Woodlands Book Club has been going for a year now. October's meeting was about Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Before settling down to discuss it, we debated the book for next month and decided on C. S. Lewis, 'Till We Have Faces": it is out of print, but available on Amazon and abebooks.com second-hand.
Dorian Gray is short but enormously interesting. One member had been to see the recent film when it came out, and did not recommend it at all - too dark and vicious; the message of the book was distorted.
Wilde's preface to the book - ending on the statement that "all art is quite useless" - is deliberately provocative, an inverted way of expressing "Art for art's sake". The opposite view is expressed in the "Letter to Artists" written in 1999 by John Paul II: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html
John Paul II sees art as being at the service of mankind, a way of expressing the goodness and especially the beauty of creation at all levels, and communicating it to others.
By contrast, Wilde's philosophy and way of life was essentially self-centred and self-seeking. He was the leader of the 'aesthetic' movement at the end of the 19th century (which started in decadence and was parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta 'Patience').
In the book, the ideal that is presented is to seek beauty and experience pleasure - not happiness, as Gray says towards the end. His 'search' for beauty is described in great detail in Chapter 11, which is key to the whole book. Surprisingly, many bookclubbers had skipped Chapter 11 because it didn't have any action!
A question that comes up repeatedly is one person's influence on another: Lord Henry Wotton is delighted at the way he is able to mould the young Dorian Gray. Gray himself is shown to have a progressively more destructive influence on the people who follow him. He ends up by refusing to admit his influence - read responsibility - on anyone.
We discussed which of the three main characters of the book was actually Oscar Wilde - Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Henry Wotton. Different bookclubbers had identified one or other of the three as Wilde when we were reading, and this coloured our interpretation of it. Presumably all three were Wilde.
