Alex Ross on Oscar Wilde's struggle over 'Dorian Gray'

WILDE AND 'DORIAN GRAY': Alex Ross explores different accounts of the life of Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde, exploring the writing of his only published novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and also Wilde's place in history as a symbol of the gay rights movement.

Wilde foresaw his posthumous triumph. “I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms,” he wrote to the early gay-rights campaigner George Ives. Even so, the clean-cut categories of contemporary sexuality might have puzzled him. He was attracted to women as well as to men, if not nearly as strongly, and the collapse of his marriage may have had as much to do with temperamental differences as with sexual ones. (You could see him as one more self-entitled Victorian male exercising his right to extramarital recreation.) Furthermore, he might have resisted the tendency toward normalization in gay circles—the drive of an oppositional culture to abolish itself. When he spoke of winning the battle, he probably did not have in mind gaining the right to join the military and marry in church.

Ross also reveals that while Wilde may have been one of history's most flawless conversationalists, his prose was meticulously revised and reworked; the original manuscript of Dorian Gray, which is exhibited at the Morgan Library, is said to illustrate Wilde's numerous revisions and minute changes. Ross writes that the manuscript shows Wilde's "deciding, sentence by sentence, just how far he would go." Read on.