Society Gone Wilde: A Survey of Morality and Reality in Oscar Wilde

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.