Introduction

TOWARD the end of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Duchess of Monmouth wonders jokingly what nickname Lord Henry Wotton might be known by, and Dorian instantly replies, “Prince Paradox.” The name fits perfectly, for paradoxes bob often in the wake of Lord Henry’s sparkling conversation. He complains, for example, about gossips who say things about him behind his back that are “absolutely and entirely true.” On other occasions he leaves us pondering why only tedious subjects can be spoken of seriously, how a fellow could have no enemies and yet be thoroughly disliked by all his friends, or why philanthropists lose all sense of humanity.

Oscar Wilde, whose powers of self-admiration were impressive, painted much of himself into his entertaining Prince Paradox. He gave Lord Henry his own tall frame, well-known languorous, heavy-lidded eyes, mesmerizing gestures of the hands (holding his trademark gold-tipped cigarettes), and the same musical, dreamy contralto voice that so many of Wilde’s friends singled out for praise. (The only faux pas: Lord Henry is called “graceful,” but Wilde himself had an oddly loping, elephantine gait.) Wilde also cast Lord Henry in exactly the role of delightful yet demoralizing celebrity that he played himself on the rather dull, self-righteous stage of late-Victorian England. We know from countless reminiscences of the 1890s that Lord Henry’s performance at his Aunt Agatha’s luncheon perfectly reflects Wilde’s own imperial sway over the dinner parties and salons of London high society: “He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves.”

There are many ways to approach the “brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible” world of Dorian Gray and its author, but none is better than considering the modes of paradox. For Wilde was a veritable King Paradox, a perfectly antithetical consort for that most literal-minded of royals, Queen Victoria. The London Times marveled at Wilde’s “passion for paradox, persiflage, and proverbial perversity” (he also loved to alliterate), and Robert Ross, his closest friend, looked back on Wilde’s life many years later and summed it up with a paradox: “It was natural to Wilde to be artificial.” Henry James noticed Wilde’s “cheeky paradoxical wit” too, though not with pleasure. Small wonder, then, that those seeking to capture Wilde’s essence have often employed paradoxes, calling him, for example, a contented ogre, a serious playboy, a conformist rebel, and a genuine counterfeiter.

Now, the dictionary defines paradox as a seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true. Wilde, however, improves upon that definition when he has Mr. Erskine say, in Dorian Gray, “the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” Testing verities is an exhilarating but dangerous game, especially during an era, like the Victorian, whose social and moral verities had been in place for so long and were still credited by so many Englishmen.

Paradox ushers the reader into the most subversive and profound undercurrents in Wilde’s art, and this is doubtless why Wilde wrote, just a year before creating Lord Henry, that “paradoxes are always dangerous things.” Any acrobatics worthy of the name require a sense of danger, a dizzying elevation from the ordinary, the mundane. One of the main pleasures of Wilde’s writings—and of Dorian Gray in particular—is our awareness that the author is taking astonishing risks, that he is venturing out on the giddy high wire of paradox. This produces the exciting tension in so many aspects of Dorian Gray: its artistic form and structure, its “moral” or philosophic position, and its revelation of Wilde’s own views on art, his world, and himself.

It is possible, of course, to read and enjoy Dorian Gray without being drawn into the often disconcerting, frustrating convolutions of paradox beneath its surface. Lord Henry Wotton himself encourages us to relish its many simple and immediately apparent pleasures in typical paradoxical fashion when he observes, “It is only the shallow who do not judge by appearances.” Walter Pater, an idol of Wilde’s early career and the main source of the aesthetic philosophizing in Dorian Gray, chose to be “deep” in Lord Henry’s sense and judged the work by its appearance in his review for the Book-man in 1891; he skated lightly on its surface, marveling at the author’s “genial, laughter-loving sense of life” displayed in this “always” clever book. Like Lord Henry, who “adores the simple” (it’s the last refuge of the complex, he adds), Pater delighted in the simple “vivid” story and its “very plain moral . . . to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse and ugly.”

Certainly, simple pleasures are abundant in Dorian Gray. Almost every page displays a characteristically Wildean blend of intellectual playfulness and rhetorical virtuosity. His suave expressions are Mozartean in their balance and neatness—as, for example, when Lord Henry opines, “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.” Many of Wilde’s other well-honed skills are inspired tampering with the well-known phrase (“Conscience makes egotists of us all”) or the commonplace (women are called “Sphinxes without secrets”), surprising denials of expectation (“One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing”), and potent alliteration (“What they call their loyalty . . . I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination”).

These skills made him a brilliant aphorist, probably the greatest the English language has produced. Many of his most familiar aphorisms are from Dorian Gray, and a minor but distinct pleasure of reading the novel is coming upon them in their original habitat. Such darts as these flung at the human race hit the bull’s-eye when Wilde first penned them—and still do:

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

 

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

 

It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting.

 

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

Thus, one is tempted to read the novel rather as one walks down a fine English garden border, plucking witty specimens for a bouquet of one’s own.

The other superficial aspect of the novel that takes no trouble to enjoy is its often hilariously withering social, cultural, and political satire on late-Victorian England. “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde’s most important contribution to political science, was written during the Dorian period, and the novel could easily have carried as its subtitle, “The Soul of Man Under Victorianism.” “English society is all wrong,” says Wilde’s doomed painter Basil Hallward, and specifics of that thesis are pursued by Wilde on various fronts throughout the novel. Dorian calls England “the native land of the hypocrite,” and that view is reiterated later by Lord Henry: “Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop.” The literary scene is nicely lampooned by Mr. Erskine when he tells of forty men snoozing in the armchairs of his club and adds, “We are practicing for an English Academy of Letters.” The aristocracy is roundly thumped, too: its art is that of “doing absolutely nothing,” and one example of the species—Lord Henry’s uncle, Lord Fermor—is wickedly skewered: “His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.” The married, the philanthropic, the middle-class—all are harassed by Wilde’s cynical wit. “Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is,” Lord Henry tells the Duchess of Monmouth. As throughout his career, moralists evoked Wilde’s particular ire in Dorian Gray, for he despised their earnest desire to foist a “good” of their own invention upon others. “We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices,” says Lord Henry; only prigs and Puritans, he adds, are inclined to do so.

All the playful fireworks of verbal dexterity and wit are bound to overwhelm the first-time reader. James Joyce was probably thinking of the novel’s glittering surface when he called it “crowded with lies and epigrams.” Seen in this way, Dorian Gray is rather like the elaborate gown, covered with five hundred and sixty pearls, that Dorian wears to a costume ball in Chapter 11. The crowded epigrams are stunningly apparent, but where are the lies Joyce refers to? Privately, Wilde might have confessed to Joyce that he was right, for in a letter to Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he admitted, “I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth.” Publicly, though, Wilde—who loved having things both ways in his life and art—would have brazened it out and construed Joyce’s complaint as a compliment. Indeed, in an essay written just before embarking on Dorian Gray, “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde praised the artist who lies and even asserted that “the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.”

He might have ventured further and added, in his patented paradoxical fashion, another liar’s aim: “to tell the truth.” That the lie is the gateway to the truth became an article of Wilde’s faith. One finds it expressed in the very title of an essay he was preparing for publication as he revised Dorian Gray, “The Truth of Masks.” And this view figures prominently in “The Critic as Artist,” an essay in the form of a dialogue also from the Dorian period. Here we learn that “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Several times in Dorian Gray this central tenet of Wilde’s artistic life is paraphrased, notably in aphorisms about acting. “I love acting,” says Lord Henry, “it is so much more real than life.” Much later, the narrator observes about Dorian, “one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.” And just as Wilde submitted truths to the tight-rope of paradox, so he did with Truth itself. “A Truth in art,” he explained, “is that whose contradictory is also true.” Dorian Gray embodies this dictum in many ways, which perhaps explains why even so probing a reader as Joyce Carol Oates is left with the feeling that the novel is “a puzzle: knotted, convoluted, brilliantly enigmatic.”

Each reader must confront and attempt to resolve Dorian’s enigma individually, and this requires delving behind poses, beneath masks and disguises, below the novel’s exquisite surface. Risks attend such exploration, as Wilde points out in his preface: “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.” This is not, I am convinced, a prohibition or even a warning, but rather an invitation. For Wilde was fascinated by peril, thin ice, and the taking of terrible risks in his own life. A character in a play he wrote a few years later speaks for him when he says, “Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living.” Before we take our perilous look beneath the novel’s epigrammatic surface and behind the famous symbol that hangs imprisoned for most of its “life” on the top floor of Dorian Gray’s Mayfair townhouse, however, it is necessary to pause to consider its gestation and remarkable artistic form. The story begins, aptly enough, in the City of Brotherly Love.

 

In 1882, at the age of twenty-seven, Wilde embarked on a yearlong tour of the United States and Canada, lecturing on art connoisseurship, interior decoration, and Irish poetry at over 130 cities stretching from Bangor, Maine, to Montreal, San Francisco, and New Orleans. He arrived as an Aesthetic Movement celebrity and was lionized at each new venue. Much satirical fun, too, was made of him for his affected dress and effete tastes. His tour manager, Richard D’Oyly Carte, knew this would happen, and he shrewdly arranged a simultaneous American tour of Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical spoof on Aestheticism and Wilde himself, Patience. At a party in his honor in Philadelphia, Wilde met the publishers J. B. Lippincott and J. M. Stoddart, and Stoddart later accompanied him across the Delaware River to the famous meeting with Walt Whitman, who pronounced Wilde “a great big, splendid boy.” Wilde enjoyed a few more years of notoriety on returning to London. But his settling into a life of freelance journalism, his marriage in 1884 to Constance Lloyd, and his apparent immersion in the respectable task of raising two young sons (Cyril and Vyvyan, born in 1885 and 1886) all combined to cause him to “drop from the scene” for several years. Stoddart had not forgotten him, though. In 1889 he was the managing editor of Lippincott’s Magazine and a visitor to London prowling for new fiction. On August 30 he dined with Conan Doyle and Wilde and emerged with promises from both to write for his magazine. The former produced the second Holmes tale, The Sign of Four; the latter sent off to America in November a long, exotic romance fable, “The Fisherman and His Soul.” Stoddart found it not quite right for Lippincott’s and rejected it. Wilde quickly reconsidered and by December was able to write Stoddart, “I have invented a new story which is better than ‘The Fisherman and His Soul,’ and I am quite ready to set to work at once on it.” The new story was Dorian Gray, and in due course a version of over 50,000 words appeared on pages 3-100 of the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine (it was published simultaneously in Philadelphia and London, but all copies were printed in America).

The furor was enormous. Wilde already had a reputation for dubious, corrupting aesthetic and moral views, and the new novel ratified the worst suspicions of Victorian editors and reviewers. The Daily Chronicle thought its atmosphere was “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction” and “effeminate frivolity.” “Why go grubbing in muck heaps?” demanded the Scots Observer in foamy dudgeon, adding that this novel whose “hero is a devil” was clearly written for “none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”—a reference to exiled homosexual aristocrats and delivery boys, who sometimes augmented their income through prostitution. W. H. Smith’s, the news seller, refused to stock Dorian Gray, deeming it “filthy.” Constance Wilde noticed that she and her husband were often snubbed after the novel appeared.

Wilde took the offensive several times in letters to editors. Seeking to downplay the unseemliness of having to defend himself, however, he did tell the Scots Observer that “of the two hundred and sixteen criticisms of Dorian Gray that have passed from my library table into the wastebasket I have taken public notice of only three.” Wilde expressed himself more candidly in private correspondence. “It has been attacked on ridiculous grounds,” he wrote to an admirer, “but I think it will ultimately be recognized as a real work of art with a strong ethical lesson inherent in it.” He told Conan Doyle, “I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral.” To another acquaintance he confided, “It is my best piece of work, and I hope to make it still better, when it appears in book form.”

The novel was indeed published as a book by Ward, Lock and Company less than a year later, in April 1891. Wilde took great pains to render its moral less obvious (and hence more artistic), suppress some (though by no means all) of its implicit homosexual themes, and expand the narrative to make more credible the passage of nearly twenty years in Dorian’s life. Many substantial and telling changes were made throughout the novel, and six new chapters were added: the present chapters 3, 5, 15, 16, 17, and 18. This final version added over fifty pages of text, or a quarter of the length of the Lippincott’s version. For some staid reviewers all these changes were to no avail; the Athenaeum, for instance, pronounced the book “unmanly, sickening, vicious.” Such attacks, it seems, succeeded in pushing the novel off the 1890s English literary scene, for the Ward, Lock edition of only a thousand copies took four years to sell out.

Fortunately, texts reflecting three stages of writing and revision prior to the Ward, Lock edition still exist. The earliest is a manuscript in Wilde’s hand with many of his changes and deletions (it is now in the Morgan Library in New York City). The next version is a typescript that Wilde used to make last-minute changes prior to its Lippincott’s publication (it is in the Clark Library, U.C.L.A.). This typescript contains many changes, suppressions, and outright acts of censorship made by Wilde himself and Stoddart. No intervening version containing the numerous changes made for the Ward, Lock edition has survived, though handwritten copies of three of the new chapters have come to light.

The author’s artistic intentions are often strikingly revealed by the material he added, altered, or subtracted from his novel, and several scholars who have closely compared the final version with its predecessors have expanded our appreciation of Dorian Gray. Unfortunately, these valuable resources cannot tell us much about the most astounding authorial feat Wilde achieved in his novel. This feat, like so much else in Wilde’s life and art, can only be expressed in the form of a paradox: Dorian Gray has been almost unanimously accounted a highly original fiction, yet Wilde constructed it from a large array of time-honored, fashionable, or even hackneyed literary genres and devices. With this novel he proved himself—as Shakespeare did with his always purloined plots—a consummate thieving magpie. He was able to shape a variety of fictional modes into something utterly personal, inimitably Wildean. It is as if an architect were to employ in his design Gothic flying buttresses, Romanesque vaults, Greek columns, crenelated castle towers, gargoyles, and rococo plasterwork and yet somehow be able to produce an edifice with an integrity and unity entirely its own.

A few of the many fictional traditions that Wilde so efficiently appropriated may be mentioned. Most prominent, of course, is the DEVIL’S BARGAIN, the exchange of one’s eternal soul for extreme but, alas, temporary gratification, an idea Wilde himself admitted “is old in the history of literature.” Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Goethe’s Faust both wink at the reader from behind Dorian’s shoulder, and two favorites of Wilde, Poe and Balzac, also employed the pact with the devil. Then there is the FALL FROM GRACE: Dorian is utterly innocent when we first meet him, is tempted, then falls—as Satan himself fell—through pride. Late in the novel Wilde associates Dorian with Satan, “that high spirit, that morning star of evil,” and the view we are given of Dorian “concentrated on evil” is exactly in the style of Milton’s Satan when he exults, “Evil be thou my good.” AGENBYTE OF INWIT is a fine old Anglo-Saxon phrase meaning remorse of conscience (close kin to the “yaller dog” conscience that sinks its fangs into Huck Finn); it identifies another potent and time-honored narrative tradition, namely, the pleasure we derive from observing a sinner hounded to his demise by a relentless, hyperactive imagination. Wilde’s technique is precisely that of Shakespeare in Macbeth when he describes Dorian’s anguish toward the end: “It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin.” Lady Macbeth’s “damned spot” is hallucinated, but in Basil’s picture the horrible truth is, for Dorian, all too real.

Dorian feels “keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life,” and this puts him and his creator firmly in the popular Romantic tradition of THE DOPPELG̈NGER OR ALTER EGO. The doubled lives of Dorian and his painted self perhaps owe something to dual-personality stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Poe, and Dostoevsky, but almost certainly Wilde was influenced by the highly successful Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) of Robert Louis Stevenson, whom Wilde much admired as a “delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose.” Another important European literary tradition present in Dorian carries a German name, the BILDUNGSROMAN. This is a novel that follows the early development and spiritual education of its main character. Dorian at the outset is a charmingly naive tabula rasa. He is most unfortunate in his choice of teacher, yet proves a thoroughly educable student of Lord Henry’s cynicism and vanity. Also famously associated with pedagogy is the SOCRATIC OR PLATONIC DIALOGUE. Wilde produced two brilliant works in this form, “The Critic as Artist” and “The Decay of Lying.” In each of them an old, worldly-wise speaker discourses to a young, inquisitive listener. The lively, probing conversations between Lord Henry and Dorian, and later those in which Dorian dominates Basil, owe much to this ancient Greek narrative device.

Wilde loved to say such things as “he hasn’t a single redeeming vice” or “wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.” This penchant reveals his devotion to the venerable tradition of THE PRAISE OF FOLLY. Wilde’s very first major essay, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” praised a forger and murderer as an exquisite artist. As Erasmus, among many others, recognized, the method of praising the apparently reprehensible is a very provocative and riveting strategy. It is the heart of Lord Henry’s conversational performances, like the one at his Aunt Agatha’s. We are told that, as he spoke, “the praise of folly . . . soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young . . . and danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life.” When Lord Henry disappears from the action, Dorian performs similarly but in more ominous minor keys.

Lord Henry asserts that we can “have in life but one great experience.” For many memorable literary figures the great experience is a DARK JOURNEY. This was certainly true for Wilde in real life: his great experience was to be thrust into the penal darkness of Reading Prison after his conviction for homosexual acts in 1895. Dorian’s Chapter 16 cab ride to the opium den under a moon that hangs low in the sky “like a yellow skull” symbolizes, for Wilde, Dorian’s voyage into the heart of his own spiritual darkness.

Darkness of a more melodramatic sort in Dorian Gray is perhaps accounted for by its many reflections of the GOTHIC NOVEL, a tradition that began with Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) and continued with such works as the writing of Mary Shelley, the Bronẗs, Poe, and Wilde’s own grand-uncle Charles Maturin, notably in his popular Melmoth the Wanderer. (After Wilde was released from prison, he wandered the Continent under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth.) Dorian Gray owes much of its exoticism and horror to the fearsome subterranean spaces, the arcane scientific machinery of experiment and torture, and the violent deaths and hideous corpses of the Gothic novel. The chemist’s grisly disposal of Basil’s body is a thoroughly Gothic episode. Dorian also owes much to the tradition of the DECADENT NOVEL, which is to say the French novelistic fashion epitomized by Th’ophile Gautier and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Lord Henry gives Dorian a “poisonous” yellow book that becomes the young man’s Bible, and many of Wilde’s first readers found the novel poisonous indeed and treated it with fear and loathing. Was the yellow book intended by Wilde to refer to Huysmans’ exotic, bejeweled novel A Rebours (1884)? To some who asked him he was coy: “The book that poisoned, or made perfect, Dorian Gray . . . does not exist: it is a fancy of mine merely.” To others he was more candid; the yellow book was “a fantastic variation on Huysmans’ over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age.” The yellow book’s “curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once,” certainly fits Huysmans’, and the Frenchman’s style is lavishly mimicked by Wilde in chapters 11 and 12.

Dorian Gray can also be considered a romantic MORAL FABLE for adults, and it bears many striking similarities to the children’s fables Wilde produced just before and during the time he was writing it. These tales were much admired by Wilde’s contemporaries and are still accounted among the finest in the language. He thought the best tale of his 1888 collection was “The Happy Prince,” which is included in this volume. It often anticipates the preoccupations of the novel: the statue of the Prince, it happens, has Lord Henry’s (and Wilde’s) “low musical voice,” and the swallow (also like Wilde in his own marriage) tires of his tedious mate and flies off to sample new experiences. As he did in Dorian Gray, Wilde also glances in this tale at the terrible regions of poverty in London and at the philistinism of its civic leaders. Other tales are also highly pertinent to the novel. “The Selfish Giant” is a Christian/socialist parable that offers a moving alternative to the anatomy of selfishness and narcissism in Dorian Gray. We have seen that the longest tale, “The Fisherman and His Soul,” was Wilde’s first submission to the American publisher of the novel, and it eventually appeared in his 1891 collection of tales, The House of Pomegranates. Not surprisingly, the tale makes a potent companion piece to the novel. The Fisherman’s struggles to free himself from the constraints of his Soul reflect powerfully on the doubling of Dorian and the picture that reveals his soul, and, as in the novel, the momentous contest between the Self and Society lies at the heart of the action.

Also apparent in many passages of the novel is the theatrical style of the Restoration COMEDY OF MANNERS. This style, whose outstanding feature is facetious, lively conversational volleying among several quick-tongued characters, is especially prominent in chapters 5, 15, and 17, which Wilde added for the 1891 edition. This is not surprising, for Wilde was on the eve of writing the first of his four successful drawing-room comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan, which premiered in early 1892. Indeed, some of the novel’s witticisms—like the Duchess of Harley’s remark that American women are all well-dressed because they get their clothes in Paris—were recycled in these plays.

