Dorian Greene Character Analysis

Dorian Greene is a young, gay man whom Ignatius and Irene meet in the Night of Joy bar, and whom Ignatius encounters again while he is working as a hot dog vendor in the French Quarter, where Dorian lives. Dorian runs a vintage clothing business and buys Irene’s hat, which is extremely old, when he meets her in the Night of Joy. Dorian is a fashionable socialite and throws notoriously wild parties in his lovely New Orleans apartment. Due to his association with the French Quarter (an area of New Orleans which was considered disreputable), he, too, is considered to be of low morals by society. As homosexuality was illegal and considered socially deviant in the 1960s, when the novel is set, Dorian’s association with the French Quarter suggests that this is a place where social outcasts and unconventional people live. Dorian is associated with beauty, youth, and disguise throughout the novel—in this way, his name and character likely allude to the literary character Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde himself was persecuted for being gay, and Dorian Gray’s character is obsessed with maintaining his youthful beauty. Ignatius befriends Dorian and decides to mingle with Dorian and his friends—he convinces them to throw a party so that he can start a political movement based entirely around gay men. Ignatius believes that if gay men infiltrate and take over politics, it will bring about world peace because they will all be too busy having sex and doing stereotypically “gay” things, such as sewing and drinking cocktails, to go to war. Dorian is amused by Ignatius’s provincial and stereotypical ideas and gay people and agrees to throw a party. However, although Ignatius does not realize this, Dorian, obviously does not take Ignatius’s political ideas seriously and thinks that he is joking. Although Dorian himself is amicable and seems to want everyone to have a good time, the behavior at Dorian’s party—which is attended almost entirely by gay men—suggests that Ignatius is wrong and that, of course, all gay people are not alike and that they are just as liable to enter conflicts and to have complex relationships as straight people. In the end, the guests at the party ostracize Ignatius, whose political speech causes a scene.