“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
Beauty is oftentimes earmarked as vanity. And why shouldn’t it be, when throughout the course of human literature and history, it has been traded at the cost of our very souls? This was Dorian Gray’s great dilemma: whether or not to sell his soul to the Devil for beauty.
Dorian Gray was at the heart of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, a novel by one of the most popular poets and playwrights of all time, the Irishman Oscar Wilde. The book follows Gray as his image is captured in a painting that keeps him from ageing, in the aftermath of exchanging his soul for eternal beauty. However, for every sin that he commits, his image in the portrait rots.
The slow-burn novel follows Gray’s descent into madness as he is driven insane by his own obsession with pleasure and aestheticism. For fans of classic literature and cinema based off of them, we come bearing good news!
A modern retelling of Wilde’s iconic story is officially in the works at Netflix! Written by Katie Rose Rogers, the TV series entitled ‘The Grays’, is a contemporary take about our fascination with youth set against the backdrop of the modern beauty industry. In a twist on the gothic novel, the series will revolve around siblings Basil and Doran Gray!
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