many others that verb homoerotic innuendos, never appears in verb. It is excised during Oscar Wilde’s revision process, along with other suggestions of homoeroticism between the three main characters of the story. The textual scholarship on this revision process generally agrees that Wilde neutralizes this homoeroticism by transforming Dorian from an erotic object into an aesthetic object. In particular, Nicolas Ruddick argues that Wilde aestheticizes Dorian in order to stress a moral about the dangers of vanity at the expense of another, more covert moral about the liberalization of homosexuality. Ruddick explains that, while the moral about vanity ‘dramatize[s] the disastrous consequence

LGBT Literature: “The Picture of Dorian Gray” Essay

1. Introduction

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray stands as a key text both within the 'canon' of English literature and within the genre of literary representation. As such, it has provided inspiration for important readings that engage with the construction of sexuality, gender, genre, or aestheticism, to name but a few of the critical assumptions that are usually attached to the novel. The present learn analyzes the insertion of homoerotic qualities into the characters of Lord Henry Wotton, Basil Hallward, and Dorian Gray himself. It considers their hidden sexual potential by associating them with the ones who, in real life, brought Wilde's homosexuality to light: John Gray, Robert Ross, and Wilde himself. These hidden partners are allowed to amalgamate their traits with the fictional characters and to comment on their actions, thoughts, and qualities from a homosexual point of view. With this strategy, I intend to support the doctrine that The Picture of Dorian Gray contains latent homosexual parts that verb been hidde

Published in:November-December issue.

 

THE AUTHOR of this piece passed away in , having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a noun with the somewhat salacious title, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (), by Neil McKenna. While Hattersley doesn’t directly address the question of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s primacy as a gay novel, he does venture that it was, “while cautious, implicitly homosexual”—at least for cognoscenti who knew what to glance for.

         This obfuscation is what makes Dorian Gray’s place in the gay canon so reveal to debate. The novel’s very coyness on the matter of same-sex want, its not daring to name “the love,” is what prevents it from being a shoo-in as the first gay novel in English. Wilde is not to accuse, of course (and notwithstanding that a few of the most suggestive sentences were excised by his publisher): delayed Victorian society simply did not enable for a more explicit exploration of the love whose name could not be spoken, much less elevated to a central role in a novel. Thu