Some of The Picture of Dorian Grey is intended to be darkly funny, right?

I was discussing The Picture of Dorian Grey briefly with someone the other day (it wasn’t a particularly deep conversation, we were stood in a queue for a few minutes). And I mentioned I found it funnier than I expected. She gave me a slightly funny look and said “Right..?”

We didn’t really get chance to talk for much longer after that, but I felt kind of embarrassed. I made an excuse that maybe it wasn’t translating to me correctly as a modern reader, and she said through a modern lense a lot of the classics can seem badly written.

But I never said it was badly written (that’s it’s own debate obviously). I thought the intention was for it to be a mockery of vanity, with Dorian Grey as a caricature of nineteenth century aristocracy rather than someone we were supposed to take 100% seriously as a believable narcissistic murderer.

And it’s been said before that a lot of the conversations are incredibly quotable, but I also felt that a lot of Lord Henry’s quips, particularly in the first chapter, we not at all supposed to be genuine life advice but closer to witty jokes on society at the time.

If it wasn’t intended to be funny, then maybe it is badly written in the sense that it’d be melodramatic and unbelievable. But my feeling was that the novel as a whole didn’t take it’s narrative and characters too seriously, it was more of a witty, purposefully exaggerated satire?

But speaking to that woman and seeing her reaction has completely thrown me. Did I read The Picture of Dorian Grey wrong?

(P.S I committed book hersey and listened to an audiobook of it, so the way the voice actors were speaking and narrating may have impacted my perception)

by HiMaintainceMachine