The Picture of Dorian Gray

Some Non-Systematic Thoughts in the Form of a Review

	The first thing I noticed, on reading this text, was the fact that Oscar Wilde repeats the same cliché twice in the space of a few pages. His closely repeated use of the word ‘tremulous’ is not the sort of thing a good poet would do? In his day this word might have had a fresh appeal to it, but I seriously doubt it?! Moreover, alerted to this motif of ‘quivering’ we find the pages of the book positively vibrating with this type of idea! It seems that the English language just does not have enough expressions in this vein to avoid frequent repetitions of words with this type of currency. What is Oscar up to? I think he is suggesting the thrill of sexual tension to the point of intense infatuation, a form of lust heading towards love if that general term is not interpreted too romantically. Moreover, it is a complex emotion tinged with a number of other features such as an involvement with the forbidden, the taboo, the culturally proscribed such as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, murder, blackmail, one’s impending death, etc. So, whenever Oscar gets back to nature, or the au naturel, a breeze, often perfumed, is sent to waft through the ‘personified’ branches, leaves or flowers of whatever is to hand, be it in the garden or elsewhere.
	Reference to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ must have been obvious to its Victorian readership although this ‘aspect’ seem rather cryptic to us in this day an age when, it would appear, we no longer have to speak in code with a hushed tone and refer to suspect relatives of Aunty Dorothy as ‘so’, ‘it’ or ‘musical’. Maybe the decadent genre of this text reinforces an expectation for the coded presence of this type of subject matter? Despite ‘innocent’ physical contact like one male touching the arm of another, being toned down in the second publication, the game is definitely given away when in the penultimate chapter we are told that Dorian will not visit the club (Whites) that night to meet the young Lord Poole, Bournemouth’s eldest son, who wants to meet him and who has already taken to wearing neckties in the same manner to the trend being set by Dorian himself. In the next and last chapter we are told that, in this act of abstention, Dorian takes pride in this change of character, read ‘soul’. So what are ‘ties’ code for, and, what would Herr Freud have to say? How ‘evil’ can our hero be if he can do good, or, is ‘doing good’ his downfall?
	Oscar appears to have set out to tame his prose in later edition(s). – physical expressions of emotion between males, on a number of occasions, are deleted. Six new chapters were added, namely, 3, 5, 15-18. This extra padding produces a ‘novel’ from what would have been only a novella or a short story that wandered off the page, so to speak, or escaped from between the covers?
	The primary genre of this text is essentially a gothic horror novel – made more surreal through interludes of wit and charming social manners, engagements and close brushes with death; such as the tension added to it through the re-appearance of James Vane seeking revenge for the suicide of his sister 18 years earlier. The increasing horror of this tale being augmented through the increasing lengthening of the litany of names of people who treat the protagonist with contempt, who have been murdered or commit suicide….
	Now this story does have an interesting twist. Written by a ‘homosexual’ we get the straight heroine bumped off though her suicide. Very quickly I might add! No 18th century elegant novel here playing the tennis match “will he get married – wont he get married?” Just a simple that’s it, curtains, the marriage is off despite the engagement! This modern twist, however, is undermined by the death of the hero, or rather, anti-hero, along with others of his ‘ilk’ plus those misfortunate characters not directly corrupted by his persona but unfortunate to have been associated with him?
	At Wilde’s trials various excerpts were adversely quoted (from the Lippincott edition). Also, under a barrage of negative letters in the press it would appear Oscar has toned down the first version of this book with a series of deletions of short passages often expressing seemingly ‘innocent’ male to male physical contact; in the process appearing to make the text less obviously homoerotic. It is interesting to note that at one point (Chapter 10) he also substitutes the word ‘symbolist’ for ‘decadent’, the former expression appearing to have less negative connotations than the latter in this respect? It would seem that Oscar took a lot of this criticism to heart along with various theoretical ideas he also seems to have been working on when we compare this text with other contemporary publications of his. In this light, another shift is the removal of an obvious ‘message’ from the text in line with his theoretical stance then being adopted that there should be only “art for art’s sake” – converting this ‘morality tale’ into a text with no obvious moral!?
	Works of art are generated within the complex dialectical ‘space’ they carve out for themselves. In this respect a number of modern interpreters see a post-modern-like ‘turn’? I am not so sure we should go down that anachronistic avenue although there is food for thought in this regard. E.g., there is a tension between the picture and Dorian himself – interestingly at the end of the novel he stabs the picture… and ends up only stabbing himself… with the picture ‘regaining’ its portrait of a lovely young man. Another space is created between the three main male characters, namely, Dorian, the artist and mentor Lord Henry – each one of whom appears to have features that resemble the complex character of Oscar Wilde himself. Then, perhaps, even closer to the bone, we have the well-known life of Oscar himself who seems hell-bent on imitating the life of Dorian. At one point in the text we have Oscar changing the age of the hero because of its close approximation it to his own age. Too close for comfit? An example of his bon mot that ‘art imitates life, and, life imitates art’ is quite prescient in this regard. Other devices helping to create this complex, dialectical sense of ‘space’ is the idea of a book being able to influence the life of the reader (and by a self-referential implication the reader must ask “what influence this book is having upon them, especially in the light of its adverse publicity?”), whether works of art, like paintings, have the power to truly influence us, etc? But, surely, ‘art is for artists alone…’ ‘just as spades are spades’, and, ‘should only be used by people who have to use them?!’ Thus this book, then, is only for ‘artists, novelists and other poseurs… along with those people who skirt and flirt along the edges of society with a tremulous spirit whose vices should not be spoken about… at least not too loudly’?!
	Decadent or symbolist – how should we view this text? Or, is it just a good old gothic horror novel playing games with words and social manners to spice things up and distract us from too closely observing, and imitating, what some young men would like to do with their ‘neckties’, or, at least those who earnestly set out to imitate how some charming older men are prone to fiddle with that same piece of apparel… with, as a result, no ultimate difference between symbolist ‘device’ and decadent ‘vice’ - that ‘fashion’ is fundamentally only a re-configuration of sexual desire through ‘display’ so that art, as fashion, perhaps, does indeed imitate nature and vice versa??

							   		 Noël Tointon, Sydney, 18.1.03.