![The Picture of Dorian Gray | [Oscar Wilde]](https://bookwi.se/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/cover-8231.jpg "The Picture of Dorian Gray | [Oscar Wilde]")
Summary: A Faustian bargain to keep beauty and youth in exchange for your soul.
One of my reading priorities this year was to read more classics. I have not done very well on my other reading goals, so when Amazon and Audible released a ton of free classics to promote their new Whispersync for Voice I decided to pick up most of them and try to start reading more classics.
Honestly, other than the reference in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I had never heard of Dorian Gray (and I did not even know there is a Dorian Gray movie until I started looking around for this review.) I knew that his portrait aged instead of his body. I assumed it was some sort of faustian bargain with the devil.
The actual book leaves a lot to the reader. There is a sort of prayer that Dorian Gray says when he is first shown the portrait where he says that he would give anything to keep his beauty and youth as the painting shows. But there is no explanation, supernatural or otherwise, for why Dorian stops aging and his portrait starts aging. Similarly, we are not really told whether it is Dorian’s own nature that he becomes evil and depraved or whether there is some connection to his soul being lost in the bargain that causes him to become depraved. I assume that Wilde just was allowing his reader to make the faustian connection.