OSCAR WILDE
(1854 - 1900)
(Full name Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde; has also
written under the pseudonyms Sebastian Melmoth and
C. 3. 3.) Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, critic,
poet, and short story writer.
W ilde is one of the foremost figures of late
nineteenth-century literary Decadence, a
movement whose members espoused the doctrine
of “art for art’s sake” by seeking to subordinate
moral, political, and social concerns in art to mat-
ters of aesthetic value. This credo of aestheticism,
however, indicates only one facet of a man notori-
ous for resisting any public institution—artistic,
social, political, or moral—that attempted to
subjugate individual will and imagination. In
contrast to the cult of nature purported by the
Romantic poets, Wilde posed a cult of art in his
critical essays and reviews; to socialism’s cult of
the masses, he proposed a cult of the individual;
and in opposition to what he saw as the middle-
class façade of false respectability, he encouraged a
struggle to realize one’s true nature. Wilde’s only
novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), is typi-
cally considered one of the defining literary works
of the Decadent movement. Exhibiting the au-
thor’s fascination with human perversity, the
novel also features numerous Gothic themes and
techniques as it details in elaborate, ornamental
prose the moral degeneration of its morbidly
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
narcissistic protagonist. Other writings by Wilde
noted for their use of Gothic elements include
two satirical short stories, “The Canterville Ghost”
(1887) and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” and the
biblically-inspired drama Salomé (1893).
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Wilde was born in Dublin, where he received
his early education. As a student at Dublin’s Trin-
ity College and later at Oxford University in
London, he was influenced by the writings of
Walter Pater, who, in his Studies in the History of
the Renaissance (1873), urged indulgence of the
senses, a search for sustained intensity of experi-
ence, and stylistic perfectionism in art. Wilde
adopted such aestheticism as a way of life, cultivat-
ing an extravagant persona that was burlesqued
in the popular press and music-hall entertain-
ments, copied by other youthful iconoclasts, and
indulged by the avant-garde literary and artistic
circles of London wherein Wilde was renowned
for intelligence, wit, and charm. Wilde published
his first volume, Poems, in 1881. In 1884 he mar-
ried Constance Lloyd, the daughter of a wealthy
Dublin family, and thereafter promoted himself
and his ideas with successful lecture tours of the
United States, Canada, and Great Britain. In the
late 1880s Wilde and his family settled in London,
and he continued to crusade for aestheticism as a
book reviewer and as the editor of the periodical
487
 Woman’s World. “The Canterville Ghost,” the first
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of Wilde’s short stories to appear in print, was
published in Court and Society in February 1887. In
addition to this work, three subsequent short
stories written by Wilde appeared in various
London magazines that same year and were later
collected as Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other
Stories (1891). His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
was published during a period of great creativity
and productivity for Wilde that extended from
1888 to 1895. Most of his highly regarded critical
essays, collected in Intentions (1891), also appeared
during this time. Shortly after the publication of
this collection, Wilde attained the greatest critical
and popular success of his lifetime with the plays
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No
Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Meanwhile,
during the 1890s, Wilde met and became infatu-
ated with Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Mar-
quess of Queensbury. His relationship with Doug-
las, the Marquess’s violent disapproval of this
relationship, and his own ill-advised legal action
against the Marquess scandalized London. The
Importance of Being Earnest was in production at
the time of Wilde’s 1895 trial on charges of “gross
indecency between male persons.” His conviction
and subsequent imprisonment led to ignominy
for Wilde and obscurity for his works. He contin-
ued to write during his two years in prison,
producing the poems in The Ballad of Reading Gaol,
and Other Poems (1898) and the essay De Profundis
(1905). Upon his release, however, Wilde was
generally either derided or ignored by literary and
social circles. At the time of his death in 1900 the
scandal associated with Wilde led most com-
mentators to discuss him diffidently, if at all.
While critical response no longer focuses so
persistently on questions of morality, Wilde’s life
and personality still incite fascination. Biographi-
cal studies and biographically oriented criticism
continue to dominate Wilde scholarship.
MAJOR WORKS
A writer far from exclusively concerned with
the supernatural, Wilde nevertheless made several
experiments with Gothic subjects during his
relatively brief professional literary career. Wilde’s
first collection of prose, The Happy Prince, and
Other Tales (1888), displays his early penchant for
ornamentation and stylistic grace in his writings
and largely predates his Gothic concerns. Often
described as fantastic due to their exotic characters
and setting, these stories feature characters who
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take responsibility for their own actions, are
conscious of the suffering of those around them,
and are capable of generosity and forgiveness as
well as selfishness and cruelty. Containing both
social and literary satire, the works collected in
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories parody
what he considered American naïveté, the cultural
and social snobbery associated with the British
aristocracy, as well as many of the contrivances of
Gothic fiction. Among these pieces, “The Canter-
ville Ghost” is a story about an American family
who rents a haunted castle in England but stead-
fastly refuses to believe in the increasingly indig-
nant ghost who inhabits it. Often dismissed as
simplistic and melodramatic, this story nonethe-
less evinces Wilde’s fascination with the super-
natural and the dark side of human nature. Wilde
further explored these themes in “Lord Arthur
Savile’s Crime.” In this story, Lord Arthur, who is
soon to be married, meets a palm reader who
predicts that he will commit murder. Because
Arthur believes in predestination, he feels obliged
to fulfill the prophecy before allowing himself to
marry. Like the family in “The Canterville Ghost,”
Arthur is unable to acknowledge or accept the
existence of evil in himself and others. At the end
of the story, after killing the palm reader by throw-
ing him in the Thames, he heaves a “deep sigh of
relief” before happily marrying his fiancée. The
title figure of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian
Gray, in evident fulfillment of his impulsive wish
to remain young while a painted portrait of
himself grows old in his place, retains his youth-
ful attractiveness while signs of age and debauch-
ery appear in the painting. Detailing a period of
eighteen years in Dorian’s life after the comple-
tion of his portrait by the painter Basil Hallward,
The Picture of Dorian Gray chronicles the young
aristocrat’s involvement in the unspecified “ruin”
of a number of individuals, his revels in rare,
beautiful, and costly objects, his experimentation
with drugs and alcohol, and finally his descent to
murder. During this time his portrait, hidden from
view in Dorian’s attic, mysteriously ages and
becomes repulsive, reflecting the effects of
Dorian’s excesses, while Dorian himself remains
young and attractive. His ultimate attempt to
destroy the painting results in his own death; the
portrait then resumes its original appearance, and
the hideous corpse found lying before it is only
with difficulty identified as that of Dorian Gray. A
thematic departure for Wilde, the one-act drama
Salomé joins a biblical subject with Decadent
themes. Retelling the story of the prophet John
the Baptist’s death due to the passion of a Judean
princess, Salomé has been categorized as an eroti-
cized Gothic tragedy that explores themes of
unrequited love and forbidden desire. Wilde’s styl-
ized and urbane social dramas of the 1890s,
including An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Impor-
tance of Being Earnest (1895) are finely crafted
comedies of manners sparkling with wit and
abounding with quotable epigrams. Generally
devoid of Gothic concerns, these dramas are usu-
ally considered Wilde’s crowning literary achieve-
ments.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray cre-
ated a sensation on its first appearance, when it
was widely interpreted as advocating the immoral
behavior of its protagonist. The subject of exten-
sive analysis in ensuing years, the novel has been
assessed as a moral fable, a Gothic horror tale, a
catalog of Decadent concerns owing much to
Joris-Karl Huysmann’s A rebours (1884; Against the
Grain), a study of Victorian art movements, and a
fictional dramatization of Paterian ideas about art
and morality. While a number of critics have read
the novel purely as a morality tale on the hazards
of indulgence and self-absorption, others accept
Wilde’s viewpoint that the suffering and belated
wisdom of the protagonist are incidental to the
work’s artistic form. Conceding a departure from
his own literary principles, Wilde freely admitted
that the book does indeed contain a moral, which
he summarized as: “All excess, as well as all
renunciation, brings its own punishment.” Critics
interested in the Gothic elements of the novel
have frequently studied these in conjunction with
the work’s aesthetic and ethical concerns. Lewis J.
Poteet has explored the affinities between The
Picture of Dorian Gray and its Gothic precursor,
Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, a work
he argues constructs both the structural and
thematic patterns of Wilde’s novel. According to
Poteet, both works share such features as the
depiction of a “radical bifurcation of nature and
art” illustrated in the seductive and corruptive ef-
fects of social knowledge, a distinctive doubling of
characters, and a shared use of supernatural hor-
ror to convey a theme of moral retribution. Ken-
neth Womack has interpreted the novel as a late-
Victorian study in Gothic subversion. Highlighting
the essential moral hollowness of Dorian Gray,
who in his debauched, hedonistic, and narcissistic
behavior sacrifices his spiritual being to empty
aesthetic pleasures, Womack suggests that the
novel principally employs its supernatural device
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of Dorian’s aging portrait for the purposes of social
WILDE
critique centered on the figure of the aesthete.
Donald Lawler has also examined the juxtaposi-
tion of Gothic and aesthetic elements in The
Picture of Dorian Gray. In Lawler’s estimation,
Wilde’s writings frequently appropriate a Gothic
sensibility as a means of exploring the outer limits
of human behavior, and that Wilde, in effect,
endeavored to “gothicize” art and aesthetics in his
novel and other works. Lawler has additionally
explored Wilde’s drama Salomé as “a gothically
inverted worship of death” concentrated on the
figure of the enraptured princess and symbolized
in the sexualized imagery associated with her call
for the head of John the Baptist. Overall, despite
such modern assessments, Wilde is not usually
considered a Gothic writer, but rather one whose
unique blend of Decadent aesthetic concerns,
literary supernaturalism, and interest in human
perversity lends itself well to Gothic interpreta-
tion. While the critical reception of Wilde’s writ-
ings remains complicated, in part because his
works have had to compete for attention with his
sensational life, the Gothic vein remains a viable
and robust critical approach to one of the more
fascinating and diverse literary figures of the late
nineteenth-century period.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Poems (poetry) 1881
The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (short stories)
1888
The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1890; first
published in the journal Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine; revised edition, 1891
A House of Pomegranates (short stories) 1891
Intentions (essays) 1891
*Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories (short
stories) 1891
Lady Windermere’s Fan (play) 1892
Salomé (play) 1893
A Woman of No Importance (play) 1893
An Ideal Husband (play) 1895
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Other Poems [as
C.3.3.] (poetry) 1898
†De Profundis (letter) 1905
489
 Collected Works. 14 vols. (poetry, essays, short
WILDE
stories, novel, plays, and criticism) 1908
The Letters of Oscar Wilde (letters) 1962
* This volume includes the short stories “The Canterville
Ghost,” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” and “The Sphinx
without a Secret.”
† This work was not published in its entirety until 1949.
PRIMARY SOURCES
OSCAR WILDE (STORY DATE MAY
1887)
SOURCE: Wilde, Oscar. “The Sphinx without a Secret.”
In 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, edited by Stefan Dzi-
emianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Green-
berg, pp. 438-44. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993.
The following story was originally published under the
title “Lady Alroy” in Saunder’s Irish Daily News in
May, 1887. Wilde changed the title to “The Sphinx
without a Secret” when the story was collected and
published in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other
Stories in 1891.
One afternoon I was sitting outside the Café
de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbi-
ness of Parisian life, and wondering over my
vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and
poverty that was passing before me, when I heard
someone call my name. I turned round, and saw
Lord Murchison. We had not met since we had
been at college together, nearly ten years before,
so I was delighted to come across him again, and
we shook hands warmly. At Oxford we had been
great friends. I had liked him immensely, he was
so handsome, so high-spirited, and so honour-
able. We used to say of him that he would be the
best of fellows, if he did not always speak the
truth, but I think we really admired him all the
more for his frankness. I found him a good deal
changed. He looked anxious and puzzled, and
seemed to be in doubt about something. I felt it
could not be modern scepticism, for Murchison
was the stoutest of Tories, and believed in the Pen-
tateuch as firmly as he believed in the House of
Peers; so I concluded that it was a woman, and
asked him if he was married yet.
“I don’t understand women well enough,” he
answered.
“My dear Gerald,” I said, “women are meant
to be loved, not to be understood.”
“I cannot love where I cannot trust,” he
replied.
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“I believe you have a mystery in your life, Ger-
ald,” I exclaimed; “tell me about it.”
“Let us go for a drive,” he answered, “it is too
crowded here. No, not a yellow carriage, any other
colour—there, that dark green one will do”; and
in a few moments we were trotting down the
boulevard in the direction of the Madeleine.
“Where shall we go to?” I said.
“Oh, anywhere you like!” he answered—“to
the restaurant in the Bois; we will dine there, and
you shall tell me all about yourself.”
“I want to hear about you first,” I said. “Tell
me your mystery.”
He took from his pocket a little silver-clasped
morocco case, and handed it to me. I opened it.
Inside there was the photograph of a woman. She
was tall and slight, and strangely picturesque with
her large vague eyes and loosened hair. She looked
like a clairvoyante, and was wrapped in rich furs.
“What do you think of that face?” he said; “is
it truthful?”
I examined it carefully. It seemed to me the
face of someone who had a secret, but whether
that secret was good or evil I could not say. Its
beauty was a beauty moulded out of many myster-
ies—the beauty, in fact, which is psychological,
not plastic—and the faint smile that just played
across the lips was far too subtle to be really sweet.
“Well,” he cried impatiently, “what do you
say?”
“She is the Gioconda in sables,” I answered.
“Let me know all about her.”
“Not now,” he said; “after dinner,” and began
to talk of other things.
When the waiter brought us our coffee and
cigarettes I reminded Gerald of his promise. He
rose from his seat, walked two or three times up
and down the room, and, sinking into an arm-
chair, told me the following story:—
“One evening,” he said, “I was walking down
Bond Street about five o’clock. There was a terrific
crush of carriages, and the traffic was almost
stopped. Close to the pavement was standing a
little yellow brougham, which, for some reason or
other, attracted my attention. As I passed by there
looked out from it the face I showed you this
afternoon. It fascinated me immediately. All that
night I kept thinking of it, and all the next day. I
wandered up and down that wretched Row, peer-
ing into every carriage, and waiting for the yellow
brougham; but I could not find ma belle inconnue,
and at last I began to think she was merely a
dream. About a week afterwards I was dining with
Madame de Rastail. Dinner was for eight o’clock;
but at half past eight we were still waiting in the
drawing-room. Finally the servant threw open the
door, and announced Lady Alroy. It was the
woman I had been looking for. She came in very
slowly, looking like a moonbeam in grey lace, and,
to my intense delight, I was asked to take her into
dinner. After we had sat down, I remarked quite
innocently, ‘I think I caught sight of you in Bond
Street some time ago, Lady Alroy.’ She grew very
pale, and said to me in a low voice, ‘Pray do not
talk so loud; you may be overheard.’ I felt miser-
able at having made such a bad beginning, and
plunged recklessly into the subject of the French
plays. She spoke very little, always in the same
low musical voice, and seemed as if she was afraid
of someone listening. I fell passionately, stupidly
in love, and the indefinable atmosphere of mys-
tery that surrounded her excited my most ardent
curiosity. When she was going away, which she
did very soon after dinner, I asked her if I might
call and see her. She hesitated for a moment,
glanced round to see if anyone was near us, and
then said, ‘Yes; to-morrow at a quarter to five.’ I
begged Madame de Rastail to tell me about her;
but all that I could learn was that she was a widow
with a beautiful house in Park Lane, and as some
scientific bore began a dissertation on widows, as
exemplifying the survival of the matrimonially
fittest, I left and went home.
“The next day I arrived at Park Lane punctual
to the moment, but was told by the butler that
Lady Alroy had just gone out. I went down to the
club quite unhappy and very much puzzled, and
after long consideration wrote her a letter, asking
if I might be allowed to try my chance some other
afternoon. I had no answer for several days, but at
last I got a little note saying she would be at home
on Sunday at four and with this extraordinary
postscript: ‘Please do not write to me here again; I
will explain when I see you.’ On Sunday she
received me, and was perfectly charming; but
when I was going away she begged of me, if I ever
had occasion to write to her again, to address my
letter to ‘Mrs. Knox, care of Whittaker’s Library,
Green Street.’ ‘There are reasons,’ she said, ‘why I
cannot receive letters in my own house.’
“All through the season I saw a great deal of
her, and the atmosphere of mystery never left her.
Sometimes I thought that she was in the power of
some man, but she looked so unapproachable that
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
I could not believe it. It was really very difficult
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for me to come to any conclusion, for she was like
one of those strange crystals that one sees in
museums, which are at one moment clear, and at
another clouded. At last I determined to ask her
to be my wife: I was sick and tired of the incessant
secrecy that she imposed on all my visits, and on
the few letters I sent her. I wrote to her at the
library to ask her if she could see me the follow-
ing Monday at six. She answered yes, and I was in
the seventh heaven of delight. I was infatuated
with her: in spite of the mystery, I thought
then—in consequence of it, I see now. No; it was
the woman herself I loved. The mystery troubled
me, maddened me. Why did chance put me in its
track?”
“You discovered it, then?” I cried.
“I fear so,” he answered. “You can judge for
yourself.”
“When Monday came round I went to lunch
with my uncle, and about four o’clock found
myself in the Marylebone Road. My uncle, you
know, lives in Regent’s Park. I wanted to get to
Piccadilly, and took a short cut through a lot of
shabby little streets. Suddenly I saw in front of me
Lady Alroy, deeply veiled and walking very fast.
On coming to the last house in the street, she
went up the steps, took out a latch-key, and let
herself in. ‘Here is the mystery,’ I said to myself;
and I hurried on and examined the house. It
seemed a sort of place for letting lodgings. On the
doorstep lay her handkerchief, which she had
dropped. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
Then I began to consider what I should do. I came
to the conclusion that I had no right to spy on
her, and I drove to the club. At six I called to see
her. She was lying on a sofa, in a tea-gown of silver
tissue looped up by some strange moonstones that
she always wore. She was looking quite lovely. ‘I
am so glad to see you,’ she said; ‘I have not been
out all day.’ I stared at her in amazement, and
pulling the handkerchief out of my pocket,
handed it to her. ‘You dropped this in Cumnor
Street this afternoon, Lady Alroy,’ I said very
calmly. She looked at me in terror, but made no
attempt to take the handkerchief. ‘What were you
doing there?’ I asked. ‘What right have you to
question me?’ she answered. ‘The right of a man
who loves you,’ I replied; ‘I came here to ask you
to be my wife.’ She hid her face in her hands, and
burst into floods of tears. ‘You must tell me,’ I
continued. She stood up, and, looking me straight
in the face, said, ‘Lord Murchison, there is noth-
ing to tell you.’ . . . ‘You went to meet someone,’
491
 I cried; ‘this is your mystery.’ She grew dreadfully
WILDE
white, and said, ‘I went to meet no one.’ . . .
‘Can’t you tell the truth?’ I exclaimed. ‘I have told
it,’ she replied. I was mad, frantic; I don’t know
what I said, but I said terrible things to her. Finally
I rushed out of the house. She wrote me a letter
the next day; I sent it back unopened, and started
for Norway with Alan Colville. After a month I
came back, and the first thing I saw in the Morn-
ing Post was the death of Lady Alroy. She had
caught a chill at the Opera, and had died in five
days of congestion of the lungs. I shut myself up
and saw no one. I had loved her so much, I had
loved her so madly. Good God! how I had loved
that woman!”
“You went to the street, to the house in it?” I
said.
“Yes,” he answered.
“One day I went to Cumnor Street. I could
not help it; I was tortured with doubt. I knocked
at the door, and a respectable-looking woman
opened it to me. I asked her if she had any rooms
to let. ‘Well, sir,’ she replied, ‘the drawing-rooms
are supposed to be let; but I have not seen the
lady for three months, and as rent is owing on
them, you can have them.’ . . . ‘Is this the lady?’
I said, showing the photograph. ‘That’s her, sure
enough,’ she exclaimed; ‘and when is she coming
back, sir?’ . . . ‘The lady is dead,’ I replied. ‘Oh,
sir, I hope not!’ said the woman; ‘she was my best
lodger. She paid me three guineas a week merely
to sit in my drawing-room now and then.’ . . .
‘She met someone here?’ I said; but the woman
assured me that it was not so, that she always
came alone, and saw no one. ‘What on earth did
she do here?’ I cried. ‘She simply sat in the
drawing-room, sir, reading books, and sometimes
had tea,’ the woman answered. I did not know
what to say, so I gave her a sovereign and went
away. Now, what do you think it all meant? You
don’t believe the woman was telling the truth?”
“I do.”
“Then why did Lady Alroy go there?”
“My dear Gerald,” I answered, “Lady Alroy
was simply a woman with a mania for mystery.
She took these rooms for the pleasure of going
there with her veil down, and imagining she was
a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she
herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I am sure of it,” I replied.
492 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
He took out the morocco case, opened it, and
looked at the photograph. “I wonder?” he said at
last.
OSCAR WILDE (LETTER DATE 26
JUNE 1890)
SOURCE: Wilde, Oscar. “To the Editor of the St. James’s
Gazette.” In The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar
Wilde, edited by Richard Ellmann, pp. 238-41. New
York: Random House, 1969.
In the following letter, published in the St. James’s Ga-
zette two days after that newspaper published a vicious
attack (“A Study in Puppydom,” June 24, 1890) on The
Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde responds to the critic’s
derisive evaluation of his work and defends his novel.
In your issue of today you state that my brief
letter published in your columns is the “best
reply” I can make to your article upon Dorian
Gray. This is not so. I do not propose to fully
discuss the matter here, but I feel bound to say
that your article contains the most unjustifiable
attack that has been made upon any man of let-
ters for many years. The writer of it, who is quite
incapable of concealing his personal malice, and
so in some measure destroys the effect he wishes
to produce, seems not to have the slightest idea of
the temper in which a work of art should be ap-
proached. To say that such a book as mine should
be “chucked into the fire” is silly. That is what
one does with newspapers.
Of the value of pseudo-ethical criticism in
dealing with artistic work I have spoken already.
But as your writer has ventured into the perilous
grounds of literary criticism I ask you to allow me,
in fairness not merely to myself but to all men to
whom literature is a fine art, to say a few words
about his critical method.
He begins by assailing me with much ridicu-
lous virulence because the chief personages in my
story are “puppies.” They are puppies. Does he
think that literature went to the dogs when Thack-
eray wrote about puppydom? I think that puppies
are extremely interesting from an artistic as well
as from a psychological point of view. They seem
to me to be certainly far more interesting than
prigs; and I am of opinion that Lord Henry Wot-
ton is an excellent corrective of the tedious ideal
shadowed forth in the semi-theological novels of
our age.
He then makes vague and fearful insinuations
about my grammar and my erudition. Now, as
regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate,
correctness should always be subordinate to
artistic effect and musical cadence; and any
peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian
Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced
to show the value of the artistic theory in ques-
tion. Your writer gives no instance of any such
peculiarity. This I regret, because I do not think
that any such instances occur.
As regards erudition, it is always difficult, even
for the most modest of us, to remember that other
people do not know quite as much as one does
oneself. I myself frankly admit I cannot imagine
how a casual reference to Suetonius and Petronius
Arbiter can be construed into evidence of a desire
to impress an unoffending and ill-educated public
by an assumption of superior knowledge. I should
fancy that the most ordinary of scholars is per-
fectly well acquainted with the Lives of the Caesars
and with the Satyricon. The Lives of the Caesars, at
any rate, forms part of the curriculum at Oxford
for those who take the Honour School of Literæ
Humaniores; and as for the Satyricon, it is popular
even among passmen, though I suppose they are
obliged to read it in translations.
The writer of the article then suggests that I,
in common with that great and noble artist Count
Tolstoi, take pleasure in a subject because it is
dangerous. About such a suggestion there is this
to be said. Romantic art deals with the exception
and with the individual. Good people, belonging
as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace,
type, are artistically uninteresting. 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. Your critic, if I must give
him so honourable a title, states that the people
in my story have no counterpart in life; that they
are, to use his vigorous if somewhat vulgar phrase,
“mere catchpenny revelations of the non-
existent.” Quite so. If they existed they would not
be worth writing about. The function of the artist
is to invent, not to chronicle. There are no such
people. If there were I would not write about
them. Life by its realism is always spoiling the
subject-matter of art. The supreme pleasure in
literature is to realise the non-existent.
And finally, let me say this. You have repro-
duced, in a journalistic form, the comedy of Much
Ado about Nothing, and have, of course, spoilt it in
your reproduction. The poor public, hearing, from
an authority so high as your own, that this is a
wicked book that should be coerced and sup-
pressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt,
rush to it and read it. But, alas! they will find that
it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this:
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All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its
WILDE
own punishment. The painter, Basil Hallward,
worshipping physical beauty far too much, as
most painters do, dies by the hand of one in
whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd
vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere
sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience,
and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry
Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He
finds that those who reject the battle are more
deeply wounded than those who take part in it.
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 artistic error? I fear it
is. It is the only error in the book.
GENERAL COMMENTARY
DONALD LAWLER (ESSAY DATE
1994)
SOURCE: Lawler, Donald. “The Gothic Wilde.” In Re-
discovering Oscar Wilde, edited by C. George Sandulescu,
pp. 249-68. Gerrards Cross, England: Smythe, 1994.
In the following essay, Lawler examines The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Salomé, and The Sphinx, asserting that
these three works share “a gothicized aestheticism whose
obsessive beauty-worship expresses itself in a symptomatic
fixation with art’s decorative character—and . . . a reli-
ance on the Gothic as expressing, determining, and resolv-
ing the artistic requirements of each work.”
As the 1880s were ending and the Aesthetic
Movement modulating into the Decadence, Oscar
Wilde was concluding a series of essays, later to be
collected as Intentions, that contributed a radical
aesthetic to this movement of which he had
become the unacknowledged leader. Having made
a case for aestheticizing Victorian manners and
mores in ‘The Decay of Lying’, Wilde began turn-
ing the tables on art in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.
H.’, by offering a fictional resolution to the
problem of Shakespeare’s sonnets, showing that
faith alone brings art to life, whereas empirical
demands for proof cause faith to become deceit-
ful, seeking foolish correlatives of itself in forgery.
Wilde’s gothic transactions with aestheticism that
were to follow in the early 1890s, invite critical
inquiry that addresses both their revisionary and
gothic character. This paper brings into focus Wil-
de’s uses of the gothic1 in three major works, in
three different structural genres: Dorian Gray, a
novel; Salome, a one-act play; and a long poem,
The Sphinx. From a critical perspective, they form
an odd sort of trilogy, connected by shared inter-
493
 ests, common themes, and treatments—especially
WILDE
a gothicized aestheticism whose obsessive beauty-
worship expresses itself in a symptomatic fixation
with art’s decorative character—and sharing a reli-
ance on the gothic as expressing, determining,
and resolving the artistic requirements of each
work.2
Wilde appropriated gothic resources of expres-
sion, effect, even genre-framing for exploring the
limits and contradictions of his own arguments
for aestheticizing life. In this series of works the
once ‘Great Aesthete’ explores the destructive ef-
fects of art, especially in the familiar romantic
idealization of beauty as well as in a synaesthesia
of art for life, an advanced form of Romantic
idealism’s disillusion with worldly commerce.
I propose to begin as did Wilde with Dorian
Gray in which he first explored and reshaped the
expressive resources of the gothic for telling the
story of Dorian Gray.3 In so doing, Wilde displayed
his exceptional powers of inventive synthesis,
theatrical intuition, and stylistic ingenuity to their
best advantage. The gothic informs every impor-
tant aspect of the novel to the extent that refer-
ences will be limited to a few representative
instances of the novel’s more innovative and
influential gothic features.4
Wilde’s contribution to exploring new worlds
of gothic influence and revelation was to gothicize
art in Dorian Gray. More precisely it was the
romantic aesthetic worship of art and beauty that
he gothicized, locating it at the juncture between
the two great forces of the revised, 1891 novel:
the archetypal moral allegory of the wages of sin
complemented by an aesthetic allegory that inter-
rogates two, art-related delusions. The first is
Basil’s artistic error of painting a confessional
portrait that proclaimed his own love for his
subject. The second is Lord Henry’s aesthetic
doctrine that living may be refined into an art-
form. Dorian’s supplement to that axiom is the
delusion that Henry’s aesthetic vision is achiev-
able with a wish-fulfilled perpetual youth stolen
from Basil’s portrait and by aestheticizing life
through art, leading to a spiritualization of the
senses.
The encryption of the gothic begins with Basil
Hallward’s romanticized portrait that awakens a
narcissism in Dorian, who sees himself through
the eyes of the artist’s ‘idolatry’. Basil’s admission
to Henry that he had erred artistically by putting
too much of himself into the painting includes
his aesthetic apologia exposing a more ambitious
motive of the artist for his subject than an invita-
494 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
tion to vanity. Dorian has ‘suggested to me a new
manner in art,’ and Basil then adds, ‘I can now
recreate life in a way that was hidden from me
before’ (14). That statement departs from Roman-
tic idealism to foreshadow the gothic world.5 Un-
like previous gothic stories, the invention of the
gothic world in this one is a cooperative venture
in three stages, dispersed over the first three
chapters. Basil provides the occasion in a life-size,
realistic portrait of his ideal Dorian. Henry adds
the catalytic temptation in his philosophy of
pleasure declaimed as Dorian poses on Basil’s
platform, while the painter adds the final touches
to the picture. These remaining brush strokes are
critical because they are a record of Dorian’s
expression as he recognizes in his repressed ap-
petites ways to a knowledge of good and evil with
the power of transforming his life. Basil paints on,
‘conscious only that a look had come into the
lad’s face that he had never seen before’ (20), as
Dorian experiences a conversion to Henry’s phi-
losophy of self-realization through affirmation
and pursuit of appetites: ‘The only way to get rid
of a temptation is to yield to it’ (21). Dorian is
easily caught in the network of Henry’s epi-
grams—‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses,
just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.’
The novel makes no claims about Dorian being
smart, but he had a perfect profile, which after all
both Henry and the author preferred to mere
intelligence in their favorites.
Thus, Basil’s portrait of an ideal Dorian be-
comes a recording of Dorian’s fall from innocence
and grace. These are the strange combinations and
conjunctions of influences reflected in the portrait
that were to have such a profound and lasting
influence on Gray. Henry’s temptation speech
established the basis for Dorian’s legitimizing his
appetites by redefining them as questing for
experience and therefore as a kind of knowledge
rather than as matters for denial, repression, and
shame. In gothic terms, Gray’s wish to exchange
lives with the portrait is his expression of the clas-
sic desire of the gothic protagonist/antagonist to
re-create himself, this time by bartering his soul
for a life in art, appropriating the appearances of
the artist’s icon, while his soul animates the
picture that will then begin to age. The painting’s
reflecting the true condition of Gray’s soul is the
price of his admission to the gothic world.
Dorian Gray never does understand the rules
of the world he hoped to live in, but they are obvi-
ously not what he expected. In the gothic world,
they never are. The interactive magical picture is
not merely the focus of the gothic world in the
novel: it is the gothic world and with its inven-
tion Wilde gothicizes art and the beauty-worship
of aestheticism, just as Mary Shelley gothicized
science and the mad scientist in Frankenstein.6 The
consequences of Dorian’s wish that gothicizes art
resonate throughout every remaining action of
the novel. Nothing is left untouched by it.
Dorian’s new opinions of art, mostly ap-
propriations from Lord Henry, nonetheless diverge
from his mentor’s even as early as the Sibyl Vane
affair. Dorian’s rejection of Sibyl is the direct result
of her abandonment of a life or more accurately a
love in art for the real thing, once she had experi-
enced it. Her declaration as a contemporary Lady
of Shalott strikes at the heart of Dorian’s aesthetic
idealism. With the loss of Sibyl’s influence and his
gradual estrangement from Basil, Gray indulges
his appetites, believing his sins justified by his
quest for self-understanding and self-fulfillment.
These may have been precepts of Henry’s philoso-
phy of the Dandy; but once acted upon, under-
standing becomes self-loathing. Dorian also enacts
and therefore transforms Henry’s doctrine of aes-
theticizing life, only Dorian really attempts it as
an extended exercise in redesigning his instinctive
behaviour, sense impressions, and even the struc-
ture of both brain and mind through art.7 This is
the main purpose of the notorious eleventh
chapter, of its central location, of its literal
cataloguing of the exotica of art, and of its posi-
tion immediately preceding Basil’s murder. Chap-
ter eleven presents two contradictory views of
Dorian’s extended experiments in self-
reconstruction. First, it implies that Gray artifi-
cially controls and refines his responses. Second, it
shows that Gray’s method for applying art to life
and recreating himself is a delusion. He is, rather,
a collector and a dilettantish one at that. His only
artistic creation, most ironically, is his gothic revi-
sion of Basil’s portrait, which Gray achieves
through his misbehaviour, contextualized in the
diary of his life as updated daily in the picture
(120).
Even Gray’s delusions of a life in art are
permanently gothicized after he reveals the condi-
tion of his soul to Basil in the gothic portrait and
then murders him. Gray who once had lived to
savour and raise every new experience to the level
of a sonnet, a fugue, or a watercolour could think
of nothing thereafter but escape from guilt and of
course his emblematic conscience, even if that
meant abandoning art and dandyism for ugliness,
violence, and crime.8 Gray is hounded by an
impressive variety of secularized, contemporary
Wildean furies in addition to the portrait: from
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the avenging but luckless James Vane to the vari-
WILDE
ous arts in which Gray seeks both consolation and
escape. Gray’s fascination with the painting
quickly becomes a morbid obsession, and as other
gothic herovillains, he becomes the enthralled
captive of the gothic world he has created, ending
in hysteria and near-madness.
The phrase ‘Gothic art’ is used by Wilde but
once and in Chapter eleven of the novel, prefaced
by Dorian’s conviction that ‘life itself was the first,
the greatest of the arts, and for it all the other arts
seemed to be but a preparation’ (100) and contex-
tualized by Dorian’s increasingly hallucinated
mental state (102). In the story of Gray’s failure to
aestheticize the life of a dandy, Wilde represents
art as having been transformed into the talisman
of gothic thinking in which the moods and
atmospheres created by art recreate, reinforce, and
sustain the nightmare originating in the picture.
Once Dorian’s imagination has been gothicized,
he cannot free himself from it. Instead of promot-
ing the ideal of Dorian’s ‘new scheme of life’,
elaborated in Chapter eleven, ‘that would have its
reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles,
and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its high-
est realization’ (101), gothicized imagination
subverts Gray’s agenda for aestheticizing life and
spiritualizing the senses into parodies as foul as
the picture of Basil’s original icon of beauty and
inspiration had become.9
* * *
After finishing Dorian Gray, Wilde turned his
attention to other projects: another essay, perhaps
a reparational homage to Ruskin in ‘The Soul of
Man under Socialism’ and the first of his deriva-
tions of the French well-made play that became
Lady Windermere’s Fan. His work on that social
comedy was soon interrupted by Salome, a topic
that Wilde had been considering for more than a
year. In addition to obvious and well-recognized
French influences and Wilde’s decision to write
out of his system a sexual tragedy before complet-
ing a more polite sexual and social comedy, it ap-
pears that he was also interested in exploring
further potentials of gothicized art for three
related interests represented but not foregrounded
in the novel: sexual passion (unfulfilled, repressed,
and perverse), the supernatural (especially the
scriptural and prophetic), and the tragic.1 0
The controversies surrounding the play must
have exasperated even the showman in Wilde
since its performance was limited to the original
French version in Paris during Wilde’s lifetime.1 1
Nevertheless, Salome, without doubt, was in-
495
 tended by Wilde to be shocking and controversial,
WILDE
and in that he could not have been disappointed.
In the play, Wilde extends the influence of gothi-
cized art to scripture, dramatizing freely from the
narratives of Matthew (14:1-12) and Mark (6:14-
29). Wilde wants his scriptural materials to exercise
influences in the play roughly analogous to myth
or legend in Greek tragedy, within the context of
a gothic mode modulated by the rich economy of
symbolist drama. Together they develop the mood
and tonal unity of the drama, transforming the
biblical account of Salome and the death of John
the Baptist from an erotically charged imbroglio
of mismatched desire into a gothically inverted
worship of death. Herod’s recoil at Salome’s necro-
philic foreplay with the head of the Baptist as the
stage empties and darkens may be the most subtly
complex dramatic action Wilde invented, and its
power, drawing upon the convergence of the
play’s gothic elements, is superbly theatrical.1 2
The decorative and descriptive symbolism
Wilde uses repeatedly in the play forecasts an ap-
proaching gothic storm of sexual emotion and
reaction. The repetitive technique may have been
inspired by Maeterlinck, but it also derives surely
from the uses of aesthetic and decorative effects
in Dorian Gray.1 3 In Salome, subtle dramatic
variations and inversions of dialogue, scenery,
lighting, acting as dramatic equivalents of balladic
refrains (according to Wilde), promote premoni-
tions of the gothic. It is not necessary to recognize
these as patterns repeated from the novel, partly
because foreknowledge of events leading to
Salome’s dance and its outcome for the Baptist
bears a parodic similarity to dramatic irony—the
gothic is a parodic form—producing resonances
for the audience with every word and action of
the characters.
The argument from unrequited or denied
sexual passion involves the major players of the
drama in a complex dance of transformations,
leading to the deaths of all but the original guilty
parties, Herod and Herodias, whose incestuous
marriage occasioned the arrest of the Baptist for
preaching against Herodias’s adultery. The overlap-
ping romantic entanglements among characters
produce several perverse and inverse passions that
build toward Salome’s awakened lust for the
prophet. It is her sudden, irresistible passion that
Wilde requires of his biblical Juliet, whose virginal
innocence is attested by the other characters in
that stylized dialogue Wilde uses to frame the
symbolist associations he unpacks from some of
his earlier stories.1 4 Wilde required Salome’s pas-
sion to flame out of an early indifference to the
496 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
attentions that her budding sexuality wins for her.
Even Herod’s leering admiration that awakens a
sense of her own sexual power does not affect her
beyond making her more wary. Rather than ap-
pearing intimidated by Herod’s amorous interest,
Salome realizes that a weakness of character
expressing itself in voyeurism gives her a degree
of power over him that she will soon exploit.
Would Salome and Herodias have discussed
Herod’s Inclination? Salome remains coyly indif-
ferent to the attentions of Narraboth, the young
Syrian captain of the guard; but then she is a
princess, and Wilde never has her forget it. Her
detachment matches that of Dorian Gray at the
beginning of the novel, a quality the author ap-
parently found attractive and perhaps personally
challenging. And yet she responds immediately to
the sound of Iokanaan’s chthonic voice, a mono-
tone that intimidates Herod if not Herodias, who
suffers no illusions that the Baptist speaks with
any supernatural authority. The appearance of the
Baptist evokes Salome’s libido, moving her to
adopt the language and manner of an aggressive
courtship of the prophet. Young and impetuous,
Salome grows more perverse with each rebuffed
advance. Acceleration of Salome’s enthralled pas-
sion for the prophet can be measured by the
Baptist’s features that her passion fetishizes: the
black hair, the white body, and finally the red lips.
Salome’s contradictory passion and denial state-
ments express youthful petulance and confusion
at failing to arouse even Iokanaan’s human inter-
est in her let alone an erotic response. Her passion
focuses at last upon the lips of the prophet as the
symbol of his power and prophetic office. 1 5
Thereafter, Salome is obsessed with kissing the
mouth of the Baptist. His contemptuous rejection
of her as unworthy of notice seems to motivate
her the more, as it warps her judgment.
Salome’s immortal dance is the central action
of the play, her art gothicized by a purpose we
foreknow to be death, but which turns out to be
something even worse. Salome dances for the
head of the Baptist, a man she loves so madly that
she will take his life in order to possess him. That
desire beckons the gothic entry into the drama,
an arrival more anticipated than experienced.1 6
The dance is a powerful scene in any venue, and
yet it is all but unwritten in the play. The unveil-
ing of the scorned woman dancing her tempta-
tion before the enthralled desire of Herod is left,
like the sins of Dorian Gray, to the reader’s (and
the dancer’s) powers of invention. Salome’s dance
becomes the first measure of her moral insanity—
once a category of psychology understood by
Victorians. Moreau’s image of Salome dances also
before our mind’s eye, a visual double and another
painted allusion, as Wilde’s image performs her
own version of this most intentional of dances.
And yet, if this be the obligatory scene of the play,
it is neither the climax nor the quintessentially
gothic scene that biblical history teaches us to
expect, a point that confirms Wilde’s theatrical
instincts.
There are three powerful scenes yet to follow
in which the gothic character of the play defines
itself. In another of Wilde’s bargaining scenes,
Herod’s haggling over the promised reward neatly
reverses the power roles of the King and his step-
daughter. In her monotonal responses, interrupted
by Herod’s prolix, Pilate-like attempts at saving
both face and conscience, Salome assumes the
imperative style of the Baptist, thereby parodying
it. The final scene begins with the head of Io-
kanaan brought to Salome on a charger, in pay-
ment of Herod’s debt and the double revenge of
two scorned women, Herodias and her daughter.
Having altered the scriptures thus far for
dramatic effect, Wilde places his personal imprint
on the Salome legend in the conclusion, produc-
ing an unusual climax for a gothic plot. Salome’s
dramatic apostrophe to the severed head and
missing body of the Baptist is indeed worthy of a
prose Browning. Salome’s perverse eroticism, out-
does even Swinburne in the gothic power of its
interrogation of the Baptist’s prophetic and
implicitly Christian asceticism by Salome’s Diony-
sian carnality. In a sense, Salome’s monologue was
prefaced by her awakened libido at the sight of
the Baptist, who represents power, supernatural
authority, her own lost innocence and frustrated
desire. More than one reader has remarked on the
parallelism between Salome and Iokanaan, and
that sense of shared identity emphasizes Wilde’s
gothic representation of the revulsion of the flesh
at what is described in Dorian Gray as ‘this
monstrous soul-life’. Iokanaan had spiritualized
his senses by denying and demonizing them and
the world to which they belong. Salome appar-
ently wins her monologistic debate with the
Baptist but at the price of becoming enough like
him to suggest the transposition of Dorian and
his picture.
The play ends with two more strong dramatic
moments. First we hear the voice of Salome
sounding like the disembodied voice of the Baptist
in her Maenad-like, triumphant peroration: ‘They
say that love hath a bitter taste. [. . .] But what of
that? What of that? I have kissed thy mouth,
Iokanaan.’ Only in possessing the head of the
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Baptist does Salome think to possess his lips of
WILDE
power and prophecy, both metaphors of the man.
Herod’s disgusted, and fearful reflex is one of those
moments of ironic and even cynical reversal that
Wilde loved to construct in his prose poems: ‘Kill
that woman!’. The genius in that reflexive instant
lies in the way Wilde forces dramatic recognition
of both the appropriateness of the sentence and
concurrently its impulsive, arbitrary, and hypo-
critical wrongness. The play closes with Salome
crushed to death but thereby released by Herod
from a state of Dionysian sexual frenzy that has
disgusted the Tetrarch (although apparently not
Herodias, whose last words are ‘I approve of what
my daughter has done’) and is supposed to appall
the audience as well. The conclusion like that of
other gothic plots remains ambiguous, inviting
revisionary, even contradictory interpretations.
Nor should we mistake the play’s and the gothic’s
heteroglossal preferences, if I may appropriate Ba-
khtin’s ingenious and fashionable term.1 7
* * *
The Sphinx, Wilde’s long unfinished poem,
had its beginnings in Paris, according to Ellmann,
in 1874 (36, 90-91), inspired by Poe, Swinburne,
and Browning. The idea was put aside but taken
up again at Oxford in 1878, after Wilde had
finished ‘Ravenna’, when it would have suited
his purpose of establishing himself as a young
poet of promise to follow the Newdigate Prize
poem with another from a similar perspective: a
set piece featuring youthful, Byronic reflections
on a vaguely classical subject graced by curious
historical and learned ornamentation. Though
ambitious enough for fame, a youngish Wilde
perhaps sensing unrealized potentials put it back
in the trunk. He may have had another go at it in
the early eighties while back in Paris but with no
better result. Finally, some time in the early nine-
ties, probably following the publication of the
original Salome, Wilde completed the poem, in
Paris, of course.
I suggest that Wilde returned for this last time
to his unfinished sphinx because he saw how it
could be revived and completed by applying a
gothic aesthetic that had produced such sensa-
tional effects in both Dorian Gray and Salome.
The gothic provided the means for realizing the
unfulfilled potentials of the various drafts, and
this revised, final version of The Sphinx was
published at last in an ornate edition designed by
Charles Ricketts in 1894, at least a year after it was
completed.
497
 Although Wilde’s Sphinx is more Greek than
WILDE
Egyptian in form, both mythic traditions are
mingled together freely in the poem. Hermaphro-
ditic, the sphinx symbolizes a pagan ideal of unit-
ing a primitive animism with animal worship, an
early representation of mystery religion, and a
forerunner of the great mystery religion, Christian-
ity, bridging the historic evolution of mind and
soul. Wilde connects the mythological sphinx—
perhaps for contemporary and later readers a relic
of an incredible age of monsters out of the fossil
rocks, somehow symbolized by the early genera-
tions of Greek and Egyptian gods, swarming with
monstrous mutations—to the Old and New Testa-
ments in which the land of Egypt, a refuge for
Joseph and Israel only to become a slave state,
later serves as a haven for the holy family fleeing
the tyranny of another Herod.
Wilde’s sphinx dwells in a private Victorian
collection of antiquities, a curiosity, a silent mes-
senger of Greco-Egyptian myth and the chaos that
informed it, surrounded by the upholstery of late
Victorian imperial England. It is a displacement
that inspired Victorian and later stories of super-
natural terror and whose gothic potentials are
obvious. The location is also a metaphor for the
aestheticized history of the sphinx, a fantastic
biography of mythic and legendary rumours, ap-
propriately chaotic and contradictory, whose
primary effect is the gothicized, nightmare-like
state of an overly stimulated imagination, such as
we encounter in Dorian Gray and Salome. Indeed,
our interlocutor’s late descriptions of the sphinx
have the distinct flavour of Wilde’s gothicized
art.1 8 The characteristic heaping up of aesthetic
ornamentation also serves purposes similar to the
gothicized art of Dorian Gray. Different forces
creating the gothic world of each work, however,
do indeed produce related but different effects.
Dorian’s intentional wish creates his gothic world
of art, but it is the speaker’s enthralled, perverse
sexual fantasies that lead him into the sphinx’s
circle of desire and devolution.
The speaker’s long, monologic interview with
the sphinx, the many questions put to the mute
statuette whose mythic voice has not been heard
in twenty centuries, seem to break an enchant-
ment of silent isolation and bring the symbol back
to a kind of life, at least in the gothicized imagina-
tion of the speaker.1 9 The sphinx yet has power, it
seems, of speaking as a gothic artifact through the
imagination of the questioner. In this respect, Wil-
de’s sphinx appears to be a significant departure
from Rossetti’s reflections on the great bull that
Layard had excavated from Nineveh and brought
498 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
as the spoils of science to the British Museum.
Wilde wants the sphinx to be a relic of an alto-
gether different sort of history, not natural but
mythic and pre-human. The Sphinx offers a
gothic archaeology of a human soul rather than
of a city, and the secret of the sphinx’s savage
antiquity lies in the imagination of the speaker as
a primitive retention of pre-conscious mind. The
life of the sphinx is stored in the imagination of
the speaker rather than at a national gallery or in
his private collection. The statuette speaks to those
who understand its unconscious iconography.2 0
The interrogation of the sphinx produces a
fantastic psychoanalysis of the god’s ancient
promiscuous life. The probing questions and
increasingly morbid emphasis on the sphinx’s
mythic indiscretions gradually reveal to the reader
the erotic fantasies of the speaker in the guise of
an inquiry into the perverse sexual preference of
sphinxes in which passion is linked with cruelty
and even murder, both aspects of erotic passion in
Dorian Gray and Salome, and both traditionally
energizing forces of the gothic. However, gro-
tesquely, the sphinx symbolizes for the speaker a
demi-god at liberty to indulge in its impulses and
appetites freely and without guilt, as matters of
preference and involving nothing of moral re-
straints or absolute prohibitions, both of which,
when viewed by Wilde’s contemporary anthropol-
ogy, were considered decayed remnants of tribal
taboos.
The speaker’s renunciation of the sphinx as
false in a complex echoing of Keats raises ques-
tions about our speaker’s stability, similar to those
about Gray. First, the rejection is also a self-
indictement of one whose imagination has been
gothicized by the sphinx’s seductive silence,
ancient at the crossroads of historic and cosmic
time yet revenant in its power to energize our
speaker’s imaginative avatar. The sphinx seems
therefore relevant historically as gothicized imagi-
nation: not merely its symbol but its reification,
realized in the monstrous archetype from which
the speaker cannot completely escape. Yeats’s
famous concluding lines to ‘The Second Coming’
may have a special relevance, perhaps even special
reference to Wilde’s revenant sphinx: ‘what rough
beast, its hour come round at last . . .’ We also
have license to recall Herod’s reflexive dismissal of
Salome’s necrophilia.2 1
Wilde’s connection of the sphinx with Chris-
tianity may not be as gratuitous as Ellmann sug-
gests. Developing from Dorian Gray and Salome,
it anticipates Wilde’s later meditations on the
aesthetic Christ as an artist of religion. Each
symbol—the sphinx statuette and crucifix—
exercises power over the speaker’s imagination in
this poem, although the crucifix is rather a late-
comer. Yet each symbol betrays albeit differently
the humanism that was at this point in Wilde’s
life central to his speculative thinking. The primi-
tive animistic power of the sphinx in its chaotic
mixture of animal and human pre-consciousness
becomes historically parallel to the irrational, that
is to say, the historically unfulfilled archetype of
the crucified god whose humanity and divinity
appear locked in unresolvable antithesis. In the
poem if the sphinx is too savage to lift the narra-
tor above the primitive avatar of human imagina-
tion, the crucifix is too complex a symbol of the
human in the divine and the divine potential of
the human to be realizable. Claims by both
symbols offer the speaker little to choose but a
cold conscience, itself the remnant of tribal guilt.
At the centre of the circle of fear and desire are
the contradictory symbols: the woman/animal
and the man/god, each representing a now gothi-
cized myth, one ancient and bestial the other
historical and divine through which, Wilde’s
interlocutor implies, human imagination has been
tangled in problematic contradictions. Arousing
himself from his gothic reveries, our speaker, still
a student in his ‘students cell’, finds himself
obliged to choose between the loathsome mystery
of the sullen sphinx whose power to ‘wake in me
each bestial sense’ and the powerless crucified God
who ‘weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for
every soul in vain’. Can there be escape from this
nightmare if the sphinx must be renounced by a
dying or poisoned soul? The waking world appears
to offer only despair in place of guilt, suggesting
that the difference between two worlds linked by
imagination is insufficient to relieve the burden of
a gothic life of desire that eventually kills the soul.
* * *
Wilde’s uses of the gothic mode in three major
works helped produce two masterpieces and
transformed an unfinished work into a dramatic
monologue of the conflicted presentations of
carnal passion and spiritual enervation.
Wilde’s first deployment of the gothic mode
seems to have arisen from the inspiration for
Dorian Gray to deconstruct Wilde’s own aesthetic
philosophy of life as represented in his stories and
essays of the late eighties and early nineties. To a
significant extent, the foundations of Dorian
Gray, Salome, and The Sphinx as decadent mas-
terpieces seem dependent upon Wilde’s decision
to use the gothic as the most effective means for
resolving artistically the competing claims of the
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aesthetic, sexual, tragic, and supernatural aspects
WILDE
of works representing portions of his own inner
life. Since the works were to be realized through
sequences of effects, like the phasmatropic projec-
tion of Victorian picture cards set into a synchro-
nized motion, Wilde required a form that empha-
sized powerful engagement of reader reaction
through his manipulation of imagery, symbols,
legendary or mythic structures and secondary or
imagined emotions. Traditionally, appeals of this
kind have been especially suited to the gothic
because the genre offered models for expressing
those hidden, complex relationships among the
sexual, psychological, and supernatural declen-
sions of mind encoded in the exotic and decora-
tive powers of art.
Wilde’s use of the gothic was a brief, brilliant
episode in an experimental phase of his career
during which he assayed and reshaped conven-
tions of the major structural genres en route to his
greatest success as a comedic dramatist. Wilde was
not to return to the gothic. Perhaps after prison
and social martyrdom, reflected so powerfully in
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, neither the gothic
nor the tragic were available options to his art
because he had experienced both real tragedy and
the fulfillment of his own imagination of disaster.
As Lord Henry once put it: ‘the only things that
one can use in fiction are the things that one has
ceased to use in fact’ (64).
Notes
1. Given the persistence of a critical superstition that the
gothic novel died in the 1820’s, I am obliged to declare
such reports have been grossly exaggerated and to af-
firm its survival despite critical interment: ‘it had a
limited run (nearly everyone dates it from Otranto in
1764 to either Melmoth in 1820 or Hogg’s Confessions
of a Justified Sinner in 1824)’ (Geary 2).
Day’s definition of gothic literature identifies charac-
ters’ experience of an enthralled state of fear and
desire as the distinctive power of the genre, and it will
serve our needs in this essay. Although emphasizing
the fate of characters in gothic plots, this approach is
a variant of reader-response in the Aristotelian tradi-
tion. The primary cause of the characters’ enthralled
condition is a kind of hubris: the desire for something
contrary to nature, often associated with the super-
natural or forbidden sex.
In his Preface to the second edition of The Castle of
Otranto, H. Walpole explained that his new type of
romance had been invented to energize the fiction of
his age by representing two powerful, instinctive
forces omitted from contemporary novels: the will to
believe in a supernatural (and the fear of it at the same
time, most often expressed as dread of the demonic)
and the desire for a sexual freedom proscribed by
social mores and religion. The gothic internalized the
conflict of these forces through the power of romance
or fantastic narrative to engage readers’ primary emo-
499
 tions of awe, fear, wonder, and desire. Walpole also
WILDE
established alliances with the tragic and the didactic,
traits that have remained affiliated with the gothic
ever since.
The transmission of the gothic to the present has
produced too many distinct sub-types even to men-
tion let alone discuss, but these discrete species range
from gothic science fiction (Frankenstein to Jurassic
Park) to gothic fantasy (Varney the Vampire to Twin
Peaks) and include domesticated gothics like The
Picture of Dorian Gray, and exotics like Salome, and The
Sphinx.
2. The premise of this approach of Dorian Gray, Salome,
and The Sphinx is that they are each in the gothic
mode, meaning that they commonly share an experi-
mental use of the gothic in conjunction with other
well-documented formal elements of plotting and
style. Wilde’s use of the gothic has been noted, albeit
in passing, by many scholars (Buckler, Charlesworth-
Gelpi, Cohen, Ellmann, Hyde, Kohl, Nassaar, Régnier,
San Juan) but not formally addressed. It seems to me
that many features of Wilde’s three works that have
perplexed critics as ‘strange’ (a favoured term) and
even ineffable are more readily understandable as
expressive of the gothic.
3. References in my text are to the revised, 1891 version
of the novel. However, in the original, Lippincott’s ver-
sion (1890), gothic sensationalism amplified the effect
of the moral allegory, of Dorian’s growing depravity
and eventual indirect suicide. Although it was not Wil-
de’s intent, his original use of the gothic contributed
to a widespread misinterpretation of that finale as the
despairing but repentant act of a justified sinner: a
misreading Wilde himself realized his text supported.
The revised version, although it does not close out
moral allegory, reinforces the relationship between art
and the gothic world of nightmare and anxiety.
4. Wilde selected the gothic because he needed a literary
mode that would promote the best features of a
complex narrative that included a fantastic premise
with supernatural resonances (the soul-bargaining and
the magical picture), a complex allegory (moral,
aesthetic, historical, autobiographical), and multiva-
lent sexual passions while producing a more tragic
than pathetic or sentimental impression. Wilde
developed his gothic fantastic treatment of the living
painting to emphasize his ingenious scheme of gothi-
cising art and everything associated with art in the
novel, but especially the decorative uses of art. The
result of these and the other conjunctions within the
context of a gothic narrative was to produce a style of
discourse, design, and symbolic emphasis that was im-
mediately identified as the distinctive idiom of British
Decadence. The key to this idiom, I believe, is Wilde’s
gothic treatment of art and its many associations, but
especially as an intensely decorative and ornamental
mode.
5. ‘To recreate life’ is the gothic signature of such over-
reachers as Drs Frankenstein and Jekyll. It does not
matter to the gothic that Basil intended no more than
recreating life aesthetically. The tragic pattern is
already established for Dorian to complete, proving
Basil’s error fatal not only for the painter but also,
eventually, for Sibyl Vane and Dorian.
6. Wilde gothicizes art in the novel and in the other
texts we examine only for the duration of the plot
and not in some ontologic sense. Nevertheless, Wil-
500 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
de’s vision of the gothic potential of art does take its
place permanently in the repertory of the gothic. Just
as Frankenstein defines the condition of gothic science,
so does Dorian Gray establish a gothicized art that is
retained as a resource in the genre.
7. It is probable that Wilde derived Dorian’s method of
attempting to spiritualize the senses from contempo-
rary thinkers like G. H. Lewes and Wilhelm Wundt.
We find traces in references to Henry’s quasi-scientific
studies of individual and group behaviour, the impor-
tance of hereditary influences on Dorian equated with
personal influences (Henry, Basil, and Sibyl) and the
influences of art. These reflect theories of Lewes and
Wundt on parallel psychic and physical causation that
informed their debate with Huxley and the Darwinists
over a purely materialist model for development and
influence of human consciousness.
The key notion for Lewes was ‘psychic causality’, an
idea that first Henry and then Dorian mis-appropriate
as a formula for reconstructing an aestheticized self,
built up by repeated exposures to artistic effects that
would produce acquired dispositions. Unfortunately
for Gray’s scheme of becoming the artist of his own
life, since art had been gothicized in the painting by
his own wish, everything aestheticized becomes
thereby gothicized as well.
8. See Dorian Gray 143: to Dorian the image of the closed
circle of hallucinated desire and fear is an apt represen-
tation of his gothicized mind. At this point art enthrals
rather than enchants because the linkage of art with
evil, of dandyism and aestheticism with the gothic
world has become a self-replicating pattern.
9. A few representative examples will do: the morning
after Basil’s murder Gray awakens peacefully in his
sunlit bedroom, then but ‘gradually the events of the
preceding night crept with silent, bloodstained feet
into his brain’ (125). The bloodstains foreshadow the
changes in the picture. Later, when Gray seeks escape
from consciousness in London’s opium dens, ‘the
moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull’ (142).
This moment comes just before he encounters his
nemesis, James Vane. It may be worth an aside to note
that Wilde’s idea for costuming Salome was to dress
the entire cast in yellow.
10. Themes of perverse sexual passion, supernaturalism of
one sort or another, and tragic deaths have been as-
sociated with the gothic novel since The Castle of
Otranto and were also linked in some of Wilde’s poetry
and later stories like ‘Mr W. H.’ and those in A House
of Pomegranates.
11. The text I use is the English language translation,
originally botched so badly by Alfred Douglas that
Wilde finally did a complete revision, after having
rejected Aubrey Beardsley’s offer to make a new
translation of his own. In a somewhat more radical if
eccentric way, the play’s transmission history forms
the rough equivalent of mediated narratives in gothic
stories.
Refusal to approve a license for the English version
while the play was in rehearsal caused a great contro-
versy over censorship, and drew from Wilde a threat
to renounce his English citizenship and defect to
France where he would be free from interference. Had
he done so rather than heed George Archer’s counsel
not to leave under fire, he would have left an intel-
lectual hero, at least in Europe, and literary and
 cultural history would have been changed. It is tempt-
ing to speculate how different Wilde’s life could have
been. As it was, Wilde stayed, and a similar motive
later kept Wilde from taking his chance to leave Eng-
land for France after the collapse of the first trial.
12. It should be noted that Salome performed is far more
effective than Salome read, although admittedly the
experiences differ. For instance the theatrical effect of
the repetitious, stylized dialogue, punctuated by the
symbolist imagery encountered in the speech of every
character but Herodias and Iokanaan can be mesmer-
izing in the theatre, especially as the erotically and
gothically derived tensions build toward a culturally
foretold climax. Indeed, no small portion of the play’s
success is the result of Wilde’s genius for playing his
characters against his audience’s expectations derived
from both scriptural authority and other artistic
representations.
13. Wilde’s gothic invasion of the world of art from the
novel to the play included the power to gothicize the
imaginations of those who invoke emotionally
charged decorative effects or seem obsessed by them:
allusiveness is an attribute of genres. This helps to ac-
count for the otherwise gratuitous foreboding shared
by the choric characters with the principals. Hence
anything that a gothicized art may incorporate either
directly or by association becomes a rumour of some
aspect of the gothic world.
The power of gothicized art, as we have already seen,
haunts the imagination of the characters and, thereby,
affects the reader’s imagination. By using the power
of a gothic aesthetic, Wilde had at his disposal for
drama a proved and effective way for exercising an
audience’s response and for energizing their imagina-
tions without need of explanations. Gothic appeals to
readers’ secondary fears and desires, for example, are
experienced as reflexes of imagination, needing no
conceptual recognition.
14. Those parodic prose-poems with biblical subjects were
given in Wilde’s aestheticized, archaic idiom. The
moon that serves symbolic duty in poems, stories, and
the novel, rises to the level of influence in Salome and
serves also as a thematic barometer, changing from
white to red to black. There is the symbolism associ-
ated with Salome’s little white feet—possibly imported
from ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ because of their
sexual fetishism there—that fascinate the Syrian
captain and even his gay admirer, the ‘Page of
Herodias’. Flower and bird symbols abound in ‘The
Nightingale and the Rose’, and a bird out of The Happy
Prince and Other Tales may have precursed the white
doves associated with the early, virginal Salome before
the moon turns red.
15. Iokanaan hardly engages Salome in dialogic exchange;
and he does not have a pleasant word to say to or
about anyone. He offers only a few words about the
Christ who is to follow but who remains distantly off
stage. The Baptist appears as the last Old Testament
prophet.
Salome, however, finds him irresistible, perhaps,
because he denies himself to her, or perhaps for no
reason at all beyond an inexplicable attraction. It is
the sort of tragic fatality about which Basil speaks in
the novel. If the fisherman (of ‘The Fisherman and
His Soul’) could fall in love with a woman’s feet
because the mermaid had none and Dorian be en-
chanted by Henry’s voice, it would not be uncharac-
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teristic in Wilde for Salome to be smitten by Io-
WILDE
kanaan’s voice, hair, skin, and at last mouth.
Religion is not so much gothicized in Salome as mar-
ginalized. However, scripture in its translated dis-
course, to the extent that it is aestheticized in the play,
does reveal a parodic, gothic potential for Wilde as it
did in the prose poems. Matthew and Mark are, after
all, revised by Wilde for a gothic, dramatic purpose.
16. Here is another instance of Wilde’s innovative use of
gothic conventions or practice.
17. Perhaps the literary and dramatic conclusions need to
be critically separated for the moment. As the perfor-
mance ends, the audience is supposed to agree with
Herod’s outrage at Salome’s necrophilia and blas-
phemy but be shocked at his arbitrary order to kill
Salome—at least this may be assumed about the
majority of Wilde’s contemporary audiences. Readers
who dramatize the text internally enjoy the burden of
electing to reread the conclusion where they will find
not only signs of authorial sympathy for the admit-
tedly mad Salome but traces of another working
myth—that of Cupid and Psyche—behind the Diony-
sian construction that is foregrounded.
There is, then, more than one irony to Herod’s com-
mand. Salome has ended her monologue: ‘If thou
hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me, and the
mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
Love only one should consider.’ What a lesson for
him! Perhaps what Salome thought she was getting in
Iokanaan was a god to equal her passion rather than a
desiccated prophet. Herod’s response is to deplore
Salome’s ‘crime against an unknown God’. It is a state-
ment with more reflexive than direct meanings. In
the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid was the un-
known god.
Historically, another Herod was to pass another death
sentence, this time on the very unknown god this
Herod condoles. And, of course, the ‘unknown God’
alludes to St Paul’s famous ‘Areopagus Sermon’ in
Athens (Acts 17:22-31) that led to the conversion of
many.
18. Wilde reintroduces from Dorian Gray the drawing
room of a collector of ancient and fabled curiosities,
especially ones that would have been associated with
anthropological study of primitive customs, religious
rituals, and sexual rites that James G. Frazer had just
analyzed in The Golden Bough. The Roots of Religion and
Folklore (1890). Wilde’s interlocutor may remind us of
Gray in both his youth and debauched imagination,
but there seems something of the amateur anthropolo-
gist in him also, more like the Victorian gentleman-
scientist of Robert Browning’s ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi’s’,
perhaps, than Wilde’s decadent brat. Once again
Wilde imports a work of art to be wished into a kind
of hallucinated, gothic life that then reflects the true
condition of the protagonist’s guilty soul.
In the 1944 MGM film adaptation of Dorian Gray, not
only does the sphinx appear in Basil’s studio, in the
painting, and in Dorian’s study but also the poem is
quoted several times as a basis for representing the
statuette as one of the gods of Egypt with the power
of granting Dorian Gray’s wish for endless youth and
for exercising an ancient evil influence over the lad in
what was a rather creative reversal of the historical
declension of influences in the texts.
501
 19. The sphinx has long since turned to stone and has no
WILDE
longer a voice of her own. Her previously reputed
conversations with humans having been riddling
invitations to death make us wonder whether this her
silence is now another form of riddle.
20. In Dorian Gray, this very argument for the survival of
imagination and conscience as transformed remnants
of the emotional and irrational life of primitive
cultures is one phase of the theme of gothicized influ-
ence. The idea fascinated Wilde, perhaps because he
was one who had learned to search for and recognize
influences that had shaped his own life, especially we
may suppose, his sexual life. This interest may have
originated with Pater and later been reinforced by the
growing influences of post-Darwinist psychology and
the newer cultural and primitive anthropology. The
theme appears in stories like ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s
Crime’, ‘Mr. W. H.’, and Intentions before it became
gothicized in Dorian Gray, Salome, and The Sphinx.
21. Wilde’s reversal of the argument of Salome in the
poem is worth noting. Instead of the female princess
who is the victim of the gothic world created by her
sick desire for Iokanaan, the speaker’s morbid and
carnal curiosity elaborated through his double-edged
confessional interview, exercises in him appetites so
feral that no human of Wilde’s class could have
entertained them without shame, even in a condi-
tional state.
References
Behrendt, P. F. Oscar Wilde. Eros and Aesthetics, New York, St
Martin’s Press, 1991.
Buckler, W. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray. An Essay in Aesthetic
Exploration’, Victorians Institute Journal 18 (1990), 135-
174.
Charlesworth-Gelpi, B. Dark Passages: The Decadent Con-
sciousness in Victorian Literature, Madison, University of
Wisconsin Press, 1965.
Cohen, P. K. The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, Cranbury, New
Jersey and London, Associated University Press, 1978.
Day, W. P. In the Circles of Fear and Desire, Chicago, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1987.
Ellmann, R. Golden Codgers, New York, Oxford University
Press, 1973.
———. Oscar Wilde, New York, Knopf, 1988.
Gagnier, R. Idylls of the Marketplace, Palo Alto, Stanford
University Press, 1986.
Geary, R. F. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction, Lewiston, New
York, Mellon University Press, 1992.
Hyde, H. Oscar Wilde, New York, Ferrar, 1975.
Kohl, N. Oscar Wilde. The Works of a Conformist Rebel, trans.
D. H. Wilson, New York, Cambridge University Press,
1989.
Nassaar, C. S. Into the Demon Universe. A Literary Exploration
of Oscar Wilde, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974.
San Juan, Jr., E. The Art of Oscar Wilde, Princeton University
Press, 1967.
Walpole, H. ‘Preface’, The Castle of Otranto. Ed. W. S. Lewis,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969.
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Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works, London, Collins, 1969.
———. Letters, Ed. R. Hart-Davis, London, Hart-Davis, 1962.
———. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ed. D. Lawler, New York,
Norton, 1987.
Worth, K. Oscar Wilde, New York, Grove Press, 1983.
TITLE COMMENTARY
The Picture of Dorian Gray
ST. JAMES GAZETTE (REVIEW
DATE 24 JUNE 1890)
SOURCE: “A Study in Puppydom.” In A Norton Critical
Edition: Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited
by Donald L. Lawler, pp. 67-71. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1988.
In the following essay, first published in the St. James’s
Gazette on June 24, 1890, the critic derides The Picture
of Dorian Gray as poorly written, derivative, immature,
and immoral.
Time was (it was in the ’70’s) when we talked
about Mr Oscar Wilde; time came (it came in the
’80’s) when he tried to write poetry and, more
adventurous, we tried to read it; time is when we
had forgotten him, or only remember him as the
late editor of The Woman’s World—a part for
which he was singularly unfitted, if we are to
judge him by the work which he has been allowed
to publish in Lippincott’s Magazine and which
Messrs Ward, Lock & Co. have not been ashamed
to circulate in Great Britain. Not being curious in
ordure, and not wishing to offend the nostrils of
decent persons, we do not propose to analyse The
Picture of Dorian Gray: that would be to advertise
the developments of an esoteric prurience.
Whether the Treasury or the Vigilance Society will
think it worth while to prosecute Mr Oscar Wilde
or Messrs Ward, Lock & Co., we do not know; but
on the whole we hope they will not.
The puzzle is that a young man of decent
parts, who enjoyed (when he was at Oxford) the
opportunity of associating with gentlemen, should
put his name (such as it is) to so stupid and vulgar
a piece of work. Let nobody read it in the hope of
finding witty paradox or racy wickedness. The
writer airs his cheap research among the garbage
of the French Décadents like any drivelling pedant,
and he bores you unmercifully with his prosy
rigmaroles about the beauty of the Body and the
corruption of the Soul. The grammar is better than
Ouida’s; the erudition equal; but in every other
respect we prefer the talented lady who broke off
with “pious aposiopesis” when she touched upon
“the horrors which are described in the pages of
Suetonius and Livy”—not to mention the yet
worse infamies believed by many scholars to be
accurately portrayed in the lost works of Plutarch,
Venus, and Nicodemus, especially Nicodemus.
Let us take one peep at the young men in Mr
Oscar Wilde’s story. Puppy No. 1 is the painter of
the picture of Dorian Gray; Puppy No. 2 is the
critic (a courtesy lord, skilled in all the knowledge
of the Egyptians and aweary of all the sins and
pleasures of London); Puppy No. 3 is the original,
cultivated by Puppy No. 1 with a “romantic
friendship.” The Puppies fall a-talking: Puppy No.
1 about his Art, Puppy No. 2 about his sins and
pleasures and the pleasures of sin, and Puppy No.
3 about himself—always about himself, and gener-
ally about his face, which is “brainless and beauti-
ful.” The Puppies appear to fill up the intervals of
talk by plucking daisies and playing with them,
and sometimes by drinking “something with
strawberry in it.” The youngest Puppy is told that
he is charming; but he mustn’t sit in the sun for
fear of spoiling his complexion. When he is
rebuked for being a naughty, wilful boy, he makes
a pretty moue—this man of twenty! This is how
he is addressed by the Blasé Puppy at their first
meeting:
“Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.
But what the gods give they quickly take
away. . . . When your youth goes, your beauty
will go with it, and then you will suddenly
discover that there are no triumphs left for
you. . . . Time is jealous of you, and wars against
your lilies and roses. You will become sallow, and
hollow-cheeked, and dulleyed. You will suffer hor-
ribly.”
Why, bless our souls! haven’t we read some-
thing of this kind somewhere in the classics? Yes,
of course we have! But in what recondite author?
Ah—yes—no—yes, it was in Horace! What an
advantage it is to have received a classical educa-
tion! And how it will astonish the Yankees! But
we must not forget our Puppies, who have prob-
ably occupied their time in lapping “something
with strawberry in it.” Puppy No. 1 (the Art
Puppy) has been telling Puppy No. 3 (the Doll
Puppy) how much he admires him. What is the
answer? “I am less to you than your ivory Hermes
or your silver Faun. You will like them always.
How long will you like me? Till I have my first
wrinkle, I suppose. I know now that when one
loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one
loses everything. . . . I am jealous of the portrait
you have painted of me. Why should it keep what
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
WILDE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JULIAN HAWTHORNE ON THE PICTURE OF
DORIAN GRAY
Mr Oscar Wilde, the apostle of beauty, has in
the July number of Lippincott’s Magazine a
novel or romance (it partakes of the qualities
of both), which everybody will want to read.
It is a story strange in conception, strong in
interest, and fitted with a tragic and ghastly
climax. Like many stories of its class, it is open
to more than one interpretation; and there
are, doubtless, critics who will deny that it
has any meaning at all. It is, at all events, a
salutary departure from the ordinary English
novel, with the hero and heroine of different
social stations, the predatory black sheep,
the curate, the settlements, and Society. Mr
Wilde, as we all know, is a gentleman of an
original and audacious turn of mind, and the
commonplace is scarcely possible to him.
Besides, his advocacy of novel ideas in life,
art, dress, and demeanour had led us to
expect surprising things from him; and in this
literary age it is agreed that a man may best
show the best there is in him by writing a
book. Those who read Mr Wilde’s story in
the hope of finding in it some compact and
final statement of his theories of life and man-
ners will be satisfied in some respects, and
dissatisfied in others; but not many will deny
that the book is a remarkable one, and would
attract attention even had it appeared with-
out the author’s name on the title page.
SOURCE: Hawthorne, Julian. “The Romance of the
Impossible.” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
(September 1890): 79-80.
I must lose? . . . Oh, if it was only the other way!
If the picture could only change, and I could be
always what I am now!”
No sooner said than done! The picture does
change: the original doesn’t. Here’s a situation for
you! Théophile Gautier could have made it roman-
tic, entrancing, beautiful. Mr Stevenson could
have made it convincing, humorous, pathetic. Mr
Anstey could have made it screamingly funny. It
has been reserved for Mr Oscar Wilde to make it
503
 dull and nasty. The promising youth plunges into
WILDE
every kind of mean depravity, and ends in being
“cut” by fast women and vicious men. He finishes
with murder: the New Voluptuousness always
leads up to blood-shedding—that is part of the
cant. The gore and gashes wherein Mr Rider Hag-
gard takes a chaste delight are the natural diet for
a cultivated palate which is tired of mere licen-
tiousness. And every wickedness or filthiness com-
mitted by Dorian Gray is faithfully registered upon
his face in the picture; but his living features are
undisturbed and unmarred by his inward vileness.
This is the story which Mr Oscar Wilde has tried
to tell; a very lame story it is, and very lamely it is
told.
Why has he told it? There are two explana-
tions; and, so far as we can see, not more than
two. Not to give pleasure to his readers: the thing
is too clumsy, too tedious, and—alas! that we
should say it—too stupid. Perhaps it was to shock
his readers, in order that they might cry Fie! upon
him and talk about him, much as Mr Grant Allen
recently tried in The Universal Review to arouse, by
a licentious theory of the sexual relations, an at-
tention which is refused to his popular chatter
about other men’s science. Are we then to sup-
pose that Mr Oscar Wilde has yielded to the crav-
ing for a notoriety which he once earned by talk-
ing fiddle-faddle about other men’s art, and sees
his only chance of recalling it by making himself
obvious at the cost of being obnoxious, and by at-
tracting the notice which the olfactory sense can-
not refuse to the presence of certain self-asserting
organisms? That is an uncharitable hypothesis,
and we would gladly abandon it. It may be sug-
gested (but is it more charitable?) that he derives
pleasure from treating a subject merely because it
is disgusting. The phenomenon is not unknown
in recent literature; and it takes two forms, in ap-
pearance widely separate—in fact, two branches
from the same root, a root which draws its life
from malodorous putrefaction. One development
is found in the Puritan prurience which produced
Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and Mr Stead’s famous
outbursts. That is odious enough and mischievous
enough, and it is rightly execrated, because it is
tainted with an hypocrisy not the less culpable
because charitable persons may believe it to be
unconscious. But is it more odious or more mis-
chievous than the “frank Paganism” (that is the
word, is it not?) which delights in dirtiness and
confesses its delight? Still they are both chips from
the same block—“The Maiden Tribute of Modern
Babylon” and The Picture of Dorian Gray—and
both of them ought to be chucked into the fire.
504 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
Not so much because they are dangerous and cor-
rupt (they are corrupt but not dangerous) as
because they are incurably silly, written by simple-
ton poseurs (whether they call themselves Puritan
or Pagan) who know nothing about the life which
they affect to have explored, and because they are
mere catchpenny relevations of the non-existent,
which, if they reveal anything at all, are revela-
tions only of the singularly unpleasant minds
from which they emerge.
LEWIS J. POTEET (ESSAY DATE
SUMMER 1971)
SOURCE: Poteet, Lewis J. “Dorian Gray and the Gothic
Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 17, no. 2 (summer 1971):
239-48.
In the following essay, Poteet surveys possible connec-
tions between The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charles
Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, maintaining
that “Wilde in fact may be said to have written a version
of Gothic novel, giving the form contemporary dimen-
sions.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s
only novel, was written and published during the
same burst of creative energy that produced the
essays collected in Intentions (1891).1 Yet it has
rarely been studied in connection with them or
with any native English novelistic tradition; it has
usually been treated as a curious, anomalous
artifact of aestheticism, deriving more from the
French than from anything else. In fact, Graham
Hough is typical in treating the novel as a bad
imitation of K.-J. Huysmans’ A Rebours. He bases
this judgment on the identity of the unnamed
“yellow book” which Dorian Gray reads in Chap-
ter X and whose influence on his life is detailed in
Chapter XI, and he says rather ungenerously that
the “yellow book,” which he identifies with A Re-
bours, “probably remains anonymous because
Wilde owed too much to it and was not over-
anxious to advertise his sources.”2 The most recent
full-length study of Wilde’s work, too, calls Huys-
mans’ novel the “main inspiration” of Dorian
Gray.3 These attributions of influence have been
made again and again despite Wilde’s clearly
caustic deprecation of Huysmans in a letter to
Robert Ross (Letters, p. 520).4 He does, to be sure,
mention Huysmans in answer to a question about
the “yellow book”: “The book in Dorian Gray is
one of the many books I have never written, but
it is partly suggested by Huysmans’s A Re-
bours. . . . It is a fantastic variation on Huys-
mans’s over-realistic study of the artistic tempera-
ment in our inartistic age” (Letters, p. 313). But
he has been taken to mean that his own novel is
the “fantastic variation”; what he says is that it is
the “yellow book” which Lord Harry sends Dorian.
In another letter, answering the same question, he
writes, “The book that poisoned, or made perfect,
Dorian Gray does not exist; it is a fancy of mine
merely” (Letters, p. 352) as if to counter the
mistaken, if commonplace, association with Huys-
mans.
Wilde may indeed have owed Huysmans more
than he acknowledged, but a close look at both
books uncovers important differences. A Rebours
is, as Wilde says in the description of the “yellow
book” in Dorian Gray, “a novel without a plot”;
Dorian Gray is definitely a novel with a plot,
beginning with Dorian’s temptation and his rash
vow, moving through his progressive loss of
“natural” innocence and his artificialization of his
life to his crime, the murder of Basil Hallward,
and his own death. A Rebours is an intensely
psychological study of a single protagonist, seen
through his own eyes; Wilde divides the reader’s
attention among three main characters and a “liv-
ing” portrait. The protagonist of A Rebours is not
criminal; Dorian is. He does not even inspire
unsavory rumors, as Dorian does, for society is ir-
relevant to the exploration of his personal aes-
thetic. In fact, the direct influences of A Rebours
on Dorian Gray are pretty much limited to
Chapters X and XI, in which Dorian encounters
the “yellow book” and imitates the protagonist by
collecting sensations—musical, artistic, gemologi-
cal, religious. But even this is only one of several
exercises in Dorian’s progressive initiation into
aestheticism: it has its appropriate place, I suggest,
in a larger scheme.
Behind the larger scheme of the book lies a
native, English Romantic literary tradition, that of
the Gothic novel, the form which a recent scholar
calls “the serious romance” and which he says the
novels of Godwin, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin,
Mary Shelley, Dickens, the Brontës, and R. L.
Stevenson best represent.5 Instead of making
generalizations about the Gothic novel in general,
we may most usefully inquire into the relation-
ship of Wilde’s novel to it by looking closely at
the Gothic novel that was most likely to be on his
mind when he wrote Dorian Gray. Charles R. Ma-
turin, one of the Gothic novelists most successful
and prolific in the Romantic period, was an ances-
tor of Wilde; in fact, Wilde mentions his novel
Melmoth the Wanderer and acknowledges the fam-
ily relationship with some pride—Maturin was his
grand-uncle (Letters, p. 520). Wilde may have
helped his friends Robert Ross and More Adey to
write an “anonymous biographical introduction
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
to a new edition of the novel in 1892” (Letters, p.
WILDE
555n), about a year after Dorian Gray was pub-
lished.
And Melmoth the Wanderer does provide many
of the larger patterns with which Wilde shapes his
novel, so that Wilde in fact may be said to have
written a version of Gothic novel, giving the form
contemporary dimensions. From Melmoth and
other Gothic novels and legends which provided
material for them (the Faust legend, for example),
Wilde takes the overall movement from rash vow
(the bargain with the devil) to condemnation.
Melmoth’s pact with the devil is for vaguely speci-
fied ends, giving him the power of a magician over
the world of spirits and demons and the power to
move about the earth freely, not limited to place
or time as are ordinary men. Thus, in the most
explicit statement about his bargain, he cries out
before his condemnation to hell, “no one has ever
exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer.
I have traversed the world in the search, and no
one, to gain the world, would lose his own soul”
(III, 327), Dorian makes a pact, the implications
of which are tied in with Wilde’s aesthetic theory,
as we shall see; he is increasingly the subject of
gossip and rumor because, like Melmoth, he
moves about secretly and is associated with
debauchery and disaster (Melmoth II, 180ff, 275).
Wilde takes from Maturin’s novel Dorian’s eternal
youth—Melmoth, though “then . . . considerably
advanced in life, to the astonishment of his fam-
ily, . . . did not betray the slightest trace of being
a year older than when they last beheld him” (I,
35-36). He also follows Maturin by making Dorian
suddenly age at the moment of his damnation,
just as, after Melmoth’s dream of damnation,
“now the lines of extreme age were visible in every
feature. His hairs were as white as snow, his mouth
had fallen in, the muscles of his face were relaxed
and withered—he was the very image of decrepit
debility” (III, 328-332).
From Melmoth and other Gothic novels, Wilde
accepts the radical bifurcation of nature and art;
he puts to original uses the Gothic novelist’s
conventional plot pattern in which an innocent
child of nature is corrupted by the artificialities of
society. In Melmoth, the child of nature is Imma-
lee: “Her drapery consisted only of flowers, whose
rich colours and fantastic grouping harmonized
well with the peacock’s feathers twined among
them, and altogether composed a feathery fan of
wild drapery, which in truth, beseemed an ‘island
goddess’” (II, 187-188). After her “seduction” into
the cruel arts of society and a knowledge of the
inconsistency and cruelty of man to man in
505
 society, Immalee finds nature no longer friendly
WILDE
but threatening (II, 210-221, 249-256). On her
“nuptial” trip with her tempter and demon-lover,
she finds nature hostile:
I feel as if I were traversing some unknown region.
Are these indeed the winds of heaven that sigh
around me? Are these trees of nature’s growth,
that nod at me like sceptres? How hollow and
dismal is the sound of the blast!—it chills me
though the night is sultry!—and those trees, they
cast their shadows over my soul!
(III, 57)
This vision of nature inverted, of a sort of anti-
nature, would not have been distasteful to the
author of “The Decay of Lying,” but of course Wil-
de’s attitude to nature and art is not precisely that
of Maturin. The point is that Wilde keeps the
concepts in opposition and connotatively loaded
as the Gothic novelist had, particularly as he
describes Dorian’s progress from child of nature in
the first chapter to disillusioned aesthete at the
end. At the beginning, he is described with
profuse nature imagery:
The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses,
and when the light summer wind stirred amid the
trees of the garden there came through the open
door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more
delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. . . .
Dorian “looks as if he was made of ivory and rose-
leaves. . . . He is some brainless, beautiful crea-
ture, who should be always here in winter when
we have no flowers to look at.”
(II, 1, 3-4)
Dorian’s vow preserves his beauty but com-
mits him to the superiority of art over nature, and
he cultivates the artificial. He finds nature increas-
ingly neither beautiful nor ugly, but dull and
without meaning. Ultimately, his natural beauty
gone, he lies dead, identifiable only by his rings
(II, 272).
The Gothic novel is also almost certainly an
influence on the passage, in Chapter XIV, in
which Wilde describes how Dorian gets rid of the
body of the murdered Hallward. The torture
devices, the dark caverns, the mysterious diaboli-
cal machines of the Inquisition which are sug-
gested in Melmoth are adapted as Dorian forces
Campbell, a young scientist whom he has compro-
mised in some unexplained way, to bring his
“heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things
that he required for his dreadful work” (II, 209) of
dissolving the body.
But most important, Wilde would have been
able to find the suggestion in Melmoth of the
portrait device. The young narrator of that novel
first encounters the Wanderer in a portrait:
506
John’s eyes were in a moment, and as if by magic,
rivetted on a portrait that hung on the wall, and
appeared, even to his untaught eye, far superior to
the tribe of family pictures that are left to moul-
der on the walls of a family mansion. It repre-
sented a man of middle age. There was nothing
remarkable in the costume, or in the countenance,
but the eyes, John felt, were such as one feels they
wish they had never seen, and feels they can never
forget.
(I, 20)
As in Dorian Gray, the portrait of old Mel-
moth is given mysterious and terrifying associa-
tions. The young narrator thinks he sees “the eyes
of the portrait, on which his own was fixed, move”
(I, 23). He discovers that his uncle asked in his
will that the portrait be destroyed, as if by that act
the obscure curse of the Wanderer might be driven
off (I, 26-27). When young Melmoth tries to
destroy it, obeying the will, he finds hints that it
may have a life of its own:
He seized it;—his hand shook at first, but the
mouldering canvas appeared to assist him in the
effort. He tore it from the frame with a cry half
terrific, half triumphant,—it fell at his feet, and he
shuddered as it fell. He expected to hear some fear-
ful sounds, some unimaginable breathings of
prophetic horror, follow this act of sacrilege, for
such he felt it, to tear the portrait of his ancestor
from its native walls. He paused and listened;—
there was “no voice, nor any that answered;”—
but as the wrinkled and torn canvas fell to the
floor, its undulations gave the portrait the appear-
ance of smiling. Melmoth felt horror indescrib-
able at this transient and imaginary resuscitation
of the figure.
(I, 93-94)
It is not only in Melmoth, of course, that this
concentration on a portrait is to be found; Eino
Railo has traced the history of the portrait motif
through Gothic literature from Walpole to Wilde,
with particular attention to works by Poe and Ros-
setti.6 But in Maturin’s attribution of a sort of life
to the portrait, which to destroy is in some way
fearful to the living, we have the most direct sug-
gestion of Wilde’s symbol in a book he knew well.
Wilde certainly puts the portrait to more
significant use than Maturin. He makes it a
structural, unifying element in his novel, and he
spins out of it whole levels of meaning never at-
tained in Melmoth. Most studies of Dorian Gray
have recognized the portrait’s function as Dorian’s
“double,” the figure which embodies the subcon-
scious, darker, evil side of his nature. This psycho-
logical allegorizing, the “doppelgänger motif,” has
been shown to be a basic technique of the novel-
istic romance.7 In studying it, Eino Railo calls this
“parting of good and evil as though into two
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
separate entities in the same individual and [the
idea of] veritable doubles” an “extremely vital
theme of terror in romantic literature.”8 In Mel-
moth, for example, Moncada, a character in one of
the internal narratives, finds himself inescapably
involved with a parricide, who acts as a catalyst to
his own unrealized darker potentialities—“I
dreaded him as a demon, yet I invoked him as a
god” (II, 42). A recent analysis of the “double”
which goes beyond mere identification explains it
as originating in a “verbal distinction . . . between
personality and character, the former as in some
way the conscious product of the latter.” In the
nineteenth century, this critic says, writers began
to treat the self as “binary or double-decked” and
naturally tended to “anthropomorphize each
part.”9 According to this analysis, Wilde’s use of
the portrait, however more sophisticated than in
Melmoth, is still relatively simple:
The artist transfers to the canvas, as by magic, the
entire personality of his sitter, thus creating the
latter’s double. . . . The portrait represents the
evil half of his being. . . . In this manner Wilde
brings to light an idea that had probably always
lain behind the portrait-theme—that the picture
constituted in some mysterious way the sitter’s
double, living a parallel life and reflecting his
personality. . . . What the author is actually argu-
ing is simply that a vicious life leaves its own
marks.1 0
While this scheme may point up Wilde’s place
in a tradition, it oversimplifies the psychology of
the artist in Dorian Gray. The essays in Inten-
tions, particularly the two parts of “The Critic as
Artist,” describe the creative personality not in
terms of conscious and subconscious but as in
process of multiple realizations of the possibilities
of the self. In one of his fanciful descriptions of
the book, Wilde suggests, similarly, that the differ-
ent characters may represent not just two but
several versions of one person: “that strange co-
loured book of mine . . . 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—in other ages, perhaps” (Letters, p.
352).
Wilde was not so much drawn, I suggest, to
the “doubling” of certain characters in the Gothic
novel as to the far more central technique of
focusing on a strong-willed central protagonist
whose goals are not narrowly defined. What
stands out, after all, about Melmoth and Ambro-
sio (hero of The Monk, 1794) and even Manfred
(The Castle of Otranto, probably the first Gothic
novel) is both their self-absorbed, narcissistic
egomania and the fluidity of their aims. They seek
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variously to possess the souls of innocent victims
WILDE
and the bodies of women (Melmoth, Ambrosio,
and Manfred) or exclusive and perpetual control
over a kingdom through a dynastic triumph
(Manfred), or power over dark powers (Melmoth
and Vathek); but the exact object of their ambi-
tions is never as important as the exercise of the
will itself. What better fictional model could Wilde
have had for the artist- and critic-figure of the
Intentions? His self is described as a creative,
dynamic one, not a simple character with fixed
attributes. He is active and forceful; his art is the
product of his conscious will; but he uses the will
not to “express” a static personality, good or evil,
but rather as an agent to flux:
The soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual
entity, making us personal and individual, created
for our service and entering into us for our joy. It
is . . . sick with many maladies, and has memories
of curious sins.
(IV, 180)
He will realise himself in many forms, and by a
thousand different ways, and will ever be curious
of new sensations and fresh points of view.
Through constant change, and through constant
change alone, he will find his true unity. . . .
What people call insincerity is simply a method
by which we can multiply our personalities.
(IV, 197)
It is perhaps not quite accidental that Wilde’s
character of the artist is derived from sources
contemporary with the Gothic novel—specifically,
Keats, whose letters Wilde loved to quote, and
whose definition, in one of the best-known of
them, of his own poetical “character” distin-
guishes it from the Wordsworthian in that it “is
not itself—it has no self—it is everything and
nothing—It has no character.”1 1
It is my contention, then, that with the
portrait-motif as with the other structural ele-
ments derived from the Gothic novel, Wilde
expresses and tests the theory of art and the artist
of the Intentions. This dimension in the novel is
suggested by Richard Ellmann when he writes,
“Dorian sells his soul not to the devil but, in the
ambiguous form of his portrait, to art.”1 2 It is not
merely “art” in the abstract, though; it is specifi-
cally to the theory of art expounded in the Inten-
tions that Dorian makes his rash vow: “If it were I
who was to be always young, and the picture that
was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give
everything!” (II, 31). Dorian’s dilemma is embod-
ied in the paradox repeated throughout the
dialogues, a paradox derived ultimately from
Keats’ Odes—man, mortal and mutable, creates
works of art which are immortal. Dorian tries by
507
 an extraordinary exercise of the will to resolve the
WILDE
paradox, to become a work of art. He is tempted
into this venture by a sort of “devil,” the aesthetic
critic Lord Henry, who preaches a version of the
dialogues’ main tenet, the artistic possibilities of
multiple realizations of the self: “I believe that if
one man were to live out his life fully and com-
pletely, were to give form to every feeling, expres-
sion to every thought, reality to every dream—I
believe that the world would gain such a fresh
impulse of joy” (II, 21-27). Dorian’s vow and his
subsequent exploration of art, music, travel, and
the whole range of sensation, not excluding
opium, sex (Lord Henry’s conquest of Dorian, and
Dorian’s of Campbell, are described with many
hints of the seduction of a younger by an older
man), and finally murder, are thus to be taken as
the story of an artist in the framework laid down
by “The Critic as Artist”:
In his search for sensations that would be at once
new and delightful, and possess that element of
strangeness that is so essential to romance, he
would often adopt certain modes of thought that
he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon
himself to their subtle influences, and then, hav-
ing, as it were, caught their color and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with a . . . curi-
ous indifference that is not incompatible with a
real ardor of temperament.
(II, 159)1 3
He is an artist in life, not only in paint or in
words, for he tries to give his life the beautiful
changeableness of the artist and artist-critic of Wil-
de’s dialogues.
Dorian Gray is, then, both artist and work of
art; in fact, in Wilde’s version of romantic, the
two are one. As artist, Dorian seeks to apply
aesthetic criteria in a pure form to all of life,
even—in the Sybil Vane affair—to love, loving the
actress only so long as her art is perfect and spurn-
ing her when, touched by real love, she loses her
sense of form. As work of art, Dorian illustrates
the Wildean notion of the independence of the
work of art from conditions of creation and the
artist’s preconceptions, for initially Basil Hallward
and Lord Henry “create” Dorian. Basil Hallward
creates the emblem of his beauty—the portrait—
which precipitates his narcissistic recognition of
his own beauty and his rash vow; Lord Henry “cre-
ates” his personality by tempting him with a vi-
sion of the artistic possibilities of confident and
aggressive self-development. But Dorian goes far
beyond Lord Henry’s instruction, for he really
acts, while Lord Henry merely speculates on the
possibilities. And Dorian bewilders Basil, who is
basically Victorian in his morality, with a complete
508
amorality. Dorian in effect takes over the creation
of the work of art from Basil, for he is himself the
work of art in the new scheme, and his artistic
experiments in living make him more and more
different from whatever the “real” Dorian Gray,
who sat for Basil’s portrait, may have been. In a
sense, he also undertakes a repainting of the
portrait, for his experiences modify the expression
on the canvas, making it more and more old,
cruel, and brutal. But these changes in the can-
vas—often explained as the conventional “voice
of conscience” in Dorian—actually reflect the life
of Dorian filtered through the judgment of Basil,
the Victorian moralist, to whom Dorian’s search
for sensation is a wallowing in sin. After all, Basil
used “realism . . . of method,” painting Dorian
“in his own dress and in his own time” (II, 138).
It is typical Wildean puckishness that at one level
the entire portrait device is an elaborate joke at
the expense of representational painting.
Dorian’s rash bargain, then, is ambiguous in
the same way as the bargain made by the protago-
nist of the Gothic novel. Melmoth’s deal with the
devil elevates him above normal men; he dares
more, he achieves more, than they do. He tests
the bounds of the spiritual universe. He sees the
world of men from a special perspective, outside
time, and can compare generations and societies
as most men cannot. He is a martyr to this special
knowledge. He is damned, for the price of his
greater knowledge and experience is his soul.
Similarly, Dorian dares to live by an aesthetic more
purely aesthetical than most men are willing to
attempt. His rejection of the moral evaluation of
behavior is complete. Wilde is, like most late
Victorians, skeptical of metaphysical systems; and
for his version of Gothic novel, even the pretended
belief in the world of demons which characterizes
the works of Walpole, Beckford, and Maturin is
impossible. But he can substitute a contemporary
version. The aesthetic dandy, cynical, amoral, and
defiant of conventional morality, keenly interested
in the contemporary French writers of “little yel-
low books” who so shocked the Victorian middle
class, was a perfect “demon” to flaunt before the
respectable late-century reading public. And from
Wilde’s point of view, the only spiritual world
with any meaning is the aesthetic one. It is thus
appropriate for Dorian’s vow to be in the service
of art.
But Wilde is at once both honest about the
possibilities of such a pure aestheticism and true
to the Gothic tradition of the moralistic ending.
He gives the moralists their spokesman in Basil
Hallward and his terrifying portrait; he acknowl-
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edges the likelihood that Dorian is excessively
individualistic (“You worshiped yourself too
much”—III, 190); and he recognizes the sterility
of the absolute affirmation of art, as the dead
Dorian can only be identified by his rings (II, 272).
Above all, Dorian’s ultimate self-hatred as he ac-
cepts the moralists’ view of his life and his conse-
quent attack on the portrait (which turns out to
be suicide)—all this is not so much a denial of the
aesthetic as it is both an acknowledgment that in
its pure form it is not ready for the world, or the
world for it, and also an experiencing of the
decadent’s final thrill—le frisson nouveau—death.
Dorian Gray, like Melmoth, seems insincerely
moralistic at the end; both were conceived,
however, as tests, experiments in the juxtaposi-
tion of opposites, to be ended only by a doom
made necessary precisely by the irreconcilability
of the opposing forces.
The Gothic novel, itself a fin-de-siècle genre
of the eighteenth century, cast off the conven-
tional eighteenth-century homage to realism,
credibility, and responsibility to an aesthetic of
taste, reaching beyond accepted novelistic ap-
proaches to life and character to explore with bril-
liant if erratic flashes a psychological universe.
Horror in the Gothic novel is almost never genu-
ine; its effects are overstated in a calculated way;
characters are rarely believable or consistent. It is
not hard to see why the Gothic novel appealed to
Oscar Wilde. In it he found implicit and explicit
attitudes toward a realistic, moralistic Establish-
ment aesthetic similar to the one he faced. It gave
him a form through which he could test his own
anti-Victorian aesthetic in a protagonist whose
very woodenness is a function of his being partly
allegorical and whose damnation is as inescapable
as it is irrelevant to the “truth” of his theories. For
the “truth” of Dorian Gray is to be found, like
the “truth” of Melmoth the Wanderer, in the reso-
nances and tensions of the work, rather than in
any fidelity to the ordinary life of the society from
which its author came.
Notes
1. All parenthetical references in the text to Oscar Wil-
de’s works are to the edition by Robert Ross (New York:
Bigelow, Brown, & Co., 1909); to the letters, to the
edition by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Rupert Hart-
Davis Ltd., 1962); to Melmoth the Wanderer, to the edi-
tion Wilde probably helped edit (London: Richard
Bentley & Son, 1892).
2. Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Meth-
uen & Co., 1961), p. 195.
3. Epifanio San Juan, Jr., The Art of Oscar Wilde (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 53.
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4. Wilde writes, “En Route is sheer journalism. It never
WILDE
makes one hear a note of the music it describes. . . .
The style is . . . worthless, slipshod, flaccid.”
5. Edwin Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tra-
dition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966),
pp. 5-6.
6. Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements
of English Romanticism (London: George Routledge &
Sons, Ltd., 1927), pp. 304-307. I am indebted to Ed-
ouard Roditi’s Oscar Wilde (Norfolk, Conn.: New Direc-
tions Books, 1947), for pointing out the possibility of
the influence of Maturin on Wilde. He also suggests a
number of analogues in other nineteenth-century uses
of the portrait motif (pp. 113-118).
7. Eigner, pp. 21-22.
8. Railo, pp. 186-188.
9. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New
York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1948), pp. 72-73.
10. Railo, p. 307.
11. John Keats, Letters (London: Oxford University Press,
1935), pp. 227-228.
12. Richard Ellmann, “Romantic Pantomime in Oscar
Wilde,” Partisan Review, (Fall, 1963), 353.
13. On possible sources for the concept of murder as a
fine art, see De Quincey’s “On Murder, Considered as
one of the Fine Arts,” Collected Works, XIII (London:
A. & C. Black, 1897), 9, and Wilde’s own “Pen, Pencil,
and Poison” (IV, 61 ff).
KENNETH WOMACK (ESSAY DATE
2000)
SOURCE: Womack, Kenneth. “‘Withered, Wrinkled,
and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the
Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of
Dorian Gray.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural
Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth
Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, pp. 168-81. New York:
Palgrave, 2000.
In the following essay, Womack argues that “[a]n ethical
reading of” The Picture of Dorian Gray “reveals the
ways in which the novelist exploits the fantastic elements
inherent in the Victorian Gothic as a means for fulfilling
his decidedly moral aims.”
As a literary phenomenon, the Victorian
gothic manifests itself in fin-de-siècle literature
both as a subversive supernatural force and as a
mechanism for social critique. Envisioning the
world as a dark and spiritually turbulent tableau,
the fictions of the late-Victorian gothic often
depict the city of London as a corrupt urban
landscape characterized by a brooding populace
and by its horror-filled streets of terror. In The
Three Impostors (1895), for instance, Arthur Ma-
chen offers a desolate, hyper-eroticized portrait of
London and its invasion by a chemically altered
degenerate race of pagan beings. In one of the
more chilling portrayals of London’s citizenry,
509
 Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1896) narrates
WILDE
the Devil’s progress through the city’s ethically
bankrupt environs as he searches for someone—
indeed, anyone—with the moral strength to resist
his temptations. He does not succeed. At the
conclusion of The Sorrows of Satan, the Devil
ascends the steps of Parliament, walking arm-in-
arm with its acquiescent ministers. The characters
in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) encounter a
similarly troubled London cityscape. In the novel,
a desperate and lonely Robert Holt wanders the
city in search of lodging only to confront the
supernatural insect, metaphor for London’s spiri-
tual vacancy in the form of a giant beetle. Finally,
in The Lodger (1923), Marie Belloc Lowndes depicts
the mean streets of 1880s London in her fictional
account of Jack the Ripper’s murderous exploits in
the city’s notorious East End. The novel’s chilling
atmosphere of suspense, fear and horror—as with
other works in the genre—underscores the man-
ner in which the Victorian gothic provides a
critique of the moral and spiritual value systems
of London and its forlorn inhabitants. Each
volume also narrates—in one form or another, hu-
man, insect or otherwise—the corruption of the
soul.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar
Wilde likewise investigates the ethics of the soul
through his own well-known portrait of aesthetic
narcissism and fin-de-siècle decadence. Yet in the
novel’s Preface, Wilde writes that ‘no artist has
ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an
artist’, he coyly adds, ‘is an unpardonable man-
nerism of style’ (1991, 69). During the novel’s
initial serialization, the popular press severely
rebuked The Picture of Dorian Gray for its osten-
sible lack of moral import. A reviewer in the 30
June 1890 edition of the Daily Chronicle described
the novel as ‘unclean’ and a ‘poisonous book’ with
‘odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’. In a 5
July 1890 notice in the Scots Observer, yet another
reviewer complained about the novel’s ‘false’
morality, ‘for it is not made sufficiently clear that
the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural
iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity’
(cited in Beckson 1998, 271). Wilde swiftly replied
to the growing horde of critics, arguing, rather
ironically, that The Picture of Dorian Gray was in
fact too moral: ‘All excess, as well as all
renunciation’, Wilde soberly concluded, ‘brings its
own punishment’ (cited in Ellmann 321). While
the novelist’s contradictory stances regarding his
narrative’s ethical properties seem purposefully
beguiling, few critics deny the moral fable that
functions at the core of The Picture of Dorian
510 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
Gray. Although Colin McGinn, for example,
evaluates the novel in terms of its humanist
agenda in Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997), he
neglects, as with other Wilde critics, to consider
the role of the Victorian gothic as the mechanism
via which Wilde achieves his moral aims regard-
ing the soul and its function as the repository for
humanity’s notions of goodness and evil—the es-
sential qualities that define our perceptions about
the interpersonal fabric of the self.1
An ethical reading of Wilde’s novel reveals the
ways in which the novelist exploits the fantastic
elements inherent in the Victorian gothic as a
means for fulfilling his decidedly moral aims in
The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ethical criticism, with
its reliance upon contemporary moral philosophy,
affords readers with a paradigm for considering
the contradictory emotions and problematic
moral stances that often mask literary characters.
Ethical criticism also provides its practitioners
with the capacity for positing socially relevant
interpretations by celebrating the Aristotelian
qualities of living well and flourishing. As Martha
C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Fragility of Good-
ness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philoso-
phy, the ethical study of literary works offers a
powerful means for interpreting the ideological
and interpersonal clashes that define the human
experience. The ethical investigation of literature,
she writes, ‘lays open to view the complexity, the
indeterminacy, the sheer difficulty of actual hu-
man deliberation’. Such humanistic criticism, she
adds, demonstrates ‘the vulnerability of human
lives to fortune, the mutability of our circum-
stances and our passions, the existence of conflicts
among our commitments’ (1986, 1314). By focus-
ing our attention upon the narrative experiences
of literary characters, ethical criticism provides a
powerful mechanism for investigating the inter-
connections between the reading experience and
the life of the reader.
An ethical reading of Wilde’s novel—
concerned, as it is, with the soul and our percep-
tions regarding the nature of goodness—demands
that we devote particular attention to these issues
and their relevance to such a reading of The
Picture of Dorian Gray. In her important volume
of moral philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good, Iris
Murdoch elaborates upon the concept of good-
ness and the ways in which our personal configu-
rations of it govern human perceptions regarding
the relationship between the self and the world.
