The Picture of Dorian Gray

The definitive Victorian double-self story — published four years before Dorian Gray, same Gothic structure of respectable surface and hidden monstrousness, but where Dorian's split is between face and portrait, Jekyll's is between body and body

Wilde's masterpiece play — the epigrams Lord Henry rehearses become Algernon and Gwendolen's wit, but here the double life is treated as comedy rather than horror

The yellow book — the actual Decadent novel Wilde encoded into the plot. Des Esseintes's life of total aesthetic isolation and sensation is the model Dorian follows to destruction

Another portrait-as-fate novel — Isabel Archer, like Dorian, is shaped by the people who observe and influence her, but James's ethics are Dorian Gray's inverted: the observer (Ralph Touchett) loves without possessing

A deeply dangerous aesthetic narrator who makes beautiful prose do the work of moral justification — Humbert Humbert is Lord Henry's most fully realized descendant

A man who murders to maintain a beautiful surface and social performance — Tom Ripley is Dorian Gray without the supernatural element, which makes him more disturbing, not less