After
critics harshly reviewed the first publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde added several new chapters
as well as a preface, in which he stated, “There
is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are
well written, or badly written. That is all.” Needless to say, Oscar Wilde was not the only
proponent of this sentiment. The creed “Art for Art’s Sake” established
opposition to the notion that art should advance a moral function within
society. Advocates of the Aesthetics Movement upheld that art had value within
itself and did not need to pass moral examination or justification. Morality—the
struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, proper and improper—should not
be the lens through which people attribute value to art. In essence the
Aesthetics believed their audiences would be able to separate all preconceived
notions of the time to observe the core beauty of the artwork. Truly art has
value that far surpasses the struggle of morality and immorality, but it seems
all together fantastical to believe that artists can neutrally create art and audiences
can neutrally receive it. Oscar Wilde unveils a piece of his artistic
vision when he states that: “Bad people are, from the point of view of art,
fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety, and strangeness. Good
people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination” (Millard
42). Aestheticism is the bridge that connects Realism and Modernism; it is the
ideology that created Dorian Gray and
began to unravel the ideologies of Victorian England.
The
most ironic aspect of The Picture of
Dorian Gray is that, as Oscar Wilde wrote in response to an 1890’s critic
of the novel, “… it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess,
as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment” (Millard 43). If Oscar
Wilde is a member of the Aesthetics Movement, as well as a proponent to the
cliché “Art for Art’s Sake,” why did he create a work which is contrary to all
that his belief base rests on? Is he that poor of an Aesthete, or is he
trudging forward in the unraveling of Victorian ideology and morality by
separating himself from Romanticism and Realism? Critic Christopher Millard
argued in 1912 that Wilde had “a wholesome dislike of the common place, rightly
or wrongly identified by him with the bourgeois,
with our middle-class—its habits and tastes—lead [Wilde] to protest emphatically
against so-called ‘realism’ in art” (Millard 189). I would suppose that Wilde’s
protest against Realism stems from the fact that Realists, in their heart of
hearts, are Romantic. They are Romantic in the sense that they thought they
could capture the essence of real life in a single, still shot. They are
Romantic in the sense that they believed all that goes into the history,
nature, beliefs, and development of a space or a human could be deduced into a
single moment. In essence, Realists believed, as the Romantics had believed, in
a universal truth that could be discovered through art. As critic Shelton
Waldrep stated, “Wilde believed that Realism was being superseded by a new type
of Romanticism. He believed that Realism did not reflect the new spirit of the
age.” (Waldrep 106). The Picture of
Dorian Gray is a novel, yet the “Picture of Dorian Gray” is a portrait. Therefore
Wilde attempted to critique Realism simultaneously through two different
mediums.
Oscar
Wilde always reserved distaste for Realism in art. His distaste for Realism set
his art on a progressive path which ventured away from the standards of
Victorian England. He advocated that “the aesthetic movement produced certain
curious colours, subtle in their loveliness and fascinating in their almost
mystical tone. They were, and are, our reaction to the crude primaries of a
doubtless more respectable but certainly less cultivated age… It reacts against
the crude brutality of plain realism” (Millard 74). Wilde’s insight was written
in response to a critic of his recently published The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel, Wilde argues, is “poisonous,
if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is
what we artists aim for” (Millard 74). In all actuality, as it was pointed out,
“Aestheticism was not ultimately a view about art, but a view about life”
(Lamarque 205). University of York professor Peter Lamarque furthered his views
of Aestheticism by saying that it is “unappealing in many respects: it
overemphasizes beauty in art (indulgent or decadent beauty at that); it
inclines toward formalism in art criticism; and in art making it tends to
prioritize appearance and design over substance and seriousness” (206). Aestheticism
called for society to change the way that it viewed art and life; Aestheticism
urged audiences to be more critical and less judgmental.
Oscar Wilde ran astray of
Victorian England’s moral expectations on numerous instances. Wilde quotably
stated that “all art is quite useless” (Wilde 4). Yet he did not believe in
this notion. Wilde believed that art’s aim was “to reveal art and conceal the
artist” (Wilde 3). Unfortunately for Wilde, he was never able to master that
trait. With mass production and popularity of the arts on the rise, Wilde
sought recognition and wealth. Lecturer Elana Gomel advocates that “even
though the novel is about painting rather than writing, Wilde shows that
different kinds of art are essentially similar in their underlying dynamics of
production and consumption” (Gomel 80). Wilde’s interest in production and consumption
came after the overall reaction of the first publication. He immediately began
looking to publish a second edition. Researcher James Swafford believes that in The Picture
of Dorian Gray “one isn't quite sure what sort of poison one has ingested”
(17). However the story of a well-dressed, conspicuous consumer tormented by a
bourgeois conscience grew in popularity over time. The ingested poison
manifests itself as a preview to Modernism and the sickness of consumption.
Wilde's famous statement that
life imitates art prompts people to analyze “the relationship and possibility,
as Wendy Steiner has recently argued in The Scandal of Pleasure, that our culture is
confusing the virtuality of art with the reality of life” (Swafford 16). Oscar
Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
“functions as an example of the paradoxical nature of his thought expressed
through a highly metaphorical version of realist fiction” (Waldrep 105). In the
book, Dorian Gray was under the impression that a book poisoned him, where after
his life was never the same. Dorian Gray believed in a utilitarian approach to
experiencing art. Art had a function for society, whether good or bad.
Therefore Aesthetes invite society to enjoy what Wilde calls “‘the unique result
of a unique temperament’ for its own sake, not for the sake of developing or
displaying our moral or political virtue” (Swafford 15). Society should rally
behind experimentations of art, and separate from the dysfunctions of reality.
Due
to Wilde’s belief in studying subjects of a bad nature, he conspired to create
the character Dorian Gray. Elana Gomel states that “Dorian’s initial aspiration
is to ‘write’ himself into the portrait, and thus to achieve the immortality
and immutability” (Gomel 80). The tragic realization for Dorian Gray is that he
succeeds in selling his immortal soul for the sinful pleasures of the flesh.
Losing the sense of sin and righteousness—the sense of morality—Dorian is
transformed from a higher plateau of development to a lower platform. Within
the creative mind of Oscar Wilde, Dorian is anything but calm, meticulous, or
conscienceless. Wilde advocates in a letter to a critic that Dorian Gray is “extremely
impulsive, absurdly romantic, and is haunted all through his life by an
exaggerated sense of conscience which mars his pleasures for him and warns him
that youth and enjoyment are not everything in the world” (Millard 73). Dorian
Gray reasons himself into trying to kill the conscience that has plagued him
for years. Dorian resolves to destroy the picture. However, by doing so, by
killing this nagging conscience, he kills himself.
The
biggest danger of Realism in art is that it can sometimes be confused with
truth in reality. Dorian Gray surrounded himself in lust, possible homosexual
relationships, lies, murder, and suicide—amongst other nameless sins. In 1895
Oscar Wilde was convicted of “acts of gross indecency” with other men.
During the trial, “Wilde and his texts were read with terrible simplicity:
beneath all the
posturing and posing was moral rottenness” (Swafford 17). The character Dorian
Gray, through the assistance of fine art, is a beautiful creation. However, his
tale is a “vivid, though carefully considered, exposure of the corruption of a
soul, with a very plain moral pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime
make people coarse and ugly” (Millard 193). Due to the fuzzy lines that
separated art from reality, Oscar Wilde was judged for as a source of
corruption to the soul of Victorian beliefs and Realist ideology.
Swafford
highlights that “the
real danger of art deemed subversive may not be that it infects the culture,
but that it provides an opportunity to define threatened boundaries more
rigidly” (17). The Picture of Dorian Gray
highlighted and solidified Victorian English society’s boundaries. Sexologist
Havelock Ellis recognized that amount of public disgrace put on Oscar Wilde was
instrumental in creation and distinguishment of the categories of heterosexual
and homosexual. Several years later, Alan Sinfield penned in his work The Wilde Century that “even attempts to
challenge the system help to maintain it. Perhaps art cannot be effectively ‘subversive’
at all” (Sinfield 15). Challenging the current trends and beliefs of Victorian
England became a powerful objective and motivation for the Aesthetics.
Moral
subjectivity is one of the most paramount concerns for the Aesthetics movement
as it attempted to shed Victorian morality and bridge the transition between
Realism and Modernism. In 1873 Walter Pater, an Oxford professor, wrote in the
conclusion to his book that “all is in flux and that any ‘clear outlines’ we perceived
are merely our own mental constructs, impressions that we group together under
an image and lend an illusory coherence by assigning a name” (Swafford 14). Pater’s
ideas are the cornerstone to all things that the Aesthetics movement was built
on. By following his logic, spectators of art can only understand momentary
impressions. Spectators absorb their impressions. Thus spectators live to
experience life for the sake of other things, but not for themselves. Through
these means finding truth, much less any sort of absolute truth, in art becomes
painstakingly problematic. Through extensive research James Swafford concluded
that Oscar Wilde viewed art as “‘the telling of beautiful untrue things’ or the
offering of a truth ‘whose contradictory is also true.’ Style and form matter,
not moral purpose. In fact, ‘ethical sympathy’ is nothing but ‘an unpardonable
mannerism’ in an artist” (Swafford 16).
Using
a piece of fiction as evidence against a person on trial caused a further
separation of Wilde from any form of Realist art. When Walter Pater, a close
friend and mentor, had read over The
Picture of Dorian Gray, he stated that Wilde was rather “‘impersonal’ with
his style and it seemed as if he did not ‘identify himself with any one of his
characters’” (Raby 79). The truth of the matter is, however, that Wilde offered
up his own theory of the characters that he identifies with: “Basil Hallward is
what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would
like to be — in other ages, perhaps” (Raby 79). Oscar Wilde, therefore, viewed
himself as one who worships “physical beauty far too much, as most painters do,
and dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd
vanity” (Millard 44). The world looked at Wilde as being a spectator to life,
and one that introduces others to evil. But Wilde said that he wanted to be
like Dorian Gray. What does that mean? “Again and again Wilde challenges the reader's expectations”
(Swafford 17).
Gomel
explains that, as we see in The Picture
of Dorian Gray, there are three separate entities that go into art: the
artist, the model, and the audience. “The three main characters of the
novel—Basil Hallward, Dorian Gray, and Lord Henry Wotton—contribute to the final
product of the portrait, and their rivalry over the possession of the painting
reflects the problematic of its dominant subjectivity. Whose true image is it:
the painter’s, who puts the colors on the canvass; the model’s, who lends his
beauty; or the connoisseur’s, who interprets and thus completes what he sees?”
(Gomel 81). For Basil Hallward, “there
is too much of [himself] in the thing” (Wilde 15). “Like the writer who
identifies with a character, Basil paints himself into another’s image. As he explains
to Dorian, the picture is an expression of his own aesthetic vision rather than
an attempt to render his friend’s personality” (Gomel 81). When Basil swears to
destroy the picture, weepy-eyed Dorian springs up from the couch to stop his
friend, declaring that to destroy the creation would be “murder” (Wilde 31).
For Basil, this creation has too much of his own ideas in it. For Dorian, it is
too real to who he is and his own existence. By destroying the portrait each
person would in essence have lost a part of themselves. Through the censorship
and limitations of art, all of society would lose a part of its own identity.
Oscar
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
was the recipient of approximately 216 articles of criticism, which were
scattered through different periodicals. Wilde admitted that he had “read no
more than half” of those responses to his story (Millard 125). Even still, his
dedication to the advancement of understanding of Dorian Gray was unparalleled. He read criticism and wrote daily to
rebut the misconceptions of his audience. However, in 1895, after his last
trial and conviction, an English newspaper proclaimed with unmistakable
pleasure, “The aesthetic cult, in the nasty form, is over” (Lamarque 205). Despite
this proclamation, Oscar Wilde promoted that all things belong to art, and that it is possible that an artist can create a
work that is considered moral without his objective being to create something
that is moral.
Works
Cited
Gomel,
Elana. “Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the
Author.” Narrative, 12.1 (2004): 74-92
Lamarque,
Peter. “The Uselessness of Art.” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Summer 2010: 68(3): 205-213.
Millard,
Christopher Sclater. Oscar Wilde: Art and
Morality. London: Frank Palmer, Red Lion Court, 1912. Print.
Raby,
Peter. Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988. Print.
Sinfield,
Alan. The Wilde Century. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994. Print.
Swafford, James. “The Provocations of
Art.” Humanities. July/August 1997;18(4):14-17. Print.
Waldrep, Shelton. “The Aesthetic
Realism of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.”
Studies in the Literary Imagination.
Spring 1996; 29(1): 103-112. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Andrew Elfenbein. New Yok: Pearson
Longman, 2007. Print.
