Content provided in partnership with

"Culture and Corruption": Paterian Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2003 by Clausson, Nils

<< Page 1 Continued from page 1. Previous | Next

Mindful of Jerusha McCormack's warning that "it is hard to say anything original about The Picture of Dorian Gray, largely because there is so little that is original in it" (110), I have no desire to referee this debate or to offer my own candidate for the true genre of Dorian Gray. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some new light on the conflicting readings of the novel's generic affiliations, as well as on its meaning and artistic success, by arguing that The Picture of Dorian Gray is neither governed by a single unifying genre nor dispersed intertextually (and unoriginally) among multiple heterogeneous ones, but rather is disjunctively situated between two conflicting genres, each of which is related to one of the two antithetical literary and cultural discourses that the novel engages but cannot successfully integrate: namely, self-development (including what we would today call "sexual liberation") and Gothic degeneration. The degeneration theme links the novel generically to such other fin-de-siecle Gothic stories as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894), while the self-development theme relates it to the novel of self-development, of which Walter Pater's Manus the Epicurian (1885) and the unfinished Gaston de Latour (1888) are perhaps the most obvious generic models, given Pater's acknowledged influence on Wilde.

More Articles of Interest: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the...; The Picture of Dorian Gray, or, the embarrassing orthodoxy of Oscar...; Princess, Persona, and Subjective Desire: A Reading of Oscar Wilde's Salome, The; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, and the rhetoric of agency

The novel's indebtedness to Pater's Marius the Epicurian and to the Gothic tradition is well established. In her introduction to the Oxford English Novels edition of Dorian Gray (1974), Isobel Murray argues that Wilde is "combining two fairly well known traditions, the 'Gothick' one of, for example, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Poe's 'The Oval Portrait', and the 'decadent' one of Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, Huysmans' A Rebours and Pater's Marius the Epicurian" (xx). I agree that the intertexts Murray identifies are present in Dorian Gray, but, in my view, the Gothic texts most relevant to Wilde's novel are not the earlier ones of Maturin (to whom Wilde was distantly related) and Poe, but the contemporary fin-de-siecle Gothic tales of Stevenson, Machen, Wells, and Stoker, among which David Punter places it in his study The Literature of Terror (1980). "One thing can be said at the outset which underlies the meaning of decadence in connexion with these texts," says Punter about the Gothic revival, "and that is that they are all concerned in one way or another with the problem of degeneration" (239). Decadence and degeneration in Dorian Gray are thus related primarily to fin-de-siecle Gothic rather than to the Paterian novel of self-development. As I hope to show, however, the Gothic plot of Dorian Gray is ultimately inconsistent with the Paterian plot of self-development, for the twin themes of self-development and degeneration are antithetical, if not contradictory, suggesting as they do positive and negative movements, respectively. These double genres-the literary and the popular-create generic dissonances as the Gothic plot of degeneration takes over and eventually supersedes the incompatible Paterian plot of self-development and individual liberation. The "Gothic" Wilde thus finds himself committed to the implications of a narrative of degeneration that undercuts the Paterian ideal of self-development posited by Lord Henry in the early chapters. In particular, the goal of (homo)sexual liberation promised by the self-development plot is subverted by the necessity, within the conventions of the fin-de-siecle Gothic tale of degeneration, of seeing Dorian's emerging homosexuality, along with his other crimes and sins, as further evidence of his degeneration. Jeremy Reed, in his introduction to a recent edition of Dorian Gray, places the novel in a tradition of subversive fiction: "One could justifiably argue for Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray comprising a blueprint for the subversive genre of fiction which in the 20th century has counted amongst its numbers the works of Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and J. G. Ballard" (5). But much as I would like to see Wilde as fathering such a tradition-and there can be little doubt that Dorian Gray is a subversive work-I believe that the potentially subversive homosexual plot of the novel is itself seriously, even fatally, subverted by the association between homosexuality and degeneration required by the Gothic plot.

"Culture and Corruption": Paterian Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2003 by Clausson, Nils

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Health

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference