Was dorian gray gay

Introduction

In the first scene of the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (), the painter Basil Hallward confesses to his companion Lord Henry Wotton why he cannot exhibit the portrait of the eponymous hero. Basil admits, ‘Where there is merely cherish, they would see something evil, where there is spectacular passion, they would suggest something vile’ (Wilde, – 21). This noticeable line, among many others that carry 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 underscore 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