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"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
And so Dorian becomes the subject of his unusual experiment:
To a large extent the lad was his [Wotton's] own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. . . .Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering harvest while it was yet spring. The pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was becoming self-conscious. It was delightful to watch him. (DG 90: 204)
The last line in particular suggests the empirical pose of the disinterested scientist. A few lines later, the narrator adds, "It was clear to him [Lord Henry] that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results" (DG 90: 205; italics added). Later Lord Henry says that "[Dorian] would be a wonderful study" (DG 90: 207). Lord Henry's effort "to project [his] soul into" Dorian's "gracious form" is described (in the 1891 edition) through a metaphor of chemical infusion: "to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid" (DG 91: 33)-just like the draught that changes Jekyll into Hyde. In Jekyll and Hyde, of course, the experimenter and the subject of the experiment are the same person; Wilde separates them into two characters. He also changes the mode of the transformation from science to art, and the location from the laboratory to the artist's studio. Art replaces science, hence the dominant role that works of art and books play in Wilde's novel, especially the "poisonous" book that acts like Jekyll's mysterious chemical agent.
Even more important than either these borrowings or the theme of the double is yet another convention of Gothic fiction that Wilde would have found particularly suitable to his project in Dorian Gray: the perennial Gothic theme of transgression. Since Lord Henry's theory of liberation from repression leading to self-realization requires transgression of existing social, moral, religious, and especially legal codes, Wilde needed a plot that could combine self-development with transgression, the later being a necessary precondition of the former. Since its beginnings in Walpole, Gothic fiction has always been a transgressive genre; as Kelly Hurley reminds us, "Gothic provided a space wherein to explore phenomena at the borders of human identity and culture-insanity, criminality, barbarity, sexual perversion" (6). This transgressiveness coincides with Wilde's own anti-authoritarian ideas expressed in his essays at this time. "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history," he says in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," "is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion" (Soul of Man 231). In "The Critic as Artist," the first part of which appeared in The Nineteenth Century in the same month that Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott's, Gilbert, Wilde's spokesman, says,
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics. . . . Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world. (Soul of Man 125-126)
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