Social Construction In Dorian Gray

OSCAR WILDE was born in Dublin in 1854. Self-advertised, he became the most notorious of late-nineteenth-century aesthetes, renowned for his conversation and wit. He published early poetry, followed by short stories, fairy-tales, and the sensational novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. He wrote two sparkling critical dialogues, and achieved public success as a comic playwright, crowned by The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. But in that year the flamboyance of his lifestyle and his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas led at last to his trial and imprisonment for two years' hard labour, for homosexual offences. After his imprisonment he wrote his most famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He died in Paris in 1900.

His mother, Jane Francisca Elgee Wilde, the young Ireland poetess “Speranza” calimed descent from Dante but her closest literary ancestor was Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer, a Gothic novel that fascinated Wilde. Its influence can be seen in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” ( and in the fact that Wilde adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth after his imprisonment, 1897). Wile was educated at the Portora Royale School ( 1864-1871), at Trinity College, Dublin (1871-1873) and at Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-1877) where he took a double first and won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry in 1878. His Oxford’s notebooks reveal his taste for Swinburnes’s sensual Pre-Raphaelitism and the Swinburne led him to the symbolists and Baudelaire. They also reveal his continuing philhellenism: his interest in Greek ( and contemporary ) philosophy and Dante, Durer, Keats and Blake as “the best representatives of Greek spirit” of his age . At Oxford Wilde was exposed to the conflicting influences of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. He engaged in practical projects with Ruskin and loved his “mighty and majestic prose”. Pater’s Renaissance was his “golden book” and he reflected in De Profundis (1897) that it had had “ a strange influence” over his life. Ruskin appealed at Wilde’s conscience as Pater did to his imagination. In his first published prose when Wilde worte that England, the land of “ the vile deification of the machine”, had yet produced artists who would foster a revival of culture and love of beauty , Ruskin and Pater were proeminent in a short list of writers .

Wilde was out of symphaty with the English novel, but the influence of French fitction was immense. Stendhal was “one of the few” he read and reread . Flaubert, to whose work had been introduce by Pater, was the “sinless master”. Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin has been suggested as a possible sourcebook for The Picture of Dorian Gray, but the clearest influences on the novel were Pater’s ideas and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884). Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, scholar and debauchee. was a hero who tried to live up to Pater’s idelas. Wilde’s Dorian is poisoned by a book given by the Mephistophelian Lord Henry Wotton: the book Wilde had in mind was one that synthesized Huysmans’s À Rebours and Pater’s Renaissance.

The aphoristic Preface to Dorian Gray was a bow to Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Wilde has visited in 1891 while writing it. Mallarmé Herodiade also influenced Salome (1891), but Wilde also listed Teophile Gautier, Maeterlinck, Anatole France, Marcell Schwob and Flaubert as joint authors of his “mosaic”. The play was also influenced by Huysmans’s reflections on Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome Dancing before Herod in À Rebours and by Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, a work that had fired Wiled’s imagination since childhood .

For his last literary work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol ( 1896), Wilde took imagery from Coleridge’s The Rime of The Ancient Mariner but the metrical form he adopted repeated that of Denis Florence McCarthy’s “New Year’s Song” wich his mother would have recited to him from the Young Ireland anthology The Spirit of the Nation.

The first published version of Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which contained thirteen chapters, appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine [Philadelphia and London] (July 1890); when published as a separate volume in 1891, the novel contained six new chapters and many revisions.

The review, written by Samuel Henry Jeyes (1857-1911), journalist and biographer, and titled ‘A Study in Puppydom’, appeared on 24 June 1890, reprinted in Mason, Art and Morality. According to Sidney Low (1857-1932), editor of the St. James’s Gazette, who wrote a prefatory memoir to a volume of Jeyes’ writings titled Samuel Henry Jeyes, ed. W. P. Ker (1915), Jeyes waged strenuous warfare against the fads and freaks which were shooting through the intellectual and artistic atmosphere in the last decade of the nineteenth century. For Yellow-Bookism, Water-Paterism, aestheticism, and all other ‘isms’ and cults sprouting so bounteously from the soil at that period, he had no indulgence.

Wilde responded to Jeyes’ attack (which Low calls ‘a brilliant piece of slashing criticism) with a letter to the editor which provoked a series of responses and replies. In his first letter (dated 25 June; appeared 26 June), Wilde objected to the reviewer’s moralistic criticism of the novel, stating what he was to repeat, in various ways, in succeeding letters: “The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.” In his memoir, Low states that he asked Jeyes to comment on Wilde’s response. Accordingly, Jeyes appended a note to the published letter, stating, in part: “We are quite aware that ethics and aesthetics are different matters, and that is why the greater part of our criticism was devoted not so much to the nastiness of The Picture of Dorian Gray, but to its dulness and stupidity.” Incensed, Wilde wrote a second letter on 26 June (which was published on 27 June) charging that the review contained “the most unjustifiable attack that has been made upon any man of letters for many years”, and elaborately defended his novel. Jeyes, appending a comment to this letter, in turn defended the right of critical judgment: “We simply say that every critic has the right to point out that a work of art or literature is dull and incompetent in its treatment—as The Picture of Dorian Gray is; and that its dulness and incompetence are not redeemed because it constantly hints, not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimes—as The Picture of Dorian Gray does”.

Again, Wilde responded in a long letter (dated 27 June; appeared 28 June), discussing censorship, the malice of the reviewer, and the difference between art and life-to which Jeycs again added a comment insisting that prosecution should not be taken “against a book which we believed to be rendered innocuous by the tedious and stupid qualities which the critic discovered and explained.” Wilde concluded his fourth letter (dated 28 June; appeared 30 June): “…let me ask you not to force on me this continued correspondence, by daily attacks. It is a trouble and a nuisance. As you assailed me first, I have the right to the last word. Let that last word be the present letter, and leave my book, I beg you, to the immortality that it deserves”.

 . John Gray was a fascinating figure who warrants more than the status of a footnote in the life of Wilde that posterity has placed upon him. He was the model for the physical beauty of Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel but not, as some writers have implied, for the corrupted character that Dorian Gray becomes as the book progresses. The distinction is crucial.

Dorian Gray is first described in the novel as a young man of extraordinary personal beauty. Wilde told John Gray that he had been the model for this character and Gray, understandably flattered took to signing himself Dorian in his letters to Wilde. It is, therefore, perhaps not too fanciful to quote the extract from Wilde’s novel describing Basil Hallward’s first impressions of Dorian Gray as a description of Wilde’s first impressions of John Gray.

“Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious Academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me. I turned half-way round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. I did not 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”.

   The Picture of Dorian Gray , though from a markedly different perspective, relevates the “tale” of a beautiful young man who is granted his wish to remain young while his alter ego, a portrait, ages, to explore ideas about art and life. The work derives from Wilde’s interest and commitment to the Aestheticism of Walter Pater and Decadence of Baudelaire and Huysman. The innocence of Gray is framed alongside the morality of the tormented artist, Basil Hallward, who paints the portrait and is clearly in love with its subject, and the irresistibly cynical dandy, Lord Henry Wooton, who teaches Dorian Gray that the only proper object in life is the pursuit of beauty. As Gray succumbs to the temptations supplied by Henry Wooton, he is led into a life of decadence, an immorality the signs of which mark his portrait but not his person. On this downward slope of decadence, Dorian commits several unnamed acts of depravity leading to the murder of Hallward in a fit of rage. Shocked by his own cruelty and enraged by the power of the portrait, Gray finally dies in an attempt to destroy it. Much of the novella’s power resides in Wilde’s depiction of the hypocrisies of Victorian society as wealth and status cloak vice and immorality, as well as the fatalistic logic of human sin.

AESTHETICISM AND DECADENCE IN DORIAN GRAY

During the late 19th century, aestheticism was a movement that focused on the idea that art existed for art's sake. Mostly, aestheticism placed a very high estimation on beauty. It was both a literary and social movement, which was ambiguous since its followers differed in the way in which they viewed art and its connection to life. According to Small aesthetes found the greatest spiritual success “to experience life in the matter of art” or Pater’s cardinal doctrine of the movement , “art for art’s sake” . Loesberg clarifies it more closely when he says that art for art's sake does not refer to the content of art but to the way in which art is experienced . Aestheticism seems to have been connected with homoeroticism since it is believed to have “claimed authority over traditionally female realms”.

Decadent, French Décadent ,a literary movement  from wich took part several poets or other writers of the end of the 19th century, including the French Symbolist poets in particular and their contemporaries in England, the later generation of the Aesthetic movement. Both groups aspired to set literature and art free from the materialistic preoccupations of industrialized society, and, in both, the freedom of some members’ morals helped to enlarge the connotation of the term, which is almost equivalent to “fin de siècle”.

With the self-awareness that distinguishes the decadent artist from the decadent hero, Oscar Wilde understood the irony of the illusory pursuit of pleasure. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Wilde, says that Wilde was fully aware of the fact that the pleasures he sought would dissipate and that he would eventually become the victim of the very experiences he pursued. "To fall victim to himself was to bring his experience to the utmost bound," says Ellmann; "unfortunately it was like committing suicide, as Dorian Gray would discover”. At one point in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian worries aloud that something horriblef the illusory pursuit of pleasure. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Wilde, says that Wilde was fully aware of the fact that the pleasures he sought would dissipate and that he would eventually become the victim of the very experiences he pursued. "To fall victim to himself was to bring his experience to the utmost bound," says Ellmann; "unfortunately it was like committing suicide, as Dorian Gray would discover”. At one point in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian worries aloud that something horrible might happen to him, and Lord Henry tells him that the only horrible thing in the world is ennui, "the one sin," he says, "for which there is no forgiveness" . Ennui, Wilde knew, was the ultimate enemy of hedonism. "Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you!" Lord Henry urges Dorian in the way Mephistopheles urged Faust. "Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism–that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do" .

Lord Henry, of course, does not believe half of what he himself says, but Dorian is overwhelmed by such intoxicating advice and follows it far in excess of anything Lord Henry could ever imagine. This is a good example of the difference between the preaching decadent and the practicing one. Lord Henry says outrageous things for their shock value, not really believing that he will be taken seriously. Still he knows that there is a half-truth in every epigram just as there is a half-truth in every lie, and beneath his offhand remarks there lurks a dark desire to see them heeded.

