The picture of Dorian Gray context
genre
Oscar Wilde
19th century
homosexuality
fell in with an artistic crowd that included W. B. Yeats, the great Irish poet, and Lillie Langtry, mistress to the Prince of Wales.
great conversationalist and a famous wit, Wilde began by publishing mediocre poetry but soon achieved widespread fame for his comic plays. The first, Vera; or, The Nihilists, was published in 1880. Wilde followed this work with Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Although these plays relied upon relatively simple and familiar plots, they rose well above convention with their brilliant dialogue and biting satire.
born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and at Magdalen College, Oxford, and settled in London, where he married Constance Lloyd in 1884.
Wilde believed that art possesses an intrinsic value—that it is beautiful and therefore has worth, and thus needs serve no other purpose, be it moral or political. This attitude was revolutionary in Victorian England, where popular belief held that art was not only a function of morality but also a means of enforcing it. In the Preface, Wilde also cautioned readers against finding meanings “beneath the surface” of art. Part gothic novel, part comedy of manners, part treatise on the relationship between art and morality, The Picture of Dorian Gray continues to present its readers with a puzzle to sort out. There is as likely to be as much disagreement over its meaning now as there was among its Victorian audience, but, as Wilde notes near the end of the Preface, “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.”
In 1891, the same year that the second edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published, Wilde began a homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, an aspiring but rather untalented poet. The affair caused a good deal of scandal, and Douglas’s father, the marquess of Queensberry, eventually criticized it publicly. When Wilde sued the marquess for libel, he himself was convicted under English sodomy laws for acts of “gross indecency.” In 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor, during which time he wrote a long, heartbreaking letter to Lord Alfred titled De Profundis (Latin for “Out of the Depths”).
Wilde published his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, before he reached the height of his fame. The first edition appeared in the summer of 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. It was criticized as scandalous and immoral. Disappointed with its reception, Wilde revised the novel in 1891, adding a preface and six new chapters. The Preface (as Wilde calls it) anticipates some of the criticism that might be leveled at the novel and answers critics who charge The Picture of Dorian Gray with being an immoral tale. It also succinctly sets forth the tenets of Wilde’s philosophy of art. Devoted to a school of thought and a mode of sensibility known as aestheticism
After his release, Wilde left England and divided his time between France and Italy, living in poverty. He never published under his own name again, but, in 1898, he did publish under a pseudonym The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a lengthy poem about a prisoner’s feelings toward another prisoner about to be executed. Wilde died in Paris on November 30, 1900, having converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed.
The Aesthetic movement
The 19th century was a practical, businesslike time. It was marked by urbanization, industrialization, function, and an emphasis on wealth. The middle class rose in power during this period. As is common historically, when one social trend emerges, other movements arise to push in opposite directions. Early in the century, England saw romantics embracing nature as an alternative to industry. Just after the middle of the century, the aesthetic movement emerged. Members of the aesthetic movement believed in the motto popularized by French poet Théophile Gautier: "Art for art's sake." The Victorians valued art that supported a useful social cause or that carried a moral message. For the aesthetics beauty was enough in itself. Wilde was strongly influenced by this movement. He knew people, like art critic Walter Pater, who helped shape the movement in Britain. Pater influenced Wilde heavily, and Wilde took the critic's book on the Renaissance with him when he traveled. He even went so far as to memorize sections of the volume.
A skilled author, Wilde incorporated the aesthetics' philosophy of beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray while also critiquing it in the same work. After Dorian, Lord Henry Wotton is the most important character in the novel, and he spends more time explaining his philosophy than Dorian does his. Lord Henry is a dandy who places a great deal of importance on keeping up appearances and engaging in leisurely pursuits. The philosophy he articulates is very much an aesthetic one. In Chapter 2 he gives a speech to Dorian in Basil's garden that changes Dorian forever by awakening him to the power and importance of his own beauty, saying, among other things, "And beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight." This is an unflinching celebration of sensual beauty. However, Wilde follows this by showing Dorian living this philosophy and ruining many lives in the process.
class
Gothic literature exposed the dark side of the romantic movement in literature. Where romanticism saw the good in emotion, Gothic literature showed the danger of excess passion and irrationality. Romantics saw ruins as picturesque; Gothic authors warned of ruins holding secrets or even curses. Gothic literature was a mature tradition by the time Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, and he was one of a number of authors in the period (such as Robert Louis Stevenson) who adapted gothic techniques for philosophical and critical ends. This novel applies several other gothic clichés, like the doubled self, forbidden knowledge, intense passions, and life-threatening hidden secrets.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde draws on elements of several different types of fantastic literature, a genre that incorporates elements of the supernatural or other worlds that defy realistic explanation. Wilde had published a collection of fairy tales in 1888 titled The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and this novel definitely has fairy tale elements. Dorian's wish inexplicably has magical power. The painting changes, but Dorian does not. Sibyl calls Dorian "Prince Charming." Beyond these specific elements, the way Wilde stylizes and simplifies reality here echoes the fairy tale genre.
Later in the book, Chapter 12, Wilde comes close to making Dorian's homosexual activity explicit. Basil asks Dorian, "Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?" and says there are rumors about Dorian—"stories that [he has] been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in London." Period reviewers found the novel scandalous and immoral because of these insinuations. One reviewer linked the novel to a famous homosexual incident from the period: the "Cleveland Street Affair," involving English aristocrats frequenting a male brothel. More generally, homosexuality played a major role in Wilde's life, and he was carrying on a so-called unseemly relationship with the younger poet, Lord Alfred Douglas. Britain's attitude toward homosexuality also shapes this novel.
Homosexual activity was considered a criminal act in Britain and was punishable by death until 1861. Such consequences are a glaring violation of human and civil rights. Sexual activities between consenting adult men remained punishable by prison terms into the mid-20th century. In the latter half of the 20th century, Britain's Sexual Offenses Act decriminalized homosexual activity, and associated legislation has lowered the age of consent to 16.
There is no explicit homosexuality in the edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray most people read. However, there is extensive homoeroticism and implied or suggested homosexual activity. This starts in Chapter 1, when Lord Henry Wotton and artist Basil Hallward discuss a painting of Dorian Gray. They linger on Dorian's beauty, and Basil reports going pale when Dorian first met his eyes. After Basil introduces Lord Henry to the flesh-and-blood Dorian, he continues to work on a portrait of the young man. Lord Henry doesn't focus on the painting but instead stares at the beautiful Dorian. There is an atmosphere of possessiveness among the three men, along with a jockeying for position, which makes more sense if readers assume physical attraction.
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‘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 Stevenson’s 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).
Dorian’s 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 don’t 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 novel’s 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 art’s 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 Wotton’s 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, Dorian’s 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 Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) includes a figure stepping from a painting and into reality while Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), written by Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Maturin, describes the haunting gaze of a portrait as it follows the viewer around a room. The picture hidden in Dorian’s attic may be the most disturbing portrait in Wilde’s book, but it is not the only canvas in the novel which provides a pointer to Dorian’s 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 Wilde’s novel.
The Picture of Dorian Gray provides both a standard ‘Gothic’ account of Dorian’s 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 Dorian’s 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. Dorian’s ultimate failure to live up to Lord Henry’s 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 Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and immediately caused an outcry due to its perceived references of homosexual desire. The review in the Scot’s 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 London’s 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 Lippincott’s 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.
Many Victorians passionately believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. Literature provided models of correct behavior: it allowed people to identify with situations in which good actions were rewarded, or it provoked tender emotions. At best, the sympathies stirred by art and literature would spur people to action in the real world. The supporters of aestheticism, however, disagreed, arguing that art had nothing to do with morality. Instead, art was primarily about the elevation of taste and the pure pursuit of beauty. More controversially, the aesthetes also saw these qualities as guiding principles for life. They argued that the arts should be judged on the basis of form rather than morality. The famous motto ‘art for art’s sake’ encapsulates this view. It meant prising the sensual qualities of art and the sheer pleasure they provide. ‘Art for art’s sake’ became identified with the energy and creativity of aestheticism – but it also became a shorthand way of expressing the fears of those who saw this uncoupling of art and morality as dangerous. Aestheticism unsettled and challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture. As it percolated more widely into the general culture, it was relentlessly satirised and condemned. Although references to the ‘aesthetic movement’ are commonplace, there was no unified or organised movement as such. Critics still disagree about when aestheticism began and who should be included under its label. Some associate the movement with the Pre-Raphaelites, who were active from the mid-19th century. Their emphasis on sensual beauty and on strong connections between visual and verbal forms was certainly highly influential. Perhaps the most important inaugurating phase of aestheticism, however, occurred during the late 1860s and early 1870s.