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Books Like The Picture of Dorian Gray
What to read after The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is the great novel of the Aesthetic movement — Dorian's bargain, Lord Henry's epigrams, and the portrait that carries what Dorian refuses to. Still the most widely read expression of Wilde's philosophy that beauty is the supreme value, and still disturbing in its portrait of what a life devoted entirely to that philosophy looks like. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
Harry Haller's inability to reconcile his wolf nature with his man nature — the twentieth-century heir to The Picture of Dorian Gray's investigation of the divided self; where Dorian displaces his moral self onto a portrait to pursue beauty, Harry cannot escape the tension between his two natures; both novels are about what happens when a person refuses to integrate their darker half
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's aestheticization of his crime — the most important twentieth-century novel in the tradition that The Picture of Dorian Gray belongs to: the self-justifying narrator who uses aesthetic language to conceal moral horror; where Dorian displaces his moral deterioration onto a portrait, Humbert uses the beauty of his own prose to obscure what he is actually describing
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Jekyll's suppressed Hyde — the closest contemporary to The Picture of Dorian Gray in English fiction; both are allegories of the divided self, published in the same decade (Jekyll and Hyde in 1886, Dorian Gray in 1890), and both use a fantastic premise to explore what happens when the respectable Victorian man's darker nature is given license to operate
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens, who gave his life to his profession and realizes too late what he has missed — the realist version of what The Picture of Dorian Gray explores fantastically: a man who made a bargain (exchanging his authentic self for his professional role) and the price of that bargain; where Dorian's portrait shows the truth he cannot face, Stevens's narration slowly reveals the truth he cannot quite admit
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The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa transformed into a monstrous insect — the twentieth-century version of the same logic as The Picture of Dorian Gray; where Wilde externalizes Dorian's inner deterioration onto a portrait, Kafka externalizes his protagonist's alienation onto a physical transformation; both novels ask what happens when the social mask is removed and the real self is revealed
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs. de Winter living in the shadow of the first in Manderley — the gothic tradition that The Picture of Dorian Gray belongs to, in its most popular twentieth-century form; both novels use a Gothic premise (a haunted house, a living portrait) to explore the psychological dynamics of obsession, identity, and the past that cannot be escaped
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The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A group of Classics students who commit a murder and live with the consequences — the contemporary dark academic novel that belongs to the same tradition as The Picture of Dorian Gray: a group of aesthetes who believe their superior sensibility exempts them from ordinary moral constraints, and the catastrophic results of that belief
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Charles Ryder's memories of the Flyte family and his years at Oxford — the Catholicism is Waugh's version of the moral reckoning that Dorian avoids; where Dorian displaces his moral self and escapes reckoning until it is too late, Sebastian Flyte is destroyed by the same beauty and privilege in full view of Charles's helpless love; both novels are elegies for a certain kind of English aesthetic experience
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