1.

Sharon Ruston
In the decadent world of Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Lord Henry smokes opium-tainted cigarettes a fitting detail for a
character whose intoxicating amorality seduces Dorian. Lord
Henry proved to be the most dangerous influence upon the
innocent and nave Dorian Gray and after the murder of Basil
Hallward, it is the memory of Henrys advice that persuades Gray
to seek solace in an opium den where he attempts to buy
oblivion. Gray becomes increasingly desperate to reach this
oblivion as the hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw at him,
and despite the horror of the opium den The twisted limbs, the
gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes he envies those who
are experiencing such new, strange heavens (ch. 16).
http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/representationsof-drugs-in-19th-century-literature

2. Perversion and degeneracy in The Picture of Dorian Gray

2
2

Article by: Roger Luckhurst

Themes: Fin de sicle, Gender and sexuality

Many reviewers denounced Oscar Wildes novel as

perverse and immoral. Roger Luckhurst explores the
works sexual and moral ambiguities.
Oscar Wildes only novel appeared in Lippincotts Monthly
Magazine in 1890, after being commissioned by the American
editor at the same meal where Arthur Conan Doyle agreed to write
the Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four. Wilde (1854-1900)
was a celebrated professional aesthete, a dandified man about
town, an early celebrity figure, famous for being famous. He had
not only been mocked in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta
Patience, he had happily toured America with it, performing the
role of dandified aesthete. Wilde had written a little and worked as
a professional journalist and editor, but between 1888 and 1890 he
published a series of essays, stories and books that made him a

serious literary figure too. His fame as a playwright and the

scandal of his downfall, when he would be arrested and
imprisoned for acts of gross indecency with other men in 1895,
still awaited him. His relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas would
prove literally fatal. He died in exile, his health broken after two
years in prison, in France in 1900. His novel would play a part in
his downfall, excavated for evidence by his prosecutors.

The Picture of Dorian Gray as first published in

The Picture of Dorian Gray was a Gothic novel that skirted
scandalous behaviour: the transgressive, supernatural elements of
the genre provided a frame for speaking unspeakable things. The
book tells the story of the beautiful young man Dorian Gray, who is
given the capacity to explore every possible vice and desire whilst
his moral decay is hidden away in his painted portrait that bears all
the marks of his degeneration. Victorians, trained in moral
physiognomy, believed that sin was written on the body, so despite
the ugly rumours, no one can believe anything ill of the unageing
beauty of Dorian. It is Stevensons story of Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885) told in reverse, Dorian keeping perfect
public command of himself whilst his double rots in secret. As the
novel progresses, Gray becomes increasingly immoral, indulging
in all manner of vices, eventually including the murder of the
portrait-painter. Gray only ends the split by plunging a knife into the
painting and killing himself. The portrait is found as it was first
painted, with a hideous, deformed creature sprawled beneath it.

Effeminate, unmanly and perverted

Almost as soon as it was published in Lippincotts, reviewers
expressed their disgust. It was called effeminate, unmanly,
leprous, and full of esoteric prurience . Worst of all, it was openly
French written under the influence of naughty French
decadence. Very recently, the translator of an Emile Zola novel had
been prosecuted for obscenity, for daring to issue an English
edition of Zolas vile Parisian filth. The book that corrupts Dorian
Gray, an unnamed yellow book, was self-evidently the weird and
perverse French novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
(1884), about a decadent last scion of a degenerate aristocratic
house pleasuring himself and defying boredom with a series of

increasingly perverse investigations.

The most famous review of Dorian Gray was in the conservative
Scots Observer (edited by the poet W E Henley), which came very
close to accusing Wilde of the crime of gross indecency that had
been made illegal in the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act. Dorian
Gray, the review said, was fit for none but outlawed noblemen and
perverted telegraph boys. This was a reference to the recent
Cleveland Street Affair, the discovery that a male brothel had
been used by aristocrats to pay telegraph boys for sex. In the
novel, Dorian Gray is openly asked by Basil Hallward, Why is your
friendship so fatal to young men? There is a litany of suggestive
rumours listed about Dorian that imply blackmail, ruin, exile or
shameful suicide. Dorians portrait is completed by an artist who
openly expresses that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly
(ch. 12).

Coded gay sensibilities

As a result of this and other reviews, the main lending library, W H
Smiths, withdrew this edition of Lippincotts. Wilde defended the
novel in the press, but was pressured by George Ward, who was
to publish a single volume version, as well as his friends, to tone
things down in the book form. For the 1891 version, Wilde added
an extra six chapters and lots more detail, but did little to alter the
tone of the book or the tendencies the novel explored. Indeed, in
the long chapter eleven, a litany of Dorian Grays life as a collector
and researcher of exotic and esoteric objects of beauty, Wilde
even coded in a long history of what might now be regarded as
gay taste or sensibility, with references to Alexander the Great,
decadent Roman Emperors and Latin poets, Edward II and his
lover Piers Gaveston, Walter Paters injunctions to experience only
the most intense pleasures in his Studies in the Renaissance
(1873), trips to Algiers to appreciate the beautiful boys, and murky
doings with sailors in Blue Gate Fields, the notorious dock area in
Londons East End. Wilde would do this kind of coding again in his
most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest. The opening
night of that play on Valentines Day in 1895 confirmed Wilde as
the greatest literary celebrity of his day, but also began the series
of events that would result in his complete disgrace and downfall
only a few weeks later.

'

Those who read the symbol do so at their

peril
Of course, reading Dorian Gray as just a gay text, looking for
clues, tends only to repeat the way the awful prosecuting counsel
(Wildes university friend in Dublin Edward Carson) mined the book
for prurient clues at his trial in 1895. Wilde wrote a brilliant
epigrammatic preface that was designed to catch out readers
looking for secrets: Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. His
defence of the aestheticist art for arts sake doctrine was there
too: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books
are well written, or badly written. That is all (Preface). There is
actually no explicit statement of what Dorians vices really are: it is
left to the lurid imagination of the reader to detail them. The
trajectory of the book is seemingly towards the punishment of the
abandonment of morals by the aesthete. Yet these defensive
tactics did not, in the end, protect Wilde from an Establishment that
disliked his political, aesthetic and sexual transgressions.
'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book: Oscar
The British Library houses the Lady Eccles collection, one of the
most extensive collections of Wilde and Wilde-related materials in
the world, containing over 1000 volumes and a variety of
ephemera. It includes a signed copy of this novel, designed by
Charles Ricketts, and with a personal inscription to the very young
Lionel Johnson, soon to become one of the Tragic Generation
poets of the 1890s. It was this copy that Johnson leant to his
Oxford friend Lord Alfred Douglas, and both young men went to
meet Wilde for the first time in June 1891. This was the beginning
of the relationship that would end in Wildes imprisonment in
Reading Gaol in May 1895.
http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/victoriansexualities

Dark desires and forbidden pleasure are at the centre

of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Greg Buzwell examines
the interplay between art and morality in Oscar
Wildes novel, and considers its use of traditional
Gothic motifs as well as the theories of the new
aesthetic movement.
Oscar Wildes only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a
superb example of late-Victorian Gothic fiction. It ranks alongside
Robert Louis Stevensons Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) and Bram Stokers Dracula (1897) as a representation of
how fin-de-sicle literature explored the darkest recesses of
Victorian society and the often disturbing private desires that
lurked behind acceptable public faces. The novel also examined
the relationship between art and reality, highlighting the uneasy
interplay between ethics and aesthetics as well as the links
between the artist, his or her subject and the resulting image on
canvas.

The Picture of Dorian Gray as first published in

The terrible pleasure of a double life

The idea of a double life of outwardly playing a respectable role
while inwardly pursuing an existence that crossed the boundaries
of acceptable behaviour is central to the plot of the novel. Dorian
Gray, once he becomes aware his portrait will bear the scars of his
corruption thus leaving his actual appearance unstained feels
free to ignore the pious morality that pervaded the Victorian era.
Rather like Dr Jekyll in Stevensons Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, Dorian is able to pursue his debauched activities
knowing his respectable appearance and unblemished looks will
shield him from accusations of depravity. His ability to have the
best of both worlds the continued acceptance of his peers and
the ability to fulfil his basest desires becomes in itself an
important part of his fascination with events. When attending a
society gathering only hours after having committed a murder we
are told Dorian felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life (ch.
15).
Dorians friend Lord Henry makes this link between the criminal
and the respectable citizen clear when he observes: Crime

belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I dont blame them in the

smallest degree. I should fancy that crime is to them what art is to
us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations (ch.
19). Dorian, with his visits to opium dens and his delight in high
culture combines the criminal and the aesthete the very definition
of decadence distilled into a single person and a disturbing
example of the split between the wholesome public persona and
the furtive private life.

Ethics and aesthetics

While much of The Picture of Dorian Gray delights in the beautiful
and the intoxicating indulgence of the senses the novels opening
paragraph for example describes the heady pleasures to be
derived from the scents of roses and lilacs it can be argued that
Wilde intended his book neither as a celebration of decadence nor
as a fable about the perils of its excesses. As Wilde states in the
preface to the novel There is no such thing as a moral or an
immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
In other words, any moral disgust or vicarious pleasure derived
from the book reflects more upon us as readers than it does on the
novel itself. The book is a tale, pure and simple. It is we, the
readers, who force it to bear the weight of a moral dimension.
The idea lying behind Aestheticism, the controversial theory of art
that was newly fashionable at this time, was that art should be
judged purely by its beauty and form rather than by any underlying
moral message (art for arts sake). This is exemplified in the novel
by the dandyish Lord Henry Wotton. Lord Henry advocates the
hedonistic pursuit of new experiences as the prime objective in life.
In his view, one could never pay too high a price for any sensation
(ch. 4). Dorian, although seduced by Wottons poisonous
whisperings, is increasingly interested in the moral consequences
of his behaviour. He stands before his decaying portrait,
comparing the moral degradation as depicted in oil with his
unblemished innocence as reflected by the mirror. The contrast
gives him a thrill of pleasure: He grew more and more enamoured
of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of
his own soul (ch. 11). Dorian via his wish to remain handsome,
while the painting bears the weight of his corruption muddies the
boundary between art and life, aesthetics and ethics. The painting

is made to serve a moral purpose, being transformed from an

object of beauty into a vile record of guilt, something bestial,
sodden and unclean (chapter 10). This tainting of the picture
perhaps constitutes, for the aesthete, Dorians greatest crime
namely the destruction of a beautiful artwork.

'

Paintings and ancestry

Paintings often play a sinister role in Gothic fiction. The first Gothic
novel, Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto (1764) includes a
figure stepping from a painting and into reality while Melmoth the
Wanderer (1820), written by Oscar Wildes great-uncle Charles
Maturin, describes the haunting gaze of a portrait as it follows the
viewer around a room. The picture hidden in Dorians attic may be
the most disturbing portrait in Wildes book, but it is not the only
canvas in the novel which provides a pointer to Dorians behaviour.
At one point Dorian walks through the picture-gallery of his country
home, looking at the portraits of his ancestors: those whose blood
flowed in his veins. The saturnine and sensuous faces stare back
at him, causing Dorian to reflect whether some strange poisonous
germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? (ch. 11).
This poses the question as to whether Dorian is free to determine
his own actions, and is thus entirely responsible for his behaviour,
or whether his actions are dictated by his genetic inheritance an
inheritance, as the faces of his ancestors indicate, of sin and
shame. The eminent mental pathologist Henry Maudsley wrote in
his book Pathology of Mind (1895): Beneath every face are the
latent faces of ancestors, beneath every character their
characters. This idea already seems present in much Gothic
fiction, including Wildes novel.
The Picture of Dorian Gray provides both a standard Gothic
account of Dorians actions the supernatural picture and the
lascivious ancestors gazing from their portraits but also a
forward-looking scientific rational for his depraved desires, namely
the importance of inheritance in determining behaviour. Dorian
resembles his mother physically, inheriting from her his beauty,
and his passion for the beauty of others (ch. 11), while, as his
corruption accelerates, the twisted portrait in Dorians attic
increasingly resembles his wicked grandfather. This latter idea
suggests Dorian is a scientific case study, as well as a moral one.
Throughout the book Lord Henry treats Dorian as a beautiful
subject upon which to experiment partly via his encouragement
of Dorian to pursue a philosophy of pleasure, and partly through a

call to social evolution a wish to abandon the restraints of

Victorian morality on the grounds that sin and conscience are
outmoded primitive concepts to be swept aside in the pursuit of
new sensations. Lord Henry locates progress in the overcoming of
hereditary fears: Courage has gone out of our race The terror
of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is
the secret of religion these are the two things that govern us (ch.
2). His call to youth is a call to courage. Dorians ultimate failure to
live up to Lord Henrys ideals is due to his inability to escape his
conscience as depicted in the portrait. By attempting to destroy the
painting, and thus free himself from the constant reminder of his
own guilt he, ultimately, manages only to destroy himself.

Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray first appeared in the July 1890 number
of Lippincotts Monthly Magazine and immediately caused an
outcry due to its perceived references of homosexual desire. The
review in the Scots Observer memorably described the book as
having been written for outlawed noblemen and perverted
telegraph-boys a reference to a recent scandal involving a
homosexual brothel in Londons Cleveland Street. In response to
such hostile criticism Wilde considerably amended the text and a
longer, noticeably toned-down version of the book was published
by Ward Lock and Co in April 1891. It is this later version that
forms the standard text of the novel. Even so the Lippincotts
version was used by opposing counsel in evidence against Wilde
in two of his trials in an attempt to show him guilty of a certain
tendency. For many people Oscar Wilde the artist with his
flamboyant public persona and his secretive private life and his
novel with its two distinctly different versions and its duplicitous
central character mirrored each other from the start.

http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-picture-ofdorian-gray-art-ethics-and-the-artist

By1891,whenhepublishedhisPictureofDorianGray,>OscarWilde
couldprojectaworldinwhichintegrationisimpossibleandwhereallof
life's paths lead to selfdestruction. As in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
hypocritical bourgeois culture is beastly dangerous, but so is every
alternativetoit.IfStevenson'ssocietyexhibitsfragmentedselves,Wilde's
revealsafracturedplacewhereeveryoneisdoomedtountimelydeath.
Appropriately, this world of Dorian Gray is described as monstrous
throughout. Cynical and manipulative Lord Henry sees law and the
temptationsitsrepressivenessfostersas"monstrous,"(Wilde,26)while
Dorian perceives his own delight in the altering portrait of him as
"monstrous" (143) and later considers people smitten with "vice and
blood and weariness" as "monstrous," too (161). And artist Basil
Hallward,painteroftheinfamouspictureofDorianGray,feelsthesecret
ofhissoulliesinthatbeautifulportraitbutseesintheendthatitindeed
"hastheeyesofadevil"(174).
Farfrombeingarefugefrombrutalreality,then,thesphereofan
inthisbookisalsodeadlydangerous. Hallwardiscruellymurderedby
Dorian after he uncovers the secret of theportrait thatDorian has so
carefully hidden away (as Jekyll does Hyde). The living Dorian, still
looking so like the beautiful, untainted picture that Hallward loves,
[122/123] has gone rotten at the core. In worshipping and depicting
Dorian's beauty, Hallward has helped create the monster of his own
destruction.Heisanothersuicide,killedbyhisownmisjudgment.Andso
isactressSibylVane. Livinginatheatricalworldofmakebelieveand
melodrama,SibylcannotaccepttherealityofDorian'srejection.When
shedecidestogiveupactingforhislove,sheisshockedatDorian's
callous, "withoutartyouarenothing"(100), followedbyhisdesertion.
Steeped in theatrics, Sibyl commits suicide like Ophelia, not like the
JulietshesohopedshemightplaytoDorian'sRomeo.YetSibylisnota
heroineofmelodrama,forheroinesofmelodramatriumphintheend.
Sibyl,avictimofart,diesfromswallowingprussicacid,heronlytribute
being the brief record of her inquest and verdict of "death by
misadventure"(139)whichisrecordedinSt.James's.
Beautiful but deadly Dorian will drive many such admirers to
suicidebeforehedestroyshisportraitandhimself. Ayoungboyofthe
guards;AdrianSingleton;AllenCampbellDorian'svictimsaremany.
ToallofthemDorianmusthaveseemedsomethingotherthanwhathe

was.Yetforalongtimedoublelifeisa"pleasure"toDorian,whoasks,
"isinsinceritysuchaterriblething?Ithinknot.Itismerelyamethodby
whichwecanmultiplyourpersonalities"(158). Onlynearhisenddoes
hedesistfromtoyingwithothers'livesandthenprideshimselfwhenhe
leavesavillagegirlbeforedestroyinghertoo.LordHenryteaseshim
withthequery,"howdoyouknowthatHertyisn'tfloatingatthepresent
momentinsomestarlitmillpond,withlovelywaterliliesroundherlike
Ophelia?"(233).Dorian,whoatlastdiscoversinhimselfthevestigesofa
conscience, resents having any conscience at all, and so projects that
conscienceintothepicture.Whenhetearsatthepaintingwiththevery
knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward, he is determined to "kill this
monstroussoullife"(247).Insteadhetakesonthe"withered,wrinkled,
andloathsome"(240)visageoftheportrait,emblemofhiscorruptedsoul,
andhimselfdies.Dorianisthenowhideousportrait;itishisotherself.
The ending of this novel was problematical for late Victorian
readers.Wilde'soddpreface, whichreadslikeanaesthetic'sversionof
Blake's"ProverbsofHell,"warnsthat"thereisnosuchthingasamoral
oranimmoralbook"(5)andthat"thosewhoreadthesymboldosoat
theirperil"(6).Neverthelessmanydidreadthe symbolandwondered
whether the book were moral or immoral. Did it say that conscience
cannot be denied and that all people who do deny it become self
destroyingmonsters?Andifso,wassuicidethenjustifiableasakindof
selfextermination of evil) Or did it say, as a reviewer for the Daily
Chroniclesurmised,thatsensationisall?
Mr. Wilde says his book has a "moral." The "moral," so far as we can
collect it, is that man's chief end is to develop his nature to the fullest
by "always searching for new sensations," that when the soul gets sick
the way to cure it is to deny the senses nothing, for "nothing," says
one of Mr. Wilde's characters, Lord Henry Worron, "can cure the soul
but the sense, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." Man
is half angel and half ape, and Mr. Wilde's book has no real use if it be
not to inculcate the "moral" that when you feel yourself becoming too
angelic you cannot do better than rush out and make a beast of
yourself (DC, 7).

A concerned Wilde reacted to this statement in a letter to the

Chronicle,publishedon2July."Therealmoralofthestory,"hestates,
"isthatallexcess,aswellasrenunciation,bringsitspunishment."Oneof
Punch'sreviewers,theBarondeBookWorm,disagreed:
If Oscar intended an allegory, the finish is dreadfully wrong. Does he
mean that, by sacrificing his earthly life, Dorian Gray atones for his

infernal sins, and so purifies his soul by suicide? "Heavens! I am no

preacher," says the Baron, "and perhaps Oscar didn't mean anything
at all, except to give us a sensation, to show how like Bulwer Lytton's
old-world style he could make his descriptions and his dialogue, and
what an easy thing it is to frighten the respectable Mrs. Grundy with a
Bogie." .Punch, 25]

Allthesame,thebogeywasthereforthefrightening.ForDorianwasa
monsterquiteoppositetothebenignElephantMan;hewasbeautifulon
theoutsidebutuglywithin.And"ugliness,"Wilde'snarratortellsus,
"wastheonereality.Thecoarsebrawl,theloathsomeden,thecrude
violenceofdisorderedlife,theveryvilenessofthiefandoutcast,were
morevivid,intheirintenseactualityofimpression,thanallthegracious
shapesofart,thedreamyshadowsofsong"(2o6).LikeTennyson's
fictionalCamelot,Wilde'sportraitoffindesicleEnglandisofaland
reelingbacktothebeasts,butwithnohopeforasecondcomingofa
KingArthurtosaveit.ThefantasyofDorianGray'sportraitisnota
Faustianstoryofaherogivinguplifeforknowledge,butablackfairy
taleinwhichaspoiledboygetshisonewishendlessyouthfulnessand
sensualityandbecomesasuicidebecausehecannothandleits
implications.Wildemayhavedeservedtheharshcriticismofhis
contemporaries,butlikeotherVictoriancreatorsoffictionsandfantasies
aboutmonstrousselveswhowilltodie,hediscernedsomethingdeeply
disturbingabouthisownculture.HisHallward,Dickens'sNell,LeFanu's
Jennings,Stevenson'sDr,Jekyll,andTennyson'sBalanallhad"alittle
shadowthatwentalongwiththem."Thatshadowwasadark,distorted
otherself,"ahideoushunchback,"touseMatthewArnold'sparaphraseof
Dr.Posey,"seatedon[their]shouldersandwhichwasthemainbusiness
of[their]livestohateandoppose."(Arnold,481)Oftenthatsubversive
hunchbackwasbeckoningthemontowarddeath.
Barbara T. Gates, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, University of
Delaware
http://www.victorianweb.org/books/suicide/06g.html

Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early
reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray must have given
him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while
his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue
of Lippincotts, a Philadelphia magazine with English
distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale
unclean, poisonous, and heavy with the mephitic
odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction. The St. James
Gazette deemed it nasty and nauseous, and suggested
that the Treasury or the Vigilance Society might wish to
prosecute the author. Most ominous was a short notice in the
Scots Observer stating that although Dorian Gray was a
work of literary quality, it dealt in matters only fitted for the
Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera
and would be of interest mainly to outlawed noblemen and
perverted telegraph-boysan allusion to the recent
Cleveland Street scandal, which had exposed the workings
of a male brothel in London. Within five years, Wilde found
himself convicted of committing acts of gross indecency
with certain male persons.
The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream Englishlanguage fiction had come so close to spelling out
homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that
Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorians portrait, is in love
with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers,
he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to
the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would
have been his corruption of a series of young men. (Basil
tells Dorian, There was that wretched boy in the Guards
who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There

was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a

tarnished name. You and he were inseparable.) At the Wilde
trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from
Dorian Gray, calling it a sodomitical book. Wilde went
to prison not because he loved young men but because he
flaunted that love, and Dorian Gray became the chief
exhibit of his shamelessness.
Wilde died in 1900, in a run-down Paris hotel, at the age of
forty-six. Almost overnight, a legend was born: Wilde the
homosexual martyr, Wilde the moral rebel. A nascent gayrights movement embraced him as a hero of defiance. When,
in 1967, Craig Rodwell opened a gay-and-lesbian bookstore
in New York, he named it the Oscar Wilde Memorial
Bookshop, and after the Stonewall riots of 1969 Rodwell
used the bookstores mailing list to help organize the first
gay-pride parade. As recently as the late eighties, you could
still find bookish young people coming to terms with their
sexuality by way of reading Wilde. (You could at least find
me.) Whether or not Wilde saw himself as part of a cause, he
did not lack courage. The multiple versions of Dorian
Graythe earliest surviving manuscript, which is at the
Morgan Library; the typescript sent to Lippincotts, which
Harvard University Press has just made available in an
uncensored edition; the published Lippincotts text; and
the expanded book publication of 1891show Wilde
deciding, sentence by sentence, just how far he would go.
The Wilde Bookshop closed in 2009, a casualty not only of
the decline of the bookselling business but also of the partial
triumph of Rodwells mission. In many major cities, at least,
gays and lesbians no longer seem to need a safe place in the
form of a store. And they no longer seem to need the
tragicomic Oscar; the young gays of today can revel in the
wit and wisdom of Neil Patrick Harris. All of which leaves
Wilde in an interesting limbo. What will he mean in a

perhaps not too distant time when homosexuality has ceased

to be a conversation stopper?
To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante
and dandy merelyit is not wise to show ones heart to the
world, Wilde once wrote. We should not assume that his
heart was revealed to us when he became a gay icon, or
when he was canonized in wider bohemian circles as the
patron saint of Be yourself. (The phrase appears in the
1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.) Wildes
aestheticism, his fanatical cult of beauty, was the deepest
and most lasting of his passions, and it is now the most
radical thing about him. Perhaps only the threat of
persecution prevented Wilde from freely expressing his
sexuality in his writing; yet he also may have been caught in
the modern struggle to inhabit an identity without becoming
defined by it. The ghastly ending of Dorian GrayDorian
stabbing his portrait in a frenzyshows a man losing a
battle with his public image.
The two most recent major biographies of Wilde are Thomas
Wrights Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of
Oscar Wilde, which appeared in 2008, and Neil McKennas
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography,
which came out in 2005. They present almost comically
contradictory portraits. Wrights Wilde is an intellectual
dreamer who rarely steps outside the literary realm. We are
told that his parentsthe eye-and-ear surgeon William
Wilde and the poet Jane Francesca Wilde, who wrote under
the name Speranzaaccumulated mountains of books at
their home, in Dublin, and that young Oscar habitually read
in bed, his mind ravished by Irish folktales, ancient-Greek
texts, Romantic poems, and gothic novels. Wright even
suggests that Wilde discovered his sexuality in the pages of
Plato. Was it a case of literary nurture over biological
nature? Wright asks, as if Wilde might have found boys

unattractive had the philosopher not put the idea in his head.
In this telling, Wildes ultimate humiliation came not on the
day of his arrest, on April 5, 1895, but a few weeks later,
when his library was auctioned off.
McKennas Wilde, by contrast, is a largely sexual being who
reads in order to find a language for his desire and writes in
order to speak that desire aloud. He is hailed as a martyr in
an epic struggle for the freedom of men to love men.
McKenna rejects the idea, set forth in previous biographies,
that Wilde had no gay life until his early thirties, when he
met Robert Ross, a precociously self-aware Canadian teenager, in Oxford. In fact, certain of Wildes youthful poems
drip with homoeroticismAnd he looked on me with
desire / And I know that his name was Loveand his early
friendship with the painter Frank Miles, among others, had a
sexual tinge. Yet McKenna reads too much into meagre
evidence. He is a writer of the almost certainly school, and
he withholds material that belies his thesis. (He does not
mention that Miles was notoriously attracted to very young
girls.) Later chapters rely on the dubious memoirs of
Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, a forger and a fantasist, who
claimed carnal knowledge not only of the principals in the
Wilde case but also of Paul Verlaine and the Dowager
Empress of China. McKenna, by fixating on Wildes sexual
life, arrives at an oddly unflattering portrait. Preying on
young literary fans, paying off rent boys, picking up lads as
young as fifteenWilde is stripped of his charm.
To read Wright and McKenna in succession is like seeing a
picture alter before ones eyes: a bookish fellow becomes a
sex addict. There is, however, no real contradiction;
countless literary lives have veered from monkish labor to
mindless pleasure. Wilde himself first felt this split when he
was studying at Oxford, in the eighteen-seventies. In the
poem Hlas!, published in 1881, he wistfully imagines a

life of austere control, in which he might have trod / The

sunlit heights, and from lifes dissonance / Struck one clear
chord to reach the ears of God. But he tastes the honey of
romance and loses his footing. Sixteen years later, Wilde
traced the same downward arc in De Profundis, the
annihilating book-length letter that he wrote in prison to
Alfred Douglas, his former lover: Tired of being on the
heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for
new sensations. He never found the middle ground between
those extremes, although he glimpsed it. All excess, as well
as all renunciation, brings its own punishment, he said,
summing up Dorian Gray.
Such epigrams were the foundation of Wildes fame, and
remain so. He is often seen as the godfather of celebrity
culture, in that from the outset he was noted chiefly for
being Oscar Wilde. Even in his Oxford days, his witticisms
were making their way beyond the university walls. (His
first hit: I find it harder and harder every day to live up to
my blue china.) On settling in London, in 1879, he assumed
the gaudy neo-Renaissance poses that inspired dozens of
Punch cartoons and two characters in Gilbert and Sullivans
Patience. He maintained exquisite attitudes during his
American lecture tour of 1882, enduring jeers from college
students and enjoying the unexpected admiration of
Colorado miners. Back in England, he caused further chatter
with a turn toward domesticity, marrying Constance Lloyd
and producing two sons. Only when he published The
Happy Prince and Other Tales, in 1888, did his literary
output catch up to his fame. With that publication, the most
intense phase of Wildes career began. His wit acquired a
sharper edge: celebrity became a vehicle for subversion.
The fairy tales are well stocked with delightful paradoxes,
yet they are encircled by strangeness and sadness. The StarChild ends with the sentence And he who came after him

ruled evilly. They are tales of impossible love: a

fishermans for a mermaid, a statues for a swallow.
Victorian parents who read the stories to their children may
have stumbled over the friskier moments, as when the title
character of The Young King presses his lips to a statue of
Antinous, Hadrians male slave. Wilde reveals the human
complexity and suffering behind the luxurious surfaces that
he summoned so easily in rolling Irish prose. The Young
King is dismayed to discover that his subjects have toiled
severelyand even diedin order to manufacture his
golden raiments, yet when he tries to assume a humbler
guise the kingdom revolts against him.
Wilde was never an open radical in the manner of George
Bernard Shaw, but the imperious essays he published
between 1889 and 1891The Truth of Masks, Pen,
Pencil, and Poison, The Decay of Lying, The Critic as
Artist, and The Soul of Man Under Socialismdug
tunnels under the moral foundations of Victorian England.
Artists are cast as outlaws (There is no essential
incongruity between crime and culture), purveyors of
dangerous ideas (the better to resist that splendid system
that elevates [men] to the dignity of machines), tellers of
gorgeous lies that supplant dull truths, and habitual
antinomians, rejecting the shallow shibboleths of any sect
or school. In The Soul of Man, Wilde imagines a
revolution that will sweep aside all middle-class
Philistinism. Technological advances, he predicts, will
liberate even the working classes, granting them lives of
aesthetic reverie. The vague economic logic of the argument
is a pretext for Wilde to vent his rage on an audience that
treated him as an amusing sideshow:
The public make use of the classics of a country as a means
of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics

into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing

the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always
asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or
a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite
oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the
kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty
is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears
they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two
stupid expressionsone is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly
immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be
this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they
mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is
new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they
mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is
true.
This fulmination anticipates the rhetoric of modernism.
Yeats and Joyce, in particular, felt a strong connection to
their Irish forerunner. Yeats, who believed that Wilde would
have made a great soldier or politician, praised him for
launching an extravagant Celtic crusade against AngloSaxon stupidity. Joyce evidently drew on the trials of 1895
in creating the hallucinogenic persecution of Leopold Bloom
in the Circe chapter of Ulysses.
The gay strain in Wildes work is part of a larger war on
convention. In the 1889 story The Portrait of Mr. W. H., a
pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of
Shakespeares sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the
pillar of British literature was something other than an
ordinary family man. In the 1891 play Salom, Wilde
expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of
decadence. Anarchists of the fin de sicle, especially in
Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav

Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas

Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines
of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (There is no
reality in things apart from their experiences) and that
various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde
(We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest
judgments are the most indispensable to us). Nietzsche and
Wilde were, in Manns view, rebels in the name of beauty.
In early 1892, Wilde enjoyed a huge theatrical success with
Lady Windermeres Fan, and until he went to prison he
confined himself to social comedy. The subversive agenda
remained: Richard Le Gallienne plausibly proposed that
Wilde made dying Victorianism laugh at itself, and it may
be said to have died of the laughter. But the increasing
virtuosity of Wildes dramatic technique masked a
weakening of his creative impulse; the plays were written
amid long periods of inactivity and relied intermittently on
old lines. The Importance of Being Earnest, brilliant as it
is, threatens to become a greatest-hits compilation. Wilde
later blamed the dissipations of Alfred Douglas for the
slowing of his productivity after 1892; their affair began that
year, after Wilde paid off a blackmailer on Douglass behalf.
After reading the newer books on Wilde, I returned to
Richard Ellmanns 1988 biography, which, despite some
errors and eccentricities, still commands the field. Ellmann
performs the supreme service of taking Wilde seriously, as a
writer first and a personality second. He catches Wildes
lawless moralism, his outcast-preacher tone. His creative
works almost always end in unmasking, Ellmann writes.
The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes
an admonitory finger. Ellmann explains better than any
other chronicler why, in 1895, Wilde chose to face his
accusers instead of fleeing to the Continent. It was not an act
of martyrdom, or of arrogance or self-delusion, but, rather,

an exercise in intellectual consistency. Ellmann writes, He

submitted to the society he had criticized, and so earned the
right to criticize it further.
Dorian Gray emerged from the same dinner that insured the
immortality of Sherlock Holmes. Wilde and Arthur Conan
Doyle dined together in London in August, 1889, as guests
of Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the editor of Lippincotts.
Doyle, like so many others, came away dazzled by Wilde.
He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to
be interested in all that we could say, Doyle recalled. Later
that year, Doyle sent Lippincotts his second Holmes tale,
The Sign of Four, assigning a few Wildean traits to the
great detective. (You can imagine Wilde saying, I abhor the
dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.)
Wilde, for his part, may have picked up some tricks from
Holmess creator: parts of Dorian Gray are as gruesome as
a police procedural.
Last spring, I spent a few hours looking at the autograph
manuscript of Dorian Gray, at the Morgan Library. When
Dorian attempts to destroy his portrait, the manuscript has
him ripping the thing right up; Wilde then adds the phrase
from top to bottom. Nicholas Frankel, the editor of the
new Harvard edition of Dorian Gray, notes that the
eviscerating gesture evokes Jack the Ripper, whose crimes
had filled the papers two years earlier.
The original magazine story, at fifty thousand words, has all
the familiar elements of the book version, which is the one
most people know. Lord Henry, a Mephistophelian aesthete
who seems to be Wildes mouthpiece, visits the studio of his
friend Basil Hallward and becomes fascinated by a picture
displayed there. Basil confesses his attraction to its subject.
When Dorian enters, Lord Henry intellectually seduces him
with a philosophy of hedonism. (The only way to get rid of

a temptation is to yield to it.) Dorian, saddened by the idea

that he must grow old while his portrait stays the same,
wishes the opposite were true. An elfin magic takes hold.
Dorian falls for a gifted young actress named Sibyl Vane and
then casts her aside when he determines that the joy of love
has rendered her art banal. She kills herself. The face in the
picture acquires a cruel look. As Dorian wallows in
debauchery, Basil pries into his secret life and wonders
about the state of his soul. Dorian, who has hidden the
picture in his attic, shows Basil the now hideous face, and
kills him. Thoughts of repentance cross Dorians mind, but
he decides that he must wipe out the only remaining record
of his crimes: the portrait. When he stabs it, he falls dead,
his face misshapen beyond recognition. In the same instant,
the pictures beauty is restored.
In the Morgan manuscript, Wildes hand flows confidently,
as if taking dictation, but the appearance of fluency may be
deceptive: the autograph is probably a copy of an earlier
draft that has disappeared. Although Wilde is celebrated as
the greatest natural talker of modern times, he edited his
prose meticulously. The opening paragraphs, describing
Basils studio, are a masterpiece of precise evocation, and
Wildes handwritten changes sharpen the imagery yet more.
In a passage that compares the dim roar of London to the
bourdon note of an organ, Wilde inserts the word distant
before organ, adding a twinge of far-off religious dread.
At the same time, Wildes revisions to the opening dialogue
between Basil and Lord Henry betray a rising anxiety, an
urge to lower the emotional temperature. Exclamations over
Dorians beauty give way to more reserved remarks about
his good looks and personality. Passion becomes
feeling, pain becomes perplexity. Wildes pen stops
Basil from mentioning the time Dorian brushed against his
cheek and from announcing that the world becomes young

to me when I hold his hand. And when Basil explains why

he is withholding the painting from London gallery-goers he
is prevented from saying that where there is really love,
they would see something evil, and where there is spiritual
passion they would suggest something vile. Tellingly,
Wilde removes intimations of a prior attachment between
Basil and Lord Henry. He deletes a description of Basil
taking hold of [Lord Henrys] hand. One passage is so
heavily scratched out as to be almost illegible, but in it Lord
Henry seems to berate Basil for having become Dorians
slave, and then blurts out, I hate Dorian Gray. In the
end, Wilde cancels any hint of jealousy and gives Lord
Henry the mask of an amused aesthete: Basil, this is quite
wonderful! I must see Dorian Gray.
Even before Wilde sent his manuscript to the typist, then, he
was hesitating over its homoerotic content, and especially
over the pages devoted to Basils desire. The focus on Basil
is not surprising, given that Wilde later declared, Basil
Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world
thinks me: Dorian what I would like to bein other ages,
perhaps.
When the typescript arrived in the Philadelphia offices of
Lippincotts, it was Joseph Marshall Stoddarts turn to have
second thoughts. His changes are noted in the new Harvard
edition. Stoddart was no prude, and moved in
unconventional circles; when Wilde came to America,
Stoddart introduced him to Walt Whitman. But the editor
knew his publics limits. He, or an associate, cut another of
Basils confessional remarks about the portraitThere was
love in every line, and in every touch there was passion
and several descriptions of Dorians nighttime wanderings,
including a sentence that might depict the ancient ritual of
cruising: A man with curious eyes had suddenly peered into
his face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps,

