The Picture Of Dorian Gray (2 page)

Indeed, one of the most telling signs that Wilde had not been sufficiently circumspect in his depiction of male relationships in his novel was the nature of many of the revisions he made when the novel appeared in book formin 1891 (significant changes are here indicated in the Notes, pp. 231–53). Wilde had already made a number of changes in the process of transferring the novel from manuscript to typescript, cutting out or modifying even more explicit material: so he may not have been entirely surprised by some of the more forthright reviews.
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When he revised the book for volume form he went further. In the 1890 version there had been a much greater degree of physical intimacy between the principal male characters. In Chapter I, when Basil Hallward tells Lord Henry about his beautiful new friend, Henry lays ‘his hand upon [Basil’s] shoulder’. This seemingly innocent or inconsequential gesture Wilde chose to omit in 1891. Perhaps he felt he had gone too far, and could not risk being either too explicit or too ambiguous about these relationships. Thus despite defiantly asserting that ‘what Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows’
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in a letter responding to the
Scots Observer’s
insinuations about the Cleveland Street scandal, he none the less chose to dispel some of the mystery surrounding Dorian’s activities when he revised the novel the following year. In Chapter X of the first version Basil visits Dorian to implore him to deny ‘the most dreadful things [that] are being said about you; – things that I could hardly repeat to you’. Basil then refers to a number of scandals in which Dorian appears to be implicated, and asks him, ‘Why is your friendship so fateful to young men?’ In the first version Dorian declines to answer any of these allegations, keeping his sins vague, and his responsibility for the ruin of young men a matter of readerly speculation. In 1891, however, he answers these charges, absolving himself of responsibility for the actions of others. These turn out to involve monetary fraud and misalliance, and are hardly the
‘unspeakable’ crimes some readers or reviewers might have suspected.

The most significant changes in this respect involve the role of the portrait in the relationship between the artist and his model, where the physical becomes the ideal, and the aesthetic bears the burden of (or provides a mask for) the erotic. This is most markedly exhibited when Basil explains to Dorian what his portrait revealed to its creator, and what he feared it might proclaim to the world. This is how it appeared in 1890:

‘It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time…. Well, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you, you were still present in my art.’

In 1891 Basil’s reference to never having loved a woman, as well as his mad, extravagant and absurd devotion, is replaced by a more ‘Platonic’ interpretation of the artist’s need for his model:

‘Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me you were still present in my art…’ (Chapter IX; original ellipsis)

It is now Dorian’s personality that dominates Basil’s ‘soul, brain, and power’. His adoration or ‘worship’ is transformed into a philosophical quest for a chaste and literally Platonic ideal of art.

According to Basil, this ‘aesthetic’ adoration communicates itself to the painting. In 1890, however, this process was interpreted rather differently. Then Basil explained to Lord Henry that he would not exhibit the painting because he had put into it ‘all the extraordinary romance of which, of course, I have never dared to speak to him’. In 1891 this is changed to ‘some expression of all this curious artistic
idolatry’. The portrait no longer runs the risk of revealing Basil’s ‘romantic’ attachment to Dorian (making him believe he had put ‘too much of myself in the thing’, as he earlier put it); it is now merely the physical manifestation of an artistic ideal. Significantly, the unmodified versions of these passages were read out in court in 1895 in an attempt to prove that
Dorian Gray was
a ‘perverted book’, thus confirming Basil’s lament that art is too often regarded as a mode of autobiography.

While the theme of a young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth is not new – as Wilde confesses, it is ‘an idea that is old in the history of literature’ (Mason, 72) –
The Picture of Dorian Gray
offers an intriguing and highly original treatment of this idea, principally owing to Wilde’s brilliant conceit of the portrait which masks Dorian’s life. This is not to suggest that magic, animated, or somehow revealing portraits were unknown in the pages of popular literature; they had been a stock feature of fantastic fiction since its earliest days. One of the marvellous and terrifying events which takes place in Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
(1764; the first Gothic novel) is the figure of Alfonso stepping down from his portrait, a portentous sign that Manfred’s days at the castle are numbered. A little-known (and decidedly extravagant) tale from 1812 entitled ‘Family Portraits’, by Jean Baptiste Benoît Eyries, which owes much to Walpole’s novel, also anticipates aspects of Wilde’s own magic portrait.
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In Eyries’ tale, the portrait of the evil Ditmar is imbued with moral significance as manifested in its physical appearance. It was painted by a ghost as an emblem of Ditmar’s crimes, depicting his soul in all its ugliness; and, as in the denouement of Wilde’s tale, it reverts to a more attractive form once expiation for these sins is accomplished. The idea of a fatal correspondence between a painting and an individual’s life – the former being parasitic of the latter–had been brilliantly handled in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1845), where the artist’s obsession with capturing absolute ‘life-likeness’ in paint eventually destroys his model, the wife worn out by the arduous sittings for her portrait.

Portraits proliferate in Victorian Gothic and sensational novels, revealing dark secrets about their subjects.
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Wilde’s novel follows suit, featuring not one revelatory portrait merely, but a number of earlier ones which, it is suggested, have some link to their pictorial descendant. Chapter XI of the 1891 version tells how Dorian would visit the portrait gallery of his country house and contemplate the pictures of his ancestors. Each one has a tale to tell, encouraging Dorian to speculate on the ‘inheritance of sin and shame’ bequeathed to him by those whose ‘blood flowed in his veins’. Standing before a particular portrait he wonders whether it was ‘young Herbert’s life that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in Basil Hallward’s studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed his life?’ This is a powerful and intriguing suggestion, providing a ‘Gothic’ (but also scientific) explanation for Dorian’s actions. It suggests that he is haunted by his ancestral legacies rather than being entirely motivated by his own personal vanity. His portrait therefore bears not only the consequences of Dorian’s own sins, but is also the culmination of an ancestral line. For as Dorian reasons, ‘man’ was ‘a complex, multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead’.

Through such emphases Wilde gives a fantastic and supernatural twist to an idea that was a staple tenet of scientific thought at the time. Dorian is invoking the idea of hereditary ‘reversion’, which is explained by the eminent mental pathologist Henry Maudsley: ‘Now and then a person may detect in his own face in the looking-glass a momentary flash of expression of the sort which will be found formal in the portrait of an ancestor… Beneath every face are the latent faces of ancestors, beneath every character their characters.’
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Wilde supernaturalizes scientific belief, providing an occult dimension to the correspondence between physical appearance and character, and the transference of ancestral legacy. This scientific frame of reference is conspicuous in his novel, especially in its revised form, where heredity plays a crucial role in explaining character and motivation. Wilde added a whole
chapter in 1891 (Chapter III) to provide some details about Dorian’s immediate ancestry. Here we learn that his maternal grandfather was ‘a mean dog’ who is suspected of bringing about Dorian’s father’s death. His mother, who had married beneath her (thus invoking her father’s revenge), makes an appearance in the portrait gallery in the revised version, thus reinforcing the suggestion that heredity in part explains Dorian’s own actions. Dorian resembles his mother physically (Chapter XI), while the transformed portrait starts to resemble the wicked grandfather: ‘There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood’ (Chapter X). Physically and morally, Dorian is a product of his heredity. His criminal tendencies derive from his grandfather (from a long line of debauchees), while his intention to marry the lower-class Sibyl Vane suggests that he is in part reverting to maternal type. For as Dorian himself asserts of the Duke of Berwick, ‘With such blood as he has in his veins, how could his record be clean?’ By stressing the role of heredity in Dorian’s actions, making him a ‘scientific’ rather than a moral study, Wilde was bringing the theme of the Faustian bargain up to date, giving it a degree of plausibility (at least with regard to his motives), and diminishing Dorian’s moral responsibility for his actions. As the narrator puts it: ‘There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move’ (Chapter XVI). Such a view is very much in line with contemporary debate on ‘Responsibility in Mental Disease’ (the title of an important work on the subject), and how forms of criminality were a consequence of ‘degenerate’ ancestry similar to Dorian’s.
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For as Wilde’s Vivian would assert in ‘The Critic as Artist’, also published in 1891: ‘the scientific principle of Heredity… has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.’
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As Dorian’s portrait is at
one point referred to as ‘the most magical of mirrors…[which] would reveal to him his own soul’ (Chapter VIII), it can be suggested that heredity provides a key to his actions and a scientific alternative to the ‘moral’ emphasis which Wilde complained was too ‘obvious’ in the 1890 version of the novel.

This scientific dimension to
Dorian Gray
suggests that it is really only the
impossible
conceit of the portrait’s transformation that makes Wilde’s tale supernatural or fantastic.
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The central motif is framed and informed by so much that was materialistic and plausible in contemporary thought. This also applies to the notion of bodily metamorphosis and the physical consequences of ‘moral’ causes, a belief that is fundamental to Wilde’s narrative. Once again, what happens to the portrait is only fantastic because it happens to canvas and paint rather than flesh and blood. The belief that underlies this transference was far from implausible at the time.

Physiognomy – the widespread belief that an individual’s appearance, particularly his or her face, reveals character – plays an important part in Wilde’s novel. A version of this logic is first encountered in its opening pages. Here Lord Henry expresses the hope that Dorian’s extraordinary good looks are not matched by intelligence. For as he reasons: ‘Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.’ This idea espouses, but also plays with, fundamental physiognomic assumptions. A ‘roman’ nose and well-developed forehead were generally considered positive attributes, indicating the intellect and moral probity associated with the learned professions which Henry goes on to disparage: ‘Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!’ However, Wilde also plays with this notion in so far as the physiognomic and phrenological registers to which he refers were usually understood to be fixed, and certainly not susceptible to the instant modification suggested here. The broad forehead (denoting
a pronounced development of cerebral faculty) determined the life of the intellect rather than vice versa. This somewhat flippant discussion of physiognomic ideas of course anticipates the focus on bodily metamorphosis which Dorian (or at least his portrait) undergoes, where actions do produce ‘hideous’ physical consequences. And yet this belief also had currency in some contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific writings, writings which help to explain the central conceit of Wilde’s ‘fantastic’ tale.

Basil articulates a version of this logic in Chapter XII when he confronts Dorian with the rumours that have been gathering about his life. As Basil reasons: ‘Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.’ It is this logic that allows Basil and others who have heard the rumours about Dorian to be duped for so long. This is hardly surprising, as what Basil asserts was very much an article of faith, and can be found in a number of writings from the period. Basil refers to ‘secret vices’, something that preoccupied medics and moralists throughout the nineteenth century. Nearly all the writings on what was euphemistically referred to as ‘self-abuse’, from cheap pamphlets sold by quack practitioners to serious monographs on mental disease or urinary or venereal disorders, referred to the ‘peculiar appearance’ of those who indulged in this practice. As one distinguished physician records of a young man who had sought his professional help to cure him of the effects of this ‘vice’: ‘He still retains the peculiar physiognomy which to me is very characteristic’; or, as another physician claimed of a similar case: ‘The expression on his countenance was… at once repulsive, comical, and weird.’ These writings suggest that certain ‘immoral’ practices produced physical consequences on the body, signs that the informed could identify. Indeed, as Samuel Tissot, the most influential authority on the subject, asserts of those who are ‘addicted’ to the practice and are exposed to its supposed consequences: ‘When the vail
[sic]
is withdrawn, the picture of their conduct appears in the most hideous light… it is a frightful picture, and makes one shudder.’
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As Tissot’s pictorial
imagery suggests, Wilde’s narrative operates within a similar framework of expectations about certain secret vices and their ‘frightful’ consequences. Again, it is only the supernatural intervention in this process that inhibits what was eminently plausible to a large section of his readership at this time. His fantastic conceit literalizes the physician’s metaphor – eventually revealing the picture in its most ‘hideous’ light: ‘The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful’ (Chapter XIII) – while the ‘mad prayer’ and the locked attic prevent the public from detecting what would clearly be manifest: Dorian’s sins, whatever they might be.