‘There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.’
Dorian to the painter Basil Hallward, page 129)
His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of Wilde’s most famous productions. It was originally published in novella length of 13 chapters in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. A longer book version, in 20 chapters, was published 9 months later in April 1891.
The original magazine version scandalised book reviewers for its alleged immorality. Basically, an innocent young man is corrupted and led astray by an older one. Some critics noted the homoerotic descriptions of young Dorian and suggested Wilde should be prosecuted for corrupting public morals. Why is Lord Henry so concerned that Dorian is handsome? Why does Dorian blush and pout like a young maiden?
He was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity…
Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais with the air of a young Greek martyr, and made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy…
How charming he had been at dinner the night before, as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow…
Alongside this the book contains a welter of epigrams and repartee which rips to shred Victorian shibboleths like conventional morality, religion, the concepts of sin and redemption, the sanctity of marriage and fidelity, you name it Wilde’s lead character, Lord Henry Wotton, mocks and ridicules it.
‘What have you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up our belief in the soul.’
These criticisms prompted Wilde to justify himself in the press, arguing for the moral autonomy of the artist i.e. loudly denying the need to truckle to conventional ‘morality’ and asserting the artist’s right to use whatever subject matter is needed to create a mood and an effect.
In long essays published the same year, such as The Soul of Man under Socialism, he argued that whenever the philistine British decried an artwork as ‘immoral’, all it meant was that it was new and extended the subject matter of art and they consequently didn’t understand it. Seen from this perspective, accusations of ‘immorality’ should be worn as a badge of pride.
When the longer, book version was published, Wilde defiantly prefaced it with a page of witty aphorisms defending the right of the artist to complete autonomy over his subject matter, lines partly based on the defences of the novel he’d published in the press the previous year. (In fact the preface had been published as a standalone article in the March 1891 issue of the Fortnightly Review.) The content, style, and presentation of the preface made it famous in its own right, as a literary and artistic manifesto, although its more taunting statements were to come back and haunt Wilde at his trial.
Nonetheless, despite all this brave talk, in the book version Wilde toned down some of the original homoerotic passages, as well as boosting the main characters’ heterosexual backstories. He added no fewer than six chapters to the book’s original 13, all of which (regrettably) steered it towards conventional Victorian melodrama. It is to be remembered that Dorian’s love interest in the novel is very prominently made to be a young woman.
Short synopsis
Fashionable Society artist Basil Hallward is painting a full-length portrait of the ravishingly beautiful young man, Dorian Gray. He is infatuated by his ‘find’ and convinced that Dorian’s beauty is responsible for the new feeling in his art.
Lord Henry Wotton
He describes all this to his friend, witty aesthete and man-about-town Lord Henry Wotton, the Wilde figure in the book, the exponent of Wilde’s doctrine that the meaning of life is complete self-expression, that there are no such things as morality or sins, that one should give in to every temptation in order to expiate it (pages 23, 28).
The pact
Structurally if not in character, Wotton plays the part of Mephistopheles the Tempter to Dorian’s Faust, delivering a long speech which hammers away at the idea that Dorian’s beauty is due to his youth, which will pass away and be lost forever and leave him only regrets.
It is under the influence of these arguments that, when Dorian views Basil’s finished portrait, he laments that it will remain young and ravishing for all time while he, the real Dorian, is condemned to grow old and withered. In a fateful moment, Dorian declares he would give his soul if only he could remain as young and virile as he is at that moment and the portrait age instead of him (p.31).
The devil doesn’t actually appear, but someone or something hears Dorian’s wish and grants it. His physical person will remain eerily preserved and perfect as the years pass, and while he is lured deeper and deeper into a life of ‘sin’ by Lord Henry, who he soon surpasses in immorality and debauchery – and all the while the portrait of himself which he keeps up in his attic will rot and age and display every moment of degradation and corruption which he has experienced. Dorian will remain timeless. His portrait will become a ‘loathesome record of sin and debauchery’.
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…
Sibyl Vane
Dorian first realises this as a result of the Sibyl Vane storyline. Inspired by Lord Henry to seek out new sensations, Dorian wanders into a seedy theatre in the East End where he is astonished to see a girl performer, Sibyl Vane, barely 17 years-old, give stunning performances of Shakespeare’s female characters. he bombards his friends with praise for her and then astonishes them by announcing he is getting engaged to her. Unfortunately, as he woos her and she falls in genuine love with the man she refers to as ‘Prince Charming’, she loses her acting ability: she no longer finds pleasure in portraying fictional love as she is now experiencing real love in her life. In effect she has sacrificed her art and hopes of a career and her family’s ambitions, all for him. This becomes clear on the embarrassing night when Dorian finally persuades Harry and Basil to accompany him to the little theatre. She is as wooden as a chest of drawers and his friends embarrassingly make their excuses and leave.
Dorian goes backstage to see Sybil, who is head over heels in love with him. But he deliberately, cruelly crushes her, telling her he is no longer interested in her, she’s become just a third-rate actress, she humiliated him in front of his friends. Although she throws herself at his feet and begs him to stay, he simply walks out never to see her again.
The portrait changes
He wanders the streets in a daze but when he returns home at dawn he catches sight of the portrait and realises it has changed. A subtle new expression of cruelty hover around the lips.
Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized? — that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, more terrible reason? He shuddered, and felt afraid… (pages 106 and 118)
But there’s more. Overnight Dorian regrets his harshness and vows to repent, to return to Sibyl and to marry. But later that day Lord Henry arrives with the shocking news that Sibyl has killed herself. The die is cast; Dorian can’t go back…
Sibyl’s family
Originally, all the story needed was the character of Sibyl. But in the extended version Wilde added to her backstory. He gave her a worn-out single mother who had herself been an actress, had had an affair with a handsome man who got her pregnant then dumped her, in the classic style. It is a comic touch but also a serious point that this woman likes to adopt histrionic poses with her troubled daughter, constantly imagining herself being watched, as if on the stage.
More importantly, Wilde gives Sibyl a brother, James ‘Jim’ Vane, who’s even younger than she is, just 16. The old Jew (see section on Antisemitism at the end of this review) who runs the East End theatre where Sibyl performs has been ‘kind’ to the family (Mrs Vane explains to her daughter, rather ominously) and has paid for young Jim to go to sea as an apprentice.
On the afternoon of the fateful evening when Dorian takes Lord Henry and Basil to see Sibyl and she completely fails to perform and Dorian then cruelly casts her off, the night which triggers his moral decline – that afternoon Jim and Sibyl had gone for a last walk (in Hyde Park) and he had questioned her about this new aristocratic admirer, full of (justified) suspicion. He is an angry impetuous boy and, despite all Sibyl’s naive insistence that she is in love and her admirer could never hurt her, Jim makes a vow that if any harm comes to Sibyl, he will personally track down and kill the admirer.
Two points: 1) This is the second vow or promise in the book, a sort of echo of Dorian’s central one.
2) Crucially, Sibyl doesn’t know Dorian’s name but has referred to him throughout their little courtship as ‘Prince Charming’. Prince Charming is all she can tell Jim, but he remembers the name, they eventually catch an omnibus back to their squalid digs on Euston Road and we hear no more of Jim, presumed set sail to the ends of the earth. Until he suddenly pops up in Chapter 16, wanting revenge…
Decline
Like all versions of the Faust story, the narrative has two key moments: when the protagonist sells his soul and then, years later, when the devil comes to collect his debt. In between these two cardinal moments the narrative has to flesh out and demonstrate what Dorian’s decline and fall mean in practice. Initially he follows the suggestions of the charismatic hedonist Lord Henry but, as Basil remarked early in the book, Lord Henry may pose as a cynic and sybarite, he may talk a good game of decadence and corruption, but he himself rarely practices it. Soon Dorian has gone past his master in excess:
‘I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.’
and all the while the portrait records every step of his moral degeneration:
Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow’s feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood.
Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth — that was enough.
When I first read the book at school I was hungry for details of Dorian’s descent into ‘corruption’ and ‘infamy’, hoping to learn how to become ‘decadent’ myself – but as with most supposedly ‘decadent’ literature, I was sorely disappointed.
Huysmans Against Nature
Dorian’s naughty activities can be grouped under two headings. 1) First, Dorian comes under the influence of a powerful book which Lord Henry loans him and leads him into a fascination with jewels and rare manuscripts and decadent perfumes etc. Wilde confirmed to various interviewers that this was based on Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours (which I immediately went off and read). In fact it isn’t so much ‘based on’ as, for 20 pages, a shameless plagiarism of that book, copying the hero’s obsession with rare jewels, precious perfumes and then accounts of Renaissance cruelty and imperial Roman debauchery.
Twenty years later
The second way Dorian’s ‘fall’ into a life of debauchery is suggested is via the four or five page long speech delivered by Basil when he comes round to see Dorian before leaving for Paris. (In chapter 16 we learn that 18 years have passed since Sibyl Vane’s death, so he must have been 20 at the time of the famous vow.
So the 20 or so pages describing the Huysman decadence have helped us skip 18 years of time.
Basil’s list of accusations
Basil turns up late one foggy night because he’s going to Paris for some months to paint but, before he goes, he needs Dorian to deny the dreadful things Basil’s been hearing about him. In all those 20 years Basil has retained his naive and trusting friendship with Dorian but he proceeds to rattle off an impressive list of wicked behaviour which is widely attributed to him. Or, to be more precise, rumours of wicked behaviour which manifest themselves in Dorian being shunned at clubs, refused invitations, people walking out of rooms when he enters and denouncing him. The list goes on and on because, the reader realises, it’s doing the main task of conveying Dorian’s decline and degeneration. A the end of an impressive list of hints and rumours, Basil asks Dorian to deny it all.
Seized by a perverse whim, Dorian tells him he keeps a diary in the attic and he’ll take him to see it. And so he leads Basil up the dark and spooky staircase to the dusty attic where he flings off the cover to show him the (by now) horrifying painting of a depraved bloated sodden man whose sins are marked in crimson across his degenerate face. Basil is suitably horrified, can’t believe it, but Dorian reminds him of the vow he made in his studio all those years ago, how it has magically come true, so that Basil slowly does come to believe it, cries out in horror, is appalled to realise that Dorian has been much worse than the worst rumours about him etc. Basil pleads with Dorian to pray with him:
‘It is too late, Basil,’ he faltered.
‘It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow’?’
‘Those words mean nothing to me now.’
‘Hush! Don’t say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My God! Don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?’
But when Dorian also looks at the painting the narrative implies that its evil spirit enters him and suddenly fills him with blind fury at Basil for making the painting which ruined his life.
Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his ear by those grinning lips.
He sees a knife shining in the moonlight through the casement and, in a surprisingly blunt and crude scene, Dorian sneaks up behind Basil, thrusts his face down onto the table where he’s sitting and stabs him in the neck again and again while Basil throws up his arms to fend of the blows then crumples into a gurgling bloody mess… Dorian has crossed a grotesque Rubicon.
Complications: getting rid of the body
First Dorian has to get rid of the body. He sends for one of the young men mentioned in Basil’s list of shame whose life he is supposed to have ruined. As usual we get absolutely no sense of what it was that divided them.
This man, Alan Campbell, is a scientist who researches the human body by dissecting cadavers etc. Dorian confesses that he murdered Basil and then asks Alan to dispose of the body in the attic. Campbell is stern, moral, disapproving and refuses to do it until Dorian writes a name on a piece of paper and pushes it across the table to him. Campbell goes pales. Dorian says he has a letter written and ready to be sent unless he does this thing. Campbell coldly agrees. Dorian sends a servant to Campbell’s lodgings with a list of equipment, which is promptly brought back, and the two men mount to the attic where Dorian lets Campbell in, hastily covers the painting with its thick purple and gold hanging, not bringing himself to look at the cold white body sprawled over the table with its neck torn open.
Five long hours later Campbell comes down to Dorian’s study and says it is done. Dorian goes to the attic and finds no trace whatsoever of the body but a smell of nitric acid. Presumably Campbell chopped it up and dissolved it in acid.
The thoughtful reader might remember Basil’s sense of doom right from the start of the book: ‘we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.’
The power of the unstated
Presumably Dorian was threatening to send a letter to some innocent woman which would reveal the immoral or illegal behaviour of someone and so shatter her illusions? Maybe to Campbell’s wife describing his immoral activities? We don’t know, Wilde doesn’t tell us.
And this made me think three things:
1) Wilde can’t put a name to most of the awful immoral things Dorian has done because it was illegal to describe anything to do with sex (the state censor would have forbidden the book from being published).
2) Quite possibly the lack of detail about Dorian’s activities in the long, elliptical list Basil Hallward iterates, maybe it was the lack of detail, which made it worse. Because contemporary readers could project their own worst imaginings into the vague hints and maybe a lot of readers’ imaginings were actually worse, more sordid, than even Wilde intended. Not specifying what he meant made the book feel even more ‘immoral’ because every single reader filled the gaps with the worst they could imagine. In this respect, its vagueness perfectly fits one of the epigrams in the preface. The vague hints and dire rumours of Dorian’s misdeeds allowed the reader to project onto it their worst imaginings which promptly triggered ‘the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass’.
3) The obvious thought that if Wilde had specified Dorian’s misdeeds, they would have aged and dulled. Did he mean luring young men into homosexual practices or taking drugs? Did the young women whose reputations he ruined simply have premarital affairs with him? Not much along these lines would shock a 2024 readership. Keeping the details of all Dorian’s misdoings is one of the things that gives the book its timeless, fairy tale effect.
Chapter 16: Opium dens and James Vane
Dorian needs to obliterate all this from his memory so he dresses in disguise and, late at night, takes a cab far out East, down to the remote squalid docks. He enters a low drinking den and bumps into Adrian Singleton, one of the many young men, it is implied, who he has ‘ruined’ i.e. reduced to hanging round in the roughest pubs with slatternly whores.
As he leaves the pub one of the whores drunkenly yells at him, calling him by his ironic pseudonym, ‘Prince Charming’. Like a bolt of lightning up sits one of the drunks slumped at the bar for it is, of course, James Vane, now a 36-year-old grizzled old merchant seaman. He asks the whores to explain and they tell him the man who just left is a byword for corruption and depravity who they all know by his nickname ‘Prince Charming’.
Correctly thinking this must be the same privileged user who caused his sister’s death, Vane blunders out into the foggy night and follows Dorian down black backstreets eventually catching up with him down some dark back alley and thrusting him against the wall by his throat. He pulls out a pistol and is about to finish Dorian who, in his wild panic, has a brainwave and tells Vane to pull him over to a nearby streetlight and look at his face.
When he does so, Vane, of course, sees that Dorian is a young, innocent pretty boy. No way does he look like the middle-aged degenerate he ought to be. Puzzled and then scared that he nearly shot an innocent man, Vane staggers back and lets go Dorian, who gives him a smart aristocratic reprimand then departs into the night.
But the incident isn’t over. One of the whores had followed Vane and now asks him why he didn’t finish Dorian off? When Vane explains that he’s only a boy, the whore laughs and says it’s 18 years since he turned her into what she is (i.e. a prostitute). And out of the mouth of this prostitute comes the simple explanation that ‘he has sold his soul to the devil for a pretty face’ (p.211). Vane realises his mistake and rushes out into the street but Dorian has disappeared in the London fog. But this storyline isn’t over.
Chapter 17
In a really vivid example of the book’s deliberate use of dualities, the next chapter switches from the fog and squalid drinking dens of the East End back to the purlieus of the rich, in this case the conservatory at Selby Royal, the main country estate Dorian inherited from his grandfather. On the face of it, from the poor to the posh, although Wilde gives it a twist by making it the setting for a quite sustained attack on the English character by Lord Henry:
‘You don’t like your country, then?’ she asked.
‘I live in it.’
‘That you may censure it the better.’
‘Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?’ he inquired.
‘What do they say of us?’
‘That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop.’
‘Is that yours, Harry?’
‘I give it to you.’
‘I could not use it. It is too true.’
‘You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description.’
‘They are practical.’
‘They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.’
‘Still, we have done great things.’
‘Great things have been thrust on us.’
‘We have carried their burden.’
‘Only as far as the Stock Exchange.’
She shook her head. ‘I believe in the race,’ she cried.
‘It represents the survival of the pushing.’
Obviously the word ‘burden’ rings bells for anyone familiar with Kipling’s 1899 poem, The White Man’s Burden, and is a kind of pre-emptive mockery of it.
Lord Henry and the Duchess of Monmouth exchange epigrams like characters in an Oscar Wilde play for half a dozen pages before they hear a cry and a thud, and rush to find Dorian fainted on the conservatory floor. He reassures everyone he is OK, dresses for dinner and is gaiety itself at table, but all the time, in the manner of the best Victorian melodrama / horror story:
Now and then a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.
Chapter 18
Stuff like this is what Peter Ackroyd (who supplied an introduction to the 1985 Penguin Classic edition of Dorian which I read) means when he talks about Wilde’s tendency to high Victorian melodrama:
The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself. The consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him. If the tapestry did but tremble in the wind, he shook. The dead leaves that were blown against the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild regrets. When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor’s face peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to lay its hand upon his heart.
Anyway, the Vane threat is quickly dealt with. Next day there is a shooting party on Dorian’s estate and even as he’s chatting to one of the guests, the duchess of Monmouth’s brother, Sir Geoffrey Clouston, he spots a hare jumping up and running towards a copse and fires at it – only for them all to hear a human shout. On investigation the man is found to be dead.
Lord Henry assures him it is just a ghastly accident afflicting the lower classes and he should forget about it but Dorian, of course, as he has to since the novel is reaching its climax, feels oppressed by a sense of doom and foreboding, expressed in some of Wilde’s most overripe prose:
‘I feel as if something horrible were going to happen to some of us. To myself…I have no terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me. Its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me…’
But that is not quite all. For that evening the head-keeper comes to Dorian to report on the corpse. Dorian is preparing to sign a check for the man’s family when the head-keeper says he wasn’t one of their staff, in fact no-one knows who he was. Seems he was a sailor from the tattoos on his arms. Dorian leaps up. Could it be…the sailor brother of Sibyl Vane whose face he thought he saw through the conservatory window? With Lorna Doone-style bodice-ripping adventure style he rushes to the stables and leaps onto a horse to gallop down to the outhouses where the body is being kept.
In less than a quarter of an hour, Dorian Gray was galloping down the long avenue as hard as he could go. The trees seemed to sweep past him in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his path. Once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him. He lashed her across the neck with his crop. She cleft the dusky air like an arrow. The stones flew from her hoofs.
At the outhouse he gets a servant to remove the covering from the corpse’s face and sees that it is none other than James Vane! A wholly inappropriate cry of joy escapes his lips. He is safe!
Chapter 19
Dorian tells Harry he is going to reform. He had been seeing a country peasant girl off and on and was due to run away with her in order, in the usual way, to deflower her then chuck her, but at the last minute he didn’t show at their assignation. He is going to turn over a new leaf. He is going to reform. (The reader can’t help wondering if this is what Dorian’s ‘wickedness’ amounted to? Seducing country girls like every other second-rate rake?)
Anyway the entire chapter consists of Dorian swearing he is going to reform and Lord Henry rattling off epigram after epigram, apothegms about art and life and sincerity and whatnot till Dorian and the reader are quite exhausted. Specifically, Dorian blames him for poisoning him with the book he lent him (the one Wilde freely admitted to being based on ‘Against Nature’), to which Lord Henry gives a characteristically aesthetic reply:
‘As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.’
Lord Henry invites him to go with him to the club but Dorian cries off saying it is 11pm and he is tired, so puts his coat on and sets off to walk home (evidently they have been at Lord Henry’s rooms).
Chapter 20
The short final chapter. Anyone reading a hard copy knows they are at the end of the story. In a world-weary mood Dorian arrives home at his apartment reflecting on the strange tale of his life. Suddenly he wonders whether his good deed of the last few days i.e. not running off with the country virgin, might possibly start to cleanse the portrait. Maybe a sustained period of moral living could heal it. In an optimistic mood Dorian climbs the stairs to the attic but, when he takes the cover off the portrait is appalled to see that the blood on its hands seems to have spread and there is a new look of cunning and hypocrisy in its eyes. Was he deceiving himself when he spared the country lass or was it, as Lord Henry suggested, just a new kind of sensation for an inveterate sensation seeker?
Suddenly he is sickened and disgusted by the portrait which has ruined his life. Once more he sees the knife with which he murdered Basil Hallward, which he has washed and cleaned many times, lying to hand. He picks it up and stabs the portrait in its wicked heart and…feels the impact in his own heart, staggers, collapses and dies! His cry of agony is heard by the servants and by passersby out in the square.
After some confabulation, the servants creep up to the long-locked attic and discover there the body of a horribly bloated, withered, agèd old man (Dorian) lying dead with a knife through his heart in front of Basil Hallward’s portrait, which has been magically restored to its pristine beauty.
In a sense the best thing about the book is the way it ends there with no explanation or moralising or clever sayings, no funeral, no eulogy from Lord Henry, nothing. It needs nothing more. It is perfect as it is. It has the perfection of a thousands fairy stories and legends behind it, indeed Dorian has a claim to be Wilde’s best fairy story.
Commentary
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a brilliant fable, a retelling of the ancient Faust legend but with a lightness and delicacy which connects it with Wilde’s lovely fairy stories. It says something so profound about life that it feels like it – the story – ought to have happened. And so the fable, and the name, have become a permanent part of the culture because it speaks to some deep truth in all of us. In his own lifetime Wilde knew he had written a classic and he was correct.
A book of dualities
He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life. (p.192)
Sexual hypocrisy
It is a cliché that the late-Victorian high society led a double life riven with hypocrisy. Victorian bourgeois men in particular heartily endorsed a rhetoric of strict public morality but in private, provided the market for the largest population of prostitutes of any European city.
Dual life of a gay man
Wilde also partook of this double life, in public a successful writer and man about town, husband of a society beauty and father of two lovely children – all the while living a secret life as a gay man and using sex workers, or rent boys as we used to call them back in the day, as much as the famously hypocritical bourgeoisie used London’s vast population of female prostitutes.
London a city of extremes
London was famous for the duality between its rich and poor. At one extreme it was a city of dazzling opulence, led by the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Royal family, the aristocracy, the House of Lords, gentlemen’s clubs, great public shindigs like the Lord Mayor’s Show etc. At the other extreme were the East End slums pullulating with poverty and the docks seething with foreign seamen, opium dens, the roughest type of prostitution etc. See my review of Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel A Child of the Jago.
The doppelgänger
The theme of characters having doubles or doppelgängers, of consciously or unconsciously leading double lives, had been a major theme in literature since the Romantic revolution of the early 1800s. In a text like Gray it reaches a kind of apotheosis, with the stark binary contrast between the man and his portrait, the one leading a charmed life, the other accumulating all the signs of ‘sin’ which should, by rights, have been marking the mortal. Probably the acme of the literature of doubles is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published just four years before Wilde began Dorian.
Two styles
This duality is reflected by the way the book has two completely different styles, 1) the deliberately drawling and nonchalant superficiality of the drawing room comedy and 2) the florid emotions and over-ripe style of Victorian melodrama.
I noted in my review of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime how easily Wilde slips into very purple melodrama, all wailing about Fate and Destiny and Tragedy. There is a duality in the text between these two modes which reflects the different psychologies and moods of the different worlds or scenes.
Quotable lines
DORIAN: ‘You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.’
I like cutting and pasting quotes into lists like this because 1) it makes me linger over them that little bit longer. Also 2) it makes you realise that the Lord Henry parts of the novel are as much a bombardment of bon mots as the plays are. And 3) makes you realise just how many of these lines were lifted wholesale from his earlier essays and/or were to be recycled wholesale into the plays.
Unless otherwise stated, all the lines are spoken by the Wilde avatar, Lord Henry Wotton:
‘The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.’
‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’
‘You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.’ ‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,’ cried Lord Henry, laughing.
‘As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.’
‘I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’
‘Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.’
‘The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.’
‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.’
‘People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’
‘Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.’
‘I adore simple pleasures,’ said Lord Henry. ‘They are the last refuge of the complex.’
‘I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.’
‘What a fuss people make about fidelity!’ exclaimed Lord Henry. ‘Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.’
LORD FERMOR: ‘Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.”
‘Yes,’ murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat, ‘and when they grow older they know it.’
LORD FERMOR: ‘Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.’
LORD FERMOR: ‘Why can’t these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.’
Lord Henry: ‘It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
‘I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.’
‘Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.’
‘When America was discovered,’ said the Radical member — and he began to give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
‘But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel,’ continued Lady Agatha.
‘I can sympathize with everything except suffering,’ said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. ‘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.’
‘Still, the East End is a very important problem,’ remarked Sir Thomas with a grave shake of the head.’
‘Quite so,’ answered the young lord. ‘It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves.’ (recycled from The Soul of Man Under Socialism)
‘Ah! Lord Henry, I wish you would tell me how to become young again.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Can you remember any great error that you committed in your early days, Duchess?’ he asked, looking at her across the table.
‘A great many, I fear,’ she cried.
‘Then commit them over again,’ he said gravely. ‘To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.’
‘A delightful theory!’ she exclaimed. ‘I must put it into practice.’
Lord Henry’s wife, Victoria, Lady Wotton:
She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.
LADY WOTTON: ‘I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage, don’t you think so, Mr. Gray?’
LADY WOTTON: ‘You have never been to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray? You must come. I can’t afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners. They make one’s rooms look so picturesque.’
LORD HENRY: ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ (recycled in Lady Windermere’s Fan)
‘Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
‘My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.’
‘As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.’
‘My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect — simply a confession of failure.’
‘When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
DORIAN: ‘The Jew wanted to tell me her history, but I said it did not interest me.’
LORD HENRY: ‘You were quite right. There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.’
‘Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.’
Experience Is of no ethical value. It Is merely the name men gave to their mistakes. (recycled in Lady Windermere’s Fan)
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. (Recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
‘Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Quite serious, Basil. I should be miserable if I thought I should ever be more serious than I am at the present moment.’
‘I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.’
‘You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man’s existence. Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience.’
‘Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.’ (recycled from The Soul of Man under Socialism)
‘You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?’ (recycled in The Critic as Artist)
‘I love acting. it is so much more real than life.’
‘It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting.’
‘There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.’
‘Good heavens, my dear boy, don’t look so tragic! The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.’
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him.
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
‘One should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.’
‘My dear Dorian,’ answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case and producing a gold-latten matchbox, ‘the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.’
‘Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.’
DORIAN: ‘Don’t talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.’
DORIAN: ‘It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. 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…To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.’
‘The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,’ said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.
‘Lord Henry, I am not at all surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked.’
‘But what world says that?’ asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows. ‘It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
‘It is perfectly monstrous,’ he said, at last, ‘the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
‘When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.’
‘Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.’
LADY NARBOROUGH: ‘Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
LADY NARBOROUGH: ‘Don’t tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
‘I like him,’ said Lord Henry. ‘A great many people don’t, but I find him charming. He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated.’ (recycled in The Importance of Being Earnest)
‘The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.’ (reworked in The Importance of Being Earnest)
‘Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues…You, as a good Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.’
‘Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.’
‘The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.’
‘Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.’
‘Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.’
‘The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.’
‘To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
Antisemitism
The fact that Wilde is a martyr to the LGBTIQA+ movement sometimes masks unfortunate aspects of his work less acceptable to modern sensibilities. He was, after all, a man of his times. I called out unacceptable antisemitic tropes in the work of Saki and do so here.
DORIAN: ‘I went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black grassless squares. About half-past eight I passed by an absurd little theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. ‘Have a box, my Lord?’ he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous servility. There was something about him, Harry, that amused me. He was such a monster…
…There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young Hebrew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the drop-scene was drawn up and the play began.’
This Jew, the manager of the East End theatre where Sibyl performs, turns out to have been very charitable to Sibyl’s mother, taken on all their debts, and is financing her son, Jim, to go to sea. There are half a dozen more, consistently disparaging, references to him in the Vane subplot. A little disturbing…
But then the book is made up of stereotypes, starting with its basis in the Faust legend, going on to stereotype all its characters, such as:
- the insouciant aesthete
- the earnest artist
- the innocent young virgin
- the vengeful brother
- the haggard single mother
all the way through to the servants, and the tradesman – Mr Hubbard, ‘the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street’ is ‘a florid, red-whiskered little man’.
They’re all stereotypes and clichés, which is one of the main things which makes the book more like a fairy story than a serious novel. And, of course, the book is simply crammed with stereotyped men and women spouting stereotypical epigrams about men and women, the woes of marriage etc (see below).
But modern (2024) culture is (rightly) more sensitive to the negative stereotyping of Jews wherever it occurs than these other paradigms which is why I am highlighting it here.
Sexism
Ditto his attitudes to women which, for someone posing as a refined dandy and an aesthete, can be surprisingly insulting. The comments the Wilde avatar, Sir Henry, are definitely sexist but do they go so far as to be misogynist? I suppose one defence is that these are the opinions of characters in a novel; but identical sentiments are expressed by the Wilde-type figures in all four plays, as well as by characters in his dialogue-essays, so… It’s a consistent, and consistently negative, attitude to women found across all Wilde’s work.
LORD HENRY: ‘Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.’
LORD HENRY: ‘Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.’
LORD HENRY: ‘My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals…
LORD HENRY: ‘There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That is all over now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society…’
DORIAN: ‘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 find 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 their stereotyped smile and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious.’
Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
‘Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.’
‘I should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to us,’ murmured the lad gravely. ‘They create love in our natures. They have a right to demand it back.’
‘That is quite true, Dorian,’ cried Hallward.
‘Nothing is ever quite true,’ said Lord Henry.
‘This is,’ interrupted Dorian. ‘You must admit, Harry, that women give to men the very gold of their lives.’
‘Possibly,’ he sighed, ‘but they invariably want it back in such very small change. That is the worry. Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.’
Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have someone with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were.
‘That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar…
‘The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art…
‘Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history. Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one’s face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and I can quite understand it. Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. Yes; there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life…
DORIAN: ‘I was terribly cruel to her. You forget that.’
LORD HENRY: ‘I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.’
‘She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.’
LORD HENRY: ‘Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.’
DUCHESS OF MONMOUTH: ‘Not with women,’ said the duchess, shaking her head; ‘and women rule the world. I assure you we can’t bear mediocrities. We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.’
DUCHESS OF MONMOUTH: ‘Describe us as a sex.’
LORD HENRY: ‘Sphinxes without secrets.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)
Wilde’s cult of Individualism and amorality
Individualism is the basis of Wilde’s worldview, expressed most fully in The Soul of Man under Socialism. The aim of life is to develop and express one’s personality.
‘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.’
Interestingly, Wilde anticipates Freud’s dynamic model of the ego or consciousness of man being in permanent turmoil.
He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
Obviously that bit at the end of Gothic melodrama but Freud would recognise the general drift. As to ‘morality’, there is no morality when it comes to seeking pleasure. Pleasure-seeking is deliberately amoral.
‘Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.’
Wilde completely upends traditional notions of morality which entail self-restraint, to praise self-expression at every opportunity, the pursuit of every sensation, and refuses to call anything a sin.
‘The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.’
Or:
‘I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.’
You can see why Victorian society was outraged. If someone appeared now, in 2024, preaching that every man should abandon all restraint, seek out every possible experience and sensation, live only for pleasure and self expression, combined with his sustained denigration of women, the outcry, not least from feminists, would be just as loud.
Tell-tale adjectives
Lord Henry goes on about the point of life being to constantly experience new things, new thoughts, new sensations, new ideas. Yet it’s striking how monotonous Wilde’s vocabulary is. When describing beautiful people (Dorian, Sibyl) he invariably compares them to lilies (10 instances), ivory (9) or silver (24).
The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.
Lord Henry’s influence is continually described as dangerous (8), and propounding ideas which are strange (67), curious (59), fascinating (36), terrible (40), full of sins (37), terror (29), horror (24) and poison (21). Amazing how much mileage you can get from ringing the changes on this handful of key words.
It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him…
He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety…
Once you start recognising this handful of a dozen or so key words, and the simple melodramatic ideas behind them, you begin to understand why this, like all Wilde’s works, is brilliantly imagined, classic in storyline and character, stuffed with clever epigrams and yet, at the same time, curiously (to use one of his own words) superficial and shallow.
Although Dorian horrified adult critics at the time, just a generation later it was being treated as one more of his delightful, if rather gruesome, fairy stories.
And then, like so much of the fiction of the 1890s, despite being written for adults, after the apocalypse of the First World War, it came to seem childish and superficial. Not exactly children’s stories but not really stories for serious adults.
Related links
Oscar Wilde reviews
Books & Boots 