Finally, it is worth noting that the tale’s central symbol was perhaps the most shopworn of all its elements. The device of the SUPERNATURAL PICTURE was astonishingly ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. Gogol’s The Portrait, Hawthorne’s Prophetic Pictures and Edward Randolph’s Portrait, Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, Henry James’s Story of a Masterpiece, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer are just some of the magic-picture works from well-known writers. Dozens of other haunted pictures are to be found in long-forgotten novels of the day, including one by Wilde’s acquaintance Edward Heron-Allen called Sylvester Gray, which came out the year before Dorian Gray. Why did Wilde risk trotting out yet another ghastly portrait? Perhaps because he was a sworn enemy of realistic painters. They paint only what the public sees, he chided, “and the public never sees anything.” A haunted portrait would be the perfect vehicle for harassing an obtuse Victorian public whose powers of appreciation were arrested at the primitive stage of realism.

 

One of Wilde’s most biting children’s fables, “The Devoted Friend,” appeared in 1888. In it a Linnet tells a Water-rat (in America, a muskrat) the story of a Miller who, by sheer force of fancy rhetoric, disguises total selfishness as generosity—a typical Wildean attack on philanthropists and professional do-gooders. The Water-rat is furious when he learns afterward that the story has had a moral: “Well, really,” he says angrily, “I think you should have told me that before you began. If you had done so, I certainly would not have listened to you.” A year later came Dorian Gray, a fable writ large in which the presence of a moral is overwhelmingly apparent. But just what precisely is that moral? This question was the focus of much controversy when the novel first appeared, and it remains the most crucial question for each reader to attempt to answer.

The loudest shrieks of dismay, like those we have noted in the Scots Observer, came from readers who perceived that the tale condoned homosexual love. Wilde had been an active member of the gay underground centered in London’s West End for three or four years when he wrote Dorian Gray, and his early versions are freighted with many astonishingly bold hints that “gross indecency” (then the term for homosexual acts in British law) figured behind the scenes of his novel. Clearly, though, Wilde was keenly aware of the risks his theme entailed. Every succeeding version he produced shows him further toning down or suppressing his story’s homosexual content. From the handwritten manuscript, for instance, Wilde deleted Basil’s telling of an excited moment when his adored Dorian’s cheek “just brushed my cheek”; he also deleted Basil’s confession to Lord Henry of his obsession: “I like . . . to think that he absolutely belongs to me. . . . Harry, I have given this young man my whole soul!” Friends in Wilde’s gay circle read the manuscript and also urged further suppression.

From the Lippincott’s edition were deleted references to harmless physical contact (a hand on a shoulder) and several passages such as Basil’s admission to Dorian himself: “I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow I never loved a woman. . . . I loved you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.” Readers of the Lippincott’s edition were left to speculate whether the “dreadful places” and “foulest dens” might be homosexual establishments, but in the final version Wilde added an elaborate description of Dorian’s visit to an opium den. In the magazine version the effect of Dorian’s friendship on several young men is called “fatal” but unspecified; in final book form, non-sexual forms of debauchery were added. When Wilde was on trial four years later, in 1895, for his gay escapades, the prosecutor of course pursued a conviction by relying on the bolder homosexual innuendos of the Lippincott’s version.

Everywhere in the final version, however, Wilde left not-so-subtle hints and encouragements to view the novel as being about—among other things, of course—homosexual experience. Basil says Dorian defines for him “the perfection of the spirit that is Greek,” and Greek culture was then popularly perceived as receptive to homosexuality. It is thus natural for Lord Henry to contrast the splendid “Hellenic ideal” with the “maladies of mediaevalism,” since it was largely during the medieval period that homosexuality came to be defined as sinful. Dorian is described as having “the face of Antinous” and as being drawn by Hallward sitting “on the prow of Adrian’s barge.” Such reference to Antinous, the gorgeous boy-lover of the emperor Hadrian, was a very common form of coded allusion to homosexuality in the 1890s. Basil’s love for Dorian is also associated with names prominent in the history of the quasi-homosexual cult of masculine friendship: Michelangelo, Montaigne, Winckelmann, and Shakespeare. Wilde, in fact, had published in 1889 a short story about the last-named and his beloved boy-actor, “The Portrait of Mr W. H.”

Much less obvious are several passages in the novel that would speak with special eloquence to readers whose sexual preference doomed them to lead secret and double lives. One thinks, for instance, of Hallward’s rueful remark that it is “better not to be different from one’s fellows” and of Lord Henry’s view (so true of Wilde’s real life) that some people who marry “are forced to have more than one life.” Wilde’s view of the dangers of denying and repressing one’s true sexual identity is perhaps voiced by Lord Henry when he says, “Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws” and only produce “sterile emotions.” And there is surely something of Wilde’s experience of feeling he was something horrible in the world’s eyes when he pauses and, in his authorial voice, observes in Chapter 16:

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses.

The distinction Wilde makes in the phrase I have italicized is vital to an understanding of his life and writing. For it is his way of saying that sexuality is a physical and psychological reality (of muscle fiber and brain cell) and that “sin” is merely a man-made fiction. By the 1890s, a scientific consensus was beginning to form that homosexuality was intrinsic or hereditary and not a product of free choice; this is one of the unspoken premises of Dorian Gray.

In Victorian England the “love that dare not speak its name”—as Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas famously termed homosexuality in his poem “Two Loves”—could not be spoken of in the course of literary controversy either. When his novel was attacked as “a wicked book,” Wilde had to ignore the obvious innuendo and take a higher road in self-defense. One strategy was to announce the real moral he had in mind in the pages of the St James’s Gazette: “The moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.” Basil, he explains, worships physical beauty “far too much” and is destroyed by the vanity he creates in Dorian; Dorian “tries to kill conscience” and in doing so kills himself. And Wilde added blisteringly, “Yes; there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray—a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.”

Should we take Wilde at his word and accept this as the final answer to the “moral” question? I don’t think so. Replying to the Scots Observer, Wilde remarked that the English public “like things to be explained to them in a tedious way,” and it may be that he offered his explanation of the obvious merely as a necessarily tedious public-relations ploy. Many of his revisions were clearly aimed at making his moral recede behind what he called the novel’s “artistic and dramatic effect.” And even then he confessed in a letter to Conan Doyle just before it appeared in final form, “it still seems to me that the moral is too obvious.” Wilde was exasperated by all the moral-hunting and moralizing of reviewers. Lord Henry says, “We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices,” and Wilde especially despised moral prejudices applied to art. It is thus no surprise to find the following aphorism in the Preface he added for the Ward, Lock edition: “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

But can we take even this view as quite true? Again, I am doubtful. Lord Henry, after all, informs us, “Nothing is ever quite true,” and that may well apply to assertions authors make about their own works—and assertions made by authors of forewords. Is there, in other words, a moral to Dorian Gray that is not obvious, that lurks beneath its surface, that is more subtle—and more general—than the one Wilde announced in the St James’s Gazette? Each reader should fashion his own answer to this question. But several passages in Dorian Gray tempt me to suggest this moral: the supreme task of the individual is to realize fully and from within one’s own identity.

Wilde expressed views to this effect throughout his adult life. On a blank page in one of his Oxford college textbooks, for instance, he wrote: “Man makes his end for himself out of himself: no end is imposed by external considerations, he must realize his true nature; must be what nature orders.” And at the same time he was revising Dorian, he observed that “Know Thyself” was written over the portal of the ancient world, but that “Be Thyself” should be written over the portal of the modern world. By “self” Wilde clearly meant the totality of each person’s physical and mental being; hence, Lord Henry’s motto (borrowed by Wilde from Pater), which plays such a crucial role in the story: “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” Basil Hallward’s idealistic exclamation early in the novel—“The harmony of soul and body—how much that is!”—announces this central tenet of Wilde’s personal philosophy. “Body and soul,” thinks Lord Henry, “how mysterious they were!” Solving their mystery, Wilde suggests, must be the goal of every individual.

Solving the mystery requires a courageous self-confidence or individualism. “Art is Individualism,” Wilde announced in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” He was well aware that the fearless individual can easily be perceived by the world as “a disturbing and disintegrating force.” And he added, “Therein lies its immense value.” I suspect that the immense value Wilde saw in Dorian Gray—what he called its “strong ethical lesson”—was its emphasis on self-discovery. I don’t think it is surprising or coincidental that the two most eloquent speeches in the novel—both uttered by Lord Henry—define true immorality as submission to the influence of others or of a complacent, philistine society. The first speech, in Chapter 2, ends, “People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.” Later, in Chapter 6, Lord Henry announces what might be termed Wilde’s Golden Rule: “To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self. . . . Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life—that is the important thing.” All the forces that combine to make us, as Lord Henry says, “afraid of ourselves”—prigs, parents, pedants, puritans, politicians—must be resisted. Only then can we end what Lord Henry calls “the self-denial that mars our lives.”

The purpose of Lord Henry’s philosophy of a new Hedonism—“to teach man to concentrate himself”—was in fact Wilde’s own. But, as Wilde’s novel makes very clear, giving a person the freedom and courage to discover his own self guarantees nothing. Only a life whose growth is arrested can be called spoiled, Lord Henry says, but whether one grows to become good (Basil) or evil (Dorian) is a matter of individual human nature. Dorian is emancipated at the story’s opening for a voyage of self-discovery, but in the end he finds a temperament that is filled with “poisonous influences.” When Basil looks with horror on his disfigured portrait for the first time, he thinks the “foulness and horror” have come “from within” the layers of paint itself, but we know they have come “from within” Dorian’s own personal hell. “Myself am hell,” says Milton’s fallen angel, and Wilde has Dorian progress inexorably to this terrible realization, too. “Each of us has a heaven and hell in him,” he cries “with a wild gesture of despair” in Chapter 12, and near his end he calls the soul “a terrible reality . . . It can be poisoned, or made perfect.” The life-enhancing potentiality of self-definition only creates in Dorian, as Wilde said, a “monstrous” vanity: a ghastly self-love. (Dorian is three times associated with Narcissus.) His self-destruction is thus virtually ordained. Many years later Wilde would write in his Ballad of Reading Gaol that “each man kills the thing he loves . . . The kindest use a knife.” Perhaps this captures the “moral” of Dorian’s final lunge at the “thing” that has obsessed him for so many years.

