“Dorian” is such a lovely name, but every time I look for its origins, the internet tells me that it wasn’t a thing before Oscar Wilde, and, knowing Oscar Wilde, that probably means he did actually name the protagonist of his only novel after a historical Greek style of architecture.
Actually, we do know the origin of Dorian’s name!
Before Oscar Wilde, the last modern work where the word “Dorian” was prominent was J. Addington Symonds’s “A Problem in Greek Ethics” (1883), where he talks about all the different tribes of Greece–especially the Dorians–and how they were all fond of comradely love ™ and alla that. It’s basically the first article to go, “Actually…the gays are cool? We stan?” and all the gay kids went completely crazy over it for, like, the rest of the century.
So yes, Oscar Wilde absolutely sat down and read this article talking about the “heroic ideal” of “Dorian love” and then went and wrote his book 8 years later like, hell yeah, this is FOR THE GAYS, and I’m going to give my protagonist the GAYEST NAME POSSIBLE.
wait so he was named after a group of people from a specific area of Greece who were known for being gay? that’s…that’s like if someone wrote a book about a gay woman and her name was literally Lesbian
OH BOY DO I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU
