The Picture of Dorian Gray (4 page)

‘Conscience' (whether one reads that in sacred or secular terms) is strongly delineated in the novel. Dorian believes that he has destroyed conscience, but in truth it destroys him. The portrait

had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it. (Chapter XX)

Thus although the central conceit of the physical consequences of certain acts is informed by beliefs peculiar to the time, Wilde's depiction of how this process affects Dorian has the power to fascinate and chill readers in an age that has discarded such beliefs, and can recognize in such descriptions an outline of what now might be termed ‘paranoia'.
Dorian Gray
is in part an acute study of obsession and psychological collapse, depicting a mind destroying itself with its own obsessions.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
is therefore a work that can be read in a number of ways. It is an enduring parable on the corruption of the soul and a study of psychological collapse, a compendium of the beliefs of its period, and an exercise in literary decadence, conspicuous in its exotica and esoteria, and defining the
Zeitgeist
of the so-called
fin de si`ecle
. Finally it is also in part a comic novel, and in the revised version especially Wilde the humorist (a role equal to homosexual martyr in the public mind today) perfected the arts of epigram and sparkling
dialogue before transferring them to the stage. In Chapter XV Lord Henry observes of Madame de Ferrol,

‘She is still
décolletée
… and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an
edition de luxe
of a bad French novel. She is really wonderful, and full of surprises. Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief

Wilde recycled this line for
The Importance of Being Earnest
, a practice he repeated often at this time. Such passages significantly enrich the novel, making it a more enjoyable and durable work of art, of comparable stature to anything he produced for the stage.

Lady Windermere's Fan
(1892), which also re-uses epigrams from the novel, appeared the year after the revised version
of Dorian Gray
and launched Wilde's extraordinarily successful career as a dramatist. At the time of his public downfall he had two plays playing to packed audiences in the West End. His ostracism was swift and conclusive. First his name was taken from the hoardings of
An Ideal Husband
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
, soon both plays were taken off, and an imminent US tour of
A Woman of No Importance was
promptly cancelled. On 25 May 1895 he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour; in November he was declared bankrupt. His wife changed her name to Holland, and on his release from Reading gaol Wilde changed his own name to Sebastian Melmoth (martyr and wanderer), and left England for ever. He died in poverty in Paris in November 1900.

And yet today Wilde's plays have never been more popular with audiences all over the world, and the book you are holding is one of the best-selling titles in the Penguin Classics series.
If Dorian Gray
does have a ‘moral' we can perhaps find it in its final paragraph: the work of art, which has been subjected to hostile moral readings, shamed obscurity, and finally physical harm, remains intact in all its beauty and wonder.

1
Wilde's
Poems
were published at his own expense by David Bogue; these he reissued with a few corrections the following year. They were not a critical success, being considered pale imitations or wanton plagiarisms of Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Arnold and Swinburne. As
Punch
put it, ‘The Poet is Wilde,/But the poetry's tame'. Wilde's first play,
Vera; or, The Nihilists
, was produced by Marie Prescott, who also played the title role, in August 1883 at the Union Square Theater in New York. It played there for only eight days, but later toured.

2
Similarly, in an editorial note in response to Wilde's defence of his novel in that paper, the
St James's Gazette
for 27 June 1890 asserted that this book ‘constantly hints, and not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimes'; reproduced in Stuart Mason (Christopher Millard),
Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A record of the discussion which followed the publication of ‘Dorian Gray'
(London, 1907; revised 1912), 46. All subsequent references to contemporary reviews are taken from this source.

3
For material from the trials, see Hyde,
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
(1948). Wilde addresses the subject of art and morality in response to the critics of
Dorian Gray
in his ‘Preface to Dorian Gray' (published in the
Fortnightly Review
of March 1891 and reproduced in this edition), in ‘The Critic as Artist' and in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism', both published in 1891.

4
See Richard Ellmann's excellent biography,
Oscar Wilde
(1987), 304. Although Wilde might have been having fun at his editor's expense here.

5
Hyde,
Trials
, 38. The fact that Wilde assents to the designation ‘English gentleman' here is significant; Wilde the Irishman and wordsmith clearly had his fingers crossed behind his back.

6
Ellmann, 261.

7
Wilde's conflation of ‘culture and corruption', and the association between art and crime, was very much in line with the views of a number of contemporary thinkers and could even be considered ‘commonsensical' at the time. For a start, a broad section of the middle classes would not be surprised to see the aristocracy and the so-called ‘criminal classes', the idle rich and the underclass, put on a par. Arnold White's comments on ‘The Sterilisation of the Unfit' (1886) provide a typical, albeit extreme, articulation of this understanding, describing the two worlds which Dorian inhabits: ‘As luxury and success corrupt the West End, the East is corrupted by want and failure…. Comfort-worship in the West leads to extravagant prudence. Comfort-worship in the
East leads to despair and its consequences' (from
The Problems of a Great City)
. White speaks on behalf of the ‘trustworthy, energetic element of the population – those who long to rise and do not choose to sink', a class almost wholly unrepresented in Wilde's novel. Furthermore, the artist was also considered by some influential writers to have many points of resemblance with both criminals and the insane. In the year that
Dorian Gray
was first published, Henry Havelock Ellis's ‘scientific' study,
The Criminal
(1890), asserted that ‘The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and emotional fact…. They share this character with a large proportion of artists and literary men. [Extreme vanity] marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organization, artist or criminal' (139). That such views were not confined to ‘specialists' is suggested by the fact that the
Scots Observer
pointed out that if Wilde's ‘assumption of vanity' (displayed in
Dorian Gray
and in his defence of it) was sincere it would ‘betoken either the madman or the criminal' (Mason, 134).

8
Algernon explains to Jack (or Ernest when he is in town) the principles of Bunburying in Act I of
The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON:
You have invented a very useful young brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable.
… Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

9
Vivian's complaint in ‘The Decay of Lying' that ‘the transformation of Dr Jekyll reads dangerously like something out of the
Lancet
[a medical paper]' is testimony to its imaginative appeal for Wilde.

10
Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror
, edited by Robert Mighall (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2002), 60.

11
The statute which convicted Wilde was an amendment to an Act ‘to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels and other purposes'. The principal aim of the Act was to protect young girls from the exploitation of brothel-keepers who ran a ‘trade' in virgins, when it raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen years. Section 11, however, dealt with intimate acts between male persons, a more precise legal proscription of homosexual activities than had hitherto been enacted. The Act outlawed any and all ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person', whether in public or private, and carried a maximum sentence of two years with hard labour, Wilde's own sentence. On Wilde's experience of blackmail, see Ellmann, 362, 366–7.

12
When a reviewer from the
St James's Gazette
, who had hinted at criminal proceedings against Wilde, challenged the author about the sincerity of what he was describing, Wilde claimed that he meant ‘every word of what I have said, and everything at which I have hinted in
Dorian Gray
'. The reviewer replied, ‘Then… all I can say is that if you do mean them you are likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days' (Ellmann, 303).

13
When asked what the flower meant, Wilde answered, ‘Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.' There are some doubts about the authenticity of this anecdote, however. Wilde claimed to have ‘invented that magnificent flower', chosen for its artificiality, its improvement on nature (Ellmann, 345). A novel written by Robert Hitchens, an acquaintance of Wilde and also a homosexual, which transparently depicts Wilde's relationship with Douglas, was entitled
The Green Carnation
. It was published in 1894, but withdrawn at the time of Wilde's trials a year later.

14
In 1883 the homosexual apologist John Addington Symonds privately printed
A Problem in Greek Ethics
, where he argued that ‘the Dorians gave the earliest and the most marked encouragement to Greek love. Nowhere else, indeed, except among the Dorians… do we meet with pederastia developed as an institution.' For him, ‘Greek love took its origins in Doris' (reproduced in Ellis and Symonds,
Sexual Inversion
, 1897). See Espey, ‘Resources for Wilde Studies at the Clark Library', in
Oscar Wilde, Two Approaches: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar
, ed. Ellmann and Espey (1977).

15
As Wilde claimed: ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.' (Letter to Ralph Payne, 12 February 1894.)

16
On these revisions, see Lawler, ‘Oscar Wilde's First Manuscript of
The Picture of Dorian Gray'
(1972), 125–35; and Lawler,
An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde's Revisions of ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray''
(1988).

17
As Wilde claimed, ‘Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray's sins are no one knows. He who finds themhas brought them' (Mason, 81).

18
Eyries,
Tales of the Dead: The Ghost Stories of the Villa Diodati
, translated by Terry Hale (1992). ‘Family Portraits' was read by Byron, the Shelleys and John Polidori during their famous residence at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which resulted in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
and Polidori's
The Vampire
. On the Villa Diodati and what it produced, see Frayling,
Nightmare: The Birth of Horror
(1996) and
Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula
(1992).

19
Perhaps the most famous ‘revelatory' portrait from nineteenth-century fiction is that described by Nathaniel Hawthorne in
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851), where the portrait of the original Pyncheon reveals a moral and physical
resemblance between its subject and his descendant Judge Jaffrey, allowing the narrative to reflect on hereditary transmission and to warn against repeating the past. A more recent model for Wilde was Mary Elizabeth Braddon's
Lady Audley's Secret
(1862), where a hidden portrait allows George Talboys to discover the truth about the character of his wife who had faked her death and re-invented herself as the eponymous Lady of the title. Revelatory portraits also appear in Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Ollala' (1885), Thomas Hardy's
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
(1891), and slightly later in Conan Doyle's
Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902). On ‘magic pictures', see Kerry Powell, ‘Tom, Dick and Dorian Gray: Magic Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction',
Philological Quarterly
62 (1982), 147–70; on the role of ‘revelatory' portraits in Gothic fiction, see Mighall,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction
(1999), Chapter 3.

20
Maudsley,
Pathology of Mind
(1895), 48.J. F. Nisbet, a popularizer of scientific ideas, had made a similar observation in 1889 when he discussed the principle of ‘throwing back': ‘Every good quality and every defect that may have existed in any of our forefathers since the reign of Queen Elizabeth is liable to be revived in ourselves The recurrence of physical character after the lapse of centuries is attested by portraits, but moral character of a normal kind… can scarcely be traced beyond the third generation' (Nisbet,
Marriage and Heredity
(1889), 106–7).