The whole spectrum of possibility, then, is open to Dorian. He makes freely the ugly choices reflected in the picture and comes to see, as he says, that “each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.” The “price,” of course, is consciousness of self-degradation. And Wilde was very careful, as he revised his novel’s denouement, to make it clear that Dorian’s assault on the picture is an utterly unrepentant gesture, an attempt simply to gain the peace of mind to be able to continue a life of reckless self-indulgence. Wilde added to the typescript version this sentence describing Dorian’s motivation: “It [the knife] would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free.” Leaving nothing to chance, Wilde then added the following sentence to the final version: “It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace.”

After the picture’s initial transformations, Dorian rightly perceives that it is “an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls.” That he is ultimately unable to escape its significance serves to make the novel a rather remarkable anticipation of the philosophy of existentialism, which is usually associated with the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80). For existentialism emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of individual experience and stresses man’s responsibility for fashioning his self and his moral responsibility for his acts and their consequences. Wilde’s vigorous attacks upon “the terror of society, which is the basis of morals” also put him in the company of another great emancipating philosopher of individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche, who died a few months before Wilde, in 1900.

Dorian Gray is a most capacious fiction, as this discussion of just a few of its many possible morals suggests. But even Wilde must have been surprised at the vast spectrum of praise and damnation it evoked, from the sputterings of the Scots Observer to the high esteem of Mallarm’, who told Wilde the novel was a “miracle” employing “all the writer’s arts.” As was his wont, Wilde transformed the controversy into an aphorism and inserted it in the Preface: “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.” Wilde was never shy about blowing his own trumpet; here he does so with considerable justice.

 

After Basil completes Dorian’s portrait, he is shocked to see how much of his adoration for the sitter it reveals and refuses to exhibit it publicly. “I have shown in it the secret of my soul,” he confides to Lord Henry. An introduction to Dorian Gray cannot end without considering what it reveals about the secrets of Oscar Wilde’s own soul.

Amid all the initial furor, of course, Wilde vigorously ridiculed as naive anyone who would read the novel as autobiography. He chided the critic of the Scots Observer for committing “the absolutely unpardonable crime of trying to confuse the artist with his subject-matter.” He urged the editor of the St James’s Gazette to teach his reviewers “to criticize a work without making any reference to the personality of the author.” Many readers amiably accepted such protestations at face value. Pater, who knew much about Wilde’s private life, pretended to be one such naive reader and said in his review of Dorian Gray that “the writer is impersonal [and] seems not to have identified himself entirely with any one of his characters.”

In fact, there is in the novel very much of Wilde past, present, and—amazingly—future. Lord Henry remarks in the very first pages that every “portrait painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter,” and this is an excellent hint how to read Dorian Gray. Wilde seems to have been confident his tedious, middle-class readers would miss the hint, but his audience of choice—the sophisticates of London society and his own intimate friends, both gay and straight—he doubtless expected to be titillated by all the small and large touches of self-revelation he carefully planted throughout his story. He knew these more privileged readers would not believe for an instant what Basil so naively tries to believe, namely, that “art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.” Dorian Gray—like his two plays that still hold the stage, Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest—shows Wilde to be a cunning master of the disguised, or masked, self-revelation.

Wilde’s intimates must have been amused by many of the story’s droll autobiographical details. As often, Wilde employed real names in his fiction: he had met in 1889 and become infatuated with a young poet named John Gray, and the picture of Sir Anthony Sherard in Dorian’s gallery glances at Wilde’s longtime friend, Robert Sherard. The tireless hostess mentioned in the first chapter, Lady Brandon, may be a satiric reflection of Wilde’s own mother, who was famed as mistress of lively salons in Dublin and London. Lord Henry’s flippant remark—“Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers”—wittily alludes to the usually strained relations Wilde had with his older brother, Willie. Lord Henry and Basil are old Oxford friends, and many of Wilde’s friendships began when he was at Oxford. Dorian’s temptation to convert to Roman Catholicism was also felt on several occasions by Wilde (his father once threatened to disinherit him if he did so). Also in evidence are several of his well-known and luxurious tastes in fashion: capes with satin-lined wings, elaborate floral buttonholes, gold-tipped cigarettes, and exotic jewellery. Even the suspiciously frequent appearances of the word wild—over twenty-five times—serve to stamp the novel with the author’s character. Some of these punny appearances are autobiographically pungent as well: Basil’s “wild adoration” for Dorian, for instance, or Dorian’s thirst for “pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins,” or his “wild longing” for the purity of his youth at story’s end.

The more general portrait of the artist in Dorian Gray, however, is by far the most fascinating. Portraits, rather—for Wilde confided, in a remarkable letter to a young admirer several years later, that there was something of himself in all three of his main characters: “I am so glad you like that strange coloured book of mine: it contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be.” The accuracy of this is astonishing. He was Lord Henry, the blithe raconteur who “talks books away,” the increasingly inattentive husband “forced to have more than one life,” the dangerous influence upon the young and impressionable. Just when Dorian appeared, the young Frenchman Andr’ Gide fell under Wilde’s spell, and Gide wrote that the Englishman was, exactly like Lord Henry, “religiously contriving to kill what is left of my soul” and instilling in him a “sanction for evil.” Wilde was also Basil, the artist whose adoration of beauty—both artistic and physical—causes him to lose his self-control. As we learn in Chapter 16, Basil is one of those people who submit to the “fearful impulses” of their nature, lose their freedom of choice, and then “move to their terrible end as automatons move.” A similar fate was in store for Wilde.

Finally and most profoundly, Wilde was becoming aware, like Dorian, that man’s ego is not “a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence” but rather leads man to explore “myriad lives and myriad sensations.” Wilde, that is, was submitting to what he believed was the one great reality of man’s nature: change. He was becoming a new—and, as it turned out, a gay—person. He was transforming himself from a most respectable husband and father into a promiscuous denizen of a nether world that was accounted “evil” and “sinful” and “grossly indecent.” Gossip about “vile and degraded” recreations and “whispered scandals” that flurries around Dorian would in time begin to dog Wilde, too.

Lord Henry, for all his wit, is not always correct in his pronouncements: “There is no such thing as omens. Destiny does not send us heralds.” Wilde’s life betrays this view at practically every turn. He worked very hard—and successfully—to create in Dorian Gray a very strange effect (the word strange occurs fifty times), but surely its strangest aspect is the countless eerie anticipations of events that were to come in the mere ten years of life that remained to him. The novel is rich in melancholy omens and grim heralds of misery and tragedy, just a few of which can be noted here. Lord Henry says that “nowadays all the married men live like bachelors,” for instance. Just months after the final version of Dorian appeared, Wilde first began keeping permanent rooms in West End hotels to pursue his secret life. At the same time, 1892, Wilde first met Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas, who was sixteen years his junior. Their love affair of three years is exactly captured in the fatal adoration Basil has for Dorian. Later, when Wilde recalled in prison the power Douglas had over him, it was just like Basil’s saying to Dorian, “I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you.” And in Dorian’s character are the strong streaks of vanity, petulance, and cruelty that Bosie exhibited during their emotional, roller-coaster affair. “As a rule, he is charming to me,” says Basil of Dorian, but sometimes he is “horribly thoughtless, and seems to take real delight in giving me pain.”

On another occasion Lord Henry says to Basil, “You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away.” In the years after Dorian, it must have seemed to Wilde’s close friends that, at the height of his fame as a playwright and celebrity, he too was risking the horrible scandal that ruined him utterly. Basil tells Dorian, “They say that you corrupt every one with whom you become intimate,” and this charge was made often against Wilde. Indeed, at his trials his adversaries read passages from Dorian Gray to display his technique of corruption.

The novel also anticipates the judicial catastrophe of 1895. When in America, Wilde visited the aged Jefferson Davis at his plantation on the Gulf Coast and came away thinking, “How fascinating all failures are!” Lord Henry makes a similar point when he remarks on the “indefinable charm” of weakness: “It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.” Wilde, in time, became one of literary history’s most fascinating failures, and we have not yet, a century later, seemed to tire of trying to understand his “feet of clay.” Golden image, feet of clay: once again paradox plays its vital role.

The novel also forecasts Wilde’s dismal post-prison years. Dorian asks at one point what will happen when he becomes “haggard, and old, and wrinkled,” and Lord Henry replies: “Then, my dear Dorian, you would have to fight for your victories.” When Wilde came out of prison in 1897, he was indeed wrinkled, haggard, and a prematurely aged forty-two-year-old. He no longer could muster the energy to fight for his victories and slowly declined during his three years as a pariah wandering from Switzerland to Italy to France.

The very picture of Dorian itself has its real-life counterparts. Basil paints it when Dorian is about twenty, and we last see it when he is approaching forty. As it happens, the two best-known paintings of Wilde that still exist roughly parallel this timespan. In 1881, when Wilde was twenty-seven, the American Harper Pennington painted the only known full-length formal portrait of him; he is handsome, slender, and elegantly posed with his trademark ebony-handled cane, gloves, and sharp-toed, patent-leather shoes. Years later, when Wilde was about forty and just before his arrest, that brutally frank and cynical painter of sinners, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, produced a merciless bust-length picture of him. The face we see—wan, flap-jowled, squint-eyed, and weary—makes a contrast just as startling as the “before” and “after” in Dorian’s portrait that Wilde asks us to imagine. Indeed, the “hideous lines that seared the wrinkled forehead” and surrounded Dorian’s “sensual mouth” are visible in Lautrec’s scathing likeness of Wilde. We look at it and see precisely what Wilde wants us to see in the picture of Dorian Gray: “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. . . . If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids.” Wilde observed in “The Decay of Lying” that “literature always anticipates life.” Dorian Gray, which he began writing a few months later, ratified this view in astonishing fashion.

Toward the end of Dorian’s life, Lord Henry says to him in admiration, “Life has been your art.” This compliment nearly paraphrases perhaps the most famous and oft-quoted of all Wilde’s aphorisms. This is an observation he made about himself to Andr’ Gide when they met by chance in northern Africa a few weeks before his world collapsed: “I have put my genius into my life—I have put only my talent into my works.” Dorian Gray, however, brilliantly demonstrates that Wilde was able to weave much of his genius-laden life into the fabric of his works.

 

—Gary Schmidgall