"We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to" , he cries, flaunting the philosophy of the hedonist who finds as much harm in renunciation as in debauchery. Lord Henry's silver tongue lures Dorian into the trap, a trap Lord Henry is too smart to get caught in himself. But to a young man like Dorian, intoxicated with life and just beginning to find his own place in it, Lord Henry's prophecy of a "new Hedonism" is the stuff voluptuous dreams are made of. Later, when Dorian has turned those dreams into sensual nightmares, the enormity of which is unknown to his mentor, Lord Henry says to him, "You have crushed the grapes against your palate" . This is an ironic echo of the line from the famous "Ode on Melancholy" in which Keats writes that none can see melancholy's "sovran shrine" save the one whose tongue "Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine." The romantic effusion of Keats, terminally ill and still in the flush of youth, smacks of a sort of gallows gallantry, an "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we surely die" élan. By the time it reaches Dorian, however, it has become the hollow exercise of the profligate who, in Ernest Dowson's words, cries out "for madder music and for stronger wine."

Later, still unaware of the extent of Dorian's depravity, Lord Henry continues to toss off flippant remarks, remarks that begin to take on sinister overtones. As Dorian inwardly cringes, Lord Henry blithely prattles on about how life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dream. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong, [he says]. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play–I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

By this time, however, Dorian knows better. He has just murdered Basil Hallward, the friend who painted his portrait, and been responsible for the suicide of Alan Campbell, a friend he corrupted and then blackmailed into disposing of Hallward's body.

Wilde exemplifies the multiple personalities of the decadent, the "three faces of Satan," as it were, for he saw parts of himself in all three of the central characters in Dorian Gray: "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be–in other ages, perhaps," he once remarked. Dorian is corrupted by decadence, Hallward contaminated by it, Lord Henry its purveyor and shrewdest critic. Lord Henry's pronouncements are parodies, but they are persuasive ones. His is the spirit that informs Wilde's comedies of manners. Hallward's is the spirit of Salome, the serious, haunted artist who has found something rotten at the core of life and is too fascinated to look away but fearful enough to keep it at a distance. Dorian is the devil's disciple. He lacks both the wit that restores the spirit and the wisdom that redeems the soul. His is the intemperate spirit of Wilde in his last days, ravaged by debauchery, bereft of hope.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde includes several scenes that illustrate the sort of precious behavior that foreshadows that of Elliott Templeton and which has insinuated itself into the pages of modern literature ever since. In one scene, Lord Henry is lying on a divan of Persian saddle bags, smoking innumerable opium-tainted cigarettes, and admiring the "gleam of the honeysweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs." As he lets this experience overwhelm him, he is aware of how the shadows of birds flitting across the silk curtains at the window produce a fleeting Japanese effect "making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion" .

In another scene one can hear the unmistakable voice of Oscar Wilde in a conversation between Dorian Gray and Basil Hallward in which Dorian insists he is not like the young man who used to say that "yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life." Dorian maintains instead, in a state-ment worthy of Mrs. Gareth, that he loves "beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp, there is much to be got from all these," he says . Dorian's most extreme expression of preciousness is prompted by his obsession with Huysmans' Against Nature. [ Wilde withholds the title of the book, but its identity is obvious from his description of it.] So enamoured is Dorian of this book that he secures from Paris nine oversized editions of it and has them bound in different colors, "so that they might suit [the] various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control." It is no wonder, then, that he looks upon the book as "the story of his own life, written before he had lived it".

Like his fictional counterparts, Des Esseintes and Jean-Baptiste

Grenouille, Dorian applies himself to the study of perfumes, probing the "secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the East." He is fascinated with the relationship between scents and moods, "wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination." In fact, so involved is he in this pursuit that he has hopes of coming up with a real "psychology of perfumes" which will enable him to analyze the various effects of such sources as "sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul" .

Dorian is also fascinated by jewels, another passion he shares with Des Esseintes who gets so carried away by his obsession that he arranges to have the shell of a live tortoise encrusted with a pattern of precious stones. He even manages to procure the services of a jeweler willing to indulge him in this eccentric and expensive whim. As he watches the abused animal drag this heavy burden across the carpet, Des Esseintes gets a curious pleasure out of seeing the way the stones catch the shifting light, but before long the weight proves too much for the tortoise, and it dies. In Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited, there is a similar episode in which Julia's fiancé Rex gives her a diamonden crusted tortoise as a Christmas gift only to have it disappear–and presumably die–somewhere in the recesses of Brideshead Castle. Dorian is so enthralled by jewels that he has extensive collections of various stones, and he sometimes spends whole days doing nothing but playing with them, arranging and rearranging them in their cases . At one point he attends a costume ball dressed as a French admiral in a uniform covered with five hundred and sixty pearls.

It is also part of decadent preciousness to display a self-conscious fastidiousness about food, or more precisely, about the setting in which food is served. Assisted by Lord Henry, Dorian Gray gives little dinners that are famous for the lthough decadents are notoriously irreverent about everything from motherhood to minimum-security correctional facilities, their favorite sport is, not surprisingly, religion. When Lord Henry Wotton gives Dorian Gray a copy of Against Nature, Dorian may call it a "poisonous book," but he also maintains that it is a book that could just as easily have come from the lives of the saints. He confesses that while he was reading it, he was never quite sure whether he was reading "the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner" .

THE CULT OF THE SELF

Narcissism is at the very center of decadence. It is the magnetic core around which all other elements of decadence cluster. Wherever decadent elements appear in literature, they are invariably expressed through the refined sensibilities of an artist or a character for whom self-love is the ultimate love. Decadents are excessively preoccupied with their own emotions and the way they alone perceive the world. How they feel and what they think are of paramount importance to them–to the exclusion of any real interest at all in the feelings of others.

Other people exist primarily as mirrors in which decadents search for a flattering reflection of themselves. If they see praise or imitation, then they have found a fan–and maybe even a friend. Decadents obviously have little patience with "sheer plod" or "the common man" or "huddled masses yearning," and they certainly do not like to share the limelight with fellow egoists or suffer the pressure of each other's company unless it happens to provide them with an occasion for mutual ego bashing.

In his biography of Oscar Wilde, Richard Elimann includes an exchange of telegrams between Wilde and James MacNeill Whistler. It is a perfect example of two decadent egos in three-quarter time–a veritable waltz of the wits:

“Wilde: When you and I are together we never talk about anything except ourselves.

Whistler. No, no, Oscar, you forget. When you and I are together, we never talk about anything except me.

Wilde: It is true, Jimmy, we were talking about you, but I was thinking of myself”.

"The narcissists," says Elimann, "out did each other" .

Decadent self-love runs the gamut from harmless vanity to overweening pride. Unfortunately, what often begins as a simple fondness for the looking glass may progress by way of a total preoccupation with oneself to a selfabsorption so intense as to result in grandiose delusions. Dorian Gray begins by falling in love with his portrait. "I am in love with it, Basil," he says. "It is part of myself." And, since it and not he grows older and uglier, he ends up murdering Basil Hallward, the artist who painted the portrait, because Hallward has seen Dorian for what he really is. Age is anathema to Dorian. "When one loses one's good looks, one loses everything," he says. "When I find I am growing old, I shall kill myself." Ironically enough, this is precisely what he does when, in attempting to "kill" the portrait, he ends his own life.

In the meantime, "in a boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips. . . . Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it" . And as the portrait continued to reflect his descent into irremediable corruption, "he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish." Self-pity is the handmaiden of self-love. After all, feeling sorry for oneself is something of a masochistic luxury, especially when the wounds are trivial and the suffering superficial.

As Dorian sinks more deeply into depravity, what began as mere vanity gives way to morbid pride. Often, returning home after days of debauchery, "he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure at that misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own" . And even after he has committed the heinous crime of murder, his mind is able to twist his transgressions into triumphs. "There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them," he muses, "strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses". It is a chilling reminder of Dorian's callousness to see him, on the very evening of the day that he blackmails Alan Campbell into disposing of Hallward's body, happily attending a party given by a "very clever woman, with what Lord Henry used to describe as the remains of a really remarkable ugliness" .

Self-love can easily turn into self-hate, especially if the narcissist is petulant enough to blame his downfall on his beauty. Early in his iniquitous career, DorianGray receives a letter in which someone has written these flattering lines about him: "The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history." Later, when his life is beginning to turn sour, he remembers these lines, and suddenly he is filled with loathing for the author of such repulsive drivel and for himself for being its inspiration. In his fury he throws the mirror he has been gazing into on the floor and crushes it to splinters beneath his heel. "It was his beauty that had ruined him," he thinks to himself, "his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for" . Decadents are among the first to understand the punishment of answered prayers.

Wilde composed a parable about Narcissus that brings Dorian's petulance and the illusions of all decadents into sharp focus. In this parable, Narcissus looks at his image in the water, but does not know that the water sees only its own image in his eyes. His portrait is truer than a mirror, for it reflects what is in his eyes–or behind his eyes, as it were–and that is the image of himself as he really is. As Wilde said: "It is the spectator, and not Life, that art really mirrors".

In this statement Wilde is obviously not talking about identifying with a character or about becoming emotionally involved in the story. His point is that what readers see in a story is not objective reality but merely their own reflection, that readers turn all stories into their own, seeing only that which relates to themselves.

"To be forced to be in harmony with others,"says Lord Henry in Dorian Gray, is the definition of discord. "One's own life–that is the important thing." One's neighbors, he tells Dorian, are not one's concern. To become concerned is to bully them with one's moral views, and that means conspiring with one's age to follow its standards and foist them on others. "I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age," says Lord Henry, "is a form of the grossest immorality." Goodness, he says, is a matter of being "in harmony with one's self" .

Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Wilde, calls such moral and intellectual exiles "aristocratic dilettantes" and points out that even when Wilde is punishing them for being "detached and heartless," he is taking great delight in them, for he undoubtedly sees their qualities in himself. Detached and heartless they might very well be, but as far as they are concerned, they have good reason. They have no peers, no equals. Let others call them decadent; they accept no labels but their own, and they would be loath to join a cult or become part of a deliberate movement. They are not joiners, and they care little for each other's company.

From what we know of Wilde's life and the life of his fictional double, Lord Henry, Wilde felt that harmony with one's self could be achieved without the necessity of retreating from society. Both the author and his creation are garrulous creatures who thrive in a social fishbowl, but we also know them to be fiercely independent men whose wit, by managing to amuse and alienate simultaneously, had the effect of insulating them from undue outside influence. 

To the decadents, renunciation is as perverse as licentiousness. Lord Henry tells Dorian Gray that when we renounce, "we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to" . When Lord Henry sends Dorian a copy of Against Nature, Dorian is quite taken by the description of its hero, the young Parisian who loves "for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin" .

Dorian, however, misses Des Esseintes's point. He does not fully understand the peculiar psychology of renunciation, which he thinks of as deprivation at too great a price. Wilde tells us that Dorian is "haunted by a feeling of loss" at how much sensual pleasure has been surrendered throughout history and to such little purpose, and he reflects sadly on the bitter irony of all those "mad wilful rejections" and those "monstrous forms of self-torture and selfdenial" that have been committed solely out of fear and that have only resulted in a degradation far more terrible than any degradation they might have fooled themselves into thinking they had escaped . To see renunciation as more depraved than profligacy is mere sophistry; to prefer renunciation precisely because it is more depraved is decadence. Toward the end of Dorian Gray there is a hint that Dorian is about ready to abandon his sinful life, but his time runs out before he gets around to doing it. Even if he had renounced worldly pleasure, however, it would have been more out of boredom and fatigue than out of a desire to feel morally superior by turning his back at the moment when temptation was most persistent.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian's mistreatment of others far exceeds any remorse he may feel. In fact, it is not until near the end of the story that Dorian begins to experience the self-loathing that hastens his end. Even so, instead of reforming him, this self-loathing only pushes him more deeply into evil behavior. Dorian's most vile crime is undoubtedly his cruel treatment of Basil Hallward, the artist who, victimized by his own adoration of Dorian, painted the portrait that captured Dorian's very soul. Ever since he first noticed an alteration in the portrait, Dorian has refused to let anyone see it. Now, near the end of his life, when the picture betrays what his beauty belies, Dorian decides to show Hallward the painting in all its ugliness. "You have chattered enough about corruption," he says to Hallward. "Now you shall look on it face to face." Wilde says that "there was the madness of pride in every word he uttered. He stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner. He felt a terrible joy at the thought that someone else was to share his secret, and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what he had done" .

Atrocious as it is, the murder of Basil Hallward after he has seen the picture is something of an anticlimax after what Dorian has done to Hallward's soul. In a way, killing him is almost an act of mercy, for he has already killed Hallward spiritually. Dorian's murder of Hallward is his only acknowledged act of deliberate physical violence, and although it cannot be excused, it could be looked upon as the tragic end towards which Hallward's life had inevitably been moving. If it is true as Wilde says in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" that we all kill the thing we love, then it may also be true that the thing we love can just as easily kill us.

It is possible that Dorian's most diabolical act of calculated cruelty, worse in its consequences than murder, is his blackmailing of Alan Campbell into disposing of Hallward's body. We can only guess at the secret of Campbell's degradation, but we have no doubt about who was behind it. All we know is that whatever it was, it is enough to persuade Campbell to carry out the abominable task and then to drive him to take his own life.

As his wicked life grows more loathsome and he begins to worry a bit about what will happen to him, Dorian inevitably gets around to the masochistic pleasure of remorse. He certainly has much to regret as he looks back on his life and sees how it has been spent, but it is the phony regret of the sinner who has simply grown tired of his sins. When Lord Henry says, "There is no one who would not be delighted to change places with you," Dorian sighs and says, "There is no one with whom I would not change places, Harry". He is not sorry for what he has done; he is only sorry that the fun has gone out of it.

Fate itself is often viewed as the sadist who tortures those who either want too much and cannot get it or get too much and no longer want it. Much of Dorian's self-pity has to do with the fact that he has exhausted every pleasure possible and has become "sick with that ennui, that terrible tædium vitæ, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing" . Karl Beckson suggests that the weariness of the decadent is more likely to be an affectation, a "mark of sophistication and moral superiority" born of his quest for new and preferably abnormal experiences.

Even Dorian Gray secretly desires to be "something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum," more than a dandy who is fit only to give advice on "the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a cane." He wants more, and what he wants is "to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization" . It is just this kind of fuzzy romanticism that tempts decadents to sympathize with ideologues whose philosophies seem reasoned and whose principles appear to be ordered, ideologues who promise the spiritualizing of the senses as their highest priority. The next step is to assist them in imposing their reason and their order on the unwilling whose senses are unworthy of spiritualization. Although such utopian dreams may appear to be progressive, they are usually quite reactionary in that they can only be realized in a society where freedom is curtailed, equality ignored, and rule of an elite-an allegedly enlightened elite-absolute.

CHARACTER CONSTRUCTION IN THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The characters of Oscar Wilde embody a complex belief systems as well as internally logical and consistent; that the story in which these characters act on their values is a test of their viability and applicability to real life, not just to the exotic worlds of decadent sensuality and drawing-room repartee; and that Dorian, as the protagonist in this drama of universal moral conflict, is a major figure in the development of the modern novel.

The views of Basil and Henry can be understood in terms of the relationship between their theory of cosmic justice and their concept of morality. Basil believes that the universe is a moral order in which God (or at least Fate) punishes evil and rewards good; that the self is (or can be) unitary and autonomous, and that art-as well as human conduct in general-can (and should) be guided by a moral code in which sympathy and compassion are primary values. This moral position leads to the gestures of melodrama (the inevitably unsuccessful-and therefore sentimental-pursuit of love, fame, or revenge), the disappointment of unrequited love, and suicide prompted by disillusionment. Henry's beliefs are based on the assumption that there is no moral order (the universe is purposeless and indifferent to human needs); that the self is not only multiple, but at war with itself and driven by forces beyond its control; and that morality is arbitrary and relative. This moral position leads to a withdrawal from human engagement, the pursuit of pleasure (both sensual and intellectual) as a distraction from disillusionment, and the manipulation of others for one's own enjoyment and edification.

Wilde wrote in De Profundis that "Doom like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray." Although Basil Hallward introduces this theme, he merely threads the needle; it is really Lord Henry Wotton who weaves the thread. In fact, despite the general critical picture of Lord Henry as dilettante, intellectual lightweight, and effete hedonist, he is actually one of the most philosophical characters in British fiction. Henry is first, a scientist and an intellectual, whose most outstanding trait is his curiosity. Early in the novel he recommends science as an antidote to social reform and insists on seeing things from "the scientific point of view." Although his scientific curiosity occasionally draws him to the exploration of mere sensation, it has evidently led him to more profound discoveries: "Ordinary people [he says] waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was torn away". As one of the elect, Henry tells Dorian and Basil, "I have known everything." The "tired look in his eyes" suggests that he is weary of this knowledge, from which he cannot, however, escape. And although he is "always ready for a new emotion," he knows "there is no such thing"

Henry's knowledge is revealed in his discussions of two of his favorite topics: nature and human nature. On both subjects, his comments demonstrate that he is an incurable pessimist. His picture of the universe might well have come from T.H. Huxley: "It often happens [he says to Dorian after Sybil Vane's death] that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that" . Of course, Henry' s frivolous manner of speaking-his lament about tragedy's "lack of style" and his equation of tragedy and vulgarity-might divert the reader from Henry' s main point, i.e., that most tragic events reflect the "sheer brute force" of nature. It may be surmised, as well, that the exceptions to this general rule-namely tragedies "that possess artistic elements of beauty," of which Sybil's death is supposed to be an example-are really only made exceptional (and unthreatening) by a willful effort of the aesthetic imagination. Later, in his explanation of Sybil's death, Henry indicates that "actual life" destroys: "She marred it, and it marred her" . When he says to one of the guests at Aunt Agatha's luncheon, "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable" , Henry is indicating that he is inured to this fundamental aspect of nature-evidently because he has simply accepted it.

Henry's knowledge of psychology is equally extensive, and his view of human nature is equally grim. Wilde comments: "[Henry] had always been enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to

him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life-that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value" . Henry acquires his wisdom about "the passions and the intellect" from literature as well as direct observation of human behavior. Sometimes "a complex personality," like Dorian's, gives him an opportunity to examine the human species in its natural habitat. What Henry has learned is, first, that human beings are irrational. When Dorian tells Henry, after the death of Sybil, that he is resolved to reform his life, Henry comments: "Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil" . Earlier he had said to Basil that human beings cannot abide by moral imperatives defining their obligations to others. Fidelity, for example, is impossible because people are moved by their emotions rather than their will. Thus love is not a product of free choice, but "a question for physiology" . Virtually all that one can say about human nature is precisely what one can say about nature writ large: it is driven by irrational, impersonal physical-biological forces beyond human control and human understanding.

In a world without purpose, the result of faith is disillusionment, the result of action is disappointment, and the result of love or sympathy or compassion is suffering. That is why "nothing is ever quite true" and ennui is the “unforgivable sin” . All truths collapse against the backdrop of chaos, and indifference is the dead end of all human endeavor. At the end of his tether, Henry engages in the only kind of action, other than suicide, that fits his desperate moral and metaphysical dilemma: contemplation. This serves both his curiosity, which he cannot quench, and his fear, which he cannot face. Indeed, all of his activities are double-edged and simultaneously serve two opposed ends: approach and avoidance, or the instincts of Eros and death. Detachment enables Henry to see dispassionately, like a true scientist, but also to refrain from emotional involvement, like a schizoid personality. Spectatorism allows him to analyze nonjudgmentally but also to turn reality into art by transforming everyday human events into aesthetically distanced drama. And cynicism permits him to act on the stage of the real world, displaying the fruits of his scientific research, but also to protect himself from succumbing to the emotional temptations of that world, thereby avoiding the suffering that shadows passion.

Henry' s cynicism derives from his dark vision of the external and internal realms of human life. His morality comes from his metaphysics, and those who do not share the latter have trouble believing the former. Basil, who evidently knows Henry well, says to him: "I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry … I believe that you are a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose" . Henry feeds this impression when he tells his dinner-party companions that "one should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner" . Nevertheless, although he no longer actively pursues physical pleasure-at least, the kind that Dorian indulges in-and lives a relatively quiet life of intellectual contemplation, he takes almost nothing seriously. And although, unlike Dorian, he would do nothing strenuous to retain his youth ("To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable" [p.255), he is quite willing–and even eager–to manipulate Dorian callously and deliberately, in order to satisfy the only desire that he believes is neither futile nor destructive-intellectual curiosity-and to experience the only real pleasures left to him, those he can have vicariously, living through others. He "would sacrifice anybody … for the sake of an epigram" (p. 242), as Dorian claims, and he would sacrifice anybody for the sake of an experiment that might yield an aesthetic thrill or an iota of knowledge.

