Reframing Dorian: Homoeroticism, Aestheticism, and the Historical Adaptations of The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract

This thesis examines the extensive adaptation history of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray from the early twentieth century to the present, focusing on how its foundational concerns—homosexuality, aestheticism, and the Faustian bargain—have been negotiated, suppressed, transformed, or foregrounded across changing cultural contexts. First published in 1890 amid controversy over its perceived immorality and homoeroticism, Wilde’s only novel has generated an unusually rich and diverse afterlife in theatre, cinema, television, and prose fiction. This study argues that homosexuality and aestheticism are not marginal elements of Dorian Gray but central to its adaptive appeal, and that the treatment of Wildean homoerotic desire provides a revealing lens through which to trace broader historical shifts in censorship, morality, consumer culture, and queer visibility. Drawing on adaptation theory, particularly the work of Linda Hutcheon, Julie Sanders, and Deborah Cartmell, the thesis approaches adaptations as historically situated reinterpretations rather than derivative reproductions. Through a series of case studies organised across three sections—cinematic, prose, and theatrical adaptations—the project traces how adapters respond to evolving attitudes toward sexuality, art, and morality. It demonstrates how early film adaptations often erase or displace homoeroticism under censorship regimes, while later adaptations variously reclaim, sensationalise, commodify, or suppress queer desire in response to movements such as sexual liberation, the AIDS crisis, postmodernism, and neo-Victorianism. By analysing adaptations across multiple media and historical moments, this thesis provides the first comprehensive, cross-genre account of Dorian Gray’s adaptive afterlives. It shows how Wilde’s paradoxical legacy—as both a gay icon and a figure haunted by moral anxiety—continues to shape reinterpretations of the novel. Ultimately, the study positions adaptations of Dorian Gray as critical interventions that illuminate the persistent cultural tensions between art and morality, visibility and silence, and aesthetic autonomy and commodification.