passing and repassing him many times. In good American

style, Stoddart had no problem with the violence.
Dorian Gray failed to scandalize America. England was,
of course, another matter. Although Wilde was already
planning to expand the story into a novel, he certainly
reacted to the insinuations in the press. More references to
physical contact between the male characters were dropped.
Just as significant as the expurgations are the additions: six
chapters, totalling some twenty-eight thousand words. They
supply further episodes of society comedy, fresh adventures
for Dorian in the opium dens, a fuller sketch of the unlucky
Sibyl Vane, and a baroque subplot involving James Vane,
Sibyls brother, who seeks to avenge her. The new material
gives Dorian Gray a novelistic heft, even a political edge.
The chapter about the Vanes, for example, sets Dorians
velvety life style in stark relief. Yet these excursions in high
and low society feel a bit like staged distractions. There are
too many tidy formulationsIt was his beauty that had
ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed
forpositioned to reassure the middle classes.
The version that Wilde submitted to Lippincotts is the better
fiction. It has the swift and uncanny rhythm of a modern
fairy taleand Dorian is the greatest of Wildes fairy
tales. Wilde made clear from the outset that he wished to
show not only the thrills and pleasures of a ruthlessly
aesthetic life but also its limits and dangers. The hideousness
of Dorians demise is as integral to the works conception as
any bloodcurdling twist in Poe, and looking at the final
pages of the manuscript you can almost see Wildes lips
curling cruelly as he wrote. Beneath the brutal final
paragraph, he signs his name in slashing strokes, as if
wielding a knife. Ellmann sums it up thus: Drift beautifully
on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.
Wilde steps outside his practiced persona to cast a cold eye

on the sensation-seeking life style popularly ascribed to him.

The most problematic aspect of Wildes revision is the
novels Preface, with its famous cavalcade of epigrams: To
reveal art and conceal the artist is arts aim; There is no
such thing as a moral or an immoral book; All art is quite
useless. These lines, together with new quips for Lord
Henry (Art has no influence upon action. . . . It is superbly
sterile), are related to letters that Wilde wrote to critics and
readers after the Lippincotts publication. They amount to a
formalist defense, positing the story as an autonomous
object in which diverse readers perceive diverse ideas. But
art does reveal the artist, and it does influence action,
however unpredictably. In Wildes narrative, books are
described as poisonous agents that enter the bloodstream:
an unnamed French book that Lord Henry gives to Dorian
discloses new vistas of vice. In the typescript, we learn that
the book is Le Secret de Raoul, by Catulle Sarrazin
probably a fictional stand-in for Huysmanss 1884 novel,
Against the Grain, which describes a gay encounter more
explicitly than Wilde ever dared to do. (Wilde read it on his
honeymoon.) Above all, there is Basils painting, which
destroys both its creator and subject. When Mallarm read
the story, he singled out for approval the line It was the
portrait that had done everything. Art is not innocent, Wilde
implies. Violence can be done in its name. Indeed, the
twentieth century brought forth many Dorian Grays:
fiendishly pure spirits so wrapped up in aesthetics that they
become heedless of humanity. Wildes anatomy of the
confusion between art and life remains pertinent with each
new uproar over lurid films, songs, or video games.
Even in the final book version, Wilde refuses to moralize, to
tell the artist what to do or the reader what to think. Each
individual must devise his own ethical code. When Wilde
wrote that all excess as well as all renunciation brings its

punishment, he evidently had in mind the contrast between

Basil, who can conceive of his love for Dorian only in
abstract terms, and Dorian, who is so intent on embracing
the physical that he loses his mind. Both men meet bad ends.
Lord Henry, by contrast, emerges unscathed, his talk
naughtier than his walk. Indeed, Basil accuses him of being
secretly virtuous: You never say a moral thing, and you
never do a wrong thing. Lord Henry espouses a peculiarly
contemporary kind of moderation, indulging his brain but
not his body, employing Dorian as a proxy hedonist. (Today,
Lord Henry might spend a lot of time on the Internet.) There
is something sad about him, for, unlike Basil and Dorian, he
fails to commit himself. His life is vicarious.
What begins as an alluring fable ends as a full-on modernist
nightmare. Only one character experiences anything like
spontaneous joy, and that is Sibyl Vane, when she decides to
abandon the artistic life and devote herself to Dorian. I am
sick of shadows, she tells him. You are more to me than
all art can ever be. Tragically, Sibyl does not realize that
Dorian has exchanged his soul for that of the painting; like
the others, she is trapped by the images spell.
The eerie thing about Wildes life is that he, too, could not
escape the infernal logic of the Picture. His own book
exhibited poisonous properties. Alfred Douglas read it at
Oxford and, by his own testimony, reread it thirteen times.
He became determined to meet the author. He was Wildes
fantasy come to lifeDorian stepping from the canvas. But
he had an ugly soul; as Wilde recognized in De Profundis,
hate excited him more than love. Wilde, Basil to the end,
adored the young man all the same.
On February 18, 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry,
Douglass hate-engorged father, inscribed a visiting card
with the words For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite, and

left it at Wildes club. Urged on by Douglas, Wilde made the

mistake of suing the Marquess for libela decision
catastrophic not only for his career but also for his sense of
dignity, since, as he later wrote, he was forced to present
himself as a champion of respectability in conduct, of
puritanism in life, and of morality in art.
At the libel trial, Queensberrys chief attorney, Edward
Carson, needed to demonstrate that the words on the card
were justified. So he set about establishing that Wilde had
already advertised his proclivities in print. Dorian Gray
became Carsons main resource, and he elected to treat it as
Wildes life storyan ironic move, because in its pages
Basil complains that men treat art as if it were meant to be
a form of autobiography. The barrister pounced on a
passage that had appeared in the Lippincotts version and
was later cut: It is quite true that I have worshipped you
with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to
a friend. . . . I quite admit that I adored you madly,
extravagantly, absurdly. The following interrogation
ensued:
carson: Have you ever extravagantly adored?
wilde: Do you mean financially or emotionally?
carson: Financially? Do you think we are talking here of
finances?
wilde: I dont know what you are talking about.
carson: Dont you?
wilde: You must ask me a plain question.
carson: I hope I will make myself very plain before I am
done.
Wilde was obviously perturbed by the exchange. It was like
talking to an eight-year-old who couldnt tell the difference

between an actor and his role. He defended himself ably, but

Carson was softening him up for the blow. Private detectives
hired by Queensberry had rounded up rent boys and
starstruck youths who had served Wildes needs, and there
were no clever answers to the next round of questions: Did
you become intimate with a young man named Conway? . . .
He sold newspapers on the pier at Worthing? . . . Did you
put your hands inside his trousers? . . . Did you give him
sums from time to time amounting to fifteen pounds? The
roll call of Wildes associates hauntingly echoes the list of
young men whom Dorian is said to have ruined.
During the two dismal criminal trials that followed, Wilde
had one magnificent moment, and it, too, involved Dorian
Gray. While being questioned on the subject of Alfred
Douglass poem about the Love that dare not speak its
name, Wilde was suddenly moved to defend that love
instead of denying it. With emotion, he announced that such
love was as pure as it was perfect, that it pervades great
works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo.
According to one transcript, he said, It is beautiful, it is
fine, it is the noblest form of affection. He was quoting
almost directly from Dorian Gray: The love that [Basil]
bore him . . . had nothing in it that was not noble and
intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of
beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the
senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known,
and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare
himself.
Wildes speech aroused hisses in the courtroom and also a
brave burst of applause. At least one member of the jury
voted against a guilty verdict, forcing a retrial. A political
panic erupted: the men around Lord Rosebery, the Prime
Minister, feared that if Wilde were not convicted they would
be accused of sheltering a degenerate. (Rosebery had a

personal motive; it was rumored that he had been the lover

of the older brother of Alfred Douglas, Francis, who had
died in 1894, probably a suicide.) A second prosecution
began, with the Solicitor General in charge, and it was
successful. Justice Wills, the presiding judge, bombastically
described the case as the worst . . . I have ever tried.
Over time, though, the shaming of Wilde generated as much
sympathy as disgust, particularly among those who were
disenchanted by the strutting poses of the British Empire.
When the verdict was announced the harlots in the street
outside danced upon the pavement, Yeats wrote. And in the
gay underworld Wildes defiance cracked open the door of
hope. Havelock Ellis, in the 1906 edition of his book
Sexual Inversion, noted that the Wilde trials generally
contributed to give definiteness and self-consciousness to
the manifestations of homosexuality, and quoted a
correspondent saying that Wildes sufferings made him feel
ready to strike a blow, when the time comes, for what we
deem to be right, honorable, and clean.
Wilde foresaw his posthumous triumph. I have no doubt we
shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous
martyrdoms, he wrote to the early gay-rights campaigner
George Ives. Even so, the clean-cut categories of
contemporary sexuality might have puzzled him. He was
attracted to women as well as to men, if not nearly as
strongly, and the collapse of his marriage may have had as
much to do with temperamental differences as with sexual
ones. (You could see him as one more self-entitled Victorian
male exercising his right to extramarital recreation.)
Furthermore, he might have resisted the tendency toward
normalization in gay circlesthe drive of an oppositional
culture to abolish itself. When he spoke of winning the
battle, he probably did not have in mind gaining the right to
join the military and marry in church.

The world spins only forward, Prior Walter says at the end
of Tony Kushners Angels in America, a gay fantasia
that opened in 1991, a century after the publication of
Dorian Gray. Prior goes on to say, We will be citizens.
The time has come. Seeing the Signature Theatre
production of Kushners masterpiece last spring, I thought of
how much had changed in twenty years, never mind a
hundred. When I was in college, aids cast a pall of fear over
gay life, and I struggled to summon the courage to tell my
closest friends who I was. I couldnt have imagined that gay
marriage would become legal in half a dozen states, or that I
would be married myself.
The transformation is almost dreamlike. Yet I doubt that
Wilde would recognize in our world the utopia that he
dreamed aloud in The Soul of Man Under Socialism. A
man who steeped himself in the literature of the ancient
Greeks, who modelled his being on the writing of Balzac
and Stendhal and Pater, who read Dante every day in prison,
might have seen a new kind of hell in the global triumph of
American-style pop culture. Medicine prolongs life and
slows aging, but personal satisfaction is as elusive a
commodity as it was for Dorian Gray. Prejudice wanes,
ignorance grows, the world spins forward and backward.
Few of us would wish for the return of Wildes London, with
its opulent surfaces and savage heart. But Wilde might have
been content to stay there, savoring his joys and sorrows. No
one lives happily ever after.
Alex Ross
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/08/110808cr
at_atlarge_ross?currentPage=all

If Oscar Wilde had been a man of our time, he

might have had rather mixed feelings about the LGBT
liberation agenda. Though Wilde himself had
homosexual tendencies and would probably have
approved of the gay rights movement, he probably
would not have been a public advocate. Decadent
dandy though he was, Wilde considered his
homosexuality his pathology: a guilty pleasure and
predilection he indulged behind closed doors.
This double life was in accord with the Victorian era in
which he lived, and also with a philosophy that
pleasures are most pleasant when they are private. No
sin is as seductive as the secret sin. There is reason to
believe that Wilde would have recoiled at the tendency
to wear ones sexuality upon ones sleeveas many do
todayinstead of making such inner desires the
substance of subtle, furtive gratifications. Illusion, as
he famously quoted, is the first of all pleasures. Wilde
was able to rationalize his temptations while enjoying
the thrill of forbidden fruitbut in his heart of hearts,
in his inmost conscience, what guilt lurked?

Just as homosexuality in Wildes only novel, The

Picture of Dorian Gray, is obvious without being overt,
many wish their sins could be unrestrained without
being seen. The Picture of Dorian Gray explores the
fantasy of invincible vice only to discover that, while
justice can be dodged, there is no escape from
conscience. Written in 1890, the homosexual

undertones of the novel were used as evidence in the

criminal-libel suit of Wilde vs. the Marquess of
Queensberry in 1895, who accused the writer of
homosexual promiscuity with his son, Lord Alfred
Douglas. Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency,
and sentenced to two years hard laborfrom which he
never recovered. He died in poverty and disgrace in
1900. Like his tragic hero, Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
tried to conceal something about himself in art, and in
the end was betrayed by art.
When Dorian Gray first beholds his portrait, he is both
enchanted and enraged. The captivating picture
promises to mock the self-centered, insecure boy,
commanding the beauty of youth that he must slowly
surrender. The image immediately provokes the
negative self-image Dorian subconsciously harbors,
which will only accentuate over time as his physical
appearance falls away from the perfection of his
portrait. The picture of Dorian Gray is at once a
complex icon of narcissism and self-hatred. Embracing
the thought that he has no other worth than his beauty,
Dorian Gray utters a prayer that it may never fade; and
that the picture would bear the effects of corruption
instead of he.
Dorian Grays prayer was a Faustian bargain with the
devil, however, who grants his terrible wish. Thus,
Dorian Gray launches out upon a life bent on justifying
the supremacy of beauty, rendering himself unworthy
of any type of admiration or love, though retaining the
face of a saint. He worships sensualism, making
aesthetics his anesthetic; and his picture mercilessly
records this deliberate self-mutilation. Dorian Gray
luxuriates in comparing the hideous face in the portrait

to his own reflection in a mirror. These revels occur in

the dusty schoolroom where he spent his miserable,
orphaned boyhood and now keeps his secret locked
away from the worldthe very chamber where he
learned the lesson of self-loathing. Dorian Grays
attempt to feign dignity is eventually crushed by a
mountain of guilt, which swells as his picture
deteriorates. There is no circumvention of the
consequences of letting vice run rampant behind the
mask of virtue. There is no security for the stealthy
sinner. There is no immunity, no escape from the
depravity which evil breeds or from avenging guilt.
The guilt that simmers in the novel is not stereotypical.
Dorian Gray is no Raskolnikov or Markheim. In a
genre known for feverish, passionate psychopaths,
Dorian Gray is eerily even-keel in his debauchery
sometimes tending to the neurotic side, always
maintaining a low-temperature (with the exception of
one mad, murderous moment). The reason for this is
the psychological element that Wilde introduces to the
structure of the gothic tale. Dorian is preoccupied with
intellectual rationalizations that are ultimately selfdeluding and self-destructive. When sophistry holds
the moral compass, morality is left by the wayside.
Even though Dorian Gray is a hypocrite, no man, as
Samuel Johnson put it, is a hypocrite in his
pleasures. Hence Dorian Gray leads an existence of
hollow experience and emotion: smoking opium,
flirting with cynical friendships, frequenting brothels
and Algerian homosexual havens, and indulging in
every public and private extravagance. The picture is
the only true thing about Dorian Gray. It had been like
conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience.

The dream of Dorian Gray is to live a full and fruitful

life according to the dictates of appetite and
unadulterated beauty. But it is nothing more than a
dreama distraction from the reality of the picture,
which eats at him like a cancer. Even in the
pointlessness of his life, he takes a sick and cathartic
fascination in the painted putridity of his soul as
compared to the beauty of his countenance. This
hubris, this bravado, is merely a tactic to slow his
sinking into guilt. If only he might drown guilt before
he himself drowned in guilt. For throughout his
veneration of beauty, disfigurement leered at Dorian
Gray from the canvas. He looked on evil simply as a
mode through which he could realize his conception of
the beautiful. It was only a matter of time
England in Oscar Wildes time was just as two-faced as
Dorian Gray, and just as guilt-ridden. Victorian society
preached a pseudo-morality that denied the sway of
temptation for the well-to-do, lauding virtue and
beauty but lusting over wealth and social status. The
Picture of Dorian Gray was Wildes brutal call for
recognition of Victorian duplicity. Like society, and
Oscar Wilde himself, the novel roils in a war of ideals
the war between ethics and aesthetics. As a student,
Oscar Wilde imagined that he might reconcile these
two factions of truth and beauty in the Catholic
Church, with its paradoxical richness and rigidity.
Mighty demons were summoned to this front:
Hedonism and Hellenism. The battle was lost for Mr.
Wilde, but not the warnot as it was for Mr. Gray.
Dorian Grays refusal to heed the call of conscience led
to a tragedy sparked by guilt. Oscar Wilde converted to
Catholicism two days before he died. Perhaps his
concession to heed the call of conscience led to a

comedy sparked by guilt.

In our time, by choosing to be proud of our sins, we
become the pictureunless pricked by guilty
conscience to be otherwise. Wildes deathbed
conversion bespeaks a type of guilt that the Church
assuages. For all its bad reputation, perhaps there is
something to be said for the good of old-fashioned
Catholic guilt.
The Picture of Dorian Gray issued by Ignatius Critical
Editions and edited by Joseph Pearce is ideal for the
modern reader. The accompanying essays offer classic
criticism and insight that are both profound and
accessible. This is the edition for those drawn to the
philosophical traditions that drew Oscar Wilde,
centering on the question, What does it profit a man if
he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own
soul?
Sean Fitzpatrick

Epicurus

Epicurus (342270 B.C.E.), a Greek philosopher active during the

Hellenistic period, had a defining influence on those identified as
Aesthetes and Decadents, particularly Walter Pater and his occasional
discipleOscarWilde.Mostofthephilosopher'sbeliefsaboutart,thesoul,
andeducationwhichsurviveonlyinseverallettersandacollectionof
maximsareadaptedtonineteenthcenturyDecadentidealsinPater's
MariustheEpicurean (and,inamorediffusedway,in Appreciations).
HisthoughtsalsoinformWilde'sPictureofDorianGray.
AsurveyofEpicurus'sphilosophyhelpscompletethepictureof
whattheAesthetesbelievedandallowedtoinfluencetheirwork.