How does one live in a world in which nothing can be believed and no one can be trusted? Henry's answer is what philosophers call ethical egoism. He encourages Dorian to follow his own example of pursuing his own self-interest, which means seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Henry's "new Hedonism" (p. 46) is based on the assumption that the quest for pleasure is natural because it is an expression of the quest for life (p. 105), a response to a basic impulse, which Freud would later call the life instinct, as Henry suggests to Dorian: "Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you!" (p. 46). This impulse or instinct requires human beings to both live and grow by acting on their "natural thoughts" and "natural passions": "The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly–that is what each of us is here for." This is "the duty that one owes to one's self." Henry goes on: "I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream–I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal–to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be" (p. 41). By allowing ourselves to develop through the expression of our innate creative drive, we evolve from simple to more complex organisms, becoming "more highly organized," which is "the object of man's existence" (pp. 101-02). What Henry means by being "in harmony with one's self" is simply obeying the instinct and pursuing the "higher aim" of "individualism" (p. 106). To do otherwise is to "spoil" one's life (p. 102), to "stagnate" (p. 248), to "make [one's self] incomplete" (p. 255).

In his theory of self-development, Henry may owe something to Aristotle, whose theory of tragedy influenced Wilde's thinking on that subject. However, the Greek ideal of self-realization, which Henry calls Hellenism, was not, at least in Aristotle's version of it, accompanied by an antisocial individualism. With his ardent elitism, his frequent contrast between the strong and the weak (and even between masters and slaves), and, particularly, his attack on the doctrine of self-sacrifice and self-denial, Henry is much closer to Nietzsche than to Aristotle. Like his more recent predecessor, Henry believes that by encouraging charity and social reform, society promotes sickness rather than health, stifles individualism, and inhibits intellectual growth. He says to Dorian: "Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age".

"The nineteenth century," he adds later, "has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy" (p. 65). To worry about "one's neighbors" is to be "a prig or a puritan." The true individual flouts "the standard of [his] age," the acceptance of which "is a form of grossest immorality." The ignorant and the poor can afford nothing more than self-denial because their economic and intellectual condition requires it, but "medieval emotions are out of date" for the rich and the civilized (p. 106).

Society succeeds in its endeavor to direct all human activity toward social, collective ends, Henry says, by making people "afraid of themselves." Their fear is created and sustained by "the terror of society" and "the terror of God"-the bases, respectively, of morals and religion. Ironically, however, these two forces actually "starve" rather than nurture the soul: "The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us." The activities that one pursues in fulfilling one's needs and satisfying one's desires may be sins, but they are "beautiful sins" that are "made monstrous and unlawful" only by "monstrous laws." In an amoral universe governed by no absolute standards, nothing is inherently evil: "It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place" (p. 41-42). In other words, "moderation is a fatal thing" (p. 215-16) because no natural law sanctions it, and no growing organism can flourish under its rule and sway.

Yet the real (or, at least, deeper) purpose of Henry's scientific and artistic approach to human experience is actually escapist. His problem, Henry tells Lady Agatha, is that he cannot stand to witness suffering, perhaps because he, more than any other character in the novel, knows that it is not only real but irremediable: "I can sympathize with everything, except suffering … I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better" (p. 64). It is not that Henry totally ignores the unpleasant facts of existence. Rather, he "plays" with them and "transforms" them. In the process, philosophy is made to serve the pleasure principle, and "facts fly before her like frightened forest things" (p. 66). It is no surprise, then, that despite his curiosity–his intellectual quest–Henry prefers Beauty to Thought (pp. 25, 45, 134). And although he tells Dorian that "life has always poppies in her hands" (p. 131), he clearly makes every effort to grow his own so that he will never have to do without the opiate of distraction. Reality cannot be changed, but it can be dressed up if "we have [not] lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things." That is why "names are everything" (p. 231).

The problem Henry faces is that these diversions, which enable him to evade terror, do not satisfy all of his needs–namely, his intellectual curiosity and his creative impulse, without which he is in danger of stagnating from inaction and even perishing from ennui. As we have seen, however, action leads to pain, and the pursuit of pleasure leads to the exhaustion of all emotion. Thus, unable to act but needing to know and to create, Henry turns to Dorian Gray, who offers him both the opportunity to analyze a complex personality and the chance to create a new (and beautiful) self. Furthermore, Dorian also represents a new life of sensation, emotion, and thought that Henry can experience vicariously and therefore safely. In this way, Dorian becomes one of Henry's multiple selves, created, as such selves always are, to live a life that one's already pained and wounded selves cannot live–to live, in short, in fiction what one can no longer live in fact: "Good artists simply exist in what they make." Great poets "write the poetry that they dare not" or cannot–"realize" in their lives (p. 81-82).

Henry reveals the dynamics of this process of self-aggrandizement even before he decides to make Dorian an extension of himself. The young man asks Henry whether he is actually "a very bad influence," as Basil alleges. Henry replies, "All influence is immoral." In the context of his theory of self-development, he goes on to explain, anyone who is strongly influenced loses his individuality, his self-determination (p. 40-41). At the same time, the person who influences someone else gains a medium of self-expression, a new stage on which to perform and an opportunity, therefore, to become a spectator in his own–though borrowed or co-opted–life. In this respect, influence (or "domination," as Henry later calls it) is the consummate creative act, partly because it requires extraordinary skill (the victim must be unaware of the influence and assume that it is coming from himself, as Dorian does [p. 42]) and partly because it results in the deepest satisfactions of doing, making, and growing: "To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that" (p. 60).

In many respects, Henry sounds like a spokesman for Wilde. Most of his ideas–his rejection of altruism, his theory of self-development, his hedonism–are recurrent themes in Wilde's essays, and Henry's wit and wisdom are delivered in the urbane style of Vivian in "The Decay of Lying" and Gilbert in "The Critic as Artist." Furthermore, Wilde as the narrator of Dorian Gray often expresses Henry's sentiments–sometimes in Henry's characteristic tone. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that Henry speaks for his creator. The effect of Henry's influence on Dorian is, after all, disastrous, and Henry is blissfully unaware of Dorian's gradual degeneration. Early in the novel, he says to Dorian, "People like you … don't commit crimes" (p. 77). Late in the book, he tells Dorian, "There is no one who would not be delighted to change places with you" (p. 241). And in his last conversation with Dorian (long after the latter has caused Sybil's suicide, murdered Basil, cold-bloodedly disposed of the body, caused the suicide of Alan Chapman, and indirectly brought about the accidental murder of James Vane), Henry restates his belief in Dorian's inability to commit murder (p. 252). He even tells his disciple, who has also become an opium addict, that he has not been "marred" by his experience (p. 255). Finally, Henry informs Dorian that he "could change places with [him]" because the world has always worshiped him and will continue to do so. "I am so glad that you have never done anything," he continues. "Life has been your art." To these almost moronic words of praise, Dorian calmly replies: "You don't know everything about me. I think that if you did, you would turn from me" (p. 256).

Basil Hallward is a far less complex character than Henry and requires far less attention. However, he is not less important in the moral scheme of The Picture of Dorian Gray, joined as he is by almost everyone else in the novel-except, most notably, Dorian-in representing a moral position that is fundamentally different from Henry's. At their first meeting, Dorian sees Henry and Basil as "a delightful contrast" (p. 40) and hears Henry and Sybil speaking in "different" voices (p. 70). The ensuing battle between the two antagonists, both of whom are fighting for Dorian's loyalty, is intensely personal (at least on Basil's side) but also moral and ideological. The foundation of Basil's actions is his belief in a moral order, in which men and women are punished for their evil deeds and rewarded for their good. Basil assumes that he either has been or will be "punished" for teaching Dorian "to be vain" and for worshiping him too much (p. 138, 191). Unlike Henry, who believes that Dorian sins without consequence to himself, Basil thinks that sin "cannot be concealed": "Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face" (p. 182). This implicit view of a universe ruled by a deity who gives human beings their due is shared by Sybil Vane, who expects God (who is "very good") to "watch over" her brother, and James Vane, in turn, who swears to avenge his sister "as there is a God in heaven" (p. 92, 95). Less merciful than Sybil's and less vengeful than James's, Basil's God is the only being, as Basil tells Dorian, who can see the soul (p. 186).

As an artist, Basil is an idealist, whose goal is not to provide pleasure–either to himself or to others–but to inspire people with an art that portrays the union of feeling and form, "the harmony of soul and body" (p. 33), for which Dorian is a fitting subject: "He is the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream" (p. 144; also p. 190, 253). To Basil, Dorian represents the ideal of the body, perfect beauty, as well as the ideal of the soul, selflessness. Responding to the young man's description of Sybil's power to "spiritualize" her audience, to make everyone feel "that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self" (p. 109)–that is, to achieve a feeling of social unity–Basil argues: "To spiritualize one's age–that is something worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world" . Given the universe as Basil sees it, living by this doctrine of sympathy and uplift, embraced also by Lady Agatha, rewards one with peace of mind, while its contradiction results in sorrow. "But, surely, if one lives for one's self," he says to Henry, in response to the latter's defense of his theory of self-development, "one pays a terrible price for doing so." If one sins, he continues, one pays "in remorse, in suffering, in … well, in the consciousness of degradation" (p. 106).

In short, Basil is really a moralist, whose art serves his moral vision and whose actions are not inhibited by Henry's assumptions about nature and human nature. For this reason, Basil allows himself not only to identify with others and sympathize with both their suffering and aspirations, but to feel in general. He idolizes Dorian but initially resists any emotional involvement with him because he knows he is capable of being swept away: "I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself" (p. 28). Sybil is less restrained than Basil only because she is even more innocent than he is. Consequently she immediately allows herself to fall in love with Dorian and thereby descends into the trap of emotion, feeling both joy and freedom but only as "a caged bird" living in a "prison of passion" (p. 87). Not surprisingly, when Dorian criticizes Sybil for not living up to his artistic standards, Basil responds, "Love is a more wonderful thing than Art" (p. 112). Thus, although he initially seems to accept Henry's fatalism ("We shall all suffer for what the gods have given us"), Basil subsequently defends all the ideals and institutions that Henry attacks, and his fidelity extends even to the most conventional of middle-class values. He refuses to believe that Dorian would sacrifice his "birth, position, and wealth" to marry Sybil (p. 100), and he later asks Dorian to consider the damage he is doing to his reputation: "Every gentleman is interested in his good name" (p. 182).

