"Murder! Good God, Dorian, is this what you have come to?"

I think that when someone can flow with the sentences, and become completely engrossed in a book as I have been with The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is hard to see it as something you would read in a classroom.  Not to say that the stories we read in class are boring, because they are interesting, but I have never found myself with my jaw-dropped as I found myself when Dorian stabbed Basil over and over, or as appalled with a character as I did later on when Dorian preceded to blackmail someone into chemically disposing of the body as to save his reputation.  The plot deceives the reader as to seeing the books true potential, and the books underlying themes are lost to the reader because of the thin layer of shock value storyline that Wilde has placed over the message of his novel, at least in my opinion.

Should Oliver Wilde's novel be graced as an Advanced Placement book, that is the question I face today.  As The Picture of Dorian Gray is on our list of possible summer reads, I thought this question would be easily answered, but I found myself struggling.  I thought that the plot was so clear and the motifs and allusions were not deeply placed in the text.  Therefore, I almost began writing about how this story should not be AP, but after the reading I just finished this evening, I found that I was very much wrong.  I find that the sentence structure is enough to become lost in, and the vocabulary, because it is written in the 1890s, would alienate most students.  So while my ideas have been that of a tug of war, I do believe Wilde's novel should be AP. 

As I mentioned earlier, I think that Wilde's sentence structure would be enough to make the book AP on its own.  His use of dialogue, which in most novels constitutes as a slight break for the reader (at least in my case), just manages to confuse me more.  He also ingrains deeper meanings into most of his chapters, so there is no such thing as a simple conversation.  Kendall was joking with me that Dorian managed to just say "I am afraid it is rather heavy," and how that was probably the shortest piece of dialogue we had encountered yet.  And even that sentence had a hint of irony within it to pick up on.  So even though I still have doubts that the allusions and motifs are too easily identified for AP students, I believe Wilde recovers with his ability to create fluid sentences and vocabulary.  But not to bash the allusions and motifs, they are also helpful to credit the story with a deeper meaning as well.  I mean, last week I completely skimmed over some of the allusions that Kendall picked up on, so it would definitely be a challenge for students who are not reading closely enough.

For me, I could easily use this novel on an AP exam, and thinking through the prompts we have encountered this year, Wilde's novel could be applied to most of them.  Because there are so many characters, and they all have very different histories and personalities, there would be a variety of things to connect the prompts too.  I find that also, as we mostly speak towards literary devices and characterization, Wilde seldom uses subtle literary devices, or he loses them in the dense text, but he has other ways to characterize characters, be that dialogue or motifs.  Overall, Dorian Gray makes quite the compelling argument to why this story should be AP.