Pleasure and Taste

Epicurusfoundpleasuretobethehighestgood,andalthoughherejected
painasanevil,heknewthatsomepainwasnecessaryasameansto
achievingpleasure.Thus,contrarytothecontemporaryappropriationof
theterm"epicurean"tosignifyapersongiventoindulgenceinhedonistic
pleasures, Epicurus advocated what the Victorians would think of as
refinement or "taste." He taught that "just as [someone] does not
unconditionallychoosethelargestamountoffoodbutthemostpleasant
food,sohesavorsnotthelongesttimebutthemostpleasant,"andthat
"Selfsufficiencyisagreatgoodbeinggenuinelyconvincedthatthose
wholeastneedextravaganceenjoyitthemost." Hence,DorianGray's
greatest sin is not surrounding himself with beautiful thingson the
contrary,theseobjectsfosterpleasure,thesupremegoodbutdepending
uponthoseobjectstoretaininterestinlife."Prudence,"thecornerstoneof
taste,"istheprincipleofallthesethingsandisthegreatestgood."Itis
not opulence and materialism in themselves, but materialism that
substitutesforspiritualismthatisundesirable.

"Sense Perception," "Wholeness," and the Soul

InAppreciations,PaterquotesGustaveFlaubert:
There are no beautiful thoughts without beautiful forms, and
conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical body the
qualities which really constitute it without reducing it to a hollow

abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; just so it is impossible to

detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of its
form (28).

FlaubertandPaterconcernthemselveswith"wholeness"ofbeing;
bothbelievestronglythattheobjectmustbestudiedinitsentirety,orelse
itisnottheobjectthatisbeingconsidered,butafragmentthathasno
meaningfulrelationshipwiththewhole.TousetheexamplethatOscar
WildepaintsinThePictureofDorianGray,theexteriorbeautyofaman
conceals inner moral decrepitude to those who do not contemplate in
earnest.But,studentswhoaretrainedtoobserveseriouslyBasilHallward
inWilde'swork,whotriestoformacompleteportraitofGrayarenot
inclined to admire refinement of the snail because its shell forms a
pleasingpattern.
MuchofthiscomesfromEpicurus,whostatessimplythat"There
existsnothinginadditiontothetotality."Therefore,theidealtrainingfor
achildoradultis"constantactivityofthestudyofnature,"which
brings"calmtolife"byallowingthepupiltoobserveherselfandothers
asawholeunitmadeupofbothexternalitiesandsoul."Calmness"means
beingfreefromdisturbance,andtoexistinsuchastaterequiresthatthe
individual use senseperception to achieve selfsufficiency which is
mostlythecultivationofsoulnecessarytoseeobjectsandpeopleintheir
entirety.Thus,thesoulisgivenhighpriorityasthebody'smostimportant
senseperceptiontool:
There is also the part [of the body] which is much finer and because of
this is more closely in harmony with the rest of the aggregate too. All
of this is revealed by the abilities of the soul, its feelings, its ease of
motion, its thought processes and the things whose removal leads to
our death the soul is most responsible for sense-perception.

So, it is not only important to observe with acuity, but to be

preparedtodosorequiresanurturedsoul.ThePictureofDorianGray,of
course,depictsthehardlessonofagentlemanwhofindsthatahandsome
aspectdoesnotconstituteabeautifulcreature,andthattheunhealthysoul
of a man who cannot regard his entire self does not really prosper.
Tormentedbyspiritualblindness,DorianneverapproachestheEpicurean
goalofbeingfreefromdisturbance;rather,heiscontinuallytroubled.To
Basil Hallward, the ideal Epicurean, "death is nothing" although
martyred, his body is reduced to purity by the Dorian's blackmailed
scientist.RejectedbyWottonandGrayinlifebecause heunderstood
themtoodeeply,hediesrelativelynaturally,humanly,andcleanlyina

symbolic gesture indicative of the purity of his calm, cultivated, and

observantsoul.Inopposition,Graybecomeshideousindeath:
Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his
heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not
till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was (241).

Gray'sfailuretodevelophissoulreachesitspinnaclewhenhedestroys
theonlyextensionofhimselfthatexemplifiesgoodsenseperception:the
painting, which alone responds to the body and soul as a whole.
Destroyingit,hedepriveshimselfofhopeforrecoveryofhissoulhe
haseliminatedhislastgrasponsenseperception;thepaintingwasthe
onlywayinwhichhecouldpossiblyhaveregardedhimselfasacomplete
personpossessingsoulinadditiontoface.Thedeadman'sknifepointsto
thehearttraditionallythedwellingofthesoulrevealingthesource
ofhisdestruction,andallthatremainsforotherstoidentifyhimbyall
he has ever been identified by are his rings, the superficial and
misleadingaccoutrementsofthesoul.Aharshend,perhaps,foronewho
doesnottakeaphilosopherseriouslyenough,butitisindicativeofthe
importance that Epicurus held for Aesthetes like Wilde and
illuminatingintheconfoundingworldofDorianGray.

Education
Oscar Wilde was well punished for taking popular Ancient Greek
approachestotheidealeducationtoanextreme.Hisaffectionforyounger
OxfordboysLordAlfredDouglas("Bosie")wasthemostinfamous
wasnotjustsexual.Moreso,itwasarealizationoftheideasfoundin
Plato,particularlyhisSymposium,andEpicurus.PhilippeJuilansuggests
thatthegardenofBasilHallward'shouseinThePictureofDorianGray
isbasedonWilde'sidealizedrecollectionofOxfordUniversity,where
attractive young men were affectionately tutored by older students in
pacificsurroundings. InHallward'sgarden,beautifulDorianmeetsthe
slightlyolderLordHenryWotton,whocultivateshim,andwhobeginsa
chainofdiscoverythatwillteachhimthattheacomelyfacecanhidethe
mosthaggardsoul.
ThefirstbookofPater'sMariustheEpicurean(which,incidentally,
wasaBibletoWildelongbeforehethoughtofDorianGray)isdevoted
toaneducationthatfeedsthesoulbyteachingthestudentideasofsense
perception and wholeness. Marius is most content during a childhood
which allows more time for contemplation than action, and when he

attendsaschoolwhichisdevoted"atoncetostrengthenandpurifya
certainveinofcharacterinhim.Developingtheideal,preexistentthere,
ofareligiousbeauty,"andthe"aesthetic"benefitofbodilyhealth(29).
The world occupied with Flavianwho, like Wilde's Lord Wotton, is
slightly more mature and an intellectual superiorallows Marius true
happinessashecultivateswholenessbyimprovingsimultaneouslyhis
soulandhispowersofperception.
TheAesthetesfollowEpicurusnotonlyabstractlyinthesubjectmatterof
MariusandDorianGray'seducations,butliterallyinthemasterdisciple
relationshipthatPaterandWildeusetoenlightentheirfictionalstudents.
Likemostphilosophers,afamousteacherwhomaintainedthat"Nooneis
eithertooyoungortoooldforthehealthofthesoul,"Epicurushimself
establishedaschoolofphilosophyinabeautifulgardeninwhicholder
mentaughtyoungerasFlavianinstructedhispupil.Muchimitatedin
Epicurus'stimeandafter,thisformatalsoclearlytakesshapeinWilde's
idealizedOxford,inHallward'sgarden,andinMarius'sRomanjuvenile
paradise.
WilliamTerpening
http://www.victorianweb.org/decadence/epicurus.html#sense

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wildes Aesthetic

Philosophy
First published in an 1890 addition of the literary journal
Lippincotts Magazine, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wildes only fulllength novel, was received with a furor of unrest and disapproval. The
book seemed to confirm the publics most sordid suspicions of Wildes
notorious dandyism: its blistering paradoxes, blithe praises of selfish
hedonism and its homoerotic undercurrents all appeared just too immoral
to a Victorian age still stuffy and self-righteous. However, rather than
bemoan the disapprobation, Wilde accepted it as but verification of the
books overriding theme; the disapproval confirmed for him his
fundamental distaste of the nave society he inhabited, an age prone to
discuss beauty in terms of morality, as good or wicked, godly or satanic.
Perhaps disgusted by the simpletons who could not read beyond the
storys clinquant prose and scandalous epigrams, Wilde added to the
second book-addition of the novel a preface noting that There is no such
thing as a moral or immoral book.
However, more than a rebuff to critics, the assertions that books
have no moral undercurrents and that all art is quite useless can be
accepted as a lens through which to understand Wildes aesthetic
philosophy about the role of the artist in society. He believed that art was
intended to be nothing but abstract and imaginative not a means for life
or death or guidance. Characterizing how his work had been at the onset
of the novel, Basil Hallward, the tragic painter who worshiped the beauty
of a fallen man, captured Wildes concepts of aesthetic beauty, And it had
all been what art should be unconscious, ideal, and remote (119).
Importantly, before he had become entranced by, captive to, the beauty of
the novels protagonist, Dorian Gray, Basil had created art from within
himself, made only to be beautiful. In his portrait of Dorian, Basil betrays
Oscar Wildes belief that there is no morality in beauty and that art is to
conceal the artist. Thus, borne out of idolatry, the portrait, changing to
the tune of its models decaying soul, functions to explore the
consequences of an aesthetic philosophy about the uselessness of art that
is violated by both its painter and model.
On the surface, the function of the portrait is simpler, intended to
be but a spectacle of allegory. Its role, at first glance, is to play out and
revisit some of the most staid themes of western literature. For one, it
takes center stage in the eerie fable of a man who has made a deal with
devil to sell his soul for triviality, the prospect of staying forever young.
Lord Henry, Dorians quick-witted, irreverent confidant, tells him upon
meeting, Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the

gods give they quickly take away (39). Dorian resolves that Youth is the
only thing worth having, and that if it were he who was to be always
young, and the picture that was to grow old he would give everything!
(43). Dorians cry is answered. He remains forever youthful, while his
portrait grows decrepit and old as an expression of his decaying soul. He
sold his consciousness, now embodied in the changing portrait, for the
vanity of youth. Wilde, in this way, characterizes youthful beauty as a
juxtaposition of both good and evil: the gods grant it but only the devil
can maintain it. Youth is a democratic concept, for all individuals to have
and for all time to be dying: Every month as it wanes brings you nearer
to something dreadful (39). The only way to maintain it is to replace the
mind the consciousness for the body. The painting, at first hollow,
becomes filled with Dorians spirit, and Dorian becomes but a beautiful
shell of a man, like a finely brushed canvass, never changing.
After the deal is made, the portrait functions to exhibit (as
artwork is characteristically intended, to exhibit) the subsequent
allegories of the novel: the fall from grace of the once-chimerical, now
stained and ruined Dorian, the doppelganger paradigm of a mans saintlike appearance animated, paralyzed by his dark, sordid spirit manifest,
and finally, the youth entrapment, like Grimms Hans and Gretel, of an
older man (Lord Henry) intent on killing the innocent (Dorian Gray), in
this case, with devilish ideas of immorality and excess.
Nevertheless, Oscar Wilde intended his novel to be much more
than a fable; in his preface, he says that those who go beneath the
surface do so at their peril, daring his reader to take up the challenge.
Beneath the surface, the function of the portrait the picture of Dorian
gray can be seen as highly serious meditation the role of the artist in
society. As a commentary on the obligations of a painter, the
circumstances of the portraits creation can be seen to foreshadow the
circumstances of its destruction. Basil Hallward, at the beginning of the
novel, understands Wildes conception of the artists obligation. Hallward
echoes Wildes assertion in the preface that To reveal art and conceal the
artist is arts aim with his statement that An artist should create
beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them (29).
Aesthetics, to Wilde and Hallward, are intended for the simple enjoyment
of an abstract sense of beauty (29).
However, when Basil Hallward meets Dorian, he violates this
understanding of art. Rather than merely as beautiful (for Wilde tells the
reader that those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are
cultivated), Hallward sees Dorian as a divine embodiment of an entirely
new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style (27). His presence no
longer inspires art, but is art itself. Basil remarks that Some subtle
influence passed from him to me allowing him, for the first time, so see
the wonder I had always looked for and always missed (28). Basil
becomes enchanted utterly dominated by Dorians aesthetic beauty,
which he sees as an artistic apotheosis that he cannot escape. Basil does
not reveal art, but the art Dorian reveals Basil, exposing his soul for
the world to see. I really can't exhibit [the portrait]. I have put too much
of myself into it (20). The portrait, at its birth, thus represents the

obscured line between art and reality, where beauty has an inescapable
influence, constructing the artist rather than the artist constructing the
beauty.
If Dorian is the incarnation of this new mode of style whereby
reality is art and art is morality, then his corruption represents the failure
of this ideal. And the putrefaction of the man in the painting serves to
belie the moral worth that Basil ascribed to this new understanding of
painting that without intending exposes all the artistic idolatry (28) of
beauty.
The portrait therefore functions to represent the first
consequence of Wilde aesthetic philosophy: that art cannot be life. The
novel confuses the boundaries of life and art. Dorian, like a piece of
artwork, never ages, always remaining beautiful and hollow. The portrait,
contrastingly, becomes like life and must suffer from the gyrating,
ostentatious decay of Dorians soul: The picture, changed or unchanged,
would be to him the visible emblem of conscience (106-7). In this way,
very literally, the portrait aids in protagonists tragic confusion of life and
art. The portrait becomes his life and his life becomes superficial artwork.
Lord Henry tells Dorian, I love acting. It is so much more real than life
(95). Dorian heads this message, that art is more real than life. In his
preface, Wilde states that it is the spectator, and not life, that art really
mirror. Sibyl Vane, Dorians first love, understands this dichotomy. When
she finds love, an emotion that burns in her more real than any stage
scene, she realizes that art is but a reflection, (101) kaleidoscopic and
superficial, rather than a reality, and she no longer needs to pretend.
Dorian, on the other hand, is convinced that art and life are but two words
for the same thing, How little you can know of love, if you say it mars
your art! What are you without your art? (102). Wilde believes that the
cardinal sin is using art to live ones life; Dorian relishes in the sensation
of this sin: to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for
it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation (143).

Fundamental to Wildes aesthetic philosophies is the prospect of a

new Hedonism, expounded throughout the novel by Lord Henry, who
fancied Dorian as its visible symbol (24). Henrys doctrine depends,
more than anything else, on the intense processes of self-realization. It
depends on the individual thinking of nothing but himself and his identity.
Henry tells Dorian that The aim of life is self-development. To realize
one's nature perfectly that is what each of us is here for (34). To do
this, we need to never relent in pursuing pleasure, One could never pay
too high a price for any sensation (73). This process of self-realization
depends on an entire disregard for others: neither charity nor reaching
out, only an attention to the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes
to one's self (34). In his essay The Critic as Artist, Wilde expressed these
views as his own, that

They miss their aim, too, these philanthropists and

sentimentalists of our day, who are always chattering to one

about one's duty to one's neighbor. For the development of the
race depends on the development of the individual, and where
self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is
instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost.

The aggrandizement of the individual is at the heart of the new Hedonism.

The realization of this ideal requires that the individual renounce all
external forces of guidance. There is no such thing as a good influence
Henry tells Dorian, for to influence someone is to give him one's own
soul so that it becomes but an echo of someone else's music. Henry
sums up Wildes broad, subterranean theme: To be good is to be in
harmony with one's self (93).
Lord Henrys philosophy, like Wildes, was of a process of intense
self-discovery through pleasure. Dorian, however, wildly perverts these
intentions. Rather than treating aesthetics as a means for gratifying and
shaping his identity, he slays his identity to gratify his pleasure.
[Pleasures] aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of
experience, sweet or bitter as they might be (144). He becomes a hollow
shell ruled over by the prospect of base satisfaction. Rather, as Lord Henry
subversively suggests, than using pleasure for his own purposes, he
allows pleasure to use him, systematically degrading his consciousness.
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or
what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the
body, every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses.
At these times, the body is ruled over by its sensation: Men and women
at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move as automatons
move. Choice is taken from them (201). The New Hedonist is a master of
his own desires. Dorian is a slave to them.
Thus, another function of the portrait is to illustrate the second,
perhaps more fundamental, consequence of Wildes aesthetic philosophy:
that art is self-realization, absent of external influence. Basil Wallward is
destroyed his worship of physical beauty, and the portrait embodies his
definitive start towards downfall. Dorian tells him, You met me, flattered
me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks (169). Basil is killed by
the vanity he inspired in with his deification of Dorians beauty. Of this
control Dorian had over his identity, Basil remarks to Lord Henry I did
not want any external influence in my life. You know yourself, Harry, how
independent I am by nature. I have always been my own master; had at
least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray (24). Basil died because he
worshiped external beauty, failing to attend to his own precious selfhood.

Dorians identity too, most profoundly, is a constellation of

external influence. For one, he is a product of Lord Henry, who found,
something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence because it lets
one hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the
added music of passion and youth (52). Also, he product of the lush book

that spins a tale of a Parisian who spent all his life trying to realizeall
the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except
his own (139) whose influence Dorian could not free himself from,
(141) whose story, indeed, alludes to his own life story, of a man trapped
young who can think all the thoughts of the world and experience all the
sensations of the world, except his own. Finally, Dorian is a product,
perhaps most stultifyingly, of the still more poisonous influences that
came from his own temperamentthe mere physical admiration of beauty
that is born of the senses (133). He is a product of his own unquenched
urges for carnal sensation and pleasure. He lives his life a slave to his
appetite: The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad
hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them (143). The portrait
thus emphasizes that his soul, quite literally, is trapped outside of his
body, subject to external control. Imprisoned by the force of its presence,
its influence, Dorian knew that only through with the portraits death could
Dorians self live once more. By stabbing the painting, he knew he could
stab at the chains that shackled him and [the knife] would kill the past,
and when that was dead, he would be free (234). However, it was too
late to salvage his identity, and he died, as he stabbed the painting,
decrepit and hollow from sin.
Oscar Wilde wrote in the first stanza of his 1881 poem Helas!: To drift
with every passion till my soul / Is a stringed lute on which all winds can
play, / Is it for this that I have given away / Mine ancient wisdom, and
austere control? With his novel, Wilde examined, for the world, this
haunting question. Dorian, tragically, was willing to forgo his ancient
wisdom so that he could drift with the whims of his passions. He was
willing to sacrifice his austere control over his identity on the altar of an
aesthetic art he worshiped, that, like a god force, ultimately enslaved him.
The portrait thus functions as a cautionary tale to a world too willing to
give up itself at the prospect of the beautiful, whatever form that may be:
the morally good, the sinfully bad, the righteous, the wicked to Wilde,
these are not from art external and imaginative, these are from oneself.
Art really is quite useless.
Max Dn

http://theliberalconviction-essay.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/picture-ofdorian-gray-and-wildes.html

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057920

The whole expectation of the Picture of Dorian, we