As a moralist, Basil gives Dorian what the latter sarcastically refers to as "good advice" (p. 81), tells Dorian to ignore Henry's cynicism (p. 110), and makes him aware of the rumors about his destructive influence on others: "One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. Yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. You have filled them with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You led them there" (p. 184). Basil wants Dorian "to lead such a life as to make the world respect [him]," "to have a clean name and a clean record," and to use his "wonderful influence … for good, not for evil" (p. 185). After Sybil's death, Basil, who is "heart-broken," finds it impossible to believe that Dorian has gone to the Opera "while Sybil Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging!" Shocked by Dorian's indifference, he accuses the young man of abandoning the values that he holds dear: "Dorian, this is horrible! Something has changed you completely. You look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. Now, I don' t know what has come over you. You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry' s influence. I see that" (p. 138). Later in the conversation, Basil thinks to himself: "There was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble" (p. 140). Sybil Vane occupies the same moral ground as Basil not only in terms of her aesthetic and moral idealism, but also because she inspires in Dorian the same values that Basil tries to inculcate. While he believes that Dorian's nature is "too fine" to "bring misery on anyone," Sybil's "trust" actually makes him "faithful," and her "belief" makes him "good" (pp. 104-05).

In Dorian Gray, Wilde's universe can sustain no traditional moral system. In other words, Basil and Sybil may be good, but they are not wise. And, from Wilde' s point of view-at least from the perspective defined in the novel–these two characters (as well as Lady Agatha and James Vane) stand for a merely conventional morality that is based on unfounded assumptions about the nature of things. The moral order that Basil believes in does not exist. At the end of Dorian Gray, the stage is strewn with the bodies of the innocent-Sybil, Basil, Alan Campbell, and James Vane-and populated also by the degraded victims of Dorian's influence: Lady Gwendolyn (Henry's sister), Sir Henry Ashton, Adrian Singleton, Lord Kent's son, the Duke of Perth (pp. 183-84), and no doubt countless others. Among the major characters, only the Mephistophelean Henry survives, showing that good and evil are not the essential determinants of cosmic rewards and punishments. Sybil's merciful God is balanced by James's vengeful God, yet both are undermined by a darker god whose influence does not reflect any principle of justice. Henry "merely shoots an arrow into the air" and hits Dorian (p. 43), Sir Geoffrey Clouston fires his gun at a hare and kills James Vane (p. 239), and Dorian stabs his portrait but only destroys himself (p. 263).

Basil is similarly wrong in his assumptions about human nature. His worship of Dorian is, like Sybil's love for him, self-consuming. The portrait, representing both Basil's idolatry and Dorian's conscience, communicates its hatred of its creator to Dorian, stirring "the wild passions of a hunted animal" in him (pp. 191-92) and prompting him to commit a murder that is, in effect, a suicide. Similarly, Sybil's eyes are "lit with an exquisite fire," and, although she is "transfigured with joy," she is "dominated" (that is, controlled) by her "ecstasy." Her "passion burns [her] like fire" (pp. 113-15), just as Basil's "idolatry" ultimately destroys him. "A burnt child loves the fire" (p. 235), Henry comments, and "what the fire does not destroy, it hardens" (p. 217). Only Henry has learned this lesson and thereby outgrown his moral childhood. And only he endures because he no longer allows himself to get burned.

As the "son of love and death" (p. 61), Dorian vascillates between Basil and Henry. However, he is not merely the product of other people's influence. Before Dorian meets Henry, Basil reports that he is not only "simple," trustworthy, candid, and pure (pp. 36, 39), but also sadistic, "horribly thoughtless," "wilful," and selfish (pp. 34, 38, 39). That is, by nature, Dorian is drawn in opposite directions. Hearing the voices of Henry and Sybil, he does not "know which [one] to follow" (p. 76). And he is similarly torn between Basil and Henry. "Of course I am very fond of Harry," he says to Basil, "but I know that you are better than he is." Yet, he continues, Basil is weaker than Henry–and more fearful (p. 140). After his self-described callous reaction to Sybil, Dorian asks, "Why had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him?" (p. 170). Hearing of Sybil's death and feeling even more remorseful about his behavior toward her, he believes "that the time [has] really come for making his choice" between Basil and Henry (p. 135). And after hiding the portrait, Dorian wavers between self-loathing, under Basil's influence, and pride, under Henry's (p. 172).

Dorian lives his life according to Henry's principles rather than Basil's to the extent that he accepts Henry's world view, which first impresses him like a "revelation": "Then had come Lord Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. That had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him … The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, uncouth" (p. 49). Eventually, too, Dorian comes to believe that there is no moral order of the kind that Sybil, James, and Basil believe in. Haunted by memories of his evil deeds, Dorian first surmises that this is the way one pays for one's sins, as Basil had argued: "Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts" (p. 226). On second thought, he concludes that this picture of Destiny or Fate or God is merely a product of his imagination: "In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak" (p. 237; my emphasis). Although he is able to articulate it only at this rather late moment in the novel, this realization is hardly new to Dorian. After all, ever since his portrait became the repository of his suffering and guilt, he has assumed that he can act without fear of punishment, as his responses to the deaths of his friends indicate. Henry "disclosed to him life's mystery" (p. 44), and he has lived with that understanding since his first encounter with his mentor.

Subsequent to this event, Dorian echoes Henry's sentiments on every subject; calls life, as Henry does, boring and disappointing (pp. 137, 214); and espouses Henry's Nietzschean views: "Like the gods of the Greeks," he thinks, "he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous" (p. 136). When Basil questions his apparent indifference to Sybil's death, he replies: "A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them" (p. 138). What Dorian has learned in this instance, thanks largely to Henry's instruction, is that life is best experienced from the point of view of a spectator. He describes Sybil's death as "extraordinarily dramatic" and "too wonderful for tears" (p. 128). And when Henry assures him that his reaction is not "heartless," Dorian gives full expression to Henry's theory of spectatorism: "I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded" (p. 130). Later, when Dorian shows Basil the portrait, he once again assumes the role of spectator–this time without even a shred of doubt or regret: "The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching [Basil] with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes" (p. 189).

Like Henry, Dorian is also motivated by intellectual curiosity. Early in the novel, he tells Henry how he wandered around in the East End of London looking for adventure and discovered Sybil Vane "in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares" (p. 71). He explains to Henry, "You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life." After his rejection of Sybil, Dorian gazes "at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest" (p. 124). He thinks that there might be "some curious scientific reason" for the alteration, yet he is content to examine the portrait for its revelations of his own nature: "For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul" (p. 136). He returns to the portrait often because "he grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul" (p. 159). All of this begins, it should be noted, when Dorian realizes that he has already made the choice to follow Henry rather than Basil: "Yes, life had decided that for him–life, and his own infinite curiosity about life" (p. 135; also p. 163). Eventually, however, his curiosity becomes obsessive and even insatiable: "The more he knew, the more he desired to know" (p. 160).

Dorian's hedonism grows out of Henry's proposal that Dorian should experience everything: "Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations" (p. 46). Thus, along with "a mad curiosity" to know, Dorian develops "a passion for sensations" (p. 73). He justifies his quest for knowledge and pleasure by adopting Henry's theory of self-development: "But it appeared to Dorian that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic." Dorian shares Henry's contempt for "puritanism"–self-torture and self-denial-but, unlike the man who espouses physical as well as intellectual exploration but only practices pure contemplation, he quests for sensual experience and adventure: the new Hedonism "was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they may be … It was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment" (pp. 161-62).

Of course, if Dorian had single-mindedly pursued these mental and physical pleasures, he would have become just another cynic, aloof from personal relationships, contemptuous of such emotions as love and compassion (although intrigued by them), happy to watch the operations of thought and passion in others, and sublimely indifferent to the consequences of his own ideas and actions. As a divided man, however-"Each of us has heaven and hell in him," he tells Basil (p. 190)–Dorian cannot entirely repress the other side of his nature. The day after he rejects Sybil, he suffers from remorse, regrets his selfishness and cruelty, and considers it his "duty" to go back to her (p. 121). When he finds out about her death, he tells Henry: "You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. She would have done that for me." Again, he wants to do his "duty"–to do "what [is] right" (p. 129)–thanks to Sybil's influence. After he has decided to hide the portrait, Dorian regrets his failure to explain his motives to Basil: "Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence [he thinks], and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. The love that he bore him–for it was really love–had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual … Yes, Basil could have saved him" (p. 149). The portrait itself serves as an even stronger reminder of his sins: "Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow Basil's reproaches about Sybil Vane had been! How shallow and of what little account! His own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgement" (p. 150). Even when Dorian visits "the little ill-famed tavern near the Docks … under an assumed name, and in disguise," he thinks "of the ruin he had brought upon his soul" (p. 159).

In fact, despite his powers of rationalization and the continuing influence of Henry, Dorian is increasingly disturbed by doubts about his moral freedom and stung by the pangs of a conscience that will not die. He knows that his soul is "sick to death," and he hopes for "atonement" although he also knows –or believes–that "forgiveness [is] impossible" (p. 220). As he watches the suffering of the grotesque creatures at his favorite opium den, he thinks: "They were better off than he was. He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a terrible malady, was eating his soul away. From time to time he seemed to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him … He wanted to escape from himself" (p. 224). His meeting with Adrian Singleton in the opium den makes him consider "how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms" as those that so frequently haunt him:

“ What sort of life would his be, if day and night, shadows of his crime were
to peer at him from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to
whisper in his ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as
he lay asleep! As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with
terror, and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder. Oh! in
what a wild hour of madness had he killed his friend! How ghastly the mere
memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to
him with added horror. Out of the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed
in scarlet, rose the image of his sin. When Lord Henry came in at six
o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will break.”

Dorian concludes that he is "too much concentrated" on himself and that his "personality has become a burden" to him (p. 242). Threatened by James Vane, whose presence reminds him of his responsibility for Sybil's death, Dorian is again terrified: "Life had suddenly become too hideous a burden for him to bear" (p. 244). Six months later, under the influence of another young woman like Sybil, Dorian announces to Henry that he is in the process of mending his ways and forswearing his sinful pursuits. "I want to be better," he says. "I am going to be better" (p. 250). Against Henry's claims to the contrary, Dorian insists that "the soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it" (p. 254). After his futile attempt to confess his murder of Basil to Henry (pp. 251-52), he continues to believe that he should be punished for his sins and that it is "his duty to confess." Indeed, he thinks, "There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven" (pp. 260-62). In this mood of remorse, combined with the realization that he cannot stop sinning, Dorian decides to kill his conscience by destroying the portrait that, to him, embodies his moral sense (p. 263). When he acts on this desperate impulse, of course, he kills himself because he has been, all along, a child of both Henry and Basil, and, unlike either of his mentors, both a hearty sinner and a reluctant penitent.

Yet the result of his occasional memory of Sybil and his intermittent recollection of the values of duty, conscience, and self-denial is not that Dorian actually changes. In fact, the long-term consequence of his double loyalty to Basil and Henry is that he turns more and more to sensation not as a means of intellectual discovery or a mode of aesthetic enjoyment, but as an escape from consciousness. Of course, Henry had told him that "to become a spectator of one's own life … is to escape from suffering" (p. 140). But when his suffering from experiences that Henry has never had becomes intolerable, Dorian loses control and breaks through the restraints that make Henry's life comparatively rational and relatively safe. Confronted by a "heart-broken" Basil after Sybil's death, Dorian asks him not to "talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things" (p. 137). When Basil is evidently upset by Dorian's cold-hearted response, Dorian says, "If you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened" (p. 140).

By the time he has read-and reacted to-Henry's little yellow book, Dorian has several things to escape from, including the phantoms of memory that remind him of his sins and the portrait that documents the effect of those sins on his soul. He frequently arises from half-waking nightmares with "a wild longing" for a world of "pleasure," but a world, too, "in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain" (p. 163). His collection of objets d'art, which might be taken to be a response to his love of beauty, is rather a "means of fogetfulness," a mode of "escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne." With "his passionate absorption in mere existence," Dorian can sometimes "forget" the portrait, "the hideous painted thing" that shows him "the real degradation of his life" (p. 172). After the murder of Basil, Dorian feels "that the secret of the whole thing is not to realize the situation"- that is, simply prevent it from entering his consciousness (p. 193): "It was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself" (p. 197; see also p. 199, 217).

Eventually, too, even Dorian's journeys into the darkest corners of London serve the same purpose. That is, the sordid world of violence, drugs, and prostitution, which originally appealed to him as a source of knowledge and pleasure, sooner or later becomes yet another means of escape: "There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new." Again, although he cannot atone for his sins or expect forgiveness, "forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one." In the end, the same insatiability that makes his quest for knowledge obsessive and interminable turns his quest for pleasure into a virtual addiction: "Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song. They were what he needed for forgetfulness" (pp. 220-22). Both pursuits take on the self-destructive quality of his "hideous hunger for opium," and neither provides him with the sense of fulfillment that he originally expected and that Henry, in his naivete continues to believe Dorian is achieving.

As I have suggested, Dorian is best understood as not just another personage in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but as the central character, whose situation is clarified by the opposition between Basil and Henry, his guides and confidants. Their principal task is to articulate mutually exclusive moral positions and, in so doing, to define the moral options available to Dorian. They are essentially "flat" characters in that they do not change in the course of the novel. In effect, they have already chosen a way of life. And unlike Dorian, therefore, they are not confronted by either the challenge of moral choice or the opportunity for moral growth. They simply demonstrate by their actions the consequences of thinking and living as they do. In this way, they show the reader (and Dorian) the limitations of their respective positions. And insofar as they reflect moral tendencies latent in Dorian (e.g., self-indulgence and self-denial) and even aspects of his psyche (e.g., instinct and conscience), they reveal, as well, the human cost of choosing one position over the other. Thus, if Dorian had accepted Basil's moralism, he would not have fallen into a life of sin. And if he had fully adopted Henry's insouciance, he would not have been burdened by remorse. Either way, however, he would have sacrificed some dimension of his personality, in which case, from Wilde's point of view, he would have been either a fool (albeit a "good" one), ignorant of the natural laws of the universe, or a parasite (albeit an interesting one), morally isolated and emotionally detached from ordinary human relationships.

In this respect, Dorian is truly the man in the middle, unable to deny the demands of his superego and equally unable to repress the yearnings of his passions. As a victim of this psychological double bind, he is not merely a hedonist paying for his sins, but a kind of Everyman, whose dilemma is a product of his human endowment. In short, if Wilde's goal was to unite instinct and conscience, then Dorian appears to be the locus on which this endeavor is carried out–unsuccessfully and inevitably, as Freud would argue almost forty years later in Civilization and Its Discontents. In this regard, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a test of at least one of Wilde's basic tenets–his belief in self-harmony and self-development–supported, to be sure, by the logic of his theorizing in "The Soul of Man under Socialism" but disconfirmed by the logic of his narrative It may be difficult for some readers to see Dorian Gray as Wilde's Everyman–that is, as the character who, embodying all the elements of humanity (instinct and conscience, skepticism and faith, appreciation of both life and art), represents humanity's last, best hope. In fact, however, Dorian confronts the great moral issue of the nineteenth century, which is dramatized in the novels of the Brontes, Thackeray, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Meredith, Melville, James, and Hardy. This is the war between competing moral visions: paganism vs. puritanism, Hellenism vs. Hebraism, hedonism vs. stoicism.

Dorian may either resolve these opposing visions through accommodation and compromise (or even transcendence) or fail to resolve them, not because he, uniquely, cannot, but because resolution is impossible.

VICTORIAN NOVEL

Wilde explored the relation of art to influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as in his social and aesthetic theory. Situating The Picture of Dorian Gray and the scandal it provoked in a crisis of images of dandies, gentleman and women, and situating Wilde in the context of late – Victorian social institutions of journalism, advertising, public schools, homosexual communities, paradoxical style but also on the circulation and consumption of knowledge in market society, in which knowledge is never pure of its packaging, the message never separable from the medium.

Eloquence in an age which doomed women to silence or empty speech could only intensify the powerful impact of some actresses upon male spectators, who respond to their genius with a medley of intimidation and admiration. Dorian Gray is “filled with awe” when he so much as thinks of Sibyl Vane, and “hectic spots of red, like the marks of a fever, burn on his cheeks when he talks of her”. As befits one who is ‚absolutely and entirely divine” rather than human, Sibyl compels him in starnge ways; for example, he visits the theatre “every night of my life” to see her perform, and does it involuntarily – “I can’t help going to see Sibyl play’, he explains, “even if it is only for a single act” . Dorian belongs in the catalogue of Victorians, real and fictional, who finds themselves placed under compulsion of women performers, overwhelmed physically or mentally by their remarkable powers.

The character of Sibyl Vane, an actress in particular and acting generally. Like many other Victorians, he contrasts actresses with the majority of women, whose lives seem by comparison predictable and superficial:

“Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always fiind them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the Park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. But an actress! How

different an actress is! “

This effusion of Dorian Gray places emphasis on the “glamour” and ”mystery” of an actress, her ability to transport an audience aut of its own place and time. What the actress can do for the male spectator – the qualities which make her ‚the one thing worth loving’ – are for Dorian Gray the distinguishing and indeed the only worthwhile features of the performing woman, whether Sibyl Vane or any other. Lost in this male-centred analysis is what made acting seem particulary attractive to Victorian women, less impressed by the “mystery” and “glamour” that seduce a masculine observer such as Dorian Gray than by the independence, professionalism and hard work required of actresses.

In the typical Victorian novel, cosmic justice is confirmed (the good are rewarded, though chastened, and the evil are punished), moral certainty is attainable (indeed, experience itself, though sometimes cruel and harsh, teaches morality), personal responsibility is assumed, and self-unification is possible. In the universe occupied by Dorian Gray, however, these verities do not hold. The novel culminates in a suicide rather than a marriage. The narrator is an observer, not a moralist. And the central character disintegrates instead of acquiring a credible, coping self. In this respect, The Picture of Dorian Gray signals the end of a literary era and looks forward to those other turn-of-the-century and pre-World War I novels of cosmic despair and moral paralysis: Gide's The Immoralist, Chopin's The Awakening, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Mann's Death in Venice, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, and Wharton's Ethan Frome. In all of them, the self, cut loose from its conventional moral and metaphysical moorings, struggles earnestly and ends tragically–a victim of excess, confusion, or obsession. Not merely a 'nineties romp, Wilde's novel stands among them, as another important work of the period, addressing the major moral issues of the day (and of any day), and a significant contribution not only to aestheticism, but to modernism.

Wilde parodies this way of life, connecting the upper and lower extremities of society, with the aristocratic patrons of opium-dens, such as Adrian Singleton whose young life was ruined by Dorian. In his own experiments with depravity, Dorian visits the “dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new” (p.140). The stark descriptions also highlight the problems faced by Victorian London’s underworld:

“ He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see if he was

being followed. In about seven or eight minutes he reached a small shabby house,

that was wedged in between two gaunt factories [. . .].

[. . .] He dragged it aside, and entered a long, low room which looked as if it

had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon [. . .].

At the end of the room there was a little staircase, leading to a darkened chamber. As Dorian hurried up its three rickety steps, the heavy odour of opium met him. He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure [. . .]. “

Dorian winced, and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy. (p.142-43)

Dorian, flips between the highest and lowest status of society. He may be debauched, but he is non-judgmental. At this stage, even though Dorian is not physically affected by his overindulgences, he is mentally alert to the fact that he also has sunk far into lascivious sensualism.

Sensualism can be defined as the worship of the senses or the elements of “a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic” (p.104). It is the creative source of a certain aesthetics. A noteworthy fact is that a look of fear was in Dorian’s eyes when Lord Henry first said, “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul” (p.31). Dorian is now at odds with himself, and is suffering in an aesthetic or moral dilemma: “He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. From time to time he seemed to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him. Yet he felt he could not stay” (p.143). His meeting with Singleton at the opium den moves him, strangely enough, to escape, even from himself. Dorian’s uneasy conscience is presented in a way that

respects the reader’s ability to make his or her own evaluation about aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic danger.

The whims of Lord Henry, to whom “Beauty is the wonder of wonders” (p.32), were carved for Dorian, who has explored the doctrine of art for art’s sake and related philosophies to their fullest extent. As Dorian lives quite well off the profits of aesthetic

sensualism, it seems—at least for a while—as though a life of sin and corruption does indeed pay. The ironic conclusion, however, is that a life dedicated exclusively to the arts and senses will lead to nothing but self-gratification.

Living in heartless joy for years, Dorian collects jewels, finery, and art, but these treasures are “means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne” (p.111). Surrounding himself with nothing but beauty, Dorian falls into the worst sort of escapism. It merits special notice that he pursues beauty for its own sake to excess as a means of avoidance, switching beautiful unrealities for the ugly realities of the most depraved life. Beauty clarifies longing while ugliness necessitates escape, but the

beautiful surface Dorian finds so seductive is what brings him down to the ugly realities:

Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became

dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song. They were what he needed for forgetfulness.

This excerpt presents evidence for the profound changes in Wilde from Victorianism to modernism, because it is a negative reaction against the aestheticism of those who worshiped beauty for its own sake, a kind of romantic escapism into fantasy characterized by refusal to see the ugly realities hidden inside of an aesthetic world. The Picture of Dorian Gray, it may be argued, is a fantasy novel of the tragic hero feeling “the terrible pleasure of a double life” (p.134) but being anxious to escape the

recognition of beauty and ugliness as the ins and outs of life.

One of the underlying themes related to social anxiety in The Picture of Dorian Gray is that of different attitudes towards sexuality. In his condemnation of social repression as the enemy of liberty and individualism, Wilde tried to undermine the encrusted Victorian social values, paradoxically through the moral deterioration of Dorian Gray.

Dorian’s frustrated erotic desire is the result of bourgeois Victorian repression of all non-reproductive sexuality. By presenting the portrait of Dorian as “the origin of all his shame” (p.119), Wilde revealed a specific Victorian complex, an unconscious sense of sexual guilt. “Paradox though it may seem,” says Vivian in Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), “it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates

life” (p.982). The belief that life imitates art corresponds to the equation of Wilde’s essentially personal vision of sexual scandal with his artistic and creative identity.

Wilde, his life submerged in the allegations of homosexuality brought

out by the Marquess of Queensbury in 1895, was particularly concerned with non-conformity as a response to the unthinking conformity of middle-class values. Jonathan Dollimore draws a correlation between Wilde’s alleged sodomy and his search for self-identity, suggesting that he created a natural self only by casting down “a Protestant ethic and high

bourgeois moral rigor and repression that generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned” (3). This search for self-identity can be interpreted as not just a will for freedom but also a respect for individuality. In “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891), for example, Wilde talks of “the natural inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism,” and states that “Public Opinion [. . .] is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought or Art” (1094).

Lord Henry Wotton directly refers to this in a conversation with Dorian Gray:

“To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,” he replied, touching the

thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. “Discord is to be forced

to be in harmony with others. One’s own life—that is the important thing. As

for the lives of one’s neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can

flaunt one’s moral views about them, but they are not one’s concern. Besides,

Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting

the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the

standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.” (p.69)

Challenging the myth that socialism is opposed to individualism, Wilde connects socialism with aestheticism in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” by claiming, “A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.

FAUST AND GENESIS

In the Picture of Dorian Gray we can identify the allusions to two myths: first, the story in the book of Genesis about the garden of Eden, the temptation of Eve by the serpent, and the fall of man; and second, to the Faust legend.
The second chapter of the novel strongly suggests a temptation scene wich takes place in a garden. Basil Hallward, the painter, is like God the creator; he has just created the picture of Dorian in all his perfection. The tempter is Lord Henry, who wants to persuade Dorian to ignore all the conventional rules of society, just as the serpent wants Eve to disregard the commandments from God. Dorian is like the first man, Adam, innocent in his perfection, who is being told by the serpent to taste of the forbidden fruit of sensual experience. At various crises in Dorian's life, Henry retains the role of the tempter. He is at Dorian's side encouraging him to adopt an attitude toward life that will cost him dear in the long run. For example, when Dorian and Henry discuss the death of Sibyl, Henry encourages him to view it from a detached point of view, like an episode in a play. This means that Dorian never develops the moral sense necessary to balance his love of sensual experience. He "falls" and his soul is blackened.
In the Faust legend, Faust sells his soul to the devil in order to gain knowledge and power. Dorian is a Faustian figure because he wants to obtain eternal youth, something that under normal circumstances no human being can obtain. He enters into a Faustian bargain when he prays that he might be able to remain forever young while the process of aging is confined to the picture. When the woman at the opium den says that "Prince Charming" sold himself to the devil for a pretty face, she is unconsciously referring to the Faust myth.

Homoerotism in Dorian Gray

In The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the homoerotic subtext is represented by a flow of gazes and ideas whose vocabulary is marked by the terms 'charm', 'fascination', and 'influence'.

So even if the narrative provides an extremely rich repertoire of coded allusions that metonymise homoeroticism,at no point does the story make Dorian’s desire for other men indubitably visible. Indeed, by using a picture to portray the young man’s unseen sins, the narrative foregrounds the idea that representations may hide as much as disclose the truth. It goes without saying that had the novel depicted homosexual acts in 1890, when it first appeared in the American Lippincott’s Magazine, then Wilde could have been prosecuted in the courts

There was something terribly enthralling about the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or strange perfume; there was a real joy in that-perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray censures sensual and aesthetic pleasure in itself. Although he is led towards nothing less than brutal murder by his intense passions, Dorian learns a valuable lesson, if at an appaling price. Setting the protagonist’s frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth’ against the many ‚calumnies… that seemed never to leave him’, the narrator seizes on the opportunity to ask: “Is insincerity a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities”.

THE DANDY DORIAN GRAY

Charles Baudelaire defined the dandy as one who “elevates aesthetics to a living religion” that the dandy's mere existence reproaches the responsible citizen of the middle class: "Dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism" and "These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking …. Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.”

The novel can thus be defined as a symbolic representation of aspects of Wilde's personality. Dorian is an archetypal image by which aspects are fascinated. This suggests that his behaviour symbolizes Wilde's unconscious (i.e. unacknowledged) attitudes. Dorian’ superiority is emphasize by his obsession with objets d'art. For example, when Basil comes to console him about Sibyl's death, he is unwilling to discuss the matter. He does not want to admit the possibility that his behaviour was reprehensible. He tells his friend: "If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things". Later, after murdering Basil, he again seeks to avoid acknowledging what he has done: "He felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation”.
Dorian escapes from every unpleasant realization by turning his attention to other things. Unwilling to admit that his actions have moral implications, he seeks refuge in art. On hearing of Sibyl's death, he accepts an invitaton, for that very evening, to go to the opera. He learns to see life only from an aesthetic perspective. He reflects:
"Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that makes such plays delightful to us."
The consequence of this attitude is that he finds himself increasingly "stepping outside" his experiences in order to observe them from a distance. Instead of living his experiences more intensely, he finds himself observing them, as in a theatre. He confesses to Lord Henry, with reference to Sibyl's suicide:
"I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded."
He tells Basil: "To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life". Some eighteen years later, Dorian no longer even feels part of his own drama. He has become only a spectator, and what he sees is a projection of the grotesque shape that his own personality has assumed. He coldly watches Basil as the latter reacts to his now hideously deformed painting: "The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes."
He is no longer watching himself only. He is watching another person's reaction to the callousness and cruelty which he does not want to recognize in himself.
Throughout the novel, the mechanism whereby involvement is translated into aesthetic perspective is associated with fear. For example, when Dorian first meets Lord Henry, to distract him from the latter's words, he turns to observe a bee: "He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield." 
He has been granted the means to enjoy life to the full, but – paradoxically – he is afraid of life. Consequently, he seeks refuge in a pseudo-aestheticism. For example, when he shows Alan Campbell into the room where Basil's murdered body lies, he is suddenly afraid that he will have to see the consequence of what he has done: "There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him". His subsequent passion for objets d'art, so lengthily described in chapter XI, is simply a way "by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne". He is afraid of that side of his own personality for which he is not prepared to accept responsiblity.

By virtue of his "mad prayer," Dorian thus appropriates the attributes of both Dionysos and Apollo. He is a symbolic personification of both Dionysian intoxication and Apollonian form; of Dionysian involvement and Apollonian unapproachability. He is able to enjoy the Dionysian pleasures to which he wants to abandon himself, but at an Apollonian distance.

Dorian incarnates a conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian elements particularly fascinating to his creator. He has a passion for "the colour, the beauty, the joy of life", but avoids becoming involved with any experience for fear of it causing him possible pain. Basil's and Lord Henry's fascination with him represents Wilde's obsession with a young dandy whose evasiveness and pseudo-aestheticism symbolize his own unconscious fears.
The Wildean dandy is content with philosophic contemplation. He is afraid of the power that an individual – any individual – is potentially capable of exercising over him. He does not involve himself in the worries of his friends, for worry signals suffering, and the Wildean dandy will do everything possible to avoid suffering. He blocks off any realization that might pain him. He is afraid of his own unacknowledged desires. He is afraid to live the kind of life that so fascinates him. His wit is just one of his means of defence. It is a way of evading the obligation to respond to the demands and individuality of another person.

He is a painted image of "extraordinary personal beauty." When Lord Henry tells him that his exceptional looks will not last, the young man prays that he be allowed to remain as he is in Basil's portrait of him. Dorian wants to enjoy his youth for ever. His "mad wish" is a key to the archetypal factors which condition the novel, for the quality of "eternal youth" is a primary attribute of Dionysos. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid uses the phrase "eternal youth" to describe an aspect of Bacchus (= Dionysos):

“For thine is unending youth, eternal boyhood (puer aeternus),
Thou art the most lovely in the lofty sky;
Thy face is virgin-seeming …”

An extraordinary thing is how many of these epithets, such Ovid's puer aeternus, also describe Dorian, but these parallels are unlikely to have been intended. That Dorian is invested with the attributes of Dionysos is, however, corroborated in the novel. The morning after he cold-bloodedly turns his back on Sibyl Vane, he checks to see whether Basil's portrait has really altered. It has — and he immediately understands what this signifies for him: “Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins — he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all. (p.105)”

The young man who realizes this has known only the passions of an adolescent's dreams. In other words, he believes that, under normal circumstances, such pleasures would stain him, not only morally, but physically. And so he prays that he may enjoy every pleasure which life can offer him, and yet remain unmarked by his experience. Such passions as those he wants to enjoy are associated with Dionysos. This is confirmed toward the end of the novel, when Lord Henry, following their discussion of Basil's murder, says to Dorian: "You have drunk deeply of everything. You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you." (p.216)

The vine belongs to Dionysos. Dorian as eternal youth incarnates Dionysian life. It is for this reason that Sibyl calls him "Prince of life !" (p.86).

The novel begins with Dorian praying that he be granted the "eternal youth" proper only to a god. To seek to appropriate a god's attributes signals psychological inflation. Not coincidentally, central to the novel is another myth whose subject is psychological inflation. It is introduced in an analogy toward the end of the novel, while Dorian is playing the piano. Lord Henry remarks:

"What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! Don't stop. I want music tonight. It seems to me that you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas listening to you." (p.216)

Not only Lord Henry, but Dorian too can be likened to Marsyas. For his portrait gradually assumes the aspect of a "hideous old satyr" (p.157). When he tries to destroy it, he unwittingly kills himself, and the portrait reverts to its original Apollonian perfection.

EFFEMINACY

The Picture of Dorian Gray comes across as a effeminate novel, both in its

presentation and in the way the characters are described. The novel is in fact presented in a rather 'straight' fashion when the homoerotic theme is downplayed when not explicitly

stated. But effeminacy comes across not only in the way the characters are presented, but in the language Wilde uses to show a rather “feminine” world. Wilde does not present any of the characters as homosexual. In fact, Lord Henry is married and Dorian falls in love with an actress, but both these relationships are very superficial. It is a very straight language in that sense, but on a closer look we see it is not the case. By writing in the manner that he does, Wilde himself shows an effeminate streak as it will be shown further down.

Since the setting of story is believed to be”saturated with homoerotic feelings and

style” we will take a closer look into this. By setting it is not only meant the place in which the novel takes place, but the whole world which it involves. It is a matter of values, theories and environment that sets the background of a possible homoerotic and effeminate world. Carroll goes as far as describing Wilde himself as an effeminate man. He sees what he calls a deep symbolic structure in the novel and says that Wilde assimilates the culture configuration available to him in the novel. Seeing how he is believed to view aestheticism as an extension of homoeroticism, the greatest direct statement against this on Wilde's part, aestheticism, thus becomes one of the greatest codes for homoeroticism. Adding Schaffer's previous statement that aestheticism penetrated fields previously dominated by women, it automatically effeminizes the followers of the 17 movement, in this case clearly the three main characters of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Descriptions of the setting can be described as soft or even feminine. When we first encounter the world of Dorian Gray it is described in light feminine tones, something that enhances homoerotic atmosphere: “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of lilac, or the more delicate perfume of pink-flowering thorn.” (p.7).

Descriptions like these of roses and other flowers are very feminine, in accordance to Schaffer's statement that Wilde as an aesthete has touched on areas before only dominated by women. Wilde is thought to have used a straight language to disguise the homoerotic elements, but that is not applicable here since this is not a very “manly” world or description. The reason for this is that the general idea is that male homosexuals automatically take after heterosexual women and therefore colours and behaviour usually attributed to women become “gay” when attributed to men

Feminine behaviour by men has more or less always been looked down upon, even

during Wilde's time. Standfort points out that “feminine characteristics are less valued than masculine ones, in general, but especially in men” and that “transgressions into femininity by men are more negatively valued than transgressions into masculinity by women” (p.599).

Schaffer believes that male aesthetes to “justify this behaviour, they had to create a visual style which metonymically associated themselves with women while distinctly affirming their superiority” (p.42). This means that during those days it was more acceptable to take on this feminine and aesthetic lifestyle for men like Wilde, who is believed to have been a dandy. Carroll states, Among heterosexuals, feminine characteristics act as a stimulus or trigger for male sexual desire. One chief reason effeminacy can be easily integrated with a homoerotic persona is that effeminacy indirectly suggests that the effeminate male could himself be annobject of male desire. (p.296)

Dorian and Lord Henry are thought to be dandies, which in turn led to the effeminacy of the characters to cause much debate. In the novel Lord Henry is referred to as a dandy when his uncle says, “I thought you dandies never got up till two…” (p.41). Elisa Glick writes, “[a]s the cultural critic Michael Bronski puts it, “dandyism was an exercise in perfecting the externals”; as a result, the dandy for Bronski is “all style and no content””(p.130). This corresponds well with the aesthetic ideals that were applied by Wilde and Lord Henry in the novel. Lastly, let us take a closer look at Dorian Gray. As the protagonist of the novel he is most known to us. Effeminate is a word that would suit well to describe Dorian seeing the ways in which he is described and behaves. The language that Wilde uses to describe him is yet again very soft and very feminine. He is described as beautiful with blue eyes, crisp blonde hair and “finely-curved scarlet lips” p.(23).

Following the release of the novel the reviews that criticised it paid attention to the effeminacy of Dorian Gray. In the novel when Dorian is displeased he “made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy” (p.24).

Carroll, views Dorian's behaviour to be more fit for a woman than for a

man, no matter his age. In the novel Dorian is upset that the painting will forever remain beautiful while his beauty and youth will wither: “The tears welled in his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying. (p.35). Carroll finds “[s]cenes of women lying prone and weeping are common enough in Victorian fiction; scenes depicting males in that posture are vanishingly rare” (p.297).

Carroll has very clear ideas of where the boundaries of gender roles should go and in what way homosexuals and heterosexuals should and do behave. Although many of his and the existing views on gender roles are highly generalised, we are prone to make presumptions on what is manly opposed to effeminate and how that fits in the question of homosexuality and homoeroticism.

CONCLUSION

It may be concluded that The Picture of Dorian Gray is “the tragedy of aestheticism” and “the aesthetic novel par excellence, not in espousing the doctrine, but in exhibiting its dangers” It is important to note the source of Wilde’s inconsistency here, the tension between his individualism and his unconquerable obsession with social status. Paradoxically, Wilde seems to reject the notion of egocentrism and the doctrine of art for art’s sake by providing a didactics the aesthetic movement at first observed but ultimately rejected in mainstream Victorian art and culture.

That life which Wilde deeply criticized is the one he finally chose to live himself. The didactic nature of the novel is a veil of irony.

An overriding sense of irony and doom permeates the novel from the moment Basil Hallward mentions his intellect and art, Lord Henry’s rank and wealth, and Dorian’s good looks: “[. . .] we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly” (p.19). At the sight of his own portrait Dorian undoubtedly understands Lord Henry’s “strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity” (p.34). Dorian’s

words sound like a prophecy of doom: “I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way!” (p.34) “There is something fatal about a portrait” (p.95), admits Dorian. Lord Henry regrets the fixed fate of beauty in the Gray family: “What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade!” (p.41) The irony of doom also portends the underlying sense of tragedy pervading the personal plight of Wilde, the upper-class champion of aestheticism. Any belief in pessimistic fatalism degrades him by depriving him of artistry, autonomy, and freedom, while middle-class attitudes to art are optimistic because tragedy is regarded as being of little moral or educational use.

What is often overlooked is the fact that Wilde raises the theme of personal moral choice in the novel. Although Dorian is doomed by what Lord Henry has said about “the search for beauty being the real secret of life” (p.49), his curiosity getting the better of him, the reader still juggles this with the notion that in the end it is Dorian with his freedom of will who makes the moral choice to give in to temptation. Witness Dorian’s relationship with Sibyl Vane. It is the touchstone of Lord Henry’s baneful influence on him. Dorian seems to choose art rather than love in order to satisfy his acquisitive instinct, though it is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

The Mephistophelean figure of Lord Henry is present to

strengthen the protagonist’s resolve” (p.72). An opium den’s prostitute swears that “he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face” (p146). The portrait is the ultimate symbol of this Faustian choice of Dorian’s.

Wilde suggests that conventional codes should not be accepted passively but explored by the individual to create a personal moral code of right and wrong. Dorian’s greatest sin is murder, and Wilde’s is homosexuality. From his own perspective, Wilde’s sin is a crime in no sense because he believed his conduct must contain no vulgarity:

“All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime” (p.160). In Victorian England, however, the notion of homosexual love, closely connected with a sense of immorality, was spat on and treated with suspicion and contempt. Eve K. Sedgwick discusses homosexuality in aristocrats as viewed by the Victorian middle classes: “[. . .] it came under the heading of dissolution, at the very time when dissolution was itself becoming the (wishful?) bourgeois-ideological name for aristocracy itself” (p.174). Many analogies have been made between Dorian’s life and Wilde’s. Autobiographical references are frequent, and Wilde relates a plethora of personal experiences in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The tragedy of Wilde is the product of prejudices in the society he lived in. He may have believed it a form of the grossest immorality to accept the moral codes of an age, but rejecting them must lead to association with decadence and moral corruption even while practicing the most innocent of crimes.

The primary aim of Dorian Gray is an inverted kind of hedonism and

carpe diem [enjoy the day] sentiment, and one which holds true for Oscar

Wilde’s firm purpose in life.

After all, Dorian could never be true to himself, so he avenged society through overindulging in life’s momentary pleasures, giving no heed to their fateful consequences. His self-deceptive and self-righteous moral choice hints a profound self-destructiveness. This choice is encouraged by Lord Henry Wotten at the beginning of the novel:

“[. . .] Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your

days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving

away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly

aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let

nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of

nothing. . . . A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants [. . .].” (p.32)

In a society ruled by the middle classes so ardently opposed to difference and

so insistent on conformity, when the upper classes were guilty of the same gross hypocrisy, it seems that to openly indulge in the sensual pleasures of life was an acceptable way forward for such bohemians as Wilde.

Wilde was a strong-willed bohemian aristocrat. He vacillated between high society and bohemian circles, and played, as Dorian does, the double role of “rebellion” (p.144) as well as “Dandyism, [. . .] an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty” (p.103). Wilde was both a morbidly refined, sensuously self-indulgent aristocrat and an individualist who needed bohemian freedom. These aesthetic poses he adopted to alleviate his growing anxiety were something quite subversive which demanded suppression and swift entombment in Victorian England.

Society was Wilde’s chief anxiety, and The Picture of Dorian Gray is

saturated with an apprehensive quality, revealing his deep mistrust and

cynical attitudes towards his contemporaries.

Bibliography:

The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Peter Ackroyd; New York: Penguin, 1985

A Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by William Baker, Kenneth Womack; Greenwood Press, 2002

The Devil's Advocates: Decadence in Modern Literature, edited by Thomas Reed Whissen; Greenwood Press, 1989

Ellmann Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Wilde,Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by R. Hart-Davis. London: Hart-Davis, 1962.

The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, edited by Peter Raby, Cambridge University Press, 1997

Schaffer, Talia. “Fashioning Aestheticism by Aestheticising Fashion: Wilde, Beerbohm and the Male Aesthetes' sartorial codes”. Victorian Literature and Culture, 2000

The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag

edited by Ellen Crowell; Edinburgh University Press, 2007

Joseph Pearce .The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, Harper Collins Publishers

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Andre Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy edited by Naomi Segal; Clarendon Press, 1998

Carroll, Joseph. “Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Philosophy and Literature, 2005

Standfort, Theo G.M. ”Sexual Orientation and Gender: Stereotypes and Beyond”. Archives of Sexual Behaviour, p. 595-611, 2005.

The Soul of Man under Socialism. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Introd. Vyvyan Holland. London: Collins, 1966.

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