Murdoch’s paradigm for understanding goodness
functions upon the equally abstract notions of
free will and moral choice. ‘Good is indefinable’,
Murdoch writes, ‘because judgments of value
depend upon the will and choice of the individual’
(1985, 3). Postulating any meaning for goodness,
then, requires individuals to render personal
observations about the nature of this precarious
expression and its role in their life decisions.
Although Murdoch concedes that goodness es-
sentially finds its origins in ‘the nature of concepts
very central to morality such as justice, truthful-
ness, or humility’, she correctly maintains, never-
theless, that only individual codes of morality can
determine personal representations of goodness
(89). ‘Good is an empty space into which human
choice may move’ (97), she asserts, and ‘the
strange emptiness which often occurs at the mo-
ment of choosing’ underscores the degree of
autonomy inherent in the act of making moral
decisions (35). Individuals may also measure their
personal conceptions of goodness in terms of its
foul counterpart, evil, which Murdoch defines
generally as ‘cynicism, cruelty, indifference to
suffering’ (98). Again, though, as with good, evil
finds its definition in the personal ethos con-
structed by individuals during their life experi-
ences in the human community.2
Because such ontological concepts remain so
vitally contingent upon personal rather than com-
munal perceptions of morality, Murdoch suggests
that their comprehension lies in the mysterious
fabric of the self. ‘The self, the place where we
live, is a place of illusion’, she observes, and ‘good-
ness is connected with the attempt to see the un-
self, to see and to respond to the real world in the
light of a virtuous consciousness’ (93). In Mur-
doch’s philosophy, goodness manifests itself dur-
ing the healthy pursuit of self-awareness and self-
knowledge. The soul, as the product of such an
intrapersonal quest, functions as the repository
for goodness and evil, as well as the essential mate-
rial that comprises the self. Moral philosophers
often conceive of the soul as a vast entity that
consists of our innate emotional senses and
desires. In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy
and Literature, Nussbaum elaborates upon the
concept of the soul, which she sees as ‘shaped and
structured by the needs and interests of an imper-
fect and limited being. Its characterization of what
truth and value are is distorted by the pressure of
bodily need, emotional turmoil, and the other
constraining and limiting features of our bodily
humanity’ (1990, 248). The soul operates as a con-
flation of sorts between bodily desires and indi-
vidual value systems, and the harmony between
these two elements produces a kind of moral
beauty. Robert E. Norton describes the soul’s
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capacity for moral beauty as ‘both the motivation
WILDE
and manifestation of virtue’ (1995, 48) and associ-
ates ‘moral purity and goodness with a kind of
beauty of soul’ (1995, 96). As the essence of a
given individual’s humanity, then, the soul con-
sists of spiritual and emotional components that
define the sensual and virtuous qualities of our
selves.
‘To choose a style’, Nussbaum writes in Love’s
Knowledge, ‘is to tell a story about the soul’. For
Wilde, the literary style of The Picture of Dorian
Gray manifests itself in his appropriation of the
Victorian gothic as his novel’s narrative means.
‘Form and style are not incidental features’, Nuss-
baum argues. ‘A view of life is told. The telling
itself—the selection of genre, formal structures,
sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of ad-
dressing the reader’s sense of life—all of this
expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of
what matters and what does not, of what learning
and communicating are, of life’s relations and
connections’ (1990, 259, 5). In this manner, the
Victorian gothic’s supernatural elements make
possible Wilde’s narration of Basil Hallward’s
artistic rendering of Dorian Gray, the painting of
whom functions as the basis for the ethical debate
that undergirds much of the novel: should we, as
human beings, pursue our id-driven desires for
sensual gratification and external beauty for the
price of a hideous soul? Wilde employs the para-
doxical Lord Henry Wotton as the voice of The
Picture of Dorian Gray’s moral deliberations and
Dorian’s soul as the object of Lord Henry’s intel-
lectual whimsy. In addition to calling into ques-
tion the ethics of the aristocracy in his novel,
Wilde avails himself of the Victorian gothic as a
means for engendering a philosophical discourse
on good and evil, as well as on the mysterious
properties of the human soul.3 An ethical reading
of The Picture of Dorian Gray not only allows us
to speculate about Wilde’s moral aims in his depic-
tion of Dorian’s increasingly repulsive soul, but
also to interrogate the Victorian gothic as an ethi-
cal construct in itself.
As with the novel itself—which John Stokes
describes as being from ‘that bottomless pile of
Gothic stories’ (1996, 37)—the character of Dorian
Gray combines elements of aesthetic decadence
with the Victorian gothic. As he roams through
the ‘dim roar’ of the novel’s desolate London set-
ting, Dorian vacillates between states of pro-
nounced ennui and musical euphoria (Wilde
1991, 71). As Basil completes the portrait, for
instance, the eternally posing Dorian complains
of boredom: ‘You never open your lips while you
511
 are painting’, he tells the artist, ‘and it is horribly
WILDE
dull standing on a platform and trying to look
pleasant’ (1991, 83). Conversely, Wilde punctu-
ates Dorian’s most intense life experiences, par-
ticular his aesthetic ones, with musical images.
Talking to Dorian, Wilde writes, ‘was like playing
upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every
touch and thrill of the bow . . . with all the music
of passion and youth’ (1991, 99). Dorian’s beauty
informs every aspect of his persona, from his
external appearance to his capacity for inspiring
confidence in every person he encounters: ‘Yes, he
was certainly handsome’, Wilde writes, ‘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 youth’s passionate
purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspot-
ted from the world’ (1991, 83). As an exquisite
combination of youthful good looks and a pleas-
ant outward demeanor, Dorian enjoys the wor-
ship of nearly everyone he meets, especially Basil
and Lord Henry.
While Dorian ultimately subscribes to Lord
Henry’s ontology of new Hedonism, Basil proffers
the moral philosophy that the young aesthete
clearly—given the novel’s tragic conclusion—
should have accepted. Devoted both to his craft as
well as to his subject, Basil espouses a theory of
moral beauty simply too realistic for Dorian to
imbibe, stricken, as he is, with his ostensibly fleet-
ing good looks. In sharp contrast with the fin-de-
siècle decadence that surrounds him, Basil’s phi-
losophy of the soul argues for a healthy balance
between our inner and outer selves, between our
spiritual centres and the external images that we
present to the world. ‘The harmony of the soul
and the body’, Basil cautions, ‘we in our madness
have separated the two, and have invented a real-
ism that is vulgar, and ideality that is void’ (1991,
79). In his portrait of Dorian, Basil clearly attempts
to strike a balance between these two vital ele-
ments, so much so that he initially refuses to
exhibit his latest creation and unleash it upon an
aesthetically absorbed late-Victorian society. Basil
fears, correctly, that the painting will consume
‘my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art
itself’ (1991, 75). Perhaps even more troubling,
the artist confesses that Dorian’s ‘personality has
suggested to me an entirely new manner in art,
an entirely new mode of style’ (1991, 78). This all-
encompassing sense of artistic style, a kind of
decadence in itself, frightens the painter even
more, for he perceives the unsettling wave of
512 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
aestheticism that characterizes fin-de-siècle Lon-
don, particularly evidenced by Lord Henry’s mind-
set.4
Unlike Basil, who champions a theory of
moral beauty founded upon a balance between
body and soul, Lord Henry advocates the separa-
tion between these two forms of experience. Lord
Henry, in the words of Amanda Witt, ‘cultivates
the attitude of observing his own life, rather than
actually living it’ (1991, 91). At times a caricature
of the disinterested upper class, Lord Henry
subscribes to a range of effected homilies and
aphorisms. In one instance, he proudly proclaims
that ‘there is only one thing in the world worse
than being talked about, and that is not being
talked about’. The philosophy of new Hedonism
that he delineates in the novel—and which
Dorian, to his detriment, literally and figuratively
absorbs—can only function by separating fully
the spiritual from the corporeal self.5 ‘Beauty, real
beauty’, Lord Henry remarks, ‘ends where an intel-
lectual expression begins’ (1991, 72), adding that
‘Beauty is a form of Genius—is higher, indeed,
than Genius, as it needs no explanation’ (1991,
88). Lord Henry’s decadent philosophy challenges
its subscribers to elevate their desires for aesthetic
experience and fulfillment over interpersonal
consequences, to achieve a total separation be-
tween their ethical obligations to their com-
munity and their needs for self-indulgence: ‘I
believe that if one man were to live out his life
fully and completely, were to give form to every
feeling, expression to every thought, reality to
every dream’, Lord Henry observes, then ‘I believe
that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of
joy that we would forget all the maladies of
mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to
something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal’
(1991, 85).
Lord Henry’s late-Victorian philosophy of new
Hedonism also proposes a striking counterpoint
to notions of goodness as espoused by such
contemporary moral philosophers as Murdoch,
Nussbaum, McGinn and others. In Murdoch’s
ethical paradigm, the concept of goodness relates
to a given individual’s capacity for perceiving the
‘unself’, or that person living within us who at-
tempts to approach the world with a ‘virtuous
consciousness’. Such a lifestyle possesses the pos-
sibility of producing a beautiful soul. In Lord
Henry’s philosophy, however, what matters is
‘one’s own life’, as opposed to the lives of the oth-
ers with whom we live in community. New Hedo-
nism, at least in Lord Henry’s postulation, urges
its adherents to pursue pleasure at any cost.
‘Individualism’, Lord Henry argues, ‘has really the
higher aim’ than endeavouring to share in the
ethical codes of one’s society (1991, 134). The
philosophy of new Hedonism also eschews moral-
ity in favour of pleasurable experience. Although
some experiences initially may be spiritually
distressing or ethically unsatisfying, Lord Henry
contends that their iteration should produce noth-
ing but pleasure once the individual has inured
his or her conscience to the soul-purging qualities
of such experiences, no matter how sinful they
may prove to be. ‘Moralists had, as a rule, regarded
it [experience] as a mode of warning, had claimed
for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of
character, had praised it as something that taught
us what to follow and showed us what to avoid’,
Lord Henry remarks. ‘But there was no motive
power in experience’, he adds. ‘All that it really
demonstrated was that our future would be the
same as our past, and that the sin we had done
once, and with loathing, we would do many
times, and with joy’ (1991, 118).
Delivered with the confidence and verbal
precision of his station, Lord Henry’s aesthetic
philosophy proves too enticing for the naïve and
impressionable Dorian to ignore and serves as the
catalyst for the Faustian bargain that he strikes in
the novel. ‘A new Hedonism’, Lord Henry tells the
young aesthete, ‘that is what our century wants.
You might be its visible symbol. With your person-
ality there is nothing you could not do. The world
belongs to you for a season’ (1991, 88). Yet Dorian,
inspired by Lord Henry’s philosophy, dares to pos-
sess the world for more than a mere season. While
staring at his portrait, ‘the sense of his own beauty
came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it
before’ (1991, 90). Fearing the day when time
finally robs him of his youthful good looks,
Dorian initially vows to kill himself when he
grows old. For Dorian—with Lord Henry’s theory
of beauty still ringing in his ears—living in
anything other than a state of exalted beauty
seems simply unfathomable:
There would be a day when his face would be
wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless,
the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The
scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold
steal from his hair. The life that was to make his
soul would mar his body. He would become dread-
ful, hideous, and uncouth.
(1991, 90)
Dorian soon finds himself unable to distin-
guish between himself and the picture, describing
it as ‘part of myself’ and the ‘real Dorian’ (1991,
93-4). Unbeknownst to himself at the time,
Dorian enters into a supernatural bargain of sorts
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when he wishes he could change places with the
WILDE
picture: ‘If it were only the only the other way!’
he pleads. ‘If it were I who was to be always young,
and the picture that was to grow old! For that—
for that—I would give everything!’ (1991, 90).
The ethics of his Faustian transaction and of
his absorption of Lord Henry’s philosophy only
become known to Dorian after his brief associa-
tion with Sybil Vane, an aspiring young working-
class actress from London’s East End. Night after
night, Dorian watches as she performs in various
Shakespearean plays, taking on a myriad of fic-
tional identities while remaining, in Dorian’s envi-
ous words, ‘more than an individual’ (1991, 115),
a beautiful soul in her own right. Unconcerned
with her lower-class origins, Dorian falls in love
with the youthful actress: ‘Sybil is the only thing I
care about’, he tells Lord Henry. ‘What is it to me
where she came from? From her head to her little
feet, she is absolutely and entirely divine. Every
night of my life I go to see her act, and every night
she is more marvelous’ (1991, 114). In short,
Dorian admires Sybil for her ability to create
genuine, beautiful souls upon the stage. He reveres
her capacity for taking fictional characters and
imbuing them with the physical and spiritual
aspects of real life that Dorian, whose external
beauty depends on stasis for its endurance, simply
cannot grasp. Yet Dorian’s love for Sybil collapses
after she gives a lifeless performance in Romeo and
Juliet. After the play, Sybil appears ‘transfigured
with joy’ because her incipient relationship with
Dorian had freed her ‘soul from prison’. Before
encountering Dorian, the only reality that she
knew existed on the stage; after meeting Dorian,
however, ‘suddenly it dawned on my soul what it
all meant’, she explains, vowing to give up the
theatre and its artificiality (1991, 140-1). Dorian
subsequently chastises Sybil for her change of
heart, for her implicit denial of Lord Henry’s
philosophy.
After he leaves a distraught Sybil in her dress-
ing room, Dorian strolls alone among London’s
desolate gothic streets: ‘He remembered wander-
ing through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-
shadowed archways and evil-looking houses’,
Wilde writes. ‘Women with hoarse voices and
harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards
had reeled by, cursing, and chattering to them-
selves like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque
children huddled under doorsteps, and heard
shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts’ (1991,
143). When he returns home after experiencing
his dark night of the aesthetic soul, Dorian per-
ceives a change in Basil’s portrait of him, ‘a touch
513
 of cruelty in the mouth’ that had not existed there
WILDE
previously (1991, 144). Suddenly remembering
his wish for eternal youth and its spiritual conse-
quences, Dorian decides to return to Sybil in order
to forestall the spiritual demolition of his soul. As
he bathes in the warm glow of his romantic feel-
ings for the young actress, Dorian repeats her
name over and over again to the music of singing
birds. ‘I want to be good’, he later tells Lord Henry.
‘I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous’
(1991, 149). After he learns of Sybil’s suicide,
however, Dorian chooses to devote himself en-
tirely to a lifestyle of hedonism in the tradition of
Lord Henry’s philosophy. Having already tasted
the pleasures of decadence, Dorian resolves to
avail himself of sin with the knowledge that he
can do so without being challenged by a guilty
conscience: ‘Eternal youth, infinite passion,
pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder
sins—he was to have all these things’, Wilde
writes. ‘The portrait was to bear the burden of his
shame’ (1991, 157). In this fashion, the picture
becomes Dorian’s ethical doppelgänger, his wilful
sacrifice for a decadent lifestyle and the means via
which he will preserve his youth.
Dorian embarks upon his life of debauchery
with the aid of a book given to him by Lord
Henry. Essentially a handbook for decadent living,
the volume—a yellow, paper-covered French
novel—influences Dorian’s progress toward total
spiritual and ethical ruin. 6 ‘The whole book
seemed to him’, Wilde writes, ‘to contain the story
of his own life, written before he had lived it’
(1991, 174). With his new Hedonist education at
the hands of Lord Henry complete, Dorian en-
gages in a protracted life of crime and corrosive
sensuality in gothic London. At the age of 25,
Dorian’s aristocratic social standing begins to
erode when an exclusive West End club threatens
to blackball him. In addition to consorting with
thieves and coiners, Dorian brawls with foreign
sailors in the Whitechapel area. Suddenly the
subject of numerous rumours and upper-class gos-
sip, Dorian becomes associated with scandals
involving the suicide of a ‘wretched boy in the
Guards’ (1991, 193); the disappearance of Sir
Henry Ashton, who fled England in disgrace; and
the diminished reputations of the young Duke of
Perth and the son of Lord Kent. ‘Women who had
wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all
social censure and set convention at defiance’,
Wilde writes, ‘were seen to grow pallid with shame
or horror if Dorian Gray entered the room’ (1991,
186-7).
514 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
In addition to his chosen life of crime and
social iniquity, Dorian feeds his exaggerated licen-
tious desires during his search for new arenas of
sensual fulfillment. In one instance, he considers
joining the Roman Catholic communion, not for
spiritual reasons, but rather, because the ‘Roman
ritual had always a great attraction for him’ (1991,
178). Dorian also becomes an avid collector of
beautiful objects and searches for yet other venues
for assuaging his aesthetic needs. At one juncture
in the novel, Dorian devotes himself entirely to
the study of music, constructing an elaborate
room with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls
of olive-green lacquer in which to serenade him-
self with the pleasing strains of Schubert, Chopin
and Beethoven. As a collector of sensual objects,
Dorian accumulates perfumes from the Far East,
painted gourds from Mexico, rare and expensive
jewelry, tapestries and embroideries once housed
in the palaces of Northern Europe, and various
ecclesiastical vestments. Dorian assembles his orgy
of material possessions to provide himself with a
‘means of forgetfulness’, Wilde writes, with ‘modes
by which he could escape, for a season, from the
fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too
great to be borne’ (1991, 185). Hidden in the attic
above his palatial London home lies the picture,
which grows even more ghastly as Dorian’s evil
exploits continue to mount. At 38, Dorian soothes
his fears in opium dens in remote London, where
‘the heavy odour of opium met him’, Wilde
writes. ‘He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils
quivered with pleasure’ (1991, 224). All the while,
Dorian earns glowing praise for his decadent lif-
estyle and his lack of meaningful social or artistic
endeavour from Lord Henry, his hedonist master
and tutor.7 ‘You are the type of what the age is
looking for, and what it is afraid it has found’,
Lord Henry tells him. ‘I am so glad that you have
never done anything, never carved a statue, or
painted a picture, or produced anything outside
of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set
yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets’
(1991, 248).
Dorian’s life of debauchery begins to collapse,
however, with the confluence of his murder of
Basil and his dogged pursuit by James Vane, Sybil’s
vengeful brother. Dorian kills Basil after the artist
insists that the aesthete show him the picture of
Dorian’s rotting soul. Basil reacts in horror as he
glimpses the portrait of Dorian’s foul inner life be-
ing slowly corroded by ‘the leprosies of sin’ (1991,
199). After he stabs the artist to death for con-
demning his evil lifestyle, Dorian stares disinterest-
edly at Basil’s lifeless body as a woman on the
street sings in a hoarse voice. By murdering Basil,
Dorian attempts to rid himself once and for all of
the artist’s irritating moral influence. As Stephen
Arata observes in Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin
de siècle, ‘The contrast between the lovely Dorian
and the hideous portrait can be taken to stand for
the difference between Henry’s ethic and Basil’s’
(1996, 64). In this instance, Henry’s hedonistic
philosophy wins out yet again. Dorian finally
begins to re-evaluate his decadent existence after
experiencing James’s stubborn effort to exact
revenge for the untimely death of his sister. After
spotting him in a London opium den, James fol-
lows Dorian to a social occasion at the home of
the Duchess of Monmouth. James startles Dorian
into a ‘death-like swoon’ after pressing his face
against the window of the conservatory. ‘The
consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked
down, had begun to dominate him’, Wilde writes
(1991, 233-4), and Dorian conceals himself in the
Duchess’s house.
After the Duchess’s brother accidentally kills
James during a shooting-party the next day,
Dorian experiences a ‘cataleptic impression’—a
cognitive, philosophical phenomenon that, ac-
cording to Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge, ‘has the
power, just through its own felt quality, to drag us
to assent, to convince us that things could not be
otherwise. It is defined as a mark or impress upon
the soul’ (1990, 265). Relieved to have survived
James’s efforts at revenge, Dorian resolves to
devote himself to goodness. ‘I wish I could love’,
he tells Lord Henry. ‘But I seem to have lost the
passion and forgotten the desire. I am too much
concentrated on myself’ (1991, 238). Despite Lord
Henry’s considerable protests, Dorian demon-
strates his intentions to adopt an ethical lifestyle
by opting not to destroy the innocence of Hetty
Morton, a girl in the village near the Duchess’s
estate. Shocked by his sudden change of heart,
Dorian ‘determined to leave her as flower-like as I
had found her’ (1991, 243). As Dorian symboli-
cally rises from the piano—the producer of the
sensual music that served as the soundtrack for
his evil life—he confesses to Lord Henry that ‘I
am going to be good’ and that ‘I am a little
changed already’ (1991, 249). Yet when he later
checks the picture for evidence of his ethical
renewal, he discovers ‘no change, save that in the
eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the
mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite’, Wilde
writes. ‘The thing was still loathsome—more
loathsome, if possible, than before’ (1991, 252).
Rather than being the product of a genuine
shift in moral attitude, Dorian’s aspirations toward
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
goodness result from his own vanity, as well as
WILDE
from his apprehension regarding the potential loss
of the self that he adores above all others in his
community. In this manner, the novel’s faux
cataleptic impression confronts readers—and
perhaps Dorian himself—with an unusual ethical
construct, the anti-epiphany. Stultified by his own
hypocrisy and his ‘mask of goodness’, Dorian
chooses to destroy his decaying soul: He ‘would
kill the past, and when that was dead he would be
free’, Wilde writes. Dorian ‘would kill this mon-
strous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings,
he would be at peace’ (1991, 253). Taking up the
knife that he used to murder Basil, Dorian stabs at
the picture. After servants hear an agonized cry
and a ‘crash’, they enter the attic and discover a
splendid portrait of their master in all ‘his exquis-
ite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor’, Wilde
writes, ‘was a dead man, in evening dress, with a
knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and
loathsome of visage’ (1991, 254). By attempting
to eradicate the picture that serves as a record of
his unethical life, Dorian succeeds in destroying
himself. While the novel’s deus ex machina conclu-
sion, a virtual cliché of gothic fiction in general,
suggests a number of narrative possibilities,8
Dorian’s supernatural demise nevertheless results
directly from his Faustian bargain and the ethi-
cally vacuous existence that he deliberately pur-
sues.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s
adherence to Lord Henry’s hedonist philosophy
clearly manifests itself in his spiritual and physical
destruction. Dorian’s soul expires, William Buckler
astutely observes, because of the ‘inevitable
consequence, not of aestheticism, but of an ugly,
self-deceiving, all-devouring vanity that leads the
protagonist to heartless cruelty, murder, blackmail,
and suicide’ (1991, 140). Wilde employs the
Victorian gothic as the express means through
which he characterizes the corrosion and ultimate
demise of Dorian’s soul. Because Wilde relies on
the supernatural and the grotesque as means for
narrating Dorian’s spiritual digression in The
Picture of Dorian Gray, the Victorian gothic
clearly operates as an ethical construct in Wilde’s
novel. Ethical criticism, with its interest in explor-
ing the trials and tribulations of human experi-
ence and their intersections with the act of read-
ing, simply affords us with a mechanism for
recognizing a given writer’s humanistic agenda. In
The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the
Mind, Cora Diamond argues that through ethical
criticism ‘we can come to be aware of what makes
for deeper understanding and an enriching of our
515
 own thought and experience; we can come to
WILDE
have a sense of what is alive, and what is shallow,
sentimental, cheap’. The ethical critique of litera-
ture reminds us, moreover, that ‘it is our actions,
our choices, which give a particular shape to the
life we lead; to be able to lead whatever the good
life for a human being is is to be able to make
such choices well’ (Diamond 1991, 303, 373). In
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde avails himself
of the Victorian Gothic in a stunning depiction of
what transpires when human beings make inef-
fectual choices and sacrifice their own senses of
moral beauty by elevating the aesthetic pleasures
of the body over the spiritual needs of the soul.
Notes
1. In ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray,’
Michael Patrick Gillespie offers yet another ethical
critique of Wilde’s novel, although, as with McGinn,
he fails to consider the role of the Victorian gothic as
the engine of the novelist’s moral debate regarding
the sanctity of the human soul, opting instead to read
the novel in terms of the ethical nature of its aesthetic
elements: ‘Through the actions of its characters’,
Gillespie writes, The Picture of Dorian Gray’s ‘discourse
establishes within us a sense of the wide-ranging
aesthetic force that ethics exerts upon a work of art.
Furthermore, Wilde’s novel gives us the opportunity
to enhance the mix of our aesthetic and ethical views
by extending our sense of the possibilities for interpre-
tation beyond those delineated by our immediate
hermeneutic system’ (1994, 153-4).
2. For a useful definition of ‘ethics’ and discussion of its
emergence as a viable reading paradigm during the
past decade, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s chapter on
‘Ethics’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaugh-
lin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd edn, 1995).
‘Understanding the plot of a narrative’, Harpham
writes, ‘we enter into ethics. Ethics will always be at
the flashpoint of conflicts and struggles’, he continues,
‘because such encounters never run smooth’ (1995,
404). As Wayne C. Booth observes in The Company We
Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, ‘the word “ethical” may
mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite
limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of
decency or tolerance’. In Booth’s postulation of an
ethical criticism, however, ‘ethical’ refers to ‘the entire
range of effects on the “character” or “person” or
“self”. “Moral” judgments are only a small part of it’
(1988, 8).
3. In Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de siècle, Stephen
Arata rejects the notion that Wilde appropriates an
ethical rhetoric in The Picture of Dorian Gray, contend-
ing that ‘here as elsewhere Wilde rejects humanistic
notions of the organic and autonomous individual’
(1996, 61). Yet a comparison of Wilde’s divergent
characterizations of the competing ethics of Lord
Henry and Basil suggests otherwise. Wilde clearly
derides Lord Henry’s ambiguous philosophy of new
Hedonism through its expositor’s pompous and
malformed discourse, while arguing in favour of Basil’s
theory of moral beauty through the devastation, and
ultimately the death of, Dorian’s soul.
516 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
4. In this instance, Basil clearly fears the rise of aestheti-
cism because he senses the erosion of the ethical and
cultural value systems of his community, a process
that William Greenslade describes as ‘degeneration’ in
Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940. ‘Such
fears at the fin de siècle were at work shaping institu-
tional practices—medical, psychiatric, political—and
their assumptions’, Greenslade writes. ‘Degeneration
facilitated discourses of sometimes crude differentia-
tion: between the normal and the abnormal, the
healthy and morbid, the “fit” and “unfit”, the civilized
and the primitive. Degeneration’, he adds, ‘was, in
part, an enabling strategy by which the conventional
and respectable classes could justify and articulate
their hostility to the deviant, the diseased, and the
subversive’ (1994, 2). Despite his espousal of a new
Hedonism, Lord Henry also registers anxiety about
the lower classes and the disenfranchised in The Picture
of Dorian Gray. As an anti-Hedonist, Basil ironically
demonstrates little affinity for the practices of degen-
eration and proves to be remarkably tolerant of the
lower classes, particularly evinced by his enthusiastic
approval of Dorian’s relationship with Sybil.
5. In Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, Gillespie
reminds us of the illogic inherent in Lord Henry’s
philosophy, an anti-ethical system with little concern
for consistency or reason. ‘As the novel progresses’,
Gillespie writes, ‘one finds that each of these points of
view contributes to a more detailed illumination of
the discourse and in doing so blunts inclinations to
privilege any one of these perspectives over the oth-
ers. New Hedonism in fact defines itself only through
the symbiotic support of multiple systems of values,
and any effort to view it in isolation would prove
reductive’ (1994, 61).
6. In Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann speculates about the
book’s identity. At his trial, Wilde conceded that the
mystery book was Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours
(1884), although it also has thematic similarities to
Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance
(1873). According to Ellmann, in the first draft of The
Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde entitled the book Le Secret
de Raoul, by Catulle Sarrazin. ‘This author’, Ellmann
writes, ‘was a blend of Catulle Mendès, whom he had
known for some years, and Gabriel Sarrazin, whom he
met in September 1888, and the name of ‘Raoul’ came
from Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus’ (1988, 316).
7. In Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations, John
Stokes notes the interesting similarities in the interper-
sonal dynamics of the relationships between Lord
Henry and Dorian and between Wilde and Lord Al-
fred Douglas, the novelist’s youthful lover and aes-
thetic protégé (1996, 11).
8. For a thorough analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s
sudden and mysterious conclusion, see McGinn’s Eth-
ics, Evil, and Fiction. ‘What Wilde has done is to
condense the general theme of his book into this final
scene’, McGinn argues, ‘giving it literal expression, so
that Dorian’s odd ambiguous status, suspended
between life and art, is represented’ (1997, 135).
Bibliography
Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de siècle.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Beckson, Karl. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS,
1998.
Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Corelli, Marie. The Sorrows of Satan, or the Strange Experience
of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: a Romance. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996.
Diamond, Cora. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy,
and the Mind. Cambridge: MIT, 1991.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Gillespie, Michael Patrick. ‘Ethics and Aesthetics in The
Picture of Dorian Gray’. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Ed. C.
George Sandulescu. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe,
1994. 137-55.
Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel,
1880-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. ‘Ethics’. Critical Terms for Literary
Study. Eds Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin.
2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
387-405.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Lodger. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1996.
Machen, Arthur. The Three Impostors. New York: Knopf,
1930.
Marsh, Richard. The Beetle. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
1976.
McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997.
Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. 1970. London: Ark,
1985.
Norton, Robert E. The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the
Eighteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1995.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy
and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Stokes, John. Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Wilde, Oscar. Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems. New York: Ev-
eryman’s Library, 1991.
FURTHER READING
Biography
Laver, James. Oscar Wilde. London: Longmans, Green &
Co., 1954. 32 p.
Succinct biography of Wilde. Includes a bibliography.
Criticism
Backus, Margot Gayle. “Homophobia and the Imperial
Demon Lover: Gothic Narrativity in Irish Representa-
tions of the Great War.” Canadian Review of Compara-
tive Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
21, no. 4 (March-June 1994): 45-63.
Explores the underlying motifs of demonized homosexual-
ity and “the Gothic reunion of the self with some
incomprehensible, unspeakable thing from which it has
been divided” in The Picture of Dorian Gray and several
other contemporaneous works of Anglo-Irish fiction.
G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
Charlesworth, Barbara. “Oscar Wilde.” In Dark Passages: The
WILDE
Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature, pp. 53-80.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.
Biographical reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Clark, Bruce B. “A Burnt Child Loves the Fire: Oscar Wilde’s
Search for Ultimate Meanings in Life.” Ultimate Reality
and Meaning 4, no. 3 (1981): 225-47.
Calls The Picture of Dorian Gray the most important
of Wilde’s works in explicating his thoughts on reality
and literary meaning.
Clausson, Nils. “‘Culture and Corruption’: Paterian Self-
Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Papers on Language
and Literature 39, no. 4 (fall 2003): 339-64.
Argues that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde
endeavored to merge a Gothic plot of decadence and
degeneration with themes of self-development and
(homo)sexual liberation inspired by the writings of Walter
Pater.
Cohen, Philip K. “The Crucible: The Picture of Dorian Gray
and Intentions.” In The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, pp.
105-55. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1978.
Suggests that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde fully
explored the potential tragedy that was circumvented in
his satiric short story “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,”
maintaining that in the essays of Intentions Wilde
sought to establish a middle ground between the repres-
sion and hypocrisy portrayed in the story and the
hedonistic abandon depicted in the novel.
Dickson, Donald R. “‘In a Mirror That Mirrors the Soul’:
Masks and Mirrors in Dorian Gray.” English Literature in
Transition: 1880-1920 26, no. 1 (1983): 5-15.
Considers “the notion of mirror images that reflect masks
of characters” with regard to the subtle aesthetic design
of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Dryden, Linda. “Oscar Wilde: Gothic Ironies and Terrible
Dualities.” In The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles:
Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, edited by Laurence Davies,
pp. 110-45. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003.
Analyzes The Picture of Dorian Gray within the genre
traditions of Gothic horror and literary Decadence,
particularly highlighting affinities between Wilde’s novel
and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Ericksen, Donald H. “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Oscar
Wilde, pp. 96-117. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.
Discusses the sources, plot, critical reception, characteriza-
tion, imagery, language, and setting of Wilde’s novel.
Gomel, Elana. “Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and
the (Un)Death of the Author.” Narrative 12, no. 1
(January 2004): 74-92.
Interprets The Picture of Dorian Gray as it traces paral-
lels between the narrative themes of fin de siècle Gothic
fantasy and postmodern theory concerning authorship,
identity, and textuality.
Jullian, Philippe. “Dorian Gray.” In Oscar Wilde, translated
by Violet Wyndham, pp. 213-23. London: Constable,
1969.
517
 Enumerates some of the diverse literary and social influ-
WILDE
ences on The Picture of Dorian Gray and summarizes
the effect of the novel’s publication on Wilde’s career and
personal reputation.
Kohl, Norbert. “Culture and Corruption: The Picture of
Dorian Gray.” In Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist
Rebel, translated by David Henry Wilson, pp. 138-75.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Attempts to account for the “continued interest in and
varied reception of Dorian Gray” through an examina-
tion of the novel’s origins, structures, setting, themes,
and characterizations.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde’s Par-
able of the Fall.” In Contraries: Essays, pp. 3-16. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Contends that “Wilde’s novel must be seen as a highly
serious meditation upon the moral role of the artist,”
regarding its theme as “the Fall—the Fall of innocence
and its consequences, the corruption of ‘natural’ life by a
sudden irrevocable consciousness (symbolized by Dorian’s
infatuation with himself).”
Pappas, John J. “The Flower and the Beast: A Study of Oscar
Wilde’s Antithetical Attitudes toward Nature and Man
in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” English Literature in Tran-
sition 15, no. 1. (1972): 37-48.
Examines The Picture of Dorian Gray for expressions of
antipathy toward nature as well as toward the place of
humans in the natural world.
Riquelme, John Paul. “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic:
Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of
Dorian Gray.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (fall 2000):
609-31.
Investigates The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that
blends various literary sensibilities, tropes, and structur-
ing principles, including Gothic doubling, Paterian
aestheticism, mythic allusion, and the technique of
chiaroscuro.
518 G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 3
Zeender, Marie-Noëlle. “John Melmoth and Dorian Gray:
The Two-Faced Mirror.” In Rediscovering Oscar Wilde,
edited by C. George Sandulescu, pp. 432-40. Gerrards
Cross, England: Smythe, 1994.
Compares the themes, characterizations, and centralizing
motif of the two-faced mirror in Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth
the Wanderer.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Image as Motif: The Haunted
Portrait.” In Disenchanted Images: Literary Iconology, pp.
78-148. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1977.
Includes commentary on The Picture of Dorian Gray in
a chapter devoted to supernatural occurrences involving
portraits in fiction.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Wilde’s life and career is contained
in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Au-
thors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 49; Beacham’s Guide to
Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 15; British Writers, Vol. 5;
British Writers: The Classics, Vols. 1, 2; British Writers
Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British
Literary Biography, 1890-1914; Contemporary Authors, Vols.
104, 119; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, 112;
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 10, 19, 34, 57, 141,
156, 190; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British
Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering
Authors Modules: Dramatists, Most-studied Authors, and Novel-
ists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Drama Criticism, Vol. 17; Drama
for Students, Vols. 4, 8, 9; Exploring Short Stories; Literature
and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center;
Novels for Students, Vol. 20; Reference Guide to English Litera-
ture, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James
Guide to Fantasy Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 7;
Short Story Criticism, Vols. 11, 77; Something About the Author,
Vol. 24; Supernatural Fiction Writers; Twayne’s English Authors;
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 8, 23, 41; World
Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; World Literature Criticism; and
Writers for Children.