by Douglas Messerli
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York:
The Modern Library, n.d)
Yet Dorian Gray finds Basil Hallward's
painting of him extremely useful in that it hides his true inner self from the
world, at least if he can keep the portrait out of sight. Any physical evidence
of his aging and his increasingly treacherous acts, indeed, have been subsumed
by art in this fiction; and by hiding away that reality in his boyhood study,
Dorian can cheat the world, despite the rumors surrounding him.
The metaphor here, of course, is not only
about his villainous actions—Gray's corruption of friends and lovers, his use
of drugs, and other devious transgressions—but concerns his own relationship
with Lord Henry, a relationship that might remind one of Wilde's
"friendship" with Lord Alfred Douglas.
In one of the earliest scenes between the
two men, Lord Henry comes close to Dorian and "puts his hand on his
shoulder," and the scene that follows is as close to a love scene—one in
which the startled Dorian finds "his finely-chiselled nostrils"
aquiver as "some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them
trembling"—as the age might permit. A few moments later Lord Henry praises
Dorian's beauty: "...You are the most marvellous youth, and youth is the
one thing worth having." Soon after Lord Henry Wotton finds himself in
near complete control over Gray's aesthetics through his introduction to the
young man of what is obviously Huysman's Against
Nature, a work that soon after determines Gray's collecting and reading
activities. Later in the novel, moreover, we discover that Lord Henry and Gray
have been sharing not only evenings at dinners and plays, but a vacation house.
Gray's hidden portrait, accordingly, is a clear metaphor of an entirely
closeted self, a hidden self that is not only ashamed of the consequences of
his behavior, the suicide of Sibyl Vance and the ruination of several friends,
but of its own sexuality.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that
Dorian feels compelled to reveal to the artist himself the miracle of his
painting, a work which Hallward has described as being rendered with his soul.
And the murder of the artist is almost inevitable, given the fact that he has
created a monster, an artwork that actually has an effect on life. Had Hallward
heeded Lord Henry's (and Wilde's) own statements and created merely a work of
great beauty, Dorian might have been spared, simply because his face would have
revealed his criminal acts as his own beauty decayed. But Hallward has been so
successful in his realism, that, as in a fairytale, he has turned the painting
into a kind of fetish that connects it to being itself. Such a transgression,
in Lord Henry's critical terms, is necessarily punishable by death. And just as
Dorian has "lost" is real body to the painting, so too does he
arrange to chemically dispose of Hallward's corpse; after Alan Campbell's
"dreadful work," nothing is left of the body.
The consequences also of hiding one's own
essence—one's actions and behavior—from the world has long been understood to
result in self-loathing, evidenced in this fiction in Dorian's final days, as
he, like the thousands of other closeted individuals before and after him,
seeks to cleanse himself of his past. But given his hidden sexuality, it is no
wonder that Lord Henry scoffs at his contrite act of breaking off a
relationship with a young country woman; and there is something delightfully
humorous in that act. It is also predictable, perhaps, that Gray must attempt
to destroy "the evidence," so to speak, to wipe away any trace of his
own condition, obviously, which ends in the self-destruction he has all too
often been played out in real life. Only through an attack upon the painting
can life be restored to its proper vessel, the human body.
Wilde uses the story of Dorian Gray,
accordingly, almost as a moral lesson for the dangers of mimeticism. Art, he
argues, must remain in its own sphere, in the world of the ideal. An art that
attempts to mimic life can only diminish the trials and tribulations of the
living.
Los Angeles, March 21, 2